The Symbol Seekers
Page 7
It was, however, never easy for any poor young man, no matter how talented or how high his ambitions, to discover a suitable career without being championed by some highly placed person.
Adolphus found hack-work in the St Giles’ colony of cheap printers and hack writers. It kept him busy for hour after hour and only just paid for his shabby lodging and meagre food. When he could snatch some time away from his drudgery, he would try to find some better employment.
Ideally, he hoped he might be taken on as studio assistant by an established painter to grind colours, mix paints, do general studio chores and fetch and carry in exchange for some tuition. One evening he paid a visit to a noted tavern in the region of Charlotte Street where there was a cluster of artists’ studios. It was the drinking place of a number of famed brothers of the brush as well as hopeful daubers and hangers-on to the artistic community.
He took a portfolio of six water colours, mostly done in his pre-London days before drudgery claimed him. He hoped they might catch the attention of someone who could offer a helping hand and a dandyish fellow standing by the bar saw the portfolio, went over to Adolphus and asked if he might see his work. He said he was ‘a kind of general factotum’ around the artistic community and generally known as O or Owl.
O looked at the pictures with interest and declared that they showed great promise. He looked at them a second time in what appeared to be professional style with his eyes half closed.
‘You know, old chap, the whole six would look capital on my bedroom wall,’ he said. ‘Would you care to sell them to me?’ He mentioned a price. It was a modest price but Adolphus, always in need of extra cash, accepted at once.
O carried them away happily, as well he might be for he had noticed two attractive facts about the pictures. Firstly, doubtless by the sheerest chance, without any conscious copying, the country lad’s style was remarkably like that of the French water-colourist Octave Drax, who was very much in fashion. Secondly, Adolphus had not signed the paintings so they did not finish up on O’s bedroom wall. O, master of many black arts, exercised one of them—forgery. Eventually, the half-dozen pictures, each inscribed with a near perfect ‘Octave Drax’, went to an easily gulled collector for a handsome sum to the benefit of O’s pocket.
O cultivated the friendship of Adolphus Crayford, telling him would watch for a vacancy for a studio assistant among the many eminent artists he knew. His true motive for the cultivation was to discover whether Adolphus had any other work that could be transmuted into paintings apparently from the hand of Drax or, for that matter, any sufficiently like that of any noted painter on which O might profitably work his dark magic.
O had a long experience of dubious dealings and he had always believed in taking his time on a project when it seemed the best course. Rather than rush in the matter of viewing Crayford’s back collection and arouse the young man’s suspicions, He would play the good, breezy chum until his chance came.
In the meantime, he was satisfied that nobody among those seeking a valuable artefact stolen in the north of England would ever imagine that it was squirreled away in the obscurity of a poverty stricken artist’s apartment in far off London, lost among the capital’s teeming citizens?
That same day, among that sea of people, a handful whose fortunes would eventually become entangled were busy with their individual concerns. Roberta Van Trask who, a short a short time before had admitted she had little time for the genteel hobby of needlework was plying a needle, altering a garment. An observer might have noted a certain expectant light in her eyes that could suggest she was anticipating some excitement to come. Esther, her level-headed black maid and companion who was more a sister than a servant, was looking on worriedly. Every so often, she murmured ‘I don’t think you should be doing this. It can only lead to trouble.’
Lodging in the home of a British supporter of the Georgian General who had conceived a grotesque plan for what he imagined was the post-war betterment of his State, two of the General’s right hand men were busy finalising plans to for a meeting in Cremorne Gardens. They hoped this would be fruitful because earlier setbacks had burdened them with anxiety about their inability to discover a certain stolen box as well as a missing man, the General’s third emissary who had a lame foot.
CHAPTER 7
GRANDON’S BURDEN OF TROUBLE
The man with the lame foot was not far from Sadler and Dobbs. He was in a back room in the home of a cousin in Somers Town, a little way behind the big railway terminal of Euston and not a great distance from Camden Town where Sadler and Dobbs were lodging with the maker of breech-loading rifles. He was brooding over several setbacks. There was the failure of his attempt on the life of Septimus Dacers; there was the loss of a Remington pistol which he had used in several military engagements across the Atlantic and, most worrying of all, there was the loss of the horse he had hired from a livery stable, swept away in the fury of the cattle stampede.
A horse, plus the saddle and tackle hired with it, amounted to a substantial cost. A lavish amount of the portion of ready cash with which he absconded from Sadler and Dobbs went on the smart clothing forming a disguise in his murder attempt. Now, Grandon was feeling the financial pinch. There was also the precarious nature of the position he had put himself into.
The owner of the livery stable was an ugly, pugnacious man who looked very likely to be familiar with “the Fancy”, the community whose interests were racehorses, fighting dogs, cockfights and bare fisted prize-fighting. He had wanted ex-Sergeant Ned Grandon’s name and address when he hired out the horse and Grandon gave him false ones. He had banked on there not being an immediate hue and cry after his shooting of Dacers and that he could make a hasty escape back to the stable and return his mount. Then, in some convenient alley, he would strip off his beard, discard his spurs and his distinguishing billycock hat and substitute a cap he kept in his pocket. He might then easily make his way to Somers Town on foot. He could not disguise his limp but witnesses who saw him shoot from the saddle would not know about it and would remember his black beard as his chief characteristic.
