Alex Scarrow - October skies

Julian offered her a reassuring smile. ‘I’ll be very gentle, Grace.’

She locked her eyebrows suspiciously, studying him for a moment before curiosity finally won her over. ‘Okay. You go ahead and do it then.’

‘All right.’ Julian smiled and then let out a deep breath. ‘Nice and gently, trust me.’

With a twist of the penknife’s blade the latch crumbled into a shower of flakes and fell away. He tried to lift the lid but it was stuck firmly to the chest. He ran the blade of his knife lightly around the edge of the lid, dislodging more flakes and small clods of earth. With another gentle twist it cracked open and, in the stillness of the moment, they heard the slightest whisper of air rushing in.

‘My God, it was actually airtight,’ whispered Julian. He looked up at her. ‘That’s very good news.’ He slowly eased the lid open, muttering to himself, ‘So, what have we got in here, then?’

It was a small chest, with very little in it, and to his immense relief, bone dry inside. He noticed a leather purse in the corner. Poking it gently, he guessed there were coins inside. He spotted a shaving brush with what he guessed were probably badger-hair bristles, a milk-glass water cup and a mirror with an ornate silver frame. Julian picked up the mirror and turned it over in his hands. There was an engraving on the back.

‘B.E. Lambert,’ read Julian in a hushed voice.

He spotted a photo frame. Turning it over, there was a fading sepia photographic portrait of a distinguished middle-aged woman, seated. Standing behind her and to one side was a young man in his early twenties, fair hair parted tidily to one side and sporting light-coloured sideburns and a modest moustache. By the likeness of their facial features, Julian guessed them to be mother and son.

Neither were smiling, both looking intently at the camera. It was a formal portrait. He noticed the young man’s hand resting gently on the woman’s shoulder; a small gesture that communicated a lot.

They were close. Or perhaps this was a farewell portrait?

Julian gently placed the frame back in the box and noticed, beneath the other things, a dark burgundy leather-bound notebook. He reached in and pulled it carefully out. Then, with a quick glance up at Grace, who nodded for him to go ahead, he opened the front cover. There was an inscription on the inside, the gently looping swirls of a woman’s hand:

Benjamin,

For all your adventures in the New World. Fill these pages with your exciting stories, and then come home safely to me.

Your loving Mother.

He grinned and looked up at Grace. ‘This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find.’

He gently flipped the first page over; fragile, yellowed by time. Overleaf a dated first entry in tidy copperplate, little more than a few hastily jotted sentences, a sketch of a quayside and, as far as he was concerned the most useful scrap of information, a bill of passage from Liverpool to New York on a ship called the Cathara.

‘Excellent.’ He laughed and looked up from the notebook. ‘That’s more than enough to find out who this bloke was, Grace. More than enough.’

He lightly turned over a few more pages, the entries growing longer and longer, dense with meticulous handwriting and a few pencil sketches. He spotted amidst the spidery pen strokes names used over and over: Preston… Keats… Sam… Emily… then the writing became too erratic, too dense and tangled and the ink towards the end too faint to easily decipher.

Watered-down ink. This guy was doing his best to stretch out an emptying inkpot.

There was a lot in this leather book, he sensed: perhaps the complete story of what had happened here. But he’d need to scan the pages and digitally clean them up to make them easily legible, particularly the latter ones.

‘Grace, with your permission, I’m going to take just this book with me, okay? Nothing else.’

She looked unhappy with that. ‘Ain’t yours to take.’

‘We’re going to need to photograph each page. Get a digital record of this immediately. The paper’s fragile, and there’s very faint ink here, towards the back.’ Julian turned a few pages. ‘Very faint. The writing’s almost like a watermark. This should come out of the ground right now, and be kept somewhere dark and dry.’

She considered that for a moment.

He closed the notebook gently. ‘If I leave it out here, it’ll deteriorate. It needs to be taken out and digitised, Grace. As soon as possible.’

The woman considered that for a moment, and then nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘you know… for trusting us.’ Julian looked up at the cold grey sky. ‘You think it’ll snow today?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Snow’s due, I guess. Usually as regular as clockwork.’ She looked up at the pale featureless clouds. ‘I reckon, though, we’ll need to head back soon. We got us about six hours of daylight for hiking back to the camp site this afternoon.’

Julian stood up. ‘Where’s Rose? I’ll get her to pack up her stuff.’ He climbed out of the ditch and called out for her. He could see the bright red flash of her anorak amongst the trees on the far side of the clearing; she was stepping slowly through the tangled briar and roots with the camera braced firmly on her shoulder.

Getting some mood footage.

Grace, meanwhile, knelt down and ran her fingers over the rough, pitted surface of the metal storage chest.

‘Mr Lambert. Mr Benjamin Lambert from England,’ she muttered quietly through a plume of evaporating breath. ‘So, you gonna tell us all about what happened here then, are you?’

18 July, 1856

Benjamin Lambert stretched in his saddle and felt the worn leather flex beneath him. His rump was sore and he could feel that his left thigh, rubbed raw by a roughly stitched saddle seam, was beginning to blister beneath the frayed linen of his trousers. It stung insistently with each rub, as the pony he sat astride swayed rhythmically like a heavily laden schooner on a choppy sea.

But the minor aches and pains were rendered meaningless as he looked up from the sweating, rippling shoulders of his pony to the sun-bleached open prairie; thousands, millions of acres of land untamed and not portioned out by mankind. No patchwork of fields, manicured lawns, landscaped rockeries or garden follies, no cluttered rows of terraced houses or smoke-belching mills spewing out grimy workers onto narrow cobbled streets.

And there were no gravel paths or smartly paved roads dividing up this expansive wilderness. Instead just the faintest, almost indiscernible track worn into the summer-baked orange soil by earlier trains of heavily laden conestogas; those that had passed this way earlier in the season.

Ben savoured this infinite horizon, defined so sharply between the swaying ochre of prairie grass and the fierce blue of a cloudless sky, not a single, solitary tree to punctuate it.

My God, this is exactly what I came for.

This was an alien landscape for Ben, a city-dwelling Englishman, used to every precious acre, yard, walkway and rat-run belonging by deed to somebody. Until he’d sailed over to the new world and embarked on this exciting journey across an unmapped continent, he realised, every step he’d taken thus far in his twenty-five years had been on ground owned by someone.

Right now he was on land owned by absolutely no one.

He reined in his pony, relieved to have that swaying motion cease for just a moment and give his back, his rump and his thighs a little respite. He took in the horizon, low and undulating gently with a smooth curvature of modest hillocks and spurs. To the west the hills grew more pronounced and shimmering in the heat; the white peaks of the Rockies danced.