Asta's Book (52 page)

‘It’s more likely not to have been in the diaries,’ he said, ‘because Asta probably didn’t know who Swanny’s father was.’

‘I’m not saying it’s as direct as that.’ I wasn’t. That seemed almost presumptuous. ‘It may be no more than one of Asta’s stories. After all, if we’d attended to Asta’s stories earlier we might have guessed the motive for Ironsmith’s killing Lizzie and even that it was Ironsmith who did it.’

So we read out every Asta story we came to but none was appropriate. I finished
Asta
a bit sooner than he did and moved on to Volume Two,
A Live Thing in a Dead Room, 1915-1924.
Paul remained doubtful about the source of my flash of recognition and returned to Ward-Carpenter. He wondered where Ward-Carpenter got his information from. How did he know Florence’s fiancé was called Ernest Henry Herzog? There was no mention of the man’s name at the trial, none of course in Arthur Roper’s memoir. It must have come from Cora Green’s story for the
Star.

‘It didn’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve read that and the man’s not mentioned by name. I suppose Florence could have told him herself.’

‘When did Florence die?’

‘Cary told me she thought 1971. The Ward-Carpenter piece was written in the thirties. I think he must have interviewed her. There are facts he couldn’t have got otherwise. How would he have known the names of Lizzie’s lovers? They weren’t mentioned at the trial. Cora Green writes about Middlemass but only by his surname and she doesn’t know if another man was Hobb or Cobb, but Ward-Carpenter does. He must have got Middlemass’s first name as Percy from Florence.’

‘So Florence told him she’d been engaged to a man called Herzog and he must have said that was an unusual name for an Englishman. It would have been a good deal more unusual in 1934 or whenever this was.’

‘And she said his grandfather was an immigrant as Mr Dzerjinski had been. She also told Ward-Carpenter he was in service with a family in Islington. Where does he get the information that Herzog was a year younger than Florence?’

‘Not from Cora Green, so from Florence herself.’

Paul said, ‘Is there any more we’re going to know? Is there any more
to
know? This is who Swanny’s father was, Ernest Henry Herzog, a servant, aged twenty-four.’

‘I wonder what he looked like?’ I said.

‘Tall and fair and handsome, I should think. North German-looking possibly. Herzog is a German name. That can’t have been very pleasant for him when the war came nine years later. There was enormous prejudice against anything German. Orchestras even stopped playing Mozart and Beethoven.’ Paul looked at me. ‘What have I said?’

‘Oh, Paul.’

‘What have I said?’

I hadn’t been able to find the piece I wanted about the man whose girl jilted him but I knew where to find this one. For some reason I remembered. It was the entry for March 20th, 1921, and I suppose I remembered it because in it there was the first mention of Hansine’s baby who was Paul’s mother. I found what I wanted.

‘ “… His grandfather was a German who came here back in the 1850s, and though his father was born in London and he was too, he had this premonition of what it would be like having that name if war came …” Paul, the translation you made for the last diaries, where is it? It’s 1966 I want, I think, or 1967, nearly at the end.’

He went to find it. Margrethe Cooper had the last thirteen notebooks and was translating them. It won’t be a longer or a thicker volume, though, for Asta wrote less and less often in the last years of the diaries. When Paul put his own typescript in front of me, I found what I wanted in October 2nd, 1966.

‘ “I was twenty-four. It’s true I was in love and I meant to marry her but when it came to it she wouldn’t have me, she said something had happened to put her off men and marriage …” ’

‘Who are you quoting? Who’s speaking?’

‘Paul,’ I said, ‘you know German. What does Herzog mean? Does it mean anything or is it just a name?’

‘It means Duke,’ he said, and I could see he didn’t know. The diaries seldom mention the name. Why should he know?

‘Swanny’s father was Uncle Harry,’ I said. ‘He was Harry Duke.’

We sat, digesting it in silence. He had been twenty-four in 1905, a year younger than Florence. What happened to put her off marriage was the murder of Lizzie Roper, the death of Maria Hyde, the disappearance of Edith. Did he know he had a daughter somewhere or did Florence tell him the child was born dead? I was certain he never knew and Asta never knew. He told Swanny you could always see the parents in a child’s face but he couldn’t see his own in hers. Yet I could. His was the face her photograph dimly recalled to me, though I had seen him for the last time in the fifties.

