Page 45 of The Dead Come to Stay

Jo had spent the last few hours in a haze.

Aiden Jones was a man of secrets, meticulous habits and a singular, abiding special interest. Like the receipts and backs

of envelopes she’d found in his archive box, the book had been written in, written on, written around , with text creeping up the sides when a new fact needed to be added in place. Interleaved between the dense-packed pages

were letters, photocopies, newsprint, timelines, obituaries, photographs and enough minutiae and ephemera that would make

Roberta Wilkinson blush.

Jo assumed the portrait of Evelyn drove his quest. She was wrong . Aiden had been reconstructing the entire family tree, a great flowering of data that put the genealogy sites to shame.

Chen had made green tea. Arthur needed time with his thoughts; Jo needed no walls and an open sky.

She and Gwilym walked to the park and sat beneath old trees and green boughs.

Even hyperlexic speed reading had been no match for Aiden’s curious scribbled spirals.

There were places where the text opened up, became ropy and loose—a mind working faster than a pen.

There were places where it narrowed, stuttered, shrank from cramped fingers afraid of losing a thought.

Explosive excitement as he made connections, winnowed details, solved the miniproblems of lost family lines.

And as she went, a mantra repeated in her head: he was like me, he was like me, he was like me . She’d lost Aiden even before her mother, but reading his words, she’d never felt so close to anyone. She’d found the family

she knew must be there. And through him, she found one thing more.

Her name was Violet. Just like the flowers decorating Evelyn’s portrait or those that sprang up over the buried hope chest:

humility, grace and delicate love . From scraps and letters, ancestry searches and medical records, Aiden pieced together the skeleton of the story. Evelyn

had indeed died in childbirth.

But the baby survived. And as for the answer Jo had been seeking all this time: Gwen had given the child away.

The travel records before her now revealed that William was in London on business when Evelyn went into labor; he returned

to her corpse. Did Gwen tell him the baby died? It seemed likely. Why not keep the baby; why not raise it as her own? She

thought better of it, eventually. Strangely, Gwen’s own letters, preserved in Aiden’s notebook, were the first clue:

November 1910, Gwen to someone named Tomlinson: “Please,” she wrote, “if you know or can discover her whereabouts, I would be happy to pay for your trouble...”

January 1913: “I can pay for travel to abroad, but I cannot go myself. I have my reasons.”

Another came in the form of scrap paper, a note scrawled in uneven script, but not by Aiden: “Flooding—must get Hobarth.”

Jo looked at the torn paper, it’s edges rust brown. Aiden provided a caption: “Written by the midwife. Evelyn needed a doctor.”

—whom? Jo found some more notes that clarified Hobarth as Dr. Ida Hobarth, the only modern physician in Abington, the same one who, in another letter, told Gwen she was barren and could never conceive.

Jo understood the meaning of the other word, too, and it wasn’t about the creeks rising.

Flooding stood in as the lingering Victorian word for preeclampsia, a hypertensive, multisystem disorder leading to severe convulsions

and hemorrhage. By 1906 physicians could manage the condition with magnesium sulfate. Hobarth would have known that; she could

even have performed an emergency C-section, risky as it was. But she didn’t. She never came. Because no one called her.

Aiden wrote more in the margins of these factual notations, as if trying to imagine the scene himself: Evelyn lying above

in the secret nursery, alone, in labor, and everything going wrong. The midwife had written the notes to someone , but if it had been the good doctor, then there would be records. What happened?

Jo thought she knew. Ida Hobarth would know the baby was William’s, which meant she’d learned of the affair. To call her would

be to invite calumny and shame. Did the midwife send that note to Gwen? Upon refusing to do as asked, did she stand in her

nightdress at the bottom of those grand stairs and let her sister die? Or did she leave the house so she wouldn’t hear the

cries?

Aiden filled in the details on his own:

Maybe she told herself Evelyn would survive on her own; perhaps she lied to her conscience. The midwife was local, low-class.

Someone poor who could be paid off. She couldn’t save Evelyn. Managed to save the infant. Evelyn’s last words were the child’s

name; call her Violet. Gwen forced the midwife to take the child with her. When it was over, the house was silent—so silent—too

silent. Or did Gwen still hear the ringing of a babe’s weak cry?

Gwen didn’t murder her sister with the twist of a knife, but she killed her all the same.

The greater crime came next; she rejected the baby—hid it from its father, sent it away.

