Antonia had to make a conscious effort to leave the cottage for the journey into Amberwood Magna and the library. In the end, she took Daniel with her, and got through the short drive by imagining how he would have reacted to the volume of traffic on today’s roads. Would he have found it exhilarating or merely noisy? At least he would not have known what a terrible driver she was.
The library was a nice old Victorian building in a corner of the little market town’s square, and once inside Antonia felt safer. The first floor had been made into a small coffee shop. She thought she would make notes until lunchtime, and then study them over coffee and a sandwich.
This part of Cheshire seemed to have quite a lot of interesting snippets of history. Antonia went carefully through all the indexes, but the only thing vaguely connected to Quire House or Latchkill was a listing for some church records of St Michael’s Church, spanning the period between 1883 and 1899. Worth a look? Yes, 1899 had been the date on Daniel’s angry letters to Latchkill’s matron. Antonia asked for the records at the librarian’s desk.
‘I think there’s restricted access to those particular books,’ said the librarian, who was a youngish boy with a face that for some reason reminded Antonia vaguely of Raffles. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
Restricted access. It sounded more like something you would encounter in a traffic system. Antonia said, ‘I don’t want to take anything away. Just to look at it and make some notes. If they’re the original records, I’ll be careful with them.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ said the boy, sounding genuinely so. ‘But you’d need what we call a private research card.’
‘Well, could I get one?’
‘I can give you an application form, and you can fill it in now, but then we’d have to send it to our County headquarters. And they’re inclined to be long-winded. It could take at least a fortnight for it to come through.’
Antonia said, ‘Oh, but—’ when a man’s voice broke in.
‘Put Miss Weston’s request on my research card, would you, Kit?’
Antonia looked round sharply.
‘Have this one on me, Miss Weston,’ said Oliver Remus.
The annoying thing was that the professor merely scribbled a signature, nodded an acknowledgement, and appeared to consider the matter closed. Antonia managed an awkward, ‘Thank you very much,’ to which he responded with a brusque nod, and then went to sit at a distant table, appearing to become instantly immersed in some research of his own.
Well, bother him and his cool disapproval.
But the records from St Michael’s Church, when they were brought, were disappointing. There were columns of births and marriages and baptisms, all recorded in a clear, graceful hand, which Antonia found rather depressing. When it came to the reckoning, was this the sum total of a life? Neat lists of names and dates? Daniel, thought Antonia, if you’re somewhere in here, I’m not finding you, and I’m not finding Latchkill either.
There were several references to the Forrester Benevolent Trust being administered, but on closer inspection these were little more than lists of payments made, or dates of meetings. These entries were in a thin spidery hand, with a signature at the foot of each page–the Reverend Arthur Skandry, who had, it seemed, been the incumbent of St Michael’s Church from 1896.
Arthur Skandry, had visited Latchkill Asylum quite frequently. He had recorded these visits diligently–so diligently that Antonia, who half an hour earlier would have traded, Faust-like, with the devil for anything about the place, found her attention wandering, until an entry for September 1899 snapped her concentration back into place. Skandry had spent time in something called Reaper Wing, ministering ‘to the poor unfortunates incarcerated there, bringing a little calm to their agitation after a recent thunderstorm, to which most of them had assigned the old pagan beliefs…’
But other that this, there was nothing of much interest. Antonia was closing her notebook, when a shadow fell across the table and Oliver Remus said, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your work, Miss Weston, but the library closes for lunch and they’ll need to lock everything away.’