The Lost Empress Read Free Page B

crash when he was a teenager had put him off flying in ways he knew he would never fully overcome, but this time the degree of anxiety he always felt whenever he thought about boarding an aeroplane was mollified by the idea of seeing Professor Jean Summer again.
    Their whirlwind romance had blossomed in the wake of the murder of the man who had brought them together, and it had come to an abrupt pause as soon as Tayte read through the contents of the safety deposit box Marcus had bequeathed to him in his will. Tayte hadn’t seen Jean since that day. He’d been so excited to have a lead on his own ancestry again after so long that he’d returned to Washington and gone deep into his own family history research, to the exclu sion of everything and everyone else. Tayte had so much to tell her about the recent discoveries he’d made—that is, if she still wanted to see him after the way he’d treated her since he was last in England.
    ‘I’ve managed to locate a few descendants of Alice’s family,’ he said, steering his thoughts back to the assignment at hand. ‘I’m sure they’re going to be a valuable source of information once I can get to speak to them.’
    He thought about the calls he’d made and the messages he’d left, letting people know he was coming and why. He hoped it might ease his introduction once he arrived, and his client had let him hold on to her grandmother’s locket with the photograph of the Stilwell children inside, which he thought might also help. He had a photograph of Alice Dixon, too. His client had told him it was one of only a very few early photographs she’d seen of her grandmother. It was a faded black and white postcard portrait that Tayte thought had been taken around 1930, when Alice would have been forty years old—the same age he was now. He imagined that photographs of Alice were sure to exist in England. If he could get to see one, he would be able to confirm beyond doubt that Alice Dixon and Alice Stilwell were the same person.
    Emile Girard followed Tayte back out into the exhibition. ‘I’ll wish you a safe flight to England then, Mr Tayte, and I shall look forward to hearing from you again someday.’
    Tayte thanked him and was left standing with his briefcase beside a display cabinet, looking through his dark-haired reflection at the first artefact to have been recovered from the wreck of the Empress of Ireland after its rediscovery in 1964: a steel double pulley that was orange with rust. He always thought it curious how such inanimate objects could form a connection to the past. He knew it was all in his head, but he felt it just the same as he stood looking at it. He wished he could touch it—feel the flaking rust beneath his fingertips. It had been a part of the ship Alice had boarded a hundred years ago. He wondered then whether she had touched it, or used any of the china or glass dishes he could see in the other cabinets. His thoughts began to drift, and he wondered again who Alice Stilwell was and why she had felt the need to escape her past life so completely as to begin it over again.

Chapter Two
    South Holland, Netherlands. Monday, 13 April 1914.
    The Stilwell family was staying at the Hotel Des Indes on Lange Voorhout, a former nineteenth-century palace in the heart of The Hague. Alice shut off the basin taps in her room and watched the steam dissipate, thinking it a very modern establishment to have hot and cold running water and a bath for every room; there was even a hydraulic elevator that she had been informed worked by the pressure of water from the North Sea. Although it was rare to accompany Henry on one of his business trips, Alice had readily agreed that it would be good for the children to spend more time with their father, and Henry had been keen for Chester to see more of the textiles business he hoped his son would one day succeed him in—although as Chester was only four, Alice supposed there would be plenty of time for that. To Alice,