Records of work done by the gardeners reveal a cold cellar dug in the basement.

It had only begun, but served as the perfect grave for Evelyn.

And when the deed was done? Jo imagined Gwen standing before the painting of Evelyn Davies where it hung in the library.

Letters, in the autumn years: April 1931 to “a friend”:

William stays so often in Allerton; we rarely speak. This house is so very empty, Ethel, and I am sick at heart. Won’t you

come see me? I cannot stand to be company to myself, and you know so much of my history. You’ll come, won’t you? I think this

place is haunted, yet.]

January 1935 to “Dr. Jack”:

He won’t rise again. I went in to see him, but he turns from me. You tell me to take heart, but I must know. Is this the end?

There are things I need to tell him. Please don’t preserve me as a lady; the world is already so dark, death is a shadow against

night.

February of the same, a letter begun and never finished:

He knows. I know he does. He will not forgive me.

Jo had thought this whole time that Gwen destroyed it out of jealousy, but it wasn’t so. She couldn’t bear the judgment of

those eyes. She couldn’t stand the guilt. The garden was still in its glory, then, well fertilized no doubt with phosphates.

Perhaps she found the sulfuric acid in a potting shed, property of the gardeners she was about to get rid of. Maybe she even

blamed them for the deed. Daughter of a steel magnate, she would, of course, know exactly what such a corrosive would do.

Aiden ended Gwen’s tree, a solitary branch.

But for William, the lines went on. Violet had become Viola.

She’d been given the last name Taylor at a home for orphans—and then shipped, with hundred of other “home children,” to rural Canada.

She’d been “received” by a farmer in Quebec in 1913 at the age of five.

The trail went cold until after the First World War; Aiden located a marriage license: Viola Taylor and Edmon Bouchard to be wed in April 1922.

The tree branched in 1923, 1925 and 1928. Three children.

“Three,” Jo said out loud. Her eyes had clouded, and she blinked at the sky to try and clear them. “Noah, Olivia and Emile.”

“Last name Bouchard, right?” Gwilym had been fighting to access his genealogy sites via mobile phone.

“Yes, but Noah died in World War II. He was a pilot, flew with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and later the British RAF.” Jo

scanned the last pages. The handwriting grew weaker, the entries further apart. The last entry wasn’t about Viola’s children

at all; it was a record of her death at the age of fifty-one. Survived by her husband, buried at Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery.

Jo checked the date; Aiden himself would have died a month after the last entry. He must have known it was coming, and that

his hope for the wedding proposal wasn’t to be. Mortal, he concluded with Viola’s mortality, then locked it away beneath a

ring he’d never give his lover.

“God, this is—this is...” Jo sank her face into her hands.

“A lot?” Gwilym asked, patting her gingerly on the back. Succinct. Correct. But not nearly enough to cover all the feelings

Jo had swelling up.

“They’re out there,” she said, looking at Gwilym through her fingers. “At least, maybe their children are, if they had them.

I have family .” Gwilym gave her a curious look. Then he leaned on his knees and looked Tyne-ward.

“You know, Jo. You have family. I mean. There’s Arthur, he counts. And Tula. Imagine what she’d say if you didn’t think of her that way.” He hazarded a glance in her direction. “MacAdams, even. And me. I hope you count me.”

Jo found it suddenly hard to swallow. Do not , she warned her cry muscles. There had been one meltdown this week already and that was plenty, so she forced the sob into

something more benign.

“You’re my friend, Gwilym. I’m not entirely sure I’ve even had one before,” she said. “Not a real one.”

“Those are the only kind worth having,” he said. Jo felt a temporary impulse to hug him. Instead, she stood up and offered

a hand in pulling him to his feet.

“I want to take Evelyn home,” she said. Her home. Abington—and Netherleigh Cottage.

“Good plan,” Gwilym agreed. Jo handed him the book; she needed to put her sweatshirt on. The day had been warm, but a cool

wind was blowing and brought with it a chill. It was nearly six in the evening, and though the sun wouldn’t set for hours,

the sky had grayed. If they crossed the next street, it would be a short walk back to Arthur’s flat; she’d taken that route

the day she encountered the butty van driver.

“We should see about getting this into Roberta’s archive,” Gwilym said, tying up the twine.

“If Arthur lets us,” Jo added. “Today might not be the day to ask.”

They stood at the corner, checking for traffic, but someone had just run ahead of them into the street. Gwilym said something