The receptionist’s face softened. ‘I lost my grandfather to cancer. It’s a horrible disease. All right. I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thank you,’ Mariana said.
‘Do you have time to go to the Records Office?’ Angelo asked as they left the building.
‘We might as well. Two pairs of eyes are quicker than one.’ And, the quicker they wrapped up this project, the quicker she’d be out of his way. The quicker she’d be able to build up the protective layers around her heart again.
At the Records Office, they talked to the staff about where to find the information they wanted, and finally they sat down with one of the computer terminals to look up the local census records.
‘Eighteen sixty-one, Barrington, Norfolk,’ she said.
They scrolled through the pages. ‘Here’s New Road. None of the families living in the cottages are the Reynoldses or the Fishers,’ she said. ‘But here’s Manor Farm. “Robert Reynolds, aged thirty-eight, tenant farmer and widower.”’
They continued searching. ‘Here’s Barrington Manor. “Charles Fisher, aged forty-eight, land proprietor,”’ Angelo read. ‘“Wife Harriet, aged forty-six; sons Henry, Frederick, James—” And, oh, look at this.’
‘“Alice, daughter, aged fifteen, scholar,”’ Mariana read.
‘That’s 1861. So when Carulli comes to the village for the first time, the year after, she’s sixteen. The second time, when his letter to his brother says he’s got a job as the drawing master for Mr Fisher’s children, she’s seventeen.’
They looked at each other. ‘Alice is the daughter of the house, not the servant we assumed she was. No wonder Carulli left the village under a cloud, if he had a fling with her. She was his pupil,’ Mariana said.
Alice had fallen in love with the wrong person. Mariana knew how that felt. She’d made a similar mistake. Alice had fallen in love with someone who wasn’t free to love her back; Mariana was falling for someone who was too stubborn to let himself love her back. Someone who’d closed himself off to everyone.
She shook herself. This wasn’t about her and Angelo. They needed to work together, for Leo’s sake. Find the truth.
If only they could negotiate the minefield of their pasts and their mistakes as easily.
‘So what happened to Alice?’ he asked.
Had she stayed in Barrington, lonely and sad, eating her heart out over the artist who’d made her light up in that portrait? Or had she managed to move on with her life?
‘Let’s try the 1871 census,’ she suggested.
‘Charles and Harriet are still there at the manor, but no mention of Alice or her brothers,’ he said. ‘So is Alice still alive? Did she marry someone else and move away, too?’
‘And what’s the connection with the farmhouse?’ Mariana asked.
‘Let’s look at Manor Farm again.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Robert’s sons have all married and moved into cottages. Robert’s listed as a farmer, but there’s nothing about being a tenant, and—oh, my God. Look at the next line.’
‘“Wife, Alice, aged twenty-five,”’ Mariana said softly. ‘The same age as Alice Fisher would be.’
‘So is that our Alice? And they have a son, Thomas. Aged seven.’
‘Born in 1864,’ Mariana said, ‘which means he was conceived in 1863.’
They looked at each other. ‘So this could be our Alice,’ Angelo said.
‘So is Thomas’s father Carulli rather than Robert Reynolds?’ she asked.
‘There’s a big age gap between Robert and Alice. More than twenty years. How likely is it that the only daughter of the family at the big house is going to marry one of her father’s tenant farmers?’ Angelo asked. ‘Surely her parents would want to marry her off to a son of a neighbouring rich family and consolidate the family fortune?’
‘She wouldn’t have had much say in the matter, back then,’ Mariana said. ‘She wouldn’t have had much choice in anything.’
He flinched slightly, as if seeing the similarities with their own situation. He wasn’t giving her any choice. And Mariana wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him and yell at him for being so ridiculously stubborn. Why couldn’t he see that not every woman had the same views as his ex? Why couldn’t he see that they had a real chance of making a go of things?