‘I wish she’d known,’ I said. ‘She always loved him, she’d have liked him for her father. And Asta loved him. How strange to think of Asta saying she’d like Harry’s child when she had her all the time.’

The first time Harry came to Padanaram Swanny had answered the door to him. He called her ‘this dear young lady’. He’d got to know Mogens in the first place because they came from the same part of London and Mogens had once lived in an area of Hackney he knew well. So there weren’t even many elements of coincidence in it, after all.

I thought I’d dream of it that night and I wanted to. I even did the reverse of what Asta recommends for avoiding a subject to dream of—think about it before you fall asleep. Deliberately, I didn’t think about it, I thought of Paul and our life together and my happiness, but still I failed and I had to imagine the kind of dream I might have had.

The sun is shining, the dull, half-obscured dusty sun of late summer in a city. There is a great deal of dust but no litter, no paper wrappings in the gutter, and there is no smell of fuel oil. Hansine comes down the steps of Devon Villa, with Swanny in her arms. She has closed the door behind her, for Florence can’t bring herself to see her off, to watch the child carried away to her new life. Florence is alone in the depths of the house, bereft. Tomorrow she will go to Miss Newman’s agency to find a new employer and the day after she will at last betake herself upstairs where an unimagined horror awaits her, where the only living things are the flies that feed on death. But that is to come. In the meantime she is a childless woman again, a woman who has yet to resolve what her future will be.

Mogens is waiting excitedly for Hansine, watching from the window of John’s house. Along Richmond Road she comes and she is carrying what he expects to see. He runs to tell his friend and his friend’s mother, and so it is that when Hansine arrives at the door it is John’s mother who is the first to see Swanny in her new guise as a member of the Westerby family.

Women wore such unsuitable clothes then, cumbersome and grotesque for summer’s heat. Hansine’s long skirt trails in the dust. Her collar comes high and tight up under her chin and she sweats. The big hat is anchored by a hat pin but still it slips and wisps of fair hair come loose from the cottage loaf. The five-day-old baby is better off in her thin lawn gown and Florence’s old shawl that wraps her. Mogens is better off in his sailor suit as he runs ahead of Hansine, to get there first, to be the first to tell Mor.

Already he loves this new sister that Hansine has been out to fetch from some mysterious source of babies. No one knows, of course, that he has just eleven years in which to love her, and it is as well they don’t. Who would wish to read the book of fate?

There has been little point in his getting to the front door five minutes ahead of Hansine, for only she has a key. But at least he can be the first to reach Mor’s bedroom with his news and by the time Hansine comes in she knows and has given a sigh of relief, as if she weren’t sure Hansine would find a baby or that the baby would consent to come.

All smiles, all pride, Hansine puts the child into Asta’s arms. Then Knud comes to see her. He who has changed his name wants to know the name of this sister.

‘Swanhild, but we shall call her Swanny.’

She looks up at Hansine and says thank you, a rather cold thank you, and then she says that things have worked out well. Are they going to stay here in her room for ever, all of them? Can’t they see she wants to be alone with her daughter?

‘Take the boys away, will you, Hansine, and dispose of this old shawl while you’re about it.’

When the door has closed she puts Swanny to the breast, a living child, a girl, a strong child that sucks strongly. Asta could cry with happiness but she doesn’t cry. She never does. For a long time she holds Swanny in her arms, feeding her and watching her fall asleep, touching the cheek that is like a plum and stroking the fine fair hair.

But after a while she lays her daughter gently in the bed beside her and does what she has to do. The most important thing, the stuff of life. She takes the notebook and the pen and the ink bottle from the bedside cabinet and begins writing it all down. There in her strong, forward-sloping hand go her pain and loss and joy, those profound emotions set down on a page destined for no one’s eyes but her own, never to be known and never to be read.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Elizabeth Murray for her imaginative research, much of it beyond the call of duty, and to Bente Connellan for all her translations into Danish and her help and advice on Danish matters.

My thanks are due also to Karl and Lilian Fredriksson for their assistance with sagas and guillotines. For the character of Mr de Filippis I am indebted to John Mortimer’s Introduction to Edward Marjoribanks’
Famous Trials of Marshall Hall.

In the pursuit of accuracy, Judith Flanders’ help has been invaluable.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1993 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd.

cover design by Jaya Miceli

ISBN: 978-1-4532-1495-4

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com