A gentle fluttering in his stomach caused Morton to look at the time: it was just gone one o’clock. Definitely time for coffee and something to eat, he thought. He placed the documents back inside the wallet, then stowed his notepad and pencil. Standing from the table, he caught sight of a run of black-bound volumes, the spines of which revealed them to be parish registers for local churches. He hesitated, knowing that they may very well contain details of Eliza’s baptism, marriage or burial, but continued towards the help desk.
‘Thank you—they were very useful,’ Morton told Sally, as he handed over the wallets. ‘What time do you shut today?’
‘We close at four-thirty, so you’ve plenty of time,’ she grinned.
‘Great. I’m going to go out for some lunch, then pop back and look at your parish records, if that’s okay?’
‘By all means. Enjoy your break—the Rye Bay Kitchen’s nice—just around the corner on Robertson Street,’ she said, then called after him, ‘Lovely courgette cake!’
‘Thanks,’ Morton said, striding from the room and not quite liking the combination of the words cake and courgette.
Outside was noisy and hot: rants from hard-hatted workmen bounced from the pavement to the top of a scaffolded neighbouring property; the repetitive beeping of a lorry trying to negotiate a delivery spot outside a health food shop echoed in the street adjacent; a crowd of teenagers devoid of all non-essential clothing surged raucously past the library entrance, forcing Morton to take a step back.
He moved away from the library and slowly headed towards Robertson Street—named, he had learned from his research this morning, after Patrick Robertson, a wealthy London merchant who had leased the America Ground land from the Crown and developed roads of stylish and respectable Victorian buildings. His name had also been given to two other America Ground streets: Robertson Passage and Robertson Terrace.
Morton walked the pedestrianised street slowly and deliberately, trying to assimilate his surroundings. He soon found the recommended Rye Bay Kitchen—a smart coffee shop bustling with outside seating, where he bought a take-out latte and a goat’s cheese panini—then continued his journey down Robertson Street. Using the map images taken on his phone, Morton navigated his way over the ghosted lands of the America Ground, stopping now and then to take photographs. He was surprised at how large the area was, now filled with an assortment of shops and businesses. It was now another world entirely from that inhabited by Eliza more than one hundred and eighty years ago; what was once a shanty-town of tumbledown properties was now four acres of prime real estate. He passed small independent cafés, hairdressers, estate agents, bars, newsagents and boutiques sitting alongside familiar large department stores.
The latte and panini having been consumed, Morton turned right onto Harold Place—a road that formed the second arm of the triangular America Ground boundary. From his research, he had learned that the road now ran directly over the Priory Stream that had once formed the Eastern boundary with Hastings.
Turning right onto Carlisle Parade, Morton wandered beside a crescent of substantial terraced properties, functioning as houses, B&Bs and hotels, until he reached the entrance to Robertson Street and was almost back to where he had started.
He stared at Holy Trinity Church, a huge edifice dominating the three roads which triangulated around it. The building was old, but Morton guessed not old enough to have seen within its walls the baptisms, marriages or burials of the Lovekin family; a marble foundation stone dated 1858 confirmed his suspicions.
A sudden yell from further down Robertson Street shifted his gaze from the church. Unable to locate the cause of the commotion from the busy street, Morton began to turn back towards the library when he suddenly noticed the huge mural emblazoned on the side of a building opposite the church. He grinned as he studied the enormous depiction of the America Ground painted red on a cream background, wondering how on earth he had not managed to spot it ever before. Under the title The America Ground was a flag combining the stars and stripes, the Union flag and the Hastings Corporation logo, which Morton guessed to be the ‘America Ground flag’ referred to in the newspaper article. Beneath that was a side-on view of how the area looked during its peak in the 1820s. A large ship’s hull, being used as a house, completed the image. He photographed it, then continued his way back to the library.
Morton was faced with an unnecessarily challenging afternoon: when he returned to the local history shelving he found parish registers for nine local churches, all of them transcribed, none of them indexed. If only whoever had taken the time to copy the burial record for Eliza had bothered to say precisely which church it had come from, it would have saved him a lot of wasted time. Taking each book out and checking the time period covered, Morton ascertained that the oldest and nearest churches to the America Ground were St Clements Church and All Saints Church and it was there that he prioritised his searches.
He carried the registers for All Saints Church to the table. His seat from the morning had been taken by an elderly gentleman with a magazine open in front of him, who was evidently having great difficulty in keeping his eyes open. Other spaces were taken at the tables by two women studying a large-scale map and a middle-aged lady diligently copying entries from a journal of some kind. Morton took the space to her left, acknowledging her with a smile and a nod of the head. Following a quick scribble of the nature of his search on his notepad, Morton delved into the burial register, skipping straight to 1827. He could tell immediately that it was not the same register from which Eliza’s burial had been copied. Still, he persisted through the next two
