The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  Hollis smiled. “If I took offense at every story of this kind, I would be a busy man.”

  Lenox nodded and took a bite from his own plate. The food was very good: beefsteak, mashed potatoes running with gravy, buttered peas and parsnips. “I suppose so.”

  “They found the perfect pawn in Winfield Bell.”

  Lenox nodded. “Exactly. The ostensible motivation was race. The real motivation was money.”

  “It might serve as a motto for our politics in America,” Hollis remarked.

  According to Forsythe Witt, it had been no difficulty at all to infiltrate the White Horse Tavern under the stolen name of Bert Smith, playing the role of a former sailor in need of funds. He had known Winfield Bell for all of three weeks before he proposed the murder of Eleazer Gilman.

  “When did you become convinced you had to kill him?” Mayne had asked Witt.

  “His letter was to Jonas. An informant—I hope to meet him face-to-face someday, damn him—told a local pastor that many of the slaves on the Jonas plantation spoke with odd accents. Word made its way around after that, apparently. Eventually news of it reached Gilman and the other abolitionists in Boston.

  “It was Tiptree’s father who pieced the whole thing together. A businessman with interests up and down the coast. He started asking questions. Eventually they reached as far as Jamaica. It seems that even people there noticed that Sheridan’s slaves had moved away in large numbers.”

  Moved away. Lenox had braced himself to ask the question during the entire course of the interview. “Are they all sold? The slaves?”

  Witt had nodded. “The plantation house is empty.”

  “Do you have bills of sale? Records?”

  “Would you have kept them?”

  “So we have no way of tracking down these men and women who are held in illegal bondage now?”

  “No,” said Witt. “You don’t.”

  Lenox had left the room. His sense of fury was almost narcotic—his sense of injustice, of rage.

  Yet there were were six million human beings in America, and a million of them were slaves. Why should this make him angrier than that?

  Perhaps because it was only human to care about the fate of a story whose participants you knew; perhaps because this scheme had been British; perhaps because he knew Sheridan; perhaps most of all because of how tantalizingly close these families had been to freedom—only to be not just taken back into slavery, but then separated.

  Strangely, it had been Dunn who had come out into the hallway where Lenox was pacing. For the first time in their acquaintance his voice was dispassionate. “Infuriating, ain’t it.”

  “Yes,” said Lenox shortly.

  Dunn had taken a pinch of snuff and walked over to the window, looked out at the glittering lights of London. “It’s our job.”

  The “our” was a gesture of kindness. “Yes,” said Lenox.

  Dunn had glanced over. “Your Willikens was smarter than anyone else.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It was he who noticed that Witt’s voice didn’t sound right. And it was he who noticed the powder.”

  “Powder?” said Lenox.

  “The Bert Smith we were after had gray hair. Witt has dark hair that’s graying slowly. We can ask, but I would bet a shilling he used powder to make himself gray. All the judges and barristers have it for their wigs. It may even have been a wig, come to think of it.”

  Now, at the Rose and Crown, Lenox described this and more to Hollis, who was steadily eating as he listened. He had the air of a man who savored each bite of good food he took—but out of determination rather than pleasure. It was peculiar; after his talk, Lenox felt he understood less about the former slave than he had before.

  “May I ask you a personal question?” said Lenox.

  Hollis set down his knife and fork and wiped his mouth, picking up his glass of wine. “Yes.”

  “You stole an inkwell from St. Bart’s, and a brass pen.”

  “Did I?” said Hollis. His expression hadn’t changed.

  “I merely wanted to know why. They helped you there, you know. McConnell helped you.”

  Hollis took a sip of wine. “Who will pay for this supper tonight?” he asked.

  Lenox frowned. “I suppose I will.”

  “And as a gentleman, should I decline your offer?”

  “No.”

  “I should—as a gentleman. It would be proper. But I won’t. I didn’t own myself for twenty-seven years, Mr. Lenox. This skin you see”—he rubbed his thumb and his first two fingers together, the very skin he meant—“was not my own. Can you imagine the feeling of that?”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Now it is my own—yet it is the reason we are dining at this very nice public house, instead of at your private club. Is that true?”

