by A. A. Glynn
The always elusive Bulloch led Charles Francis Adams and his hired detectives a merry dance, and it was in connection with the hunt for Bulloch and his associates that Adams sent Theodore Van Trask on his mission to Liverpool with Septimus Dacers as his bodyguard.
But the war’s end brought dire hazards for James Bulloch and his half-brother who, before his service in the Shenandoah, was the youngest officer aboard the Alabama, rescued after her sinking. Their wartime activities caused them to be branded pirates by the U.S. government, and a return to America would inevitably mean capture, trial, and, almost certainly, execution for both if convicted. Although James Bulloch and his younger half-brother were seen as heroes of the most courageous kind by the people of the South, the spirit of vengeance ran high among the victorious Northerners, so they lay low in Liverpool.
Each was a dogged, fighting sailor and neither was a man to waste away in idleness. When word of the Resurgent South—otherwise The Dixie Ghosts—caused the senior Bulloch to scratch his hairless head, the junior Bulloch knew something decisive would surely spring from it.
CHAPTER SIX
THE WATCHER IN THE SQUARE
Old Dr. Alexander McLeish studied the long scar in Dacer’s side from which he had just removed the tightly wound dressing and strapping. “Aye, it’s healed well,” he rumbled in his rich Scottish accent. “Mind, you’ll no doubt continue to get a twinge or two for a wee while yet and you’ll carry that bonny scar to your grave. No harm in that. A few scars suggest a man’s lived an eventful life, as I’ll wager you have in the peculiar business you follow, Mr. Dacers. Now you’re free of the bandaging, don’t do any more business with villains who carry knives. You can expect my bill in the post.”
Septimus Dacers stepped out of his doctor’s premises in Old Holborn, and set off to thread his way through a skein of streets that would take him to Seven Dials and Setty Wilkins.
“The Dials” took its name from the junction of seven straggling mean streets and a pillar bearing seven sundials that, long ago, stood at the point of their meeting. It was a squalid, ramshackle, unhealthy, and dangerous district where disease and crime stalked a maze of decaying streets. Police went into The Dials in groups and never singly. A respectably dressed stranger might lose his watch, his money, or even his whole suit of clothes in an encounter with denizens of The Dials.
Grubby men with hair cropped Newgate style and slatternly women glowered at Dacers from darkened doorways; a baby wailed somewhere; a man and woman were holding a furious, bellowing, and screeching argument behind a broken window; and he was approached by two small ragged boys, pleading: “Give us a penny, guv’nor,” He ignored them, not through hard-heartedness, but if he parted with a coin, a tribe of begging youngsters would emerge from nowhere and swarm around him.
Dacers, who had ventured into many a sector of London’s murky underbelly without fear, felt as uneasy as any man every time he visited Seven Dials, but Setty Wilkins was happy to dwell there for his own reasons, and Dacers wished to consult him this day after his meeting with Roberta Van Trask.
He negotiated the cracked paving and broken cobbles and avoided a dead cat in his path to reach Setty’s ancient dwelling-cum-workshop. He still had half a suspicion that Setty, as the only person who knew he had gone to the Blue Duck, was behind his beating. But he was ashamed of it when he thought of the sterling character he knew to lie under the old engraver’s eccentric front.
He entered the slanted door of the workshop and found Setty sitting on an old wooden box, smoking a clay pipe and reading a “penny dreadful,” one of the cheap sensational publications devoured by young boys, and against which clergymen preached and magistrates railed, alleging their influence was corrupting the morals of the young.
“Vy, it’s Mr. Dacers again!” he exclaimed heartily. “You’re alvays as velcome as the flowers in May, my good sir.”
Dacers nodded towards the printed paper in Setty’s hand. “Small wonder the jails are full when such fare as that is in circulation,” he said gravely.
“Come, now. If there vasn’t no criminals, there vouldn’t be no private inquiry agents makin’ their fortunes,” Setty replied. “Bedsides. I done the cuts in this.” He held up the paper to show a full-page illustration of a terrified man being hanged in chains by a leering group of ruffians festooned with swords and pistols, while a flock of wild-eyed, expectant vultures flapped their wings overhead. It was headed: “Revenge of the Highwayman’s Henchmen!” The typeface was fuzzy, but Setty’s handiwork as engraver of the picture was competent, sharp, and clear.
