by A. A. Glynn
The regular weekly breakfasts which gave Dacers and Miss Van Trask the opportunity for the semi-serious conversations in which they scored points off each other were initiated by Miss Van Trask’s diplomat father.
In 1863, while the Civil War was raging, Theodore Van Trask, a widower, was based at the London embassy while his daughter was in the Union capital, Washington, in a government office. When her father became seriously ill, Roberta decided to cross the ocean to nurse him. Although at one point, her father came close to death, he eventually made a good recovery and was able to return to his duties.
When Theodore Van Trask was required to go to Liverpool, a hotbed of support for the enemy of the United States, the Confederate States of America, hosting such activity as the secret building and commissioning of ships to attack United States’ shipping. The US embassy engaged Septimus Dacers to accompany him as bodyguard. Dacers was known as an intelligent and discreet agent and this assignment caused a strong friendship to be forged between the diplomat and himself.
A little later, after Roberta and Dacers had figured in an affair that came to be called the Case of the Dixie Ghosts, Theodore Van Trask, realising that his daughter spent much time in their home and knew few people in London, devised the weekly breakfast at Carrington’s for her and Dacers. At first. Roberta was accompanied by her black maid and companion, Esther. On rare occasions when his duties permitted, Van Trask also attended. After a while, Roberta told Esther she need not attend the breakfast if she did not wish to. Esther felt relieved because Theodore Van Trask was so rarely there that she was beginning to feel a gooseberry when at table with only Roberta and Dacers. She also had the distinct feeling that, strictly proper and almost puritanical though he was, Theodore Van Trask was playing the matchmaker when he set up the breakfasts for his daughter and Dacers…
The meal over, Dacers escorted Miss Van Trask to her home near Grosvenor Square, so short a distance that no cab was required and it was refreshing to walk in the crisp February air and the winter sunshine that gave some promise of spring. When the couple parted Dacers went in search of a cab to reach his Bloomsbury lodgings. Opening the street door with his key, he entered and found his landlady, Mrs. Slingsby, in the hall.
‘Ah, Mr. Dacers,’ she said ‘breakfasting with Miss Van Trask again?’
‘Yes,’ said Dacers.’
‘And how is the young lady?’
‘Very well and she sends you her best regards, Mrs. Slingsby.’
There was a certain twinkle in Mrs. Slingsby’s eyes. She was not an inquisitive woman but she had a romantic heart. She had no great wish to lose Dacers, her long established and valued lodger, but if she did, she hoped it would be to what she called “a nice wife”. She had great hopes of Dacers and the American girl.
She indicated the hall table. ‘A letter came for you this morning, Mr. Dacers,’ she said.
He took the letter upstairs to his rooms and found it to be accompanied by a most acceptable cheque in payment for an assignment in which he nipped in the bud a cunning method of fraud operated by a few employees of a small building society. If not stopped in its early days, it had the potential to ruin the company. The letter was one of effusive thanks from the company’s directors.
He took down his ledger from a shelf and entered the cheque. Then he checked the ledger to gather some idea of his finances. They were healthy enough but this year of 1867 was just opening and there was no telling how his fortunes would fare in the coming months. This train of thought led to a consideration of his chances of marriage to Roberta Van Trask, provided she accepted him—and provided he plucked up the courage to ask her. Earning his living on a catch-as-catch-can basis, could he ever afford to marry her? He thought not.
Then came the usual march of gloomy reasons why she would never be his bride. When she attended embassy functions on her father’s arm as his companion, she must meet many young men whose eyes she must dazzle: trade emissaries, youthful military and naval attaches and the like. Any one of them might whisk her off to the altar. Then came the gloomiest of all: Roberta would laugh off his proposal because she considered him to be too old. No, she would not laugh; her nature was too compassionate for that. It would be a gentle, kindly rejection, but a rejection just the same.
He sighed and picked up the morning paper which, as usual, Mrs. Slingsby had left in his rooms. He took in some of the major stories.