From the start, Grandon’s strategy had risks but he had not reckoned on everything going wrong due to a stampede of cattle, something he might encounter on the developing cattle ranges of the American West but which he never expected to burst upon a London street. On losing himself in the warren of small streets and alleys after the stampede, he got rid of the beard, spurs and billycock, donned the cap and found his way back to his relative’s home without mishap. Then his doubts began to assail him.
Ned Grandon was no coward but, from whichever angle he looked at his present position, he saw he was in a hole. He even wondered if he was not a little crazy to have put himself in that position in the first place. Maybe his experiences in the war had unhinged him. It had happened to plenty of other men. He was overtaken by thoughts that jarred him back to solid, sane reality as he skulked in his Somers Town refuge. The more he brooded on his actions of the recent past, the more unnerved he became and the more he convinced himself that they were the doings of a crazed man.
If he had been in his right mind, he would never have sought to avenge his brother’s downfall by killing Septimus Dacers in the way he chose. He secretly schemed for months; he curried favour with General Vavasour to gain a place with Sadler and Dobbs on their expedition to England specifically to seek Dacers and kill him and he made a hectic runaway flight from Liverpool to London. Yet, in the end, the murder plot blew back in his face.
His multiple problems were now nagging him persistently: suppose the liveryman tracked him down, demanding the price of his horse and tackle. Such a man was likely to inhabit a social milieu from which he could call on the support of prize-fighting friends who might take a perverse pleasure in beating a man to a pulp!
In the way that imaginary bogeymen can almost become real and haunt a fevered mind, this notion began to prey on him.
Worrying, too, were the undisguised hints concerning money from his cousin, Hector, with whom he was lodging. Hector had tolerated him as a visiting relative but the toleration soon grew very thin. Hector he had a wife and a growing family and was simply a working man. He had lately dropped broad hints that Grandon could not expect to live rent free for ever in the household of a mere artisan.
In his youth, Grandon had spent some time living with Hector’s parents and he and Hector were old cronies from their young days but relations between the two were now becoming strained. Money was at the root of their mutual ill-feeling and Grandon had lately come to the alarming realisation that the modest portion of the General’s funding with which he fled to London, was almost dried up. He did not realise it but his problems were bulking up and preying on his mind. In a word unknown until the next century, he was becoming paranoid.
The big war in America had its effects on both Hector and Grandon in different ways. Ned Grandon was most drastically affected through his military service with the Confederacy. Hector, was happy to be on the make provided it was within wide margins of safety. He had hoped he might receive some small financial benefit from the ambitious post-war confidence trick put in motion by Ned’s brother, Howard. Howard, in the persona of “Mr. Fortune”, was the deviser and leader of the ‘Dixie Ghosts.’ These tricksters arrived in England with elaborate plans to rook the British profiteers who had supplied ships, armaments and other goods to the South during the American Civil War.
With an unlikely tale that the defeated South was gearing to rise in arms again and required money for its war aims, they had managed to relieve some of the most gullible of the old suppliers of yet more money.
It ended in disaster and Howard Grandon—otherwise “Mr. Fortune”—was now in a British convict prison. While his brother fought the powerful armies of Abraham Lincoln as an honourable Southern soldier, Howard Grandon established himself in the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. He had a minor post in the Confederate government then became a double agent, frequently crossing the Potomac River between Virginia and the Union capital, Washington, in disguise and dealing with both sides. He was never caught and made such a profitable thing of his duplicity that, while America endured its post-war turmoil, he resolved he would exploit the situation and follow a life of crime.
With the collapse of the Southern government, Howard Grandon knew, from his days inside the Government apparatus where he could find details of the British interests and individuals who had contributed to keeping the lifeblood of the rebel nation flowing by trafficking in ships, arms, ammunition, food and other supplies. He appropriated these for use in his confidence trick, founded on a tale of a bogus resurgent South, already rearming itself and ready to fight all over again.
His brother, Ned, had knowledge of the scheme from his brother’s glowing, supremely confident letters. Remaining in Georgia, Ned had no hand in implementing the trick Howard had dreamed up but became part of General Vavasour’s hare-brained Unconquered Banner movement which had spread its wings and was established in a tentative way in England.
Like his cousin Hector, in London, who knew of the Dixie Ghosts’ villainy, Ned vainly hoped some of the money conjured out of the shipbuilders and armaments kings across the ocean by Howard’s tricksters would come his way. The Grandons in both England and America had never been rich and saw no reason why they should not benefit from the rooking of a bunch of money hungry manufacturers and speculators who had chased profits during the war in America.
The spectacular collapse of the Dixie Ghosts and the trials of the principal actors in their crimes were reported in the newspapers in full. It emerged from press clippings sent to Ned by his cousin Hector that the enquiry agent Septimus Dacers, of Bloomsbury, played an active role in bringing them to justice. In fact, Dacers was played up in print as a hero of the debacle that brought an end to the Dixie Ghosts’ criminal venture. The trial judge had made special mention of Dacers’ energetic unmasking of the man who called himself “Mr. Fortune”, chief of the Dixie Ghosts.
