Read The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) for Free Online

if I didn’t.’
    Kristen shrugged. ‘She was born Elizabeth Manners in Bath in 1824. Just turned nineteen when she met her soon-to-be husband, Lord Edgar Stamford. He was only two years older than her, but already well known as a botanist and chemist. He’d inherited the family fortune very young. Massively rich, dashing and handsome, whisked her off her feet and brought her to Ireland. It wasn’t exactly the happiest of marriages. She soon found out that Stamford was a controlling despot of a man who treated everyone around him like filth.’
    ‘That’s what they say.’
    ‘They’re not wrong. Total bastard wouldn’t be too much of an understatement. As lord of the manor he was also a Justice of the Peace, which in rural Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century basically allowed him to play God with the peasant farmers who worked on his lands. They had a pretty rough existence under his rule. Then when the Great Famine struck the land hard in 1847, things got worse for them. A lot worse.’
    Ben was no historian, but he had a fairly clear idea of what Kristen was talking about. It wasn’t possible to live in Ireland for any length of time, or for that matter to have had an Irish mother, without picking up a few of the key facts about one of the defining moments, and quite possibly the darkest hour, of the country’s history.
    ‘Bad time,’ he said. ‘About a million dead from starvation. They’d become too dependent on the potato for food. When the blight wiped out the crop, they didn’t stand much of a chance.’
    ‘More like anything up to two million, by some estimates,’ Kristen corrected him. ‘That’s out of an overall population at the time of just eight million. Compare those figures to the famine in Darfur in 2003: a hundred thousand dead out of a population of twenty-seven million. We tend to forget nowadays how bad things got here. Irish people died like flies. Heaped in mass graves, sometimes while they were still alive but too weak from starvation to protest. Starvation was everywhere. Yet if Lord Stamford caught one of his hungry tenants stealing so much as an apple to feed their children, he’d have them strung up.’
    ‘Sounds like a nice guy to be married to.’
    ‘It was a wretched time for her. Women couldn’t just walk away from an abusive relationship in those days. Husbands had complete control over everything. Marital rape was legal; men could basically do what they wanted. I’m sure Edgar Stamford exploited that freedom to the nines, though I can’t prove it without the journals.’
    ‘Journals?’
    ‘She kept a private diary during her years in Ireland, several volumes long. They’d have been a key resource for me, if I’d been able to get hold of them.’
    ‘They were lost?’ Ben asked.
    Kristen shook her head. ‘I finally tracked them down to this former academic who has them now, a private collector specialising in Irish history. Tried to persuade him to let me view them, but I’m still waiting for him to get back to me.’
    ‘Pity.’
    ‘Anyway,’ Kristen said, ‘we know a lot about her married life from her later writings and personal letters, some of which I managed to get hold of.’
    ‘Did she leave Ireland after her husband died?’
    ‘No, he died later. She had eight years of hell with him and then managed to escape back to England with a little help from sympathisers. That was when her life really began. She campaigned for women’s rights, published a couple of volumes of poetry and a successful novel, and founded a school to help educate underprivileged girls and young women.’
    ‘Sounds like a happy ending, for her at least,’ Ben said.
    ‘Sadly not. The good times didn’t last long. I’ve got some of her personal letters that suggest she got herself mired in some kind of legal action in the late summer of 1851, though it’s all a bit of a mystery. From what I managed to piece together, Elizabeth made contact with one Sir Abraham Barnstable,