October Skies Read online

  Nestling at the bottom of a shallow ditch, surrounded by jagged ribs of wood that protruded from the ground like the long gnarled fingers of a clawing hand, Julian found something he’d hoped he’d find.

  He squatted in the ditch, teasing the wet peat-like soil aside. His fingers traced around the edge of his find: a small tin chest, black and pitted with rust and decay, but incredibly, still firmly sealed. He found a latch at the front; no longer functioning, of course. Time, moisture and the elements had turned it into one solid nugget of flaking, oxidised metal. He pulled out a pen-knife and probed the latch with the tip of the blade. It began to crumble.

  ‘What have you got there?’ said Grace, standing over him.

  Julian lurched. ‘Jesus . . . I didn’t see you there.’ He pointed at the chest. ‘The whole thing’s still sealed. It’s incredible.’

  She stepped down into the ditch beside him and looked around at the ribs of wood protruding from the ground around them. ‘Seems they built some kinda shelter out of each of the wagons.’

  ‘They knew they were going nowhere.’

  Grace nodded. ‘And that’s when they turned on their wagons and pulled them to pieces. They must’ve been stuck here for a long, long while.’

  A thought occurred to him. ‘No bodies so far, Grace. Why do you think that is?’

  ‘The animals will have had them. Anybody died here would have been bear or cougar food before long.’

  ‘Surely there’d be bones lying around, though?’

  Grace shook her head. ‘Not here. Maybe go looking around hard enough, you’ll find them all together stacked neatly into a hillside nook, like hotdogs in a jar. A bear larder. Could be one just a few hundred yards from here, could be a mile away.’

  She smiled coolly at Julian, ‘I reckon dumping a body up here in the mountains is just about the best way to get rid of it. Nature’s a great recycler.’

  She looked down at the chest Julian was still holding. ‘You goin’ to open that up?’

  Julian nodded. ‘I need to find some names. If we can identify just one or two of the people who ended up here, that’ll be enough to get me started on the research.’

  Grace looked unhappily at the chest for a moment. ‘You gonna be careful with it?’

  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?’

  CHAPTER 5

  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 thi
gh, 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.

  Not quite so far away now.

  ‘Oh God, this is wonderful,’ he muttered to himself. This - THIS - was why he came; to see it all before swarms of humankind descended upon it and broke it up into a million homogenous parcels of fenced-in farmland.

  Beside him the wagons rolled past, each pulled slowly but assuredly by a six-team of oxen. He twisted in his saddle, looking down the length of the train; in all he had counted forty-five of them. Some open carts, many smaller rigs, and a couple of dozen ten-footer conestogas with flared sides and sturdily contructed traps.

  This particular caravan of overlanders was a blend of two parties that had happened to find themselves setting off into the wilderness from Fort Kearny at round about the same time and had merged to form a loose, if somewhat uncomfortable alliance.

  The smaller contingent was one he had joined at the very last moment: five wagons that had coalesced outside the military outpost, looking for others to share the arduous and hazardous trip. Fort Kearny was considered by most overlanders readying themselves for the journey as the stepping-off point, the very edge of the United States of America. Beyond that point it was God’s own wilderness.

  Many families delayed at this outpost longer than they should, gathering their wits, their willpower, supplies, and mustering their wavering courage to commit to the crossing ahead of them. Ben had made his way here and chanced upon these five wagons in his carefree, meandering way. They were amongst the last wagons lingering around the fort, preparing to leave. Over a shared evening meal with them, and too much drink, Ben had casually announced that he intended to journey to Oregon on his own, trading on his skills as a doctor along the way - and to write a book of his adventures and experiences. They very quickly disabused him of that foolish notion, assuring him that to travel alone, with no plan, more to the point, with no guide, would see him dead out there on the trail within days.

  Ben smiled at his own reckless bravado.

  They had successfully managed to scare the shit out of him and he promptly decided to throw in his lot with them and even contributed a substantial portion to the pool of money that purchased the services of ‘Wild’ Bill Keats, a prairie guide who dressed more like an Indian than a white man. Keats confidently assured them he had led dozens of parties safely across to the far side of both the Rockies and the more challenging Sierra Nevada mountain range beyond.

  With Keats came an Indian partner, Broken Wing - a Shoshone, Keats assured his clients, one of the friendlier tribes.

  The other contingent, about forty Mormon families led by their First Elder and spiritual leader, William Preston, had travelled down from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and had arrived with great haste just as Keats and the others were setting off. With both groups intending to head west at the same time, both equally keen to beat the season and cross the Rockies, the salt deserts, and the Nevada range beyond before the snows arrived, it was Keats’s idea that both groups should combine, there being safety in such numbers.