Septimus Dacers loomed in Ned Grandon’s imagination as the bete noir who who had ruined the chances of his London relatives and himself falling into some little profit in the way of some crumbs from the rich table furnished by the Dixie Ghosts’ villainly.
Ned Grandon, was a Southerner who, like so many more, had in no way profited from his service to the Confederacy. He had gained only near destitution, permanent physical impairment, an exhausted spirit and a burning sense of injustice. Possibly, as he now came suspect, he was not wholly mentally balanced after his war experiences and he focussed his resentment on Septimus Dacers, of Bloomsbury. He was convinced that, had the applecart of his brother’s confidence trick not been so decisively upset by Dacers, he would be enjoying a share of the easy life.
After four years in the hellish American Civil War he had developed a lowered tolerance to the notion of killing a fellow human being, so he decided to go to London and kill Dacers. After all, he had lived in London for a time when young. He knew the city fairly well and his cousin’s modest home in Somers Town might be used as a bolthole.
He was sure Hector and his family would put him up but he would not make them privy to his murderous scheme, so no blame could be attached to them if his plans failed. If he could plan and execute the deed skilfully enough, all London, including Hector and his family, would only know that the murder of Septimus Dacers was the work of an unknown hand.
In preparation, he acquired an up-to-date directory of city businesses and found private inquiry agents, including Dacers, listed. He observed the address from the small park in the middle of the square for a couple of mornings, saw Dacers come out to post his letters and followed him, keeping well behind him, noting where he crossed the larger street every morning to reach the post box.
On the morning after his failed attempt on Dacers life, when sobering thoughts occupied him, he was faced by Hector over breakfast which was always early because Hector had to leave early to follow his trade as a carpenter. Cousin Ned was an American relative and everyone knew American relatives were always turning up in the old country heavily laden with money, usually just in time to save the old folks at home from eviction or bankruptcy. It was a stock theme of the popular melodramas staged in the cheap theatres known as “penny gaffs”.
Ned had shown up out of the blue having arrived in England on some mission he had not discussed with Hector and his family but, so far, he had shown not one red cent of any fabulous American wealth.
Hector was not tight-fisted but money was not easily obtained by a man in his social position. He had the broad hospitality of the London working-class and an honest Cockney outspokenness. That outspokenness showed itself over the breakfast table.
‘You know, Cousin Ned, keepin’ a family alive these days ain’t easy’, he said bluntly when his wife, Sarah, had left the table to go to the kitchen. ‘What I mean to say is, you comes an’ goes most of the day but I don’t ask what you’re up to. It ain’t none of my business but I presumes you might be makin’ a copper or two—an’ spendin’ a bit. Like on that sharp toff’s set of togs, billycock tile and all, you showed up in. That must’ve cost you a fair slice of gelt. You don’t never seem to think of coughing up a few quid to keep this house goin’, do you?’
His cousin’s words brought home to Grandon the uncomfortable truth that the modest amount of money he took with him when he abandoned Sadler and Dobbs had dwindled away alarmingly. He could scarcely account for its disappearance and, before long, he might well be penniless here in London with no means of earning so much as a copper. He knew he must part with a little more money. Though his stomach sank at the prospect, he tried to hold up an untroubled front.
‘Of co
urse, you are right, Cousin Hector. It’s not that I had the slightest intention of sponging on you. It was all a mere matter of my having a lapse of memory. I’ll bring down a few pounds for you when I go up to my room later.’
Hector nodded and mumbled his thanks. He seemed satisfied for the present.
Ned Grandon felt a hollow void in his guts and a coldness at his brow. He felt his grasp on reality was floundering and a jittery apprehension was encroaching on him. In short, he was close to a nervous crack-up.
CHAPTER 8
A FUSS AT CREMORNE
A skyrocket whizzed into the chilly air, trailing an arc of smoke then, high above Chelsea, it burst, releasing a near-blinding cascade of red, green and blue sparks giving the evening air a brief fairyland touch. Such displays would soon give James Whistler, the cantankerous painter, who lived nearby, the inspiration to paint sky high flowering lights. He captured in paint the hissing, exploding and descending colours that regularly emanated from rowdy and unprincipled Cremorne Gardens, the pleasure spot on the Thames.
Whistler found the gardens excitingly attractive, as did many a man about town, many a dandified lounger of the Swell Mob and many a sharp-faced luminary of the Flash Mob, London’s two major regiments of cunning criminality. Then there were dollimops from the houses of fleshly pleasure in gaudy finery, the property of their madams. Their less favoured, streetwalking sisters, sometimes marked by their pimps’ fists as well as by the signs of hunger, were also to be found at Cremorne. At the bottom of Cremorne’s social order were the scroungers: the ragged folk with tales of distress who had somehow eluded the gardens’ security measures along with barefoot urchins who scampered among the patrons, begging pennies.