Then again, who was she to talk, when she found it hard to trust? She bit back her impatience. ‘Let’s look at the church records.’
‘Alice should be in 1846—yes, she’s here,’ Angelo said. ‘Listed with her mother Harriet and her father Charles.’
‘Here’s Thomas Reynolds, in March 1864.’ Mariana worked backwards. ‘So he was conceived in June 1863, and Alice would’ve known for definite by September that she was pregnant. It all ties up.’
‘So was the baby Carulli’s? Or did she fall in love with Robert and have a secret fling with him rather than Carulli, and maybe Carulli took the blame?’ Angelo asked.
‘Would a seventeen-year-old girl really fall for someone twice her age—someone who’s not far off the age of her own father—and not from the same social class as her family? If she’d fallen for one of Robert’s sons, I could imagine that more easily,’ Mariana said.
‘Let’s see if we can find the wedding,’ Angelo said.
* * *
They pored over the screen together; the tiny space meant that they were jammed up against each other. Touching. Angelo was very, very aware of Mariana: the warmth of her body, her light floral scent. He couldn’t help thinking about last night. How it had felt to sleep with Mariana in his arms. How wonderful. How right. Maybe he could tell her he’d made a mistake in pushing her away—but how selfish that would be. How could he expect her to give up her dreams of a family for him?
He really needed to get a grip.
They were looking up information about the woman who was possibly the model in his grandfather’s painting. And his feelings about Mariana needed to be squashed. Right now.
‘Here we go. “Robert Reynolds of this parish, widower, aged forty, and Alice Fisher of this parish, spinster, aged seventeen. Married by licence in this church, the first of October 1863,”’ she read.
‘What does “married by licence” mean?’ he asked.
She looked it up on the Internet. ‘You didn’t have to have the banns read. So it was a rushed wedding, by the sounds of it. Oh, look—she’s signed the register, but Robert has put a cross, with the vicar’s handwriting next to it saying “his mark”.’
‘So she could write and he couldn’t.’
‘I hope,’ she said softly, ‘he didn’t make her feel bad about that.’
Was she thinking about the way Eric had made her feel bad about herself? Or—guilt flooded through him—was she thinking about the way Angelo himself had made her feel? ‘They might have been happy together,’ he said. ‘She might have taught him to write.’
‘I hope so.’
He continued looking at the file. ‘Robert’s father was Thomas—he’s deceased. So I’m guessing that Robert took over from him at the farm. And Alice’s father is Charles Fisher, landowner. So she’s definitely our Alice. Her father is a witness, along with John Reynolds—Robert’s oldest son.’
She bit her lip. ‘It looks to me as if Charles did a deal with one of his tenants—marry Alice and give the baby his name, and in return he’d get the farm. Let’s check and see if they had any more children.’ She went back to the microfiche for the births and scrolled through the rest of the eighteen-seventies. ‘No. No more children. So maybe Robert and Alice agreed that it would be a marriage in name only. Or maybe they couldn’t—’ She stopped. ‘Sorry.’
Angelo flinched. He knew what she’d been about to say, and he knew just how that felt. Would Robert have wanted children of his own with his new young wife? Would he have wanted a daughter, perhaps, with her mother’s beautiful smile? As the years passed, and no children arrived, would he have felt more and more useless, less and less of a man, the way Angelo himself had felt after Stephanie’s rejection? Or would Robert have been content with the three sons he’d had with his first wife? How would it feel to bring up someone else’s child as your own?
Stephanie had refused to consider IVF. Or adoption. Or fostering. But Mariana had brought up the subject herself.