The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  “Interesting. It’s a tricky moment between us and the Americans.”

  “Is it?” Charles asked curiously.

  Edmund was a backbencher, but he picked up a great deal. He was friendly and discreet, intelligent, and well connected, and as a result had become a confidant to many men who yearned for someone who possessed those qualities without the ruthless ambition that usually attended them in politicians.

  “This fellow Pierce is no good. So much depends on the president there, you know. The last chap, Fillmore, brought together a very awkward sort of compromise between the slave states and the free states, but it was at least a compromise. Pierce is from the North himself, but he’s only thought well of in the South. Meanwhile they’re conducting a dry run for a civil war once you go past the states—Kansas Territory.”

  Lenox was only obscurely aware of the Kansas Territory. He had become just about accustomed to California as a state, but everything that lay between it and Wisconsin was a mystery of reported images to him: buffalo, vast plains, red rocks, flocks of birds so dense and vast that the sky could go black for a full hour on a clear day at noon.

  “But they won’t really have a war.”

  That was the prevailing wisdom. “No,” said Edmund. “Of course not. The idea is ruinous. If they did, half of our Parliament would support the South.”

  “Right.”

  “The trouble is that slavery will have to be brokered some way or another. And this new party they have is—well, it is a young country, and young countries will founder sometimes. That is what people whisper. Then it will be up to what’s left of them, and to us and France and the rest, to fight over how it’s parceled up. And the United States of America will be a memory.”

  “What new party?”

  “You must read the papers for more than crime,” Edmund chided him. “You haven’t heard of them? The Know Nothings?”

  “The what?”

  “Clever bunch, unfortunately. United around a common loathing for the Germans and Irish immigrating to America at the moment. Call them dirty, lazy. Fewer jobs to go around. And people—there—seem to agree. If they win the next election it will be a disaster.”

  “For us?” said Charles. “It seems hard to imagine that Britain shall be put off by anything they can do.”

  Edmund shook his head. “The wisest men I know have their eyes on America. It is such a great deal of land and material—so much empty space into which to build. If it falls nativist, and there is a war after all, who knows what evil might come of it?”

  Lenox nodded thoughtfully. “This is the background from which Gilman emerges, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps. I know nothing of him. But I have been, even myself, the recipient of petitions from the anti-slavery movement, and speaking generally they couldn’t give a fig for anything except the plight of the black Americans.”

  “One sees their point.”

  “Of course. And yet I can never offer them hope.” Edmund took a sip of his coffee, and in that moment, calm and thoughtful, he reminded Lenox very much of their father. “It’s all so convoluted—I know nothing of what the Utah Territory thinks of slavery, or who’s to venture down to South Carolina and dispossess them of what they consider as much their property as I consider this table my own. How could I?”

  “Then what do you tell them?”

  “I tell them that I will sign anything they wish protesting slavery,” said Edmund. “And I always do, though people in Parliament get cross with me.”

  This was one benefit of having a seat in one’s pocket, of course, and also of not caring about advancement; Edmund could vote and act his conscience. Markethouse would sooner return a pig to Parliament than turn a Lenox out of it.

  “But you cannot do anything practical.”

  “No. Precisely. That is what I tell them.”

  “Who could?”

  Edmund shrugged. “Half a dozen men in either party, I suppose.” He smiled. “The Queen. All of them could help. One hears the idea that there should be no new slaves—that black men and women should be born free.”

  “It is a compromise,” said Charles.

  “A hard one on a young slave,” said Edmund, shaking his head. “And even in that case the Southerners dislike it furiously.”

  “There is the idea of a colony in Africa.”

  “The Southerners dislike that further still.”

  “But how can they defend the idea in their minds!” said Lenox with sudden anger. “Slavery! And they come here and insist upon every refinement—I have met them—pure gentlemen, raised to the highest codes you would have thought, as noble aboard a horse as Cincinnatus.”