  Lenox flushed—for it was. “What does that have to do with St. Bart’s?”

  “I expect to be killed sooner or later,” Hollis said. “I have a wife and four sons. I mean to accumulate whatever I can in the time left to me, and however I can.”

  “So then, did you steal from the Thompsons?”

  “No.”

  “Or Mr. Carlisle?”

  Hollis looked offended by the question. “No.”

  “But why not them?”

  “They invited me into their homes. Even if I loathed them, I would not steal from them. But I steal from the machine that made me. I gain particular pleasure in stealing from a rich man, or a miser, or a man who judges me by my race, or the phrenology of my skull. But I do not mind stealing from a hospital either.”

  “I don’t know what to call that sort of code.”

  “Then you needn’t call it anything.”

  They fell into silence. It was bred so deeply into Lenox that theft was wrong that he couldn’t claim to understand Hollis. It was bred so deeply into Hollis that the world was unjust, on the other hand, that it was hard to call him wrong.

  Lenox wondered if it was as simple as his wife and four sons; if perhaps the feeling of never being allowed to possess anything had led to a kind of insane desire for possessions, no matter how inconsequential. If the theft was even voluntary.

  He broke the silence. “Thank you for answering. It was an impertinent question.”

  Hollis looked down and started eating again.

  “To finish the story,” Lenox went on, “Winfield Bell leapt at the offer that Witt made him, it would appear. Witt picked him because he was the most violent and vicious man there, or so it seemed. He offered him fifty pounds. Twenty-five before and twenty-five after.”

  “For how many of us?”

  “All three. Tiptree was not an accident. Gilman was killed the first time he was out of the company of others.”

  “I wish I had stayed with him. So they merely wished to silence Gilman?”

  “It would seem. In Gilman’s letter he said that he would expose them if they did not all work on behalf of the bill he was proposing. Then they were to forfeit what he had calculated they made to a charity for escaped slaves. It was a high price he asked. Easily high enough to justify murder in the minds of the three men.”

  Hollis said, “I myself have wondered if there were other, higher people who wished Gilman dead. From everything I understand, the bill he proposed might have gained the support of your Queen. He had letters of introduction from Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Meetings with the dozen most powerful men in this country of either party. America is strong, but England’s censure would still mean a great deal to her.”

  “Interesting,” said Lenox.

  Hollis smiled a bitter smile. “But there were a thousand men who wished to see Gilman dead. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if he had been killed at the march.”

  “No?”

  “No. Indeed, he knew as much. Not least among the people who wished him ill would be those still doing what Sheridan, Witt, and Jonas grew rich from.”

  “Importing slaves. Yo
u think it still happens?”

  “I have no doubt of it at all.”

  “I must do my best to speak to people about that.”

  Hollis shook his head. “Do you know, in despondent moments, I think of them sometimes, forced aboard a ship, not knowing what awaits them. Unlike so many of my brothers and sisters in slavery, I have not taken Christ into my heart. I cannot see the point or truth of him. I look to this world for justice. And I ask myself: Who will be the last one, the last passenger, dragged unwillingly aboard such a ship? Who will be the last slave to remember what I have known? And how far in the future will he or she be born?”

  A quiet settled over the conversation. Finally, Lenox signaled for the bill. “Would you like to come to my house, Mr. Hollis,” he said, “and have a glass of whisky? It settles the stomach.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “I thank you for the invitation.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  How would London remember the months that followed the dawn of 1856?

  In Fleet Street it was a time of giddy joy: three Members of Parliament arrested for murder! And from each side of the aisle, meaning that no accusation of political bias could be leveled! The column inches filled themselves. Sketches appeared in all the papers, of every party involved in this spectacular plot.

