The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [289]
“Got it,” I said, running over to the clerk’s counter and rousting him by banging my hands on the surface of the thing, where he’d nestled his lazy head on a few books. Grumbling and cursing as he got to his feet, the mug dragged himself off to fetch the requested item, which turned out to be another small, dusty record book. I ran it back over to Miss Howard, who sat beside Cyrus and quickly started examining it, looking for any mention of people named either Franklin or Fraser.
“Here it is,” she said, after about ten minutes of searching. “Formalization of a common-law marriage—George Franklin and Clementine Fraser, April twenty-second, 1852.”
“There’s two other children listed here,” Cyrus said, still going over his volume. “George Junior, born September of 1852, and Elijah, born two years later.”
“Well,” Miss Howard said, looking almost disappointed, “there goes the bastard theory. It looks as though she simply adopted her mother’s maiden name as an alias when she left home.”
“And how do we find out when that was?” I asked. “Supposing we can’t locate the parents, I mean.”
“We know that she was working for the Muhlenbergs in 1886,” Miss Howard answered. “We could check the 1880 census—that’ll narrow things down a bit.”
“On it!” I said, heading back over to the clerk’s counter. The man heard me coming this time, and jerked his head up before I had a chance to give him another start; and when he reappeared from some faraway corner behind the counter, he evened things up some by dropping an enormous book onto my hands. Yelping as I grabbed the thing and turned to carry it away, I mumbled, “Nothing like a government job for improving your sense of humor, hunh?” then went back to the others.
From the 1880 census we learned that Libby Hatch had in fact still been living with her family in that year, when she would’ve been twenty-one. We also learned that George Franklin’s occupation had been “farmer” (no thundering shock), and that the two Franklin boys were also still living at home, where they worked as hands for their old man. The only other question what we figured could be answered in the records office was whether or not Libby’d ever been married while she was living in Rensselaer County: another check of wedding records, though, came up blank, leaving us wondering if she’d taken the vows in some other county in the years between 1880 and 1886, or if the kid we knew she must have given birth to had been born out of wedlock. We got no help with this last mystery from the birth records for those years, which didn’t mention anybody named either Franklin or Fraser bringing any babies into the world; and so, with all those questions still hanging in the air, we returned our pile of books and files to the clerk and headed back to the train station.
We caught the four o’clock local back to Ballston Spa, and the trip turned out to be a pretty merry and exciting one, given the information we’d come up with. True, there was every chance it would lead nowhere: it was impossible to say what the fortunes of the Franklin family had been in the years since 1880 (I still thought the odds were even that Libby’d done the whole bunch in), but at least now we had a legitimate place to start a reasonable search. Anxious to let the Doctor and the others know all this, we raced up the hill from the Ballston train depot to the court house once we reached town, only to find that court had already adjourned. So it was on down to Mr. Picton’s house at what became a dead run, to spread the word that hope for new information wasn’t dead yet.
But we found that this news didn’t encourage the rest of our troops much, given what’d gone on in court during the day. As expected, Mr. Darrow’d opened the defense’s case with his three