  They set out from Fort Kearny on a fine morning, the last day in May, with the rumpled and leathery old trail guide announcing solemnly that they were the last party who were going to be able to make it across the mountains this year. They left the fort behind with Keats and his party leading the way, and the Mormon wagons behind, led by Preston.

  ‘Hey, Mr Lambert!’

  Ben turned away from the distant peaks. Passing beside him was the Dreytons’ conestoga. The large wagon was perhaps more than this small family needed. Mrs Dreyton was a widow - Ben guessed - in her early thirties. She dressed, like all the other Mormon women, very modestly, covered from neck to toe in a drab-coloured dress of hard-wearing material, every last wisp of her hair tucked away inside a bonnet for modesty. She shared the wagon with her two children; Emily, a pretty girl of nine or ten who made no secret of the fact that she adored Ben, and her older brother Samuel, a tall, broad-shouldered and muscular young lad of seventeen, with a sun-bronzed and freckled face, topped with sandy hair.

  The young man held the reins in one hand and waved with the other. ‘Morning!’

  ‘Good morning!’ Ben shouted cheerfully across to them. He reined his pony in, and steered it and a second, tethered behind and bearing all his worldly possessions, towards them. He fell into step beside their wagon, which was clattering noisily with pots and pans dangling from hooks along the outside, and the jingling of the oxen harnesses ahead of them.

  Samuel and Emily’s smiles were as wide as they were warm, a marked contrast to most of the sour-faced and stern-lipped members of Preston’s people.

  ‘How’s the riding today?’ asked Sam.

  Ben shuffled in his saddle and winced. ‘My blisters have blisters, I think.’

  ‘You can always tie up your pony on the back and sit up here with me,’ offered Sam. ‘We got room.’

  Emily’s face, poking through a canvas flap over her brother’s shoulder, lit up. ‘Oh we got room, Mr Lambert, haven’t we, Momma?’

  Mrs Dreyton shot a cool glance back at her children, and then at Ben. ‘I don’t think it would be appropriate,’ she said flatly. ‘And, Emily, put your sun bonnet on, this instant!’

  ‘Mom,’ Emily chimed unhappily, ‘it makes my head hot.’

  She turned round to her. ‘Do you want a face as brown as a savage?’

  Emily shook her head.

  ‘Then you best put it back on.’

  She then turned to stare at Ben with an expression that quite clearly indicated there wasn’t room on the jockey board.

  Ben quickly responded. ‘That’s all right, Mrs Dreyton. I’m just fine where I am.’

  Sam shrugged apologetically. Emily wilted.

  He liked the two children. The rest of their group had kept very much to themselves under the stern and watchful eyes of Preston and his cadre of loyal elders. They were all a little too sombre and cheerless to make easy travelling companions - ‘too churchy’ Keats had grumbled after only a couple of days on the trail with them. But these two youngsters were as bright and as welcoming a sight as a couple of shined pennies.

  He turned his pony away, wary that tongues amon
gst the neighbouring Mormon wagons might start wagging if he loitered too close and for too long beside the Dreytons.

  ‘I’ll bid you good morning.’ Ben doffed his broad-brimmed felt hat.

  Sam called out to him. ‘Will you take a mug of coffee with us, Mr Lambert? When we stop at noon?’

  The young man’s mother looked sharply at her son with steel-grey eyes.

  Ben nodded. ‘That’s kind of you, Sam, but maybe not today.’

  He turned round and, with a jab of his knees, urged his pony to break into a lethargic trot, taking him up to the front of the column where the small contingent of wagons under Keats rolled on, through the dust.

  CHAPTER 6

  Saturday

  Blue Valley National Parks Camp Site, California

  They emerged from the woods and onto the gravel parking area just as the pallid autumnal sun dipped down behind the brow of tree tops. There were only two vehicles parked up here - Grace’s Cherokee, marked with the National Parks Service logo, and the Toyota Prius Julian had rented from Hertz.

  They exchanged goodbyes, and Grace gave them her home and mobile numbers to call when they were ready to trek out there again. She firmly reminded them both that she was going to do the right thing and call in the find to the park’s manager in a fortnight’s time . . . and no later.

  Julian and Rose thanked her, watching her dump her pack in the boot and carefully put away the Parks Service issued hunting rifle in a case on the back seat. She climbed in, offered them a wave, started up the Cherokee and swung out of the parking area, kicking up a rooster tail of stones and grit, onto a single lane of road that wound its way down the mountainside to the nearest town, Blue Valley - a half-hour’s drive through some of the most beautiful scenery Julian had ever seen.