A Curious Beginning

I blinked in surprise. “She was Catholic.”


He nodded gravely. “Apparently. There is a mention of the priest who presided over her funeral, a Father Burke. Look here, it is his obituary. He died six years after your mother and according to this was the parish priest of Greymount in Dublin. Veronica, he would never have let her be buried in holy ground if she had taken her own life.”

“Still,” I persisted. “It is too coincidental. Unless she simply willed herself to die. Is that even possible?”

He shrugged. “I have seen stranger.”

“So, my mother was an Irish Catholic actress. I suppose Ashbourne was a stage name. I wonder if there is any way of tracing her through the burial records to find her real name.”

“No need,” he said, producing another cutting. “Her real name was Mary Katherine de Clare.”

“De Clare?” I took the cutting. Another piece from her triumphant American tour of 1860, but this one went into great depth about her past. “She ran away from home,” I told him. “Born to a respectable Irish family and they disowned her when she went on the stage. Here is a photograph of her with her brother,” I said, pointing to the cutting. “Edmund de Clare, as a boy of fifteen.”

Stoker scrutinized the photograph. “Is this the fellow who accosted you at Paddington?”

I nodded and he handed back the cutting. The photograph was taken some years before Mary Katherine de Clare had changed her name and taken her place on the stage. She was dressed in a suitably girlish frock, standing behind her seated brother, serious in his town suit, but with the same elegant bones and graceful demeanor as his sister.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” I murmured.

Stoker shrugged. “Perhaps he felt revealing himself as your uncle was too private a matter for a crowded train station.”

“Perhaps.”

I read on, learning more about my mother. Famed as a gifted tragedienne, she had built her career upon the death scenes of Juliet and Ophelia. But she had been best known for the role of Phaedra in an English adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre. There was a photograph of her, dressed in purest white, poison vial held aloft as she contemplated her fate. I raised my eyes briefly. “I presume you have noticed all her best roles were suicides?”

His expression was skeptical. “That proves nothing.”

“I suppose not,” I conceded. I burrowed through the rest of the papers—a motley collection of obituaries, notices from her plays, and two photographs. “My God,” I breathed. “Stoker, look.”

I handed him a photograph of Lily Ashbourne holding an infant. He read, “‘Me with Baby. December 1862.’ You were six months old.”

I had been a plump infant, sitting upright in my mother’s lap for the photograph. I must have moved, for my face was faintly blurred at the edge. But Lily’s face was perfectly immobile, the moment captured forever, like a birdwing butterfly pinned to a card in all its brilliance. It had been nearly twenty-five years, but Lily Ashbourne’s beauty was undimmed so long as that photograph existed to give truth to it. I peered closer and saw clutched in my chubby fist a tiny velvet mouse. Chester.

Wordlessly, Stoker handed me one of his great scarlet handkerchiefs to wipe my eyes. I moved on to the second photograph. Another photograph of me, clearly from the same sitting, for my white petticoats, stiff with embroidery, were unchanged. But Lily was missing. Instead, I was held by two women, their expressions wooden. Lily had contrived to look natural for the camera, as at ease as she might have been with a portrait painter. But these two were unaccustomed to having their pictures taken. Their chins were sharp, their mouths pursed in expressions of wariness. But even so, I knew them.

“It is Aunt Nell and Aunt Lucy!” I exclaimed. “The Harbottle sisters. I always thought they took me from a foundling home, but they must have known my mother.”

I turned over the photographs. Scribbled in the same hand as the other, in a scrawl of violet ink: “Baby with Ellie and Nan.” “I don’t understand. Who are Ellie and Nan?”

Together we sorted through the papers until Stoker brandished one, triumphant. “I have it. A mention in this notice about her American tour that Miss Ashbourne will be traveling with her dresser, Nan Williams, and her maid, Ellie Williams, sisters.”

I sat back, my mind working furiously. “It makes no sense. Why would Nan and Ellie Williams change their names to Lucy and Nell Harbottle? And given me the name Veronica Speedwell? You notice there is no indication of what my mother called me, only ‘Baby.’ What does it mean?”

We searched through the rest of the papers, but there was nothing more to be learned.