my head wasn’t throbbing as badly, but it felt loose and overrun with drifting things, cobwebs and fog and thistledown.
Hugo broke four eggs into a bowl and started whisking. “Now,” he said, his voice lightening. “The surprise; what I was waiting to tell you until you were a bit more awake. You won’t believe it.”
I did my best to play along; I owed him that, at least. “Oh yeah?”
“I think I’ve cracked Mrs. Wozniak.”
The grin on his face was wide and real. “You’re joking,” I said.
“No, I’m pretty sure. Haskins, our diary fellow? In November of 1887, he starts grousing about his wife landing him with her family’s problems. He’s such a complainer that I didn’t take much notice at first, almost skipped the whole section, but luckily I stuck with it. The wife’s sister in Clare—yes, can you see why my ears pricked up?—she wants to send her sixteen-year-old daughter to stay with the Haskinses, in Tipperary, for a few months. Haskins’s main complaint is that he’ll be stuck with the expense of feeding this girl, but he’s also puffing up with outrage because she might corrupt his children—who are three, four and seven at this point, so I would have thought fairly difficult to corrupt. Unless . . .” He cocked an eyebrow at me, dropping butter into the frying pan, Have you got it?
It took me a while to fish anything out of the morass in my head. “She was pregnant?”
“Well, it’s hard to be positive of anything—Haskins was so furious that his handwriting turns into a complete snarl, double underlining everywhere—but from all the mentions of shame and disgrace and wantonness, I think she was. Pass me the salt and pepper, would you?”
I handed them over. His serenity was starting to freak me out. I wondered if he had forgotten the entire conversation; if we would have to have it all over again that evening, when Melissa didn’t come home.
“Thanks. And”—happily salting and peppering away—“can you guess the niece’s surname?”
“McNamara?”
“It was indeed. Elaine McNamara.” He was smiling, squinting at the cooker dial as he adjusted the gas burner just so, but I could see the depth of his satisfaction. “She hasn’t shown up in any of the family trees so far, has she? Or has she?”
“Not that I remember.”
“We’ll track her down. So then”—pouring the eggs into the pan, fizzle and hiss—“I’m afraid I got impatient and started skimming ahead, looking for any mention of any O’Hagans—just to confirm the theory. And sure enough, a few weeks into 1888, Mrs. Haskins is suggesting that their lovely neighbors the O’Hagans might be willing to ‘conceal Elaine’s shame.’ It would have been easy as pie—plenty of lying on birth records, back then: the O’Hagans could just go to the registrar and put down the baby as their own, no need to prove where they’d got him. Our man Haskins isn’t mad about the idea—he thinks it would be letting Elaine off too lightly, she won’t comprehend the full something, I think it’s ‘magnitude,’ of her transgression; he wants to send her to a mother-and-baby home. But I think we can be pretty sure his wife won that argument in the end.”
The peaceful run of his voice, the savory smell of the eggs cooking, bright chill blue of the sky outside the French doors. I thought of my first day back here, the two of us in his study, rain at the windowpane and my mind wandering off among the knickknacks as he talked.
“And that’s as far as I got,” Hugo said, “before I heard you getting up. All the same, though: a good morning’s work, I think.”
His glance at me was almost shy. “That’s amazing,” I said, managing a big smile. “Congratulations.”
“To you, too. We did it together. We should have a glass of something to celebrate—is there any prosecco, anything like that? Or would that be too much for your head?”
“No, that sounds great. I bet we’ve got something somewhere.”
“Now, of course”—he sprinkled grated cheese into the pan, a big handful, topped it with the chopped ham—“I have to work out how to tell Mrs. Wozniak.”
“She should be over the moon,” I said. I found a bottle of prosecco in the booze cabinet; not chilled, but what the hell. “This is what she was after, isn’t it? It’s not like you’ve found a murderer in the family tree.”
Hugo gave me a thoughtful glance over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, “unless I’ve got this all wrong, that baby