He ignored that. “Come here and chop this. I don’t trust my hand.”
I went obediently to the counter, found a knife and started on the ham. The painkillers were kicking in; my head wasn’t throbbing as badly, but it felt loose and overrun with drifting things, cobwebs and fog and thistledown.
Hugo broke four eggs into a bowl and started whisking. “Now,” he said, his voice lightening. “The surprise; what I was waiting to tell you until you were a bit more awake. You won’t believe it.”
I did my best to play along; I owed him that, at least. “Oh yeah?”
“I think I’ve cracked Mrs. Wozniak.”
The grin on his face was wide and real. “You’re joking,” I said.
“No, I’m pretty sure. Haskins, our diary fellow? In November of 1887, he starts grousing about his wife landing him with her family’s problems. He’s such a complainer that I didn’t take much notice at first, almost skipped the whole section, but luckily I stuck with it. The wife’s sister in Clare—yes, can you see why my ears pricked up?—she wants to send her sixteen-year-old daughter to stay with the Haskinses, in Tipperary, for a few months. Haskins’s main complaint is that he’ll be stuck with the expense of feeding this girl, but he’s also puffing up with outrage because she might corrupt his children—who are three, four and seven at this point, so I would have thought fairly difficult to corrupt. Unless . . .” He cocked an eyebrow at me, dropping butter into the frying pan, Have you got it?
It took me a while to fish anything out of the morass in my head. “She was pregnant?”
“Well, it’s hard to be positive of anything—Haskins was so furious that his handwriting turns into a complete snarl, double underlining everywhere—but from all the mentions of shame and disgrace and wantonness, I think she was. Pass me the salt and pepper, would you?”
I handed them over. His serenity was starting to freak me out. I wondered if he had forgotten the entire conversation; if we would have to have it all over again that evening, when Melissa didn’t come home.
“Thanks. And”—happily salting and peppering away—“can you guess the niece’s surname?”
“McNamara?”
“It was indeed. Elaine McNamara.” He was smiling, squinting at the cooker dial as he adjusted the gas burner just so, but I could see the depth of his satisfaction. “She hasn’t shown up in any of the family trees so far, has she? Or has she?”
“Not that I remember.”
“We’ll track her down. So then”—pouring the eggs into the pan, fizzle and hiss—“I’m afraid I got impatient and started skimming ahead, looking for any mention of any O’Hagans—just to confirm the theory. And sure enough, a few weeks into 1888, Mrs. Haskins is suggesting that their lovely neighbors the O’Hagans might be willing to ‘conceal Elaine’s shame.’ It would have been easy as pie—plenty of lying on birth records, back then: the O’Hagans could just go to the registrar and put down the baby as their own, no need to prove where they’d got him. Our man Haskins isn’t mad about the idea—he thinks it would be letting Elaine off too lightly, she won’t comprehend the full something, I think it’s ‘magnitude,’ of her transgression; he wants to send her to a mother-and-baby home. But I think we can be pretty sure his wife won that argument in the end.”
The peaceful run of his voice, the savory smell of the eggs cooking, bright chill blue of the sky outside the French doors. I thought of my first day back here, the two of us in his study, rain at the windowpane and my mind wandering off among the knickknacks as he talked.
“And that’s as far as I got,” Hugo said, “before I heard you getting up. All the same, though: a good morning’s work, I think.”
His glance at me was almost shy. “That’s amazing,” I said, managing a big smile. “Congratulations.”
“To you, too. We did it together. We should have a glass of something to celebrate—is there any prosecco, anything like that? Or would that be too much for your head?”
“No, that sounds great. I bet we’ve got something somewhere.”
“Now, of course”—he sprinkled grated cheese into the pan, a big handful, topped it with the chopped ham—“I have to work out how to tell Mrs. Wozniak.”
“She should be over the moon,” I said. I found a bottle of prosecco in the booze cabinet; not chilled, but what the hell. “This is what she was after, isn’t it? It’s not like you’ve found a murderer in the family tree.”
Hugo gave me a thoughtful glance over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, “unless I’ve got this all wrong, that baby was Amelia Wozniak’s grandfather—Edward O’Hagan, the one who emigrated to America. He only died in 1976; it’s quite likely that she knew him well. Except with this, it may feel as if she didn’t know him that well after all. He wasn’t Edward O’Hagan, he was Edward McNamara. An entirely different person, in some ways if not all. And”—scattering spinach into the pan—“that new person comes with an awful lot of grief attached, a lot of injustice. That sixteen-year-old being sent away from her family in disgrace, having her baby taken away whether she liked it or not, was Amelia’s great-grandmother. And all of that grief and injustice is bound up with Amelia’s existence. Without it she might have been Amelia McNamara, or she might never have existed at all.”
“I guess,” I said. I was having a hard time working up much sympathy. I would have swapped my own problems, or his, for Mrs. Wozniak’s existential crisis any day.
“Well, who knows, maybe she’ll see it your way. But I’d rather go about it delicately, just in case.” It took him a couple of tries, but he got the omelet folded over. “It’s not today’s problem, anyway. We’ll have to decipher the rest of the diary first—I’d like to find out what happened to Elaine in the end, and see if we can get any kind of lead on the baby’s father. At some point we can ask Mrs. Wozniak whether there are any male-line descendants floating around, for Y-DNA matching; but for now maybe you could start on the parish records, try to find out whether Elaine eventually married? I doubt any husband would have been the baby’s father, or why wouldn’t she just marry him in the first place—more likely he was ineligible, one way or another—but it’s worth looking into.”
“OK,” I said. Apparently we were supposed to go right back to our comfy routine and pretend that none of last night had happened, although I couldn’t imagine how Hugo thought that was going to work in practice. Never mind how on earth he thought he was going to sort everything out: I was starting to wonder if his plan had been some illness-generated delusion involving the bat-signal or a Rafferty voodoo doll or something. Was it possible that he hadn’t worked out what was going on? That he thought the only problems here were a cousin-spat and a relationship rocky patch, everyone under stress and being silly, just need a good firm talking-to? “Cheers. Here’s to us.”
“And to Elaine McNamara.” Hugo took the glass from me and stepped aside to let me turn the omelet out of the heavy pan. “Poor child.”
I surprised myself by wolfing down my half of the omelet, fast enough that Hugo laughed at me. “There are more eggs, if you’re still hungry.”
“You were right,” I said. “I needed that.”
“Of course I was. Maybe next time I tell you something”—smiling at me, over his glass—“you’ll stop fussing and take my word for it.” And as I scraped up the last bite: “Now go find your cigarettes, would you? Since we’re being decadent.”
We sat there quietly, smoking a cigarette and then another, topping up our prosecco glasses. Hugo’s head was tilted back and his eyes half-closed, gazing up at the ceiling with grave, dreamy calm. Faint trail of cries from wild geese somewhere, carrying all the flavor of autumn, first frost and turf smoke. Hugo’s big hand tapping ash into the chipped saucer we were using as a makeshift ashtray, sunlight bringing the battered wood of the table alive with an impossible holy glow.
* * *