  Yet Lenox observed that as January and then February vanished, the tale took on a strange, confused aspect, which at times he scarcely recognized—casting Sheridan as the witless aristocratic dupe of a scheme hatched by Jonas and Witt, and later more definitely just Witt, so that by the start of February there was merely a general sense that Sheridan had been part of “some mess or other in Jamaica.” The other two were more harshly judged by public opinion, yet it was nonetheless for the most part still Winfield Bell who was blamed for the murders of Norman Haase, Abram Tiptree, and Eleazer Gilman.

  Forsythe Witt would no doubt remember the start of 1856 as the time of first his capture and then his escape. One evening, apparently not trusting that his testimony was enough, he disappeared from Newgate Prison. Nobody knew how. There was one sighting of him, on a light cruiser to Newfoundland—but the news of it took so long to return to London that Lenox’s best guess was that Witt had already found a soft landing place by the time the search for him began. Perhaps even a way back into the slave trade.

  Sheridan and Jonas had neither Witt’s cunning nor his enterprise. Lenox had ample time to observe them both.

  Jonas was a pathetic, self-aggrandizing, blubbering specimen, a monster of some kind or another. The sentimental cross-stitch of Jonas Hall might have been his crest. He would speak in the most maudlin terms about his fatherly love of the slaves at Jonas Hall, for hours if you let him, then change the subject immediately at the mention of the cruelty of their position. Changing it, in general, to his second-favorite subject, which was the injustices he had suffered in the past few months: cut off from the Carlton Club, from his happy rooms, never having raised a hand to anyone, he would say, never having even laid eyes on Eleazer Gilman. Always afraid of Witt, only obeying Witt. All this despite the fact that he existed in a state of fair comfort, importing greasy plates of chicken, greedily reading the tabloids, even paying his hairdresser to come in and arrange his delicate strange pillow of hair, his vanity undimmed by the loss of his status.

  Yet it was Sheridan who struck Lenox closest to home. Sheridan was bitter, furious, skittish, delusional. His hair had grayed, his face developed deeper lines. But he was nevertheless home to Lenox—as familiar as the scent of tobacco in a gentleman’s club. Their lives had been so roughly similar, if one took the view of the great spectrum of humanity, that there was a discomfiting sense that Sheridan’s guilt implicated him. At moments Lenox felt he himself ought to stand trial in Sheridan’s place.

  Absurd, of course. Still, Lenox became desperate to know what his life had rendered him blind to—it was what had made him a detective, perhaps—while Sheridan would do anything to preserve his own myopias.

  Cobb would remember the second month of 1856 as the time of his passage back to Washington, case successfully resolved. He took with him four jars of jam from Lenox House and posted his first letter to Lenox from his ship’s brief stop in Boston, a long analysis, more than five pages close-written on both sides, of every element of the case.

  Lenox studied these pages again and again, scribbling notes to himself, pulling old newspaper clippings for comparison, correcting details of geography, before beginning his own long reply. He hoped (and better yet, knew) that the letter was, as Cobb had signed it, the beginning of what I hope shall be a long and mutually fruitful correspondence.

  Jane would remember that January and February for the long, empty weeks, Lenox thought, without Deere; Graham perhaps for the resumption of his daily routine, though it was difficult even for someone as close to him as Lenox to say whether such a return was welcome or regrettable, his demeanor remained so even. Edmund? For long days of work, probably, and a few happy hours at home in the country. Slowly, invisibly, but emphatically, he was becoming their father. This struck his younger brother as both enviable and slightly smothering, and he thought that providence had chosen the order of their birth correctly, for few men were happier than Sir Edmund Lenox.

  And what about Charles Lenox himself? How was he to remember this time?

  On the second Tuesday of January he was at Kitty Ashbrook’s salon—Mrs. Ashbrook’s, properly speaking—when the man who had paid him such an abrupt visit entered the room.

  “Lord Cormorant!” Kitty had said in surprise, and Lenox noticed that she seemed sincerely startled. “We did not expect your return so quickly.”

  “I shortened my voyage to see you,” said Cormorant.