“And if no private enquiry agents, perhaps no downy birds to send them to low boozing dens to be beaten up,” rejoined Dacers, indicating the bruises on his face.
“My eye, Mr. Dacers!” exclaimed Setty. “Did that happen at the Blue Duck? I’m sorry to see it, but I did give you the office that it’s an uncommon rough shop.”
Dacers gave a wry grin. “You know more than that, Setty. I never knew a man with more in his head than you. I’ll wager you know a good deal more about these Americans who’re to be found at the Blue Duck.”
“Vell, you only asked me if I knew vhere these Yankees congregate, and I told you there’s some to be found at the Blue Duck, and you told me they’re not likely to be Yankees but the blokes what fought the Yankees. Now, I keeps business matters confidential as a rule, but I reckon I can tell you that they did a bit of business with me. Some engraving, a letterhead it seems. I’ll show you a proof.”
He rose from the box, moved to a chipped and scarred oaken table, which held his proofing press, and, from a drawer, produced a sheet of paper and handed it to Dacers. It bore a line illustration of a Confederate flag and the legend “The Resurgent South,” the style suggesting the letterhead of a business concern. Dacers almost jumped when he saw that the design embodied an address for the enterprise: “5 Blindman’s Yard, Hungerford Bridge, London, England.”
So, the men who appeared to be plotting a new civil war in America had a name for their venture, and what looked like a business address quite close to the Blue Duck.
“An address in Blindman’s Yard,” mused Dacers aloud. “I believe I’ll pay a call there, Setty. I wish you’d told me of it earlier.”
Setty blew out pipe smoke and stated stiffly: “There’s such a thing as confidentiality between supplier and customer, Mr. Dacers, an’ I’m a business concern vot honours the proper formalities.”
Dacers studied the engraved design with intense interest. As well as the Stars and Bars of the South, there were cannon, stacked cannonballs, crossed muskets, and a Latin motto of ominous significance: Sic Semper Tyrannis—Thus to all Tyrants. It was the motto of the State of Virginia and the cry of the Virginian John Wilkes Booth as he leapt from the theatre box having shot Abraham Lincoln.
The whole grandiose pictorial panoply trumpeted warfare and glory, like a brash and blatant advertisement, yet it represented a supposedly clandestine group plotting to reignite a bloody and tragic war. Its headquarters were by the reeking Thames, and its herald was an engraver in Seven Dials whose hand embellished cheap works of bloodthirsty fiction and catchpenny “fakements” concocted by down and out hacks to be hawked at the foot of the gallows. Suddenly, the Resurgent South enterprise showed itself to be a cheap fraud.
“Mighty stirring stuff, Setty,” commented Dacers with a note of sarcasm. “All grand and martial.”
Setty Wilkins shrugged. “Don’t mean nothin’ to me, Mr. Dacers. It vos just a job, makin’ a crust or two. I ain”t had no book learnin’—vot does ‘resurgent’ mean?”
“Don’t gammon me, Setty,” said Dacers. “You have more learning than you let on, and you obviously completed a sound apprenticeship to your trade. You write a masterly engravers’ copperplate and you never spell a word wrong. As for ‘resurgent’, in this instance, it means trouble.”
“Trouble don’t vorry me,” said Setty. “In The Dials, ve live in the midst of it all day long and all night. But the c
oves vot came to see me over the job didn’t look much like trouble.”
“How many of them were there?”
“Two.”
“Both big men, one with a yellow moustache and a powder burn on his face; the other looking like a prizefighter, and both in tall hats and frock coats, all very respectable?” asked Dacers.
“Yes. That’s them to a T, and it’s a great vonder they got in and out of The Dials without having all their valuables lifted as well as their gelt,” replied Setty, using the “flash”—criminals’ slang word for “money.” He chuckled and added: “Togged up like they vos, they could easily have been skinned. That means—”
“I know what it means. It’s the flash for being robbed of one’s clothing and left bare bottom naked. You didn’t see anything of a smaller man—a hunchback?”
“No.”
