The Telling

Williams family grave. She was laid on top of her husband’s bones. The sextons filled in the earth, and someone chipped her name into the remaining clear inches of stone. No space for dates. No space for anything more than the defining phrase, his wife . And for the first time I wondered was there more to that phrase than met the eye; was there a hint of defiance to it, an undertone of assertion? Was it her son who had insisted it be carved? Her husband was dead, after all, and couldn’t comment.
    The son. Conceived when she was nineteen. I flicked back, looking for his birth. The neat accounting for the souls received, united, dispatched. The Reverend Jonathan Tatham’s careful double-entry bookkeeping for God. I found myself warming to the man; the unassuming abbreviation of his name, the smooth looping quality of his handwriting.
    There was a season for babies too. James Robert Williams was christened in the summer of 1843, between a Stephen Goss, plump son of George and Mary Goss, farmers, and a Dorothy Anne Hollings, bastard daughter of Anne Hollings, domestic, pinkly bawling as the water washes her ill-begotten soul.

    June 23rd
James Robert
son of Thomas Williams
 
 
& Elizabeth Williams
     
    There it was, in black and white, though the words were white and the background black, like text on a computer screen, highlighted before deleting.
    I was in that moment’s stillness before gravity bites. I was looking at the boy’s name, the boy who grew up, and died, and was buried somewhere other than the family grave, and was long rotted away to bones. Whose own grandchildren will have been of an age to be ploughed into the mud at Ypres or picked apart by fishes in the Dardanelles. Far worse than the burials, the baptismal records: the freight of heartbreak they carried; the inevitable grief of living. Then I noticed the handwriting; that it was different. It was not so neat, it scrawled and scratched; the signature was practically illegible. Initials R. and G., possibly W. Not Reverend Jonathan Tatham any more. The clergyman before him.
    A baby suspended over the font, water dripped over his head, the muttering of benedictions. A young woman standing in the background, weak, pale, fierce. The vicar’s blue-shaven wattles shaking with the words: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen .
    A baby born in June.
    I scrabbled at the microfiche in its slide, my hands clumsy with haste. June June June June June. If he was christened late June 1843, he must have been conceived…
    There was no wedding recorded in September between Thomas Williams and Elizabeth. The year scrolled back through harvest-time and hay and dog roses in the hedgerows, back through May blossom and cherry blossom and bluebells, back through daffodils and snowdrops and wind-chased clouds, and there was no wedding between Thomas Williams and Elizabeth. I shifted the slide again, scrolling back through that same summer again, through other weddings and babies and unseasonable deaths, and the days shortened, and the leaves began to turn, and they fell, and there was frost in the mornings, and my hands were shaking. They married in December.
    December the 12th, 1842. Elizabeth was nineteen, must have been two, nearly three months pregnant, and must have known that she was, since there was no blood when there should have been, and there was sickness and fatigue. She would have seen these signs in other women, and have known what they meant.
    Elizabeth Parke,
her mark
     
    The X was large, out of proportion, displayed the cautious awkwardness of someone unused to a pen. It shocked me more than anything else. More like a denial than an assertion, it seemed to make a kind of sense.
    *
     
    I passed the counter on the way out. The same girl, sweet creamy skin, who looked up to give me a concentrated and concerned look that made me almost love her.
    ‘I –’ I tried.
    She lifted a box of tissues from underneath the counter, but I shook my head.
    ‘I just wanted to know –’ I cleared my throat. ‘I found this thing. A young woman, mid-nineteenth century, she marked a cross by her name rather than signed. I thought that there was basic education, pretty much, by then. Sunday schools and stuff.’
    The assistant nodded sympathetically. ‘It wouldn’t have made her illiterate, necessarily. Some church schools, they’d teach the kids to read, but not to write. People often learned to write in later life.’
    ‘I don’t