  “Men will square anything in their heads that keeps them rich,” said Edmund, glancing at his watch. “But I must go. Do you still want a ride?”

  Lenox was still pondering the imponderables of America, of Eleazer Gilman, but looked up, distracted. “Yes,” he said. “Thanks. And thank you for breakfast. And for not wearing your new stockings.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Greensleeves was an old-fashioned coaching inn that had been tossed into modernity like a drunk bundled into a country prison cell—that is, awaking to find himself at least modestly warm and comfortable, when he might have slept in a ditch. Not a bad result.

  It was a small wooden building with a rickety interior arcade. It must have served every stripe of society in its earlier days—especially travelers, since it had a stable. But if Lenox had to guess, he would have said that courtesans once lived in the rooms here. The reason was the name. There was a time several centuries past when no respectable lady in England wore green: It was the most suggestive color, supposedly because of the way grass stained a maiden’s white dress once she had lain down in it. It was this that had prompted the mythical figure of Lady Green Sleeves, and the song of the same name.

  But now the hotel’s trade seemed to be mostly in foreign visitors. Lying so close to Embassy Row, it housed an immense variety of people who had arrived at the center of the British Empire to try to pluck some bargain from or offer some entreaty to her ruling class. Lounging around the entranceway of the hotel were men who looked to be from the Continent, from Asia, from Africa. Perhaps even the Utah Territory. Certainly one couldn’t wish to see a greater diversity of clothing anywhere in the city—neither east nor west.

  To the surprise of precisely one of their party (which consisted of Dunn, Mayne, Hemstock, Lenox, and a bright-eyed American youth from the consul’s office named Mallori Pearce), Hemstock suggested they get a drink in the bar, which even at the breakfast hour was loud and busy.

  “Absolutely not,” said Sir Richard Mayne.

  “Not a quick one?” Hemstock said.

  “A quick drink!” said Pearce, blushing, a skinny tadpole a year out of William and Mary College. He was the son of a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

  “Mr. Hemstock must have been joking, I believe,” said Lenox.

  “Ah!” said Pearce, turning to him, greatly obliged for this innocent explanation. “I see. Of course. The dry British wit. Of course. I must sharpen my parrying sword if I remain in this—this wonderful country.”

  “Or you could go home,” said Dunn.

  “I think Mr. Pearce will find that people here are fairly open and kind in the end,” said Lenox.

  They were met by the hotel’s owner. He was a stout Liverpudlian named Johnson with slick hair and a broad belly, waistcoat stretched taut over it. Evidently aware of the benefits of a friendly police force, he led them with every courtesy of manner to a room he had set aside just for the inspection of Gilman’s trunk. Hemstock, who not been joking at all, nevertheless grumbled along behind the rest of them through the hotel’s restaurant.

  After his breakfast that morning, Lenox had gone home and found a wire from Sir Richard in response to his own. It had offered praise for his discovery of the trunk (Very well done) along with an invitation to meet at the Yard at ten.

  In the
small private room, which lay behind the restaurant and away from the noise of the street, they saw a blue steamer trunk with brass fittings, E. GILMAN in large lettering on its side, sitting on a plain brown table.

  The room was otherwise empty. “I shall leave you here, gentlemen,” said the hotelier.

  Mayne thanked him. “It’s got a lock,” he said when they were alone. “Dunn?”

  Dunn frowned. “Should have thought of it.” He popped his head out of the door. “Do you have a pair of heavy cutters?” he asked the hotel’s retreating owner.

  He turned back. “In the stable.”

  “Could you lend them to us?” asked Mayne.

  “Of course,” said the owner. “Give me a moment.”

  As they waited, Lenox leaned back against one wall, trying to remain unobtrusive, and pulled from the inner pocket of his jacket the paper he had spent the trip to the hotel reading. He wanted another look at it.

  It was a short biography of Eli Gilman, which the consulate had provided to Mayne. It originated, apparently, from a garrulous journal of congressional events in Washington, D.C. called The District Record.