  He was a large, confident, fairly handsome gentleman with small eyes, aged perhaps forty or forty-five, and certainly, by how he carried himself, unaccustomed to contradiction.

  “Please allow me to introduce you to Mr. Charles Lenox,” Kitty said.

  “We have met,” Cormorant said shortly, and inclined his head.

  “Indeed,” said Lenox.

  It was of course impossible that Miss Ashbrook should show any favor to Lord Cormorant, and for much of that morning and the Thursday that succeeded it, he sat glowering in the corner as Lenox and Kitty talked, their usual lively banter.

  She was halting only on the subject of this new wooer. “How do you know Cormorant?” Lenox asked when they had a moment to themselves. “I’m not sure I recognize the title.”

  “It is quite new,” she said, and glanced away. “His father was the first. He was a director of the East India Company. But he studied at Gonville and Caius before that, I believe. The father.”

  “Ah.”

  This reference to Cambridge was the first moment, Lenox would later reflect, when he should have known that in the end he would lose his battle. It betrayed Kitty’s anxiety that Cormorant came out of trade. His father having gone to Cambridge, before amassing his vast fortune, seemed to vouchsafe that it was not quite so.

  It took Lenox a very, very long time to realize that Kitty’s heart was not his. When the realization did come, it crushed him.

  It was a cold morning in the middle of February, with flurries melting as soon as they hit the pavement, the sky a steely white. He had spent a happy breakfast hour poring over a new letter from Cobb, sipping tea and eating eggs as Mrs. Huggins’s cats chased each other around his study—immune, apparently, to pieces of toast occasionally striking them in the back, or the irritated commands of their house’s owner that they be gone.

  When he arrived at Kitty’s, it was to find Cormorant in conversation with the maid of the house, Virginia. “It had better be two dozen of the shortbread,” he said, and passed her a note, before glancing at Lenox—they had never mentioned their sole encounter previous to these at Eaton Square—and passing into the sitting room.

  It was only this trivial moment of intimacy that led Lenox to see how profoundly he had misunderstood the rol
es he and Cormorant played here.

  He had missed it all, he saw in a flash: the whole drama, played out day by day, and he not the hero but the antagonist. He inquired discreetly of Virginia whether his lordship came often—and was told, with a knowing look that near broke his heart, oh, yes, every day almost, including the Sabbath itself, when he walked Mrs. Ashbrook to the early service; and weren’t they all expecting an announcement pretty soon!

  It was the maid’s ease in telling him this that showed Lenox more finally than anything else that all was settled. He must be, he thought … not a joke, perhaps, but no one to take very seriously. The also-ran.

  Yet he’d thought he and Kitty had been as close as ever. Certainly they had spoken with as much rushing enthusiasm as they always had in prior days of books, of travel, of the prosaic tales in the news. Every night, as he fell asleep, Lenox had thought of her face and how dear and unique it was to him, how particularly beautiful in its animation. It became the center of his world for a while—the one thing to which his heart answered, not books, not friends, nothing but Kitty Ashbrook’s face.

  And yet it was Cormorant she would marry.

  With Cormorant she exchanged stilted niceties about, for instance, his wine cellar, a subject very close to his heart; or his money, another. Not directly—his money washed itself clean, conversationally, through hobbies, ponies, broughams, a gun collection, a new sailing yacht, a thousand acres in Scotland, each of them a way, like the very good red laid down by his father in ’23 and now worth too much to part with, to mention his wealth without mentioning it.

  Lenox hadn’t a need in the world. He could afford most anything, and if he couldn’t—well, he didn’t want a sailing yacht, or a case of red wine worth the same as a sailing yacht.

  Yet he discovered what he did need, after all. More than he had conceived even in his innermost soul, he needed love. His mother had been correct. She had sensed that he was or soon would be lonely—and even if her means of remedying that inevitability was inelegant, it had been correct. He wondered—though far off from the problem, dully—if that meant she was also right that he should not be a detective. A thought that had shadowed the whole case, though now lapsed in significance amidst the fog of this rejection.