Ben looked at her and found himself smiling. She was attractive, she was warm and engaging. Under any other circumstances, a man might have felt a pang of disappointment that she’d be gone the next day. A new female attachment was the last thing Ben was looking for at this point in his life, but he was still sorry that he was going to lose an interesting companion. He shoved all those thoughts to the back of his mind.
‘Eight months is a lot of time to spend on research, just to give up on it,’ he said. ‘What happened, did you lose interest?’
‘Not at all. Lady Stamford’s is a fascinating story.’
‘Tell me some of it.’
‘You really want to know?’
‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.’
Kristen shrugged. ‘She was born Elizabeth Manners in Bath in 1824. Just turned nineteen when she met her soon-to-be husband, Lord Edgar Stamford. He was only two years older than her, but already well known as a botanist and chemist. He’d inherited the family fortune very young. Massively rich, dashing and handsome, whisked her off her feet and brought her to Ireland. It wasn’t exactly the happiest of marriages. She soon found out that Stamford was a controlling despot of a man who treated everyone around him like filth.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘They’re not wrong. Total bastard wouldn’t be too much of an understatement. As lord of the manor he was also a Justice of the Peace, which in rural Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century basically allowed him to play God with the peasant farmers who worked on his lands. They had a pretty rough existence under his rule. Then when the Great Famine struck the land hard in 1847, things got worse for them. A lot worse.’
Ben was no historian, but he had a fairly clear idea of what Kristen was talking about. It wasn’t possible to live in Ireland for any length of time, or for that matter to have had an Irish mother, without picking up a few of the key facts about one of the defining moments, and quite possibly the darkest hour, of the country’s history.
‘Bad time,’ he said. ‘About a million dead from starvation. They’d become too dependent on the potato for food. When the blight wiped out the crop, they didn’t stand much of a chance.’
‘More like anything up to two million, by some estimates,’ Kristen corrected him. ‘That’s out of an overall population at the time of just eight million. Compare those figures to the famine in Darfur in 2003: a hundred thousand dead out of a population of twenty-seven million. We tend to forget nowadays how bad things got here. Irish people died like flies. Heaped in mass graves, sometimes while they were still alive but too weak from starvation to protest. Starvation was everywhere. Yet if Lord Stamford caught one of his hungry tenants stealing so much as an apple to feed their children, he’d have them strung up.’
‘Sounds like a nice guy to be married to.’
‘It was a wretched time for her. Women couldn’t just walk away from an abusive relationship in those days. Husbands had complete control over everything. Marital rape was legal; men could basically do what they wanted. I’m sure Edgar Stamford exploited that freedom to the nines, though I can’t prove it without the journals.’
‘Journals?’
‘She kept a private diary during her years in Ireland, several volumes long. They’d have been a key resource for me, if I’d been able to get hold of them.’
‘They were lost?’ Ben asked.
Kristen shook her head. ‘I finally tracked them down to this former academic who has them now, a private collector specialising in Irish history. Tried to persuade him to let me view them, but I’m still waiting for him to get back to me.’
‘Pity.’
‘Anyway,’ Kristen said, ‘we know a lot about her married life from her later writings and personal letters, some of which I managed to get hold of.’
‘Did she leave Ireland after her husband died?’
‘No, he died later. She had eight years of hell with him and then managed to escape back to England with a little help from sympathisers. That was when her life really began. She campaigned for women’s rights, published a couple of volumes of poetry and a successful novel, and founded a school to help educate underprivileged girls and young women.’
‘Sounds like a happy ending, for her at least,’ Ben said.
‘Sadly not. The good times didn’t last long. I’ve got some of her personal letters that suggest she got herself mired in some kind of legal action in the late summer of 1851, though it’s all a bit of a mystery. From what I managed to piece together, Elizabeth made contact with one Sir Abraham Barnstable, who was one of the very top lawyers in London at the time and a bit of a shadowy figure.’
‘Shadowy how?’
She shrugged. ‘Government connections. Some have said he was a spy. What she was in touch with him for, nobody knows, because then the Gilbert Drummond thing happened and—’
‘You’re losing me completely.’
‘Sorry. Gilbert Drummond was a new teacher Elizabeth had hired to work at her school that July. He was twenty-six, handsome, dashing, but volatile. The story goes that he fell obsessively in love with her, and in September he finally declared his passion for her. When Elizabeth rejected him, he became convinced she was in love with someone else, went off in a rage and got a horse pistol … and you can guess the rest.’
‘He shot her,’ Ben said.
Kristen made the shape of a gun with her index finger and thumb, aimed it and clicked her tongue. ‘Single slug to the heart.’
‘So that was the end of that.’
‘Except there’s a mystery to it,’ Kristen said.
‘Even more mystery?’
‘I told you, I can get information out of a stone. I’m the only researcher I know of who’s found out that Gilbert Drummond couldn’t have fallen in love with her at all. He was actually gay, and his conviction for murder was a complete set-up. The real killer knew that Drummond wouldn’t bring shame and public scandal on his family by revealing the truth about himself, even though he was facing the gallows for a crime he didn’t commit.’
‘Very noble. So who did it?’
‘A paid assassin called William Briggs. As for who employed him, well, I’m still working on that one. Or … was.’
‘1851,’ Ben said. ‘Wasn’t that the same year old Stamford torched his house and killed himself?’
‘Actually, it wasn’t just the same year – they died in the same month. Just two weeks apart, Elizabeth on September sixth, her former husband on the twentieth.’
‘Maybe he did it out of grief for her,’ Ben said.
Kristen
