‘You’re wasting time,’ he mumbled to himself, fretfully tapping the steering wheel.
Taking a final glance around him, he grabbed his bag from the passenger seat and ran—fast—into the Kent History and Library Centre, receiving strange, uncertain looks from the motley group of smokers loitering in front of the main entrance.
He slowed down with just a split second to allow the automatic doors to slide apart, giving him just enough time to enter the building.
At the family history help desk he found the delightful Brenda Buxton but, judging by the narrow dutiful smile on her lips when she saw him, she evidently didn’t recognise him from their previous encounter. Thank goodness.
‘Good morning,’ Morton greeted, hoping for a fresh start.
‘Hello,’ she replied.
‘Do you have a microfilm and table free today, please?’ he asked politely. ‘One of the PC ones, if possible.’
Brenda’s excessively long red fingernails tapped at the keyboard on the desk in front of her. She looked up from the computer screen to Morton. ‘Are you going to buy a photography licence today, or try and take illicit pictures behind my back?’ she asked sourly.
Morton’s cheeks flushed. No fresh start today, then. ‘I’ll see how I get on.’
Brenda turned back to the computer and typed something. ‘In that case, I’ll put you on number one so I can keep an eye on you.’ Something resembling a look of pain, but which Morton suspected to be a scornful smile, erupted on Brenda’s face as she handed over his card and locker key. ‘Do I need to remind you of any of our other rules? Like no bags or pens in the search rooms?’
‘No need,’ Morton answered, scurrying off towards the bank of lockers, certain that she must share the same severely mutated gene responsible for acerbic wit as Deidre Latimer.
Ignoring Brenda’s monitoring gaze, Morton stowed his belongings in the locker, then carried his laptop and notebook to the microfilm reader. He wasted no time in retrieving the film containing Westwell baptisms from the cabinet, winding it on until he reached the 1760s.
The parish registers in this period contained none of the neat orderly boxes that began in 1813 and made searches all the easier; the faded ink scrawls now on the screen in front of Morton required great concentration to decipher.
Even though he was twenty years away from Eliza’s likely date of baptism, Morton took his time, reading each and every entry carefully, wanting to build up a picture of Westwell at that time and hopefully extracting any of Eliza’s wider family. The village being quite small, there was approximately one year’s worth of baptisms per page.
In twenty minutes, Morton had reached the 1780s—the likely decade of Eliza’s baptism. He continued his search through the register and found her in 1786—exactly where he had expected to find her.
June 16, Eliza Winter, baseborn daughter of Eliza Winter
Like almost all baptism entries of the period, it provided only scant information. No occupation. No address. No additional or quirky comments.
Morton printed out the entry, satisfied to have found the first real clue as to Eliza’s early life. Did Eliza senior have more illegitimate children? Or did she marry, then have a family? Morton continued his search, making a note of every baptism where the mother was named Eliza, irrespective of their surname.
His searches continued until it was impossible for there to have been more children. There were several baptisms on his notepad where the mother’s Christian name had been Eliza, but there were no more to Eliza Winter.
Morton flipped open his laptop lid and, opening two web browsers, ran a general search at Ancestry and FindmyPast for Eliza Winter. Thousands of results, in every category of their holdings. Flicking between the two, he added the keyword Westwell. On Ancestry there were no results. On FindmyPast there was one result: in ‘Newspapers and Periodicals’.
Morton clicked the entry and waited a moment for it to load. It was a scan of an 1802 edition of the Morning Chronicle, titled Assize Intelligence. Home Circuit—Maidstone, 29 November. He zoomed in and began to read the article.
Before Mr Baron Alderson.
Thomas Honeysett, 40, was indicted for feloniously administering a certain drug to Eliza Winter, with intent to procure a miscarriage. Mr Phillips and Mr Holmes prosecuted. The prisoner was defended by Mr Horne. It appeared that the prisoner, who had formerly been in the army, and who at one time bore a very good character, had been appointed to fill the situation of governor of the Westwell Union Workhouse, and he resided in that establishment with his wife. The prosecutrix was a pauper girl, and it would seem that the prisoner, soon after his wife’s death, had taken advantage of the influence of his position, persuading her to consent to his solicitations and the result was that she became in the family way, and in order to avoid the consequences of his misconduct, the prisoner had induced her to take a quantity of savin. It likewise appeared, in the course of the case, that the prisoner had had an improper connection with two other pauper girls, Lydia Booth and Amelia Odden who were likewise in the family way by him, and to whom he had also administered some unwholesome drugs.
Morton stopped reading for a moment and looked at the Lovekin family tree, which was written in brief on his notepad; it suddenly dawned on him that the article was referring to Eliza junior, who would have been sixteen at the time of the trial, not her mother, who would have been around the same age as the man accused. Morton continued to read.
Mr Horne addressed the jury at some length for the
