I drew up my scenario on a fresh piece of paper and propped it up at the end of the bed. I made a cup of hotel tea and sat there sipping and admiring. It had been enjoyable, like solving a crossword puzzle.

By the time I’d finished my tea, the exhilaration had faded. My intricate scenario made sense of the information, but that was all. The information might not be correct, and it was almost certainly not complete.

Let’s face it, I told myself. All I can be sure of now is exactly what I knew before: Solomon Wiseman was born, in some house or other, of some mother and father or other, in some year or other. All I’ve done is tell a story.

I realised, though, that I’d learned one very useful thing: not about Solomon Wiseman, but about searching for the past. I’d learned the difficulty of establishing even the simplest fact. Solomon Wiseman was born in London…that had always seemed so solid. Now it felt like the opening line of a fairytale.

My education had taught me to look for a bedrock of verifiable data on which to build. This process was teaching me to be more humble. So far I’d found nothing that was absolutely certain. The transcript of the trial was a fact. But it recorded only what was said in court—who knew what really happened on that dark night in 1804, or why?

Constructing a story to accommodate all those Solomon Wisemans, I’d learned something else, too: how strong the urge was to make sense of things. The desire to find a pattern could overwhelm the reality that there might not be one.

Now, sitting on my bed in the hotel room, I remembered the pamphlet from the Society of Genealogists. ‘Finding out more about the convict,’ I read. ‘If you really want good quality personal information about a convict, then you would be better advised to look for an application for clemency.’

Solomon Wiseman had been sentenced to death, but was reprieved. Perhaps he had applied for clemency.

‘Applications for clemency often included just the kind of details about personal circumstances and family background that family historians want to know. They can be found in the collections of the Public Record Office at Kew.’

Family historian? I still rejected that idea of myself, but I wasn’t too proud to go to Kew.

6
The Public Record Office

I took the train the following day. Kew was a quiet and tidy suburb of small semi-detached villas. Pairs of squat milk bottles on every front step. Shiny brass letterslits in the front doors. Neatly clipped hedges and gauze curtains, with grand pianos and blond children visible beyond them. And a great suburban silence hanging over everything.

Suddenly the streets fell away, a void opened up and the Public Record Office sat in front of me like a mother ship come to earth. In the blankness of its gaze, the bareness of its surrounds—square ponds with toy-like ducks gliding on them—it resembled nothing so much as a prison.