Rewinding the film, he returned it to the cabinet and glanced up at the large clock on the wall. He had been here only ten minutes, but the pain in his head was increasing rapidly. Time to leave, he thought, turning back towards his belongings. As he did so, he caught sight of the small typed labels of the upper drawers of the filing cabinet. Parish Registers. Now that he was here, he might as well quickly try and locate Agnes’s marriage entry. Reluctantly, he slid open the metal drawer and pulled out the reel of film for baptisms, marriages and burials at Capel-le-Ferne, which fell in the Dover registration district, then returned to his machine.
The backs of his eyes were on fire and he couldn’t bear to look at the screen as the images flashed past until he paused at October 1912.
He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his temples, then he began to systematically check each and every page. Thankfully, it was a small parish and it took just ten minutes for him to locate the marriage entry in December 1912. Agnes Spyglass was recorded as a twenty-three-year-old spinster, the daughter of Charles Edward Spyglass. Her husband was James Finch, a surveyor and the witnesses to the occasion were Ada Potter and Frances Jenkins.
Morton sat back and stared at the entry. So Ada and Agnes had been friends for several years prior to the outbreak of war. But what could have been contained in those files that meant that they needed destroying a hundred and four years later? His pained eyes remained fixed on the screen in front of him, but his attention wandered off, back to when he was inside the office at Cliff House. The first file had been dated 1912, then the next—if he remembered correctly—had been dated 1940. Why the huge gap? It made no sense. Or maybe it was just his aching brain that couldn’t join the dots together.
He swallowed down some headache pills with a gulp of water from a bottle in his bag, then tried to switch off for a moment. He desperately wanted to leave and the allure of his sofa at home was almost too much to bear. Yet he was here now and there were things that he could research. He knew that he had been too hasty in the speed at which he had just ploughed through the parish registers. It wasn’t his usual diligence.
With a grudging sigh, he rewound the film back to the late 1800s and began to trawl through the registers, hoping to find any mention of the Spyglass or Finch family, now believing that part of the answer to the mystery of The Spyglass File lay many years prior to the Second World War.
An hour had passed and Morton yawned. His head still throbbed, punishing him for continuing. He had checked the marriage register until its termination in 1952. Not a single Finch or Spyglass. In the burial register he had found Agnes’s entry in July 1943 and that of her husband, James Finch in 1922.
Another glimpse at the clock. He could leave now without searching the baptism register and catch the next train home, or he could wait for another hour and finish the job.
He had to stay and complete it.
Morton’s idea that Agnes had been born and baptised in Capel-le-Ferne proved to be incorrect, as he trudged through the dying days of the Victorian era and pushed into the early 1900s, without locating any members of the Spyglass or Finch family.
When an entry presented itself onscreen, it took Morton an exorbitant amount of time to trust what his beleaguered eyes were telling him that they were seeing.
When Baptized: 5th February 1912
Child’s Christian Name: Eleanor Spyglass
Parents’ Names: Agnes Spyglass
Abode: Spring Cottage, Capel-le-Ferne
Quality, Trade or Profession: single woman
Ten months before she had been married to James Finch, Agnes had given birth to an illegitimate daughter.
Morton photographed the entry, then opened up his laptop. Despite the pain in his head, he ran a series of quick searches in Ancestry for the marriage or death of Eleanor Spyglass. Nothing. According to the indexes, she neither married nor died. He tried a general search in all of their online records. Nothing. He switched his search to Agnes and found her on various censuses. In 1911, the closest to the baby’s birth, she was residing as a boarder at Spring Cottage, Capel-le-Ferne—the home of Ada Potter.
Morton tried to ponder the question of whether The Spyglass file had been named after Agnes, or her illegitimate daughter, Eleanor, but the agony in his head prevented any meaningful thought process. Perhaps the link between the various Spyglass files was illegitimacy. He desperately wanted to stop, but he wasn’t finished yet. He still had forty years left to search of the baptism register.
He fought on.
There was nothing further of interest in the register until he reached the 1940s, when he located several of the fallen women taken in by Agnes Finch. Given her own past, it was of little wonder that she had opened her home to other women in similar circumstances. All the women had cited Cliff House as their place of residence. All were single and none had named a father. Morton had hoped to find Elsie among their number, but she didn’t appear.
Finally, the glorious words, in white capital letters on a black background announced that he could pack up and go home. END.
He went to close his laptop, then spotted that he had two new emails. One from Barbara and one from Liu Chai, the journalist. Despite his head, he couldn’t ignore them.
Liu’s message, being