There was much excitement at the opening of the latest great wonder of the world, the Suez Canal and a long article on what it meant for world trade. There was a bloody clash between Caucasian and Chinese miners on the Crocodile River gold diggings in Australia.
Nearer home, there was news of increasing fear of the Irish nationalist movement, the Fenians, furthering their aims by military action against Britain. Many Irishmen with Fenian sympathies had served in the armies of the American Civil War and now posed a threat, returning to Europe equipped with military experience which they were ready to use against British rule in Ireland. It seemed a fever of fear of the Fenians was gathering in parts of England.
From America also, more violence was reported from the agonised Southern United States: rioting ex-Confederate soldiers shot dead by Union troops in Texas; a party of freed slaves murdered in Virginia and masked riders in Mississippi burned down a plantation mansion acquired by opportunists who came from the North to snap up the property of ruined Southerners. Such opportunists were called “carpetbaggers”. In this instance, after the burning, the carpetbaggers were hanged.
Because of his association with Theodore Van Trask and his daughter; his assistance to the US Embassy and the affair of the Dixie Ghosts, Dacers had found himself growing increasingly interested in American affairs, tangled though they were in this fraught post-war period when the fighting had by no means stopped.
He found himself reflecting on what he knew of the strife across the Atlantic which looked as though it was gathering pace.
It resulted from the policy of “Reconstruction”, by which the victorious Northern States attempted to pacify their recent enemy, the South and bring it back into the Union of States. Harsh methods were used. The Union’s new President. Andrew Johnson, who had been Lincoln’s vice-President and who was tainted by a reputation for drunkenness, negated Lincoln’s hopes for the moderate treatment of the vanquished South uttered only hours before his murder. Lincoln’s call for malice toward none and charity for all was forgotten after that cowardly act which shattered the soul of the United States.
Johnson and his Radical Republican faction who held sway in the US government wanted punishment, so the South came under an iron grip with a virtual new civil war breaking out. Ex-Confederates fought the US military; carpetbaggers came in to plunder; freed slaves, cut loose from the old plantation life they had known, were offered scant protection and were burned out of such schools and churches as were set up for them. There were shootings and hangings in the dead of night. Then came fierce Southern riders, masked and mostly former Confederate cavalrymen who destroyed property acquired by Yankee incomers and, frequently, destroyed the incomers themselves. Eventually there emerged a powerful band of hooded, vengeful riders, robed in white to represent the ghosts of the Confederate dead and oddly named the Ku Klux Klan.
Genuine peace and national unity under one flag seemed as far away as ever, Dacers thought, as he folded the paper to lay it aside.
As he did so his eye caught a coded item at the bottom of a column of public announcements:
‘LUB: The good father is wrong. The ban not con. Mtg to be arr—watch here. Si Se Ty’
Dacers read it once then a second time. He translated a small portion of the code with ease but the rest was meaningless. He did not know why but sight of the item brought to mind the American affairs he had just been thinking of and the case of the Dixie Ghosts, in which a set of confidence tricksters sought to make their fortunes with a spurious plan to
restart the American Civil War.
All that morning, the notice, the code and the echo of the Dixie Ghosts affair persisted in coming into his mind.
Earlier that day, at just about the time Dacers and Roberta Van Trask were crossing swords in their semi-serious way over breakfast, another conversation was taking place in a neat house in Lindsey Row, facing the River Thames in Chelsea. It was the home of the upstart American born painter, James Whistler. The cantankerous Whistler had for a long time denied that he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. The city blessed with hosting the auspicious occasion of his arrival in the world, he contended, was St Petersburg, Russia.
This morning, the dandyish Whistler sprawled in an armchair, stroking his ample moustache and glowering through his eyeglass at a younger man sitting opposite, filling the air with the scented fumes of a Turkish cigarette. He was just as dandyish as Whistler and, in a lapel, he wore the blood red ribbon of some decoration.
