Chapter 2: Lady Sheila

It was the photograph of Tony in the Observer newspaper which first caught the eye of Lady Sheila Radcliffe as she ate her breakfast which immediately aroused her interest. Suddenly, as what she was reading sank in she gasped, surely it could not be possible. She left her breakfast and ran to the lounge grabbing an album of old photographs. She compared the photographs of her husband when he was twenty with the picture in the newspaper.

"Could it be possible after all this time?"

Both her and her husband had spent a lot of money over the past years trying to trace her abandoned baby son, the baby that she had foolishly abandoned as soon as it was born. The searches had been totally ineffective and they had both become quite despondent. She knew that they had made a bad decision. In hindsight, she would gladly have faced the disgrace of having an illegitimate baby, because nothing or no-one could ever have parted her permanently from her beloved Larry.

It had been wholly her decision to abandon the baby, Larry would have taken the blame willingly and married her, which he had done anyway later, but she was the one who had panicked and insisted on abandoning the baby. Two hours after they had left him on the doctors' doorstep, she had changed her mind and they went back for him, but he was gone. Now until just a few moments ago she had almost given up hope of ever finding him, now after losing her beloved husband in an air attack on his ship she was thinking of once again resuming the search. But where could she start?

The photograph was so much like Larry in his youth that her hopes had been rekindled. It was so like her husband that if she had not known better she would have said that it was a copy of her dead husbands photograph.

In the days of her youth, having an illegitimate baby would have ostracized both her and her fiancé in the eyes of society. Her boyfriend Larry, the father of the baby and later to be her husband and who had also later inherited his fathers' title of Lord Radcliffe had spent thousands of pounds in a futile search for their abandoned baby son. They had hired private detectives but all to no avail. But at the time the baby was born, they realised that they had panicked, and just left the new born baby on a doctor's doorstep where it would be found and cared for. The doctor had since died and on-one seemed to have any recollection of finding the baby. It was just as though it had disappeared into thin air.

The records at local orphanages were vague and often incomplete and so the years had gone by.

Their search had taken on a new urgency when they found that they could not have any more children She had not sought proper medical attention after the birth and that seemed to have been a possible cause of her lack of fertility, and so their marriage had ostensibly been childless and now the title was vacant...

She could not take her eyes off the photograph in the paper, she read the article time and time again and she kept coming back to the photograph. She continued her breakfast in an air of introspection. It was a possibility she could not, dare not ignore, according to the newspaper report he was about the right age, and there was no doubt about it, the photograph was so similar to her late husbands' likeness in his early twenties.

Rising impatience and some little hope, won in the end and she rang the breakfast bell and asked the maid to send the butler to her straight away. She told Hammond the butler to go and buy a copy of every newspaper that had an article on the same story.

She waited impatiently and spent the morning reading and re-reading every newspaper she could get hold of that ran the story. Eventually, she was so convinced that she was on the right track, that she rang a friend of her husbands at the Port Admirals office in Portsmouth.

"Would you like to meet the lad?" He asked.

"He was the boy who saved your husbands ship from a collision after he was killed although he was badly wounded when Larry was killed."

"Can you tell me his date of birth?" Her ladyship asked.

"Yes I have his papers here. He was born on the 10th September 1918 and he is an orphan I presume, as he has no next of kin."

Lady Sheila had to sit down. She felt faint as she gasped into the telephone.

"Bob I think that he may be our son and I may be his mother, but please don't tell anyone else for the time being."

"Its OK Sheila old girl. I will pop round and pick you up and we can have a chat on the way to the hospital."

Her friend Bob a naval captain and a close friend of her husbands said to her in the car.

"Look Sheila dear take it easy; let's find out all we can about him first. You are visiting him as his ex captains widow. He may well be resentful of the fact that his mother just dumped him all those years ago, and he may not want to know you at all; you've waited all these years so don't blow it now. Just wait a bit until you have sounded him out and given him a chance to get to know you."

On arrival at the hospital Joan was sitting by Tonys bed, and when the visitors arrived she kissed him possessively on the cheek and on leaving said.

"I'll bring you some fresh pyjamas tonight dear."

Sheila felt a pang of jealousy as Joan left. After she had left and she had been introduced she could not help but ask.

"Is that your girlfriend?"

"No your ladyship, that's my best friends widow. Her husband was on the Corsham which was the next ship to ours and he died of his wounds. We had been best friends, just like brothers since we were about eight years old. We met in the orphanage where we were both brought up."