October skies

Maurice Lambert, knighted later on, had only one son with his wife Eugenie — nee Eugenie Davies, a distant relative through marriage, Julian discovered, to the Duke of Westminster. Their son, Benjamin Edward Lambert, went to Westminster Boarding School and on to Oxford to study medicine, later specialising in the emerging discipline of psychiatry. Julian wondered if that was his father’s aspiration — for his son to practise medicine in the hospital he paid for?

He also managed to find a short article in The Times’ online archive, an article dated 1855 in which it was mentioned that Benjamin Lambert, son of Sir Maurice, had announced that he was preparing to extricate himself from polite London society and travel to the Americas to explore the wilderness of the west. He planned to write a study of the frontier, perhaps even a novel, which he would publish on his return. The paper wished him bon voyage and looked forward to serialising his work.

And that’s where the trail of information dried up.

Julian chewed absent-mindedly on a biro.

That didn’t necessarily mean Lambert perished out in those woods. There might be further biographical footprints from later on in his life, elsewhere. For example, he might have survived and stayed in America — in which case, there would be a trail somewhere.

But for now, there was nothing more he could easily find. Any further information on Lambert would require some digging.

The doorbell rang, and five minutes later Julian was sitting in his bay window looking out past rain streaks at the evening traffic on the road below, enjoying a glass of wine and tearing hungrily into a slice of pizza.

Idly, his mind kept drifting back to Rose and what might have happened last night if there’d been just a couple more empty beer bottles on the table between them.

Get a grip, Julian. You work together… it’s best that nothing happened.

Outside a siren bounced off the block of flats opposite as a police car tore down the wet street. The noise broke the spell. And he figured, if it was a spell broken so easily, then perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.

Back to work, slacker.

He wiped grease from his fingers and returned to the keyboard, opening up Google and typing ‘Preston Party’.

He got the usual avalanche of irrelevant hits. ‘Preston’s Bar’ in Chicago was having a party. There were photos of a Preston Macey’s graduation and subsequent party. Preston Town’s civic hall was hosting a question and answer session with their MP from the Labour Party. Preston Entertainment, an online DVD store, had a list of movies with Party in the title. And so on, and so on.

Julian sighed. There was so much tat on the web these days. He tried refining his search: ‘Preston Party’ + ‘Mormons’.

He got several more pages of hits to wade through. The ‘Mormon’ tag was predominantly giving him loads of community and church pages, featuring chatty reportage about recent, wholesome family days out and pending prayer meetings. Lots of pictures of happy, shiny faces; pictures of church elders, respectable and smart — successful by the look of many of them — gathered at picnics and fairs and camps and tents. Pictures of sandy-haired kids in smart casual clothes, innocent and healthy, baring happy grins as they hugged each other and goofed around for the camera.

Julian wondered if any of these kids would one day walk into a high school dressed in black and packing an assault rifle in their shoulder bag ready to do God’s work. Perhaps not. Whilst Julian was not a big fan of religion he conceded that it seemed to hold communities like these together like a sturdy glue. It always seemed to be the loners, the kids who’d floated off into their own lonely parallel universe, who ended up blowing their classmates away.

He leafed through the printed pages of the journal, looking for something. Finding a reference to the preacher’s first name, he tried again: ‘William Preston’… and for good measure he added ‘+Missing Wagon Train’.

The search was too specific. It gave him only one hit. He was about to have another go when something about the brief thumbnail description caught his eye.

… account of a Mormon wagon train on their way to Oregon that went missing…

He hit the link and was immediately presented with a simple page, a black screen topped with a banner that read ‘Tracing William Preston’s Party’. Beneath that was a rather dry and blandly written block of text laid out in a small and tiresome font that described little more than the early history of the Mormon church. If Julian hadn’t had a particular interest in the subject, this drab-looking web page would have had him clicking away very quickly.