‘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.