To the coterie who enjoyed justified reputations as the cream of London’s artistic and literary talent, this man was nicknamed “Owl” but some other people in some other places knew him as “Mr. O”.
‘I’m not having it, Owl, my dear fellow,’ Stated Whistler emphatically. ‘Not having it at all. I suppose you have hawked it all around the daubers in London and they won’t touch it. Now, you know I consider you to be a devil of a fellow. You’re an adventurer who should be in top boots and a plumed hat. There’s no man better as an artists’ agent; nor can anyone equal you at discovering exquisite ceramics and the finest examples of antique furnishings but never have I known you to try to sell something sight unseen. You come here, with this yarn about a box containing a relic of American history of very high value but you haven’t even brought it with you. How’s a man to make a judgment when he hasn’t seen the object on offer?’
‘It’s far too valuable to be treated lightly.’ Owl said. ‘One cannot just carry it from place to place as if it were some common object.’
Whistler gave a sharp laugh. ‘I’ll wager you tried this sight unseen dodge in the studios of all those who consider themselves to be the great men of English art. I suppose the Pre-Raphaelite bunch—Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown and the rest—were all too busy living in the Middle Ages to notice the Nineteenth Century passing them by. So, under the mistaken notion that I am an American, you turn up here to try your luck with old Jimmy Whistler.’
‘But you are an American, Jimmy,’ objected Owl. ‘It’s widely known that you were born in Lowell and were once a cadet at West Point.’
‘Bosh! I was born where I say I was born and St Petersburg is far more attractive than Lowell. Yes, I was a West Point cadet and when it was decided that the US Military Academy and I should part company, there was near hysterical joy on both sides. I have no special regard for the United States. Did I ever tell you my mother is descended from an old Southern family? And, anyway, who are you to question my word? You, who claim to be heir to various estates in Portugal and that you hold a royal honour of Portugal, the ribbon of which you are, even now, sporting in your coat, whether you have any right to or not. Let’s not forget all the many stories from the time you were absent from London for so many years. You claim you were associated with the bomb-throwing Felice Orsini’s attempt to kill the Emperor of the French and escaped while Orsini went under the guillotine. Then there are the yarns about your living as a card-sharper and diving for lost treasure in some ocean or other.’
‘All true,’ declared Owl, standing and striking a pose which he hoped looked heroic.
‘Gammon!’ replied the painter. ‘I suspect you know the whole of London’s artistic colony can see through your tall tales but nobody minds since you’re an all-round good fellow and you have gifts peculiar to yourself.’
Whistler suddenly lowered his voice and said: ‘I’ll tell you the reason why I’m not in the market for this relic, pig in a poke, cat in a bag or whatever it is, Owl, my dear fellow.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m broke.’
‘Broke, Jimmy—you? But you’re only just back from half a year in Chile.’
‘Where I went to paint and for no other reason,’ Whistler said firmly. ‘The fact that I arrived there just as Chile and Spain went to war was a coincidence, so discount the silly rumour that I went as a spy for one government or the other. I put Jo in charge of my affairs while I was gone and I had hopes of her selling a set of etchings I had recently completed. There were no buyers which shocked me because, as you know, I’m considered a dab hand with an etching needle. I found Jo in low water financially when I returned and things are not much better now.’
Joanna Hiffernan, a copper haired Irish beauty, was Whistler’s mistress and model and the subject of his painting White Girl, which caused a sensation when first exhibited.
Whistler suddenly adopted the tones of a street corner cadger: ‘I don’t suppose, old fellow, that you can find a pound or two to help a man out until I gather some tin by selling some work.’
‘Sorry, Jimmy,’ Owl answered quickly. ‘I’m under the squeeze myself. As you know, I’m marrying Frances in the summer and hoping to buy a little place in Putney. You know how things are these days. Every penny has all but gone before a man earns it.’