  Several of the details within it had struck Lenox. He read the article again now closely, deliberately trying to slow his pace.

  Promising Massachusetts Republican

  Eli Gilman to be resident at the establishment of

  Mrs. Patricia Baptiste, Georgetown, from March 1

  Strong opponent of Fugitive Slave Act; Unionist

  Districters, a cynical people once they see their first few crops of politicians come and go from elsewhere in these united states, generally expect little of first-term arrivals in the great chamber.

  An exception may be expected, however, in the case of the fluent and well-connected Mr. Eleazer Whitney Gilman, whose surprise election over Rep. Hannibal Granger proposes to provide an interesting flavor to the forthcoming session.

  Born in Lawrence, Mass., in 1830, the son of a minister in that town and grandson of a captain in the Revolution, Mr. Gilman was a brilliant student at nearby Phillips Academy, where under the tutelage of Samuel Harvey Taylor he gained a reputation as a gifted scholar of Latin and Greek and an unrelenting debater. By letter, Taylor expressed no surprise at his former pupil’s election. “We were luckier to have him than he to have us,” the great educator writes, graciously, to The District Record.

  At the age of 16, Mr. Gilman abruptly withdrew from plans to attend Harvard and instead made a two-year sojourn in the territories, often by foot, taking odd work where he found it, generally alone but occasionally in the company of a friend from Andover, Mr. Charles Bemis, of the notable New York family, now a junior lecturer at Yale.

  Gilman has commented that these two years altered his political and philosophical ambitions. Upon their conclusion he returned to Harvard for a year of scientific study, having decided during his time in the West that he no longer wished to follow the trail of his father in the ministry—but rather that of his grandfather, who remained in service of one kind or another to his country throughout his life, finally as a pension administrator for the state.

  In a series of fiery orations delivered at the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, at 283 Washington Street, the young Mr. Gilman gained the stunned admiration of a crowd which included numerous prominent local citizens, among them Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mr. Alexander Williams, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  These speeches, collected in a pamphlet called A Young American’s Travels, sold through three editions and went into a fourth. Soon, insistent friends demanded that Mr. Gilman challenge Granger—a Whig stalwart—for his seat. Bolstered by the personal appearance of Mr. Emerson on his behalf, Gilman carried the ballot box, to the surprise of local prognosticators, at the tender age of 23.

  “I do not go to the Congress to bide my time,” he vowed in his victory speech to supporters. He is already planning a trip to our Southern neighbors in Tennessee and Alabama to investigate the state of slavery there.

  Gilman is unmarried; asked if he would accept an invitation to Mr. Pierce’s White House despite their political differences, he replied in the negative, evidence, perhaps, of a new firebrand spirit that some fear could bring warring factions to a head, but others hope could resolve the great issue of our “peculiar institution” once and for all. It shall be of interest to note whether other invitations from prominent Washington residents obtain a more favorable reception. What is sure is that Gilman will reside with Mrs. Patricia Baptiste, in Georgetown. For reasons of frugality, however, he plans to take his meals in the Congress.

  Lenox was just finishing this fascinating document again—fascinating both advertently and inadvertently, he thought—when one of the hotel’s stable hands returned. In a trice he sheared the lock on the trunk away, and after he had gone, they all crowded forward to see what they would find, Lenox included.

  “Awful lot of clothes,” Hemstock remarked.

  “Yes. What a shock,” Dunn said.

  “I only meant to say—”

  “Let us get to the bottom of the trunk at least,” Dunn said, “before we have any more commentary. Unless we find, for instance, a bloody knife.”

  “Fine,” muttered Hemstock, loose in his dirty jacket, overdue for a cut and a shave. “Fine.”

  Together, Dunn and Pearce, the American, took an inventory of the trunk’s contents, both inspecting each item as it was removed from the trunk.

  “Jackets, two,” Dunn said.

  “Jackets, two,” Pearce repeated, making a note. Then the pair looked at the jackets, checked all the pockets, folded them, and set them aside. “Next?”