Fortune might be the brains of the group, thought Dacers, though, it seemed, he contrived to always keep in the background. But there were times when he was decidedly to the fore. He remembered what he saw at the Cardsworth manor house: humpbacked Fortune in the leading role, projecting plans of an improved Southern-created submarine boat from a magic lantern, and doing all the talking.
The sight of the engraved letterhead caused Dacers’ mind to turn to thoughts that first entered it when he crouched in the flower bed under the window of the manor house and heard Fortune’s words: “Whatever you put in will be a sound investment.” And there was the talk of an eager horde, ready to take up the sword again. Surely, no one could swallow that. One need only read the newspapers to know the South was on its knees.
It was all glib sales talk and, if he ever believed the venture to be a genuine attempt to revive the defeated South into a viable fighting nation by misguided but genuine patriots, he now saw its cheapjack reality.
It was aimed at rooking wealthy British donors, like Sir Oswald Vaillant, who had financed the supply of highly expensive materiel of war to the Southern belligerents. It was an elaborate trick of a kind that might be devised by the intelligent end of the Swell Mob—those of a much brainier order than Dandy Jem and Skinny Eustis.
It was a variation on the mobsmen’s confidence dodge known as the “long firm lurk,” whereby money was conjured out of the gullible by setting up a spurious business firm.
Only, in this instance, the gullible were the very rich, and Dacers had no idea how many of them had been visited and hooked by their fanciful blather of fortunes to be made.
And, somewhere, Theodore Van Trask fitted into this mosaic of false patriotism, war talk and a hunchback’s hump that, according to Miss Van Trask, seemed to come and go.
When he left Setty Wilkins, he was thinking of the Resurgent South or the Dixie Ghosts and the useful knowledge of their address, memorised from the letterhead: 5, Blindman’s Yard, Hungerford Bridge.
So, unless it was merely an address for the reception of mail. it seemed there was a place to which the Dixie Ghosts enterprise could be pinned down.
But he was not the only one concerned with an address.
As Dacers made his way on foot from Seven Dials to Bloomsbury, a solidly built man with a pugnacious face was sitting on a bench in the small park in the centre of the square in which Dacers resided. He ground the butt of a cigar he had just finished under his heel and sighed with boredom.
Sam Meakum had been ordered to keep an eye open for a man who lived at a certain house in the square and, by some means, discover his identity and what his business was.
He had already made the man’s acquaintance in a manner of speaking, for he was the one he and Cal Tebbutt, who tried to impress the gullible by pretending he was of the aristocratic Virginian Fairfax clan, had set upon outside the Blue Duck.
He took out his cigar case, selected yet another cigar, and lit it with his flint-and-wheel lighter. He made sure he was obscured from view from one side of the square by a tree positioned just behind the bench. Already, the beat policeman had appeared from the edge of the square three times and plodded along that side on his regular, precisely-timed patrol.
The peeler had not noticed the solitary man occupying the bench on this cold February day but, sooner or later, he might do so and want to know what Meakum was doing there and why he was lingering so long.
Sam Meakum was considerably disgruntled. He was growing tired of taking orders from the overbearing and fanatically driven Fortune, the deviser of the scheme which, according to Fortune, would net his associates and himself wealth beyond their dreams.
Meakum did not mind pulling his weight in any enterprise. Nor did he mind having to handle the brougham coach the trio had at its disposal, because he had a farming background and understood horses. Increasingly, though, he had to take over Cal Tebbutt’s duties, for the effects of whatever struck Tebbutt over the head in the battle of Shiloh was making him more erratic and unreliable, particularly when he had given in to his passion for hard liquor.
He now considered himself a fool for allowing himself to be pushed by the impetuous Tebbutt into attacking the snooper at the Blue Duck. Moreover, where he normally strove to keep Tebbutt under control, this time he lost his grip on him, and now wondered if he was not being morally contaminated by Tebbutt. Their attack on the snooper yielded nothing. Instead, they should have done their own snooping and followed the man to discover something about him.
More and more, when Fortune was absent from London, supposedly softening up prospective donors to the Resurgent South, Meakum had to handle a dozen jobs and ensure that Cal Tebbutt did not fly off the handle into one of his increasing irrational fits.