There were no hard feelings between the pair because they could not help each other by handing over money, although Owl’s chief concern was to get the box from Birkenhead off his hands since he believed there would be a fairly intensive search for it. He had never yet felt the hand of the law clamped on his shoulder and he had no desire to feel it at this stage of his life. He was approaching marriage to his statuesque and handsome cousin, Frances and, while there was no guarantee that holy matrimony would cure his criminal ways, it was likely to make him more cautious.
Owl stepped out of Whistler’s house into the road on the other side of which flowed the River Thames. He paused for a minute or two to light a fresh cigarette and stood thinking about the box and how best he could secrete it in a safe place until the threat of police action blew over. He reflected on how he came to engineer the theft of the box the contents of which was unknown to him. He was simply told it was something of historic importance, particularly to Americans and it would gather value year by year. In the spirit of maintaining honour among thieves, he asked no questions. Among the lower echelons of criminality, where he was known as Mr. O, it was understood that he could acquire almost anything useful to breakers of the law.
At the more rarefied level of painters’ studios and salons where the newest exquisite glass and china was collected and swooned over, he was known as a swashbuckler who could supply anything in the fine art line. No questions asked, of course.
He stood finishing his cigarette in his customary sucking and gulping fashion and he recalled how he was commissioned to lift the box from the Birkenhead villa. An eccentric American collector, living obscurely in London heard of the box, wanted it for his gallery of Americana and set certain wheels turning to give felonious employment to Mr. O, Sephton and Twist.
Then, for the first time in his adventuring in the murky world below the respectable surface of Queen Victoria’s Britain, a deal turned sour on him. He had not counted on just how eccentric his eccentric client was. For, when it came to delivering the box to him, he found the man had taken a sudden notion to return to America and he did so, lock, stock and barrel, leaving no forwarding address. Not only was O unpaid for his risky activities in the north of England, he had on his hands the box containing he knew not what. Something else he did not know was that the man of distinction in Birkenhead, the victim of the theft, had no desire for the British authorities to know of the crime. He feared they might be justified in claiming the box as properly belonging to the United States. Consequently, there was no police investigation because the police never heard of the theft.
All O knew of the contents of the box was that it was chiefly
of interest to Americans so he considered his best prospect as a buyer was James Whistler, the American he knew best, though Whistler persisted in sticking to the fantasy of his birth in St Petersburg. Rebuffed by Whistler, O was thrown into a quandary. He stood on the margin of the Thames, finishing his cigarette. As usual, he smoked it down to the merest scrap of a butt which he could scarcely hold in his fingers.
He tossed the butt away. Then he almost jumped in the air. It might have been the stimulation of his scented Turkish tobacco or the sharp wind blowing off the wide river, but something brought an almost miraculous inspiration to him. He suddenly knew where to deposit the burdensome box.
He tilted his tall hat to a rakish angle and, swinging his stick like a man conducting an invisible orchestra, strode jauntily off alongside the river, the most relieved man in London.
CHAPTER 3
THE MEN FROM GEORGIA
The streets of the dockland area of Liverpool were crowded and the throngs made up a mosaic of the people of the world. Seamen of every rank and nation rubbed shoulders with each other: the skinny young cabin boys; the smartly uniformed officers; the Chinese and Lascar deckhands and the tanned and bearded old salts who had spent their lives before the mast and had seen every wonder of the world.
There were voyagers of every class: the prosperous men of business just arrived in the country or just about to leave it, both of them travelling in the interests of profit and the families of emigrants, hopeful of new lives under new skies far away. There were beggars, one with a model of a battered ship on the crown of his hat, the mark of the sailor (supposedly) ruined by shipwreck. Ragged young women accompanied by two or three wan youngsters wandered among the crowd, telling sad tales of a seaman husband and father (supposedly) lost beneath the waves. Ladies of easy virtue prowled the scene with their eyes peeled for the black reinforced top hats of the policemen prominent above the two-way tide of bobbing heads. The harsh yells of hot pie vendors and newspaper sellers created a background anthem to the activity.
