Caroline’s Story

Caroline Ashburne blinked once, twice in quick succession and wiped a tear from her eye. She removed the handkerchief from her lower lid and stared at the black deposits that lay smeared across the fine linen. Soot. She coughed, feeling the scratch of smoke in her throat, blinked again, sniffed hard, and wiped away another tear.

Her stomach lurched with movement of the train. She had never been a good traveller, but today was much worse and she was thankful to have the carriage to herself. At least she didn’t have to pretend to strangers that everything was fine. She didn’t have to struggle to keep up the English social niceties.

They were calling it an Indian summer. It was already September, and still the heat seared with the intensity of a jealous lover. How typical of the English weather to play these awkward games. It had been dull for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation at the beginning of June. The rain had spit contemptuously on street parties all over the country, when everyone had prayed for fairytale sunshine, and now it was turning out to be the warmest late summer in memory.

Caroline uncrossed her legs. Her thighs slipped easily, one over the other, thanks to the sheer of her stockings. The luxury of silk was still a novelty after the long years of clothes rationing. This morning, however, she would have been glad to do without it, as Caroline cursed the closeness of the heat, the closeness of the stockings that made the journey unbearable.

As she shifted her weight, the material that covered the seat pricked though her petticoat and her thin summer dress, stabbing like a million unforgiving claws. The train jostled, controlling her body’s movements as if she were a rag doll in the hands of an excited child. All the while, the engine thumped its rhythm, whistling and belching out smoke, smearing everything it touched with a film of grime that got into her eyes and made them stream.

Caroline took a sip of water and forced herself to swallow. She winced, tightening the muscles in her neck, urging it, by pure strength of will, to stay down. Her head throbbed from the heat and a lack of fluids. Perhaps, if she could just keep the water down, then the sickness would ease.

She closed her eyes, encouraging the journey to pass. With each breath, London was left a little further behind. With each expiration of gritty air, the dirt and the bustle, the coal dust and the fog, so thick it moved around of its own accord in a phlegm coloured cloud, shifted closer to being a memory.

Soon, she would breathe in the cut glass air of the country; so clean, you could smell the rain coming, where the only pollution lay in the natural smells of farming, of sweet hay and fresh grass, of sloppy dung in the yards and silage in the fields. It had been five years since she had returned to her childhood home in Salop and five years since she had seen her mother. Now, she had to make the journey once more. She knew it was for the last time.

‘Ticket please, Miss.’ Caroline jumped to the sound of the inspector’s voice and lifted her head, which had been resting in the cool damp of her palm. She had failed to hear him slide open the carriage door and her sudden start at his appearance caused another wave of nausea to wash over her.

She took in the stranger. He was in his mid-forties at a guess and heavily built. He held a vague expression behind his eyes. Caroline knew he was of old Salop stock, just as readily as she would have recognised a local breed of sheep that had wandered too far from its flock.

‘Would you like me to close the window for you, Miss? Save you getting the soot and smoke in your eyes.’

Caroline shook her head. The way he eased out the words with that particular lilt confirmed her suspicions. Even this far from Salop, she could recognise the physical characteristics that came from generations of working the land. It was lucky they eventually built that bridge across the river Severn; otherwise the families would have remained dangerously inter-married, even to this day.

The locals were not an adventurous people, and they saw little point in travelling far to find a mate, when there was a cousin to hand. She had heard accounts of even closer matches and horror stories of resulting offspring, born with two heads or cretinous, or at the very least, cursed with idiocy. There were childhood fables of midnight drownings, of baby-sized funeral pyres that burned through the night, only to be extinguished by the dew at day break, leaving nothing but a charred patch of ground and a sinister stench to indicate the place of the devil’s work.

Caroline shuddered at the memory of these tales and tried to convince herself that they only related to lambs and piglets, that it was only the local farmers taking care of business and eradicating nature’s mistakes

The inspector held out his hand and waited. For Salop people, unlike those used to living in the city, there is never any hurry about things. She rummaged through her bag to find the ticket. She knew it was in there somewhere. Her hands still shook from her recent, sudden awakening and she fumbled, pinching the skin of her forefinger in the tight clasp of the fastener as she hurriedly tried to snap it shut. She held in a tiny whelp of pain, and discreetly wiped a tear from each eye as she handed the ticket to the stranger, without meeting his gaze.

He barely glanced at it before returning it with a polite nod. Caroline let out a sigh as he left the carriage and closed the door behind him. She sucked her finger, holding it gently between her front teeth to relieve the stinging and looked at her watch. It wasn’t even midday. She would be home by 4 o’clock. Just in time to share her mother’s pot of Earl Grey.

The thought of the heavily scented bergamot reminded Caroline of her nausea. She wiped the wet finger along her dress and brought one arm to rest across her body, cradling her stomach. Its gentle roundness offered a strange comfort that she did not truly understand. She had never been thin. She put this down to being an Ashburne. Now, at the age of twenty-five, Caroline grudgingly had to accept that she was just like her mother; tall and fair, with heavy bones and plenty of flesh. In spite of this, there was elegance to her bearing and she carried herself with a grace and ease that enabled her to be considered as striking.

Unsettled by the intrusion from the inspector, Caroline became conscious of herself, though he was no longer there to look at her. She took out a compact and peered into the tiny mirror as it danced to the movement of the train. She tried to stabilise the image while she dabbed the pressed powder onto the bridge of her nose and wondered, as she often did when faced with her own reflection, what she had gained from her father.

She replaced the powder puff and continued to stare into the finger-smeared glass. Her mother’s searching face frowned back at her. Caroline was younger. Her eyes were bluer, a little softer; but it was the same face. It was the face that haunted her. The one that she had loved and hated by degrees for the whole of her life.

She closed the compact and returned it to her bag with an overwhelming sense of defeat. This time she took care not to catch her finger in the clasp. Her mind wandered back to the memory of her own image in the mirror. What had her father given her? What part of him had gone into the making of her? Did something in his blood affect the way she saw the world, or the way she sat, or gestured when in animated conversation? Was she like him, in the way the damp morning air made her fingers numb, or in the way her lips tingled when she had had too much wine?

As the train rattled towards the Salop countryside, Caroline knew this was her last chance to find out the answers to these questions. Questions that had plagued her since her earliest days, when the cruel jibes at the village school gate woke her to the fact that every other child had a father. She had to know the answers. It was more important than ever. If she was to find out who she really was, she had to find out now.

What harm could there be in the mention of a name? What damage could be done in being allowed a glimpse of an ageing photograph? She had to convince her mother finally to reveal the identity of her father. After all, how much longer did she have? Days, perhaps, possibly weeks. The doctor had been unclear on the telephone. He was only certain about one thing, Caroline’s mother was dying, and there wasn’t much time left.