The worst so far was the one that caused him to suddenly jump from the carriage in which all three were riding and charge into the home of the U.S. diplomat claiming he had unfinished business there.
At an earlier date, Meakum and Tebbutt had had some highly secret business with Theodore Van Trask. That was during the war when Tebbutt and Meakum, as a pair of Southerners stranded in England through the misfortunes, of war became associated with Henry Hotze, who was a more or less open Confederate agent. Tebbutt’s action the day he barged in on Van Trask stemmed from that business. It was simply crazy and totally fruitless.
Meakum, in the menial role of coach driver, had almost turned the brougham over in making a speedy escape from the scene as Fortune dragged Tebbutt into the coach. It worried Meakum that Tebbutt, whom he had stood by loyally, guarded and helped out through shared vicissitudes, could easily become a liability.
Further concerns worried him He was beginning to doubt the soundness of this Dixie Ghost affair. True, they had visited three or four of the earlier donors of funds to the Confederate cause during the war, but after an initial enthusiasm, they were showing a marked reluctance to make any commitments this time around.
Or was the record of business so meagre because crafty little Fortune was making his own deals during his absences on lone ventures and siphoning off what should be profits for all three? After all, by his own cunning means, Fortune ensured that he always kept on his person the documents and lantern slides used to back up their claims to have the means of creating advanced weapons of war.
Furthermore, he insisted that he and only he should handle all correspondence pertaining to their activities. His two companions were kept in the dark as to how things were progressing, and Meakum’s feeling they were merely being used as tools was growing.
The more he thought about it, the more rickety the Resurgent South or Dixie Ghosts enterprise appeared, and his initial enthusiasm for it was being replaced by the feeling that it would not take much to make him up and quit the whole affair. First, though, he must get out of Fortune’s clutches. For the hunchback had a tenacious grip and, without his help, Meakum and Tebbutt, as refugees from the broken Confederacy, would be nearly destitute.
Then, suddenly, his gloomy reverie was broken, because he saw the very man who was on his mind, crossing the far side of the square. Meakum did not know it, but Septimus Dacers was ret
urning from his visit to Setty Wilkins’ workshop, where he had received his own enlightenment about the Dixie Ghosts affair.
Meakum kept his gaze on the tall figure across the square, where he had been joined by the crossing sweeper, one of the ragged legion of London’s destitute who earned what they could by sweeping the horse droppings and mud from the cobbles for the well-being of gentlemen’s boots and the hems of ladies’ gowns as they crossed from kerb to kerb.
He saw the crossing sweeper, a bent old man in an ancient topcoat and a bashed-in old top hat, touch the brim of his headgear, then step before the man and begin sweeping with his broom, walking before him and wielding the broom as he crossed. At the further kerb, the man handed the sweeper a tip, then walked in the direction of the house whose number Fortune had identified to Meakum. Meakum kept watching until Dacers opened the street door with his key and entered the house. Though he was growing half- hearted about his role in the Dixie Ghost scheme, he set about the task Fortune had set him.
He rose, left the little park, and strode across to where the crossing sweeper stood with an idle broom. The old man turned, touched his hat brim, and looked hopefully at Meakum but Meakum halted and did not begin to cross the roadway.
Not wanting to leave any evidence of American incursion in the area, Meakum tried to put on a languid English accent. “Pray, my good fellow, is that gentleman who just crossed the street not Dr. Jones?”
A pair of rheumy eyes, set in an unwashed, grizzled face considered him from under the shattered brim of the stove-in old top hat.
“’Im, sir? No, ’e ain’t no doctor. That’s Mr. Dacers, ’e’s a sort of detective like.”
“Oh, a policeman?”
“No, ’e ain’t with the reg’lar crushers. ’E’s sort of private like. There’s bin stories about things wot ‘e’s done in the noospapers now and then. Not that I could tell you wot they was. Never had no schoolin, d’ye see? Can’t read.” He laughed, showing a toothless cavern of a mouth. “A fair gentleman is Mr. Dacers. I’ve bin on this crossin’ nigh on eight years an’ never met a finer gentlemen.” He paused then added meaningfully: “’E allus tips a man ’andsome arter ’e’s done a bit of sweepin’ for ’im.”
