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 wrinkled her nose. ‘Seems a bit out of character, don’t you think?’
Ben pondered for a few moments. ‘Anyway, I don’t know much about writing books. But it sounds to me like you’ve got a great thing going here. Drama, murder, injustice, scandal, intrigue – why give up on it?’
Kristen hesitated, as if uncertain what, or how much, to tell him. ‘It’s like I said. Because something else came up.’
Ben could see the shadow of anxiety, intermingled with excitement, that had entered her face. The nervous light that had come into her eyes was similar to the expression she’d worn earlier when checking her messages. ‘You told me that this research trip had thrown up something unexpected,’ he said. ‘Are we getting to those trade secrets now?’
She nodded. ‘You see, a few days ago I … I found something.’
‘Found something?’
‘Yes. Something that changes everything. The reason I’m stopping with the book. If my hunch is right and this comes off, I might never have to write another book again.’
‘You didn’t find the leprechauns’ gold, did you?’ Ben said with a dry smile.
‘No, I found something very real. Information that nobody else knows, that’s been kept a secret for a very long time. Just stumbled on it in the middle of my research, totally by chance, almost like it was sitting there waiting for me. Something big, and I mean big. I can’t say more than that. No offence.’
‘None taken,’ Ben said. ‘But I’m curious. Earlier on you didn’t want to tell me anything at all about your secret. Why tell me this much now?’
‘Because of what you told me,’ she said. ‘About how you helped people. People who might be in trouble.’
‘I said I used to. What’s the connection?’
‘Would you … I mean, would you still …?’
He looked at her. ‘Go on.’
‘Just that … this thing I found out … there’s, well, a potential risk involved. Quite a bit of risk, if I’m honest.’