  “Pants … three pair.”

  “Three pairs of pants.”

  They went on like this until they had gone through the trunk entirely. Lenox stood where he could see the top of Pearce’s list clearly. Shirts—5, it said, papers—various. And so forth.

  It was the books and papers that made Lenox most hopeful. He knew that he was the most likely person present to find something useful here, being the most patient.

  But it was a jacket he asked about. “Could I see that for a moment?” he said, as Pearce folded a plain black coat.

  It had one of Mr. Wedgwood’s pins on its lapel, the figure on one knee, pleading: Am I not a man and a brother?

  Pearce shrugged. “By all means.”

  Lenox looked at the inside pocket. H. M. Carraway, Lawrence, Massachusetts. He rubbed his thumb over the satin label, and at that moment, for whatever reason, he felt the full impact of Gilman’s murder. A mixture of rage and sadness rose suddenly in his heart. This was no doubt identical to the labels that had been cut away so cold-bloodedly on the 449. Lenox could picture the young politician proudly ordering his clothes from his father’s tailor, as Lenox had from his father’s—good sturdy material, well constructed, meant to last a lifetime. At least, a lifetime longer than a quarter century. Somewhere in Massachusetts, at that moment, a minister in a jacket that bore the same label was soon to learn that his son was dead. He wondered if Gilman’s father was very proud of his son; no doubt. Lenox’s thoughts flashed to his mother’s wish that he give up this career, but it was painful, and he pushed it away.

  “What are the books?” asked Mayne, as Pearce and Hemstock unloaded these from their carefully stowed corner of the trunk.

  “Probably Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” said Dunn.

  In fact, the first book he held up was something called Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, its pages still uncut. None of the Britons knew the writer, but Pearce assured them he was well regarded on the other side of the Atlantic, where this book had been released not long before.

  “Never got to read it, poor fellow, did he,” said Hemstock.

  “He read these often enough, though,” said Mayne, holding up a battered copy of John Donne’s sermons.

  There was a slim dark red leather copy of The Tempest, a two-volume copy of Alexis de Tocqueville, a brief history of England.

  But it w
as the mass of letters and notepads that Lenox was most keen to see, as they unwrapped and set aside various items of food, dress, and personal grooming. He was hopeful, despite himself, that they would find some decisive clue and solve the murder of the young man whose life, whose speeches, whose choices, had been so full of now-commuted promise.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “How did you and Mr. Gilman first meet?”

  Josiah Hollis raised his eyebrows—at least, as high as he could beneath the fresh bandage over his brow.

  He looked markedly better than he had the evening before, when Lenox had left him in Thomas McConnell’s office. The doctor on the ward at St. Bart’s had released Hollis without cavil, and now he and Lenox were on their way to Mrs. Thompson’s house. Hollis’s possessions—in a dark traveling case fetched from the Greensleeves—were bound neatly to the back of Lenox’s carriage. Hollis had agreed that it was necessary he find lodging elsewhere, since his attacker had obviously known where he, Tiptree, and Gilman had intended to stay. He hoped to find a room near the Thompsons.

  It was all proceeding in good order—with the exception of one fleeting incident just now at the hospital, which Lenox had tried to put out of his mind, had even tried to convince himself he had seen wrongly. But couldn’t, quite.

  “We met in the Minnesota Territory,” Hollis replied. “He was on his travels, and it was winter, very cold—colder than an Englishman can rightly imagine, I would think.”

  “I have been to a few cold places,” said Lenox.

  “Then perhaps you can. Regardless, he was in no wise dressed for the weather.” The carriage bumped over a stone, and Hollis winced, putting a hand to his head. “He came to St. Paul and slept in a church there. I was speaking at a tavern nearby. He was in the audience and approached me afterward. We sat to supper—even my most sympathetic listeners there, Mr. Lenox, were not prepared to go that far—and from that day forward I counted him my friend.”

  “Then this journey had been some time in the planning.”