“And I was not, perhaps, as good an actor as I thought myself. My Thespian talents do not shine at their brightest on the boards, sir: they are better suited to the wider stage of life.”
The open mouths of his young family added to his cares. At length, the young man could shoulder his burden no more. At that time he and his wife were in New York. A chance-met acquaintance in a tavern offered to procure him a berth on a boat sailing for Cape Town where, he was told, there was such a hunger for dramatic entertainments that no actor worth his salt could fail to make himself a fortune within a very short time indeed. There was not a moment to be lost for the ship was to sail on the outgoing tide. According to his account, Poe had scribbled a note explaining his intended absence to his wife and had entrusted it to a friend.
“Alas! I trusted too well. My letter was never delivered. My poor Elizabeth went to her grave a few months later not knowing whether I was alive or dead, leaving my unfortunate children to depend on the charity of strangers.”
David Poe’s misfortunes had only just begun. The ship in which he was to work his passage to Cape Town was a merchantman sailing under British colours – at that time, our two countries were not yet at war. But the Union flag proved Mr Poe’s undoing for the ship was snapped up by a French privateer out of Le Havre. Mr Poe was reticent about how he had spent the next few months, but by the summer of 1812 he had moved to London.
“I know a man of your sensibility, Mr Shield, will have no difficulty in picturing my distress when I discovered, by a circuitous route, that my beloved Elizabeth had died. My first impulse was to rush to the side of my motherless children and provide what comfort a poor widowed father might bring. But on second thoughts, I realised that I could not afford the luxury – I might say the selfishness – of indulging in my paternal sentiments, not for my own sake but for the sake of my children. To get a passage to the United States at that time would not have been easy, since Congress had declared war on Great Britain in June. I understood, too, that my children were being cared for by the most amiable of benefactors: indeed, even if I could get to the United States, their material circumstances would immediately worsen. I blush to admit it, but there had been a little temporary embarrassment just before I left New York, in the shape of unpaid debts. No, though every generous feeling urged me to rush to the side of my children, prudence restrained me.” Here I imagined him on the other side of the trap-door, standing at the foot of the stairs with his hand on his heart. “A father must place his children’s welfare above his own selfish desires, Mr Shield, though it break his heart to do so.”
Fortunately, the grieving widower was not obliged to grieve in solitude. He had wooed and won the heart of a Miss Iversen, who lived with her father in Queen-street, Seven Dials, and assisted him in his business.
“She was not in the first flush of youth,” Mr Poe told me. “But then nor was I. We were both of an age when one woos with the head as much as with the heart. Mr Iversen’s health was failing and he was anxious to secure the future of his only child in the event of his death. She was a most amiable lady, with the additional attraction that she brought not only her delightful self to our connubial bower but also a means of earning my living – by honest toil, the sweat of my brow, but I did not mind that. There can be no higher calling than to heal the ills of one’s fellow men. I firmly believe we have had more success in that department than the entire College of Physicians. We doctor their souls as well as their bodies.”
“You tell fortunes?” I inquired. “You give them coloured water and pills made of flour and sugar? You interpret their dreams, sell them spells and help women miscarry?”
“Who is to say that is wrong, sir?” Mr Poe replied. “You would not believe the cures I have effected. You would not credit the number of sorrows I have soothed. I give them hope, sir, which is better than all the money in the world. In my way I am a philanthropist. Tell me, which is worse? To live as I do, an honest tradesman, a broker of dreams. Or to prey upon widows and hard-working men, and prise away their little fortunes and give them nothing in return. A splendid establishment and a carriage with a crest on the door are no guarantee of moral probity. I need refer you only to Mr Henry Frant and Mr Stephen Carswall as evidence of that.”
I believed him – or rather, I believed some part of him meant what he said: no man is a monster to himself, not entirely. And he spoke no more than the truth: the distance between Seven Dials on the one hand, and Margaret-street and Russell-square on the other, is shorter than the world realises.
When old Mr Iversen died in 1813, his daughter had been plunged into a melancholy so profound that her doting husband had feared she would never emerge. She could not bear to be parted from her papa. In the end Mr Poe had suggested that his body be embalmed.
“It is done in the best families now. And the old man, despite his trade, was an out-and-out Rationalist. Why should he wish for the grave or the attentions of worms? And of course the solution was also eminently practicable. My patrons are, by and large, a superstitious crew. They do not care to play foolish tricks on a man whose father-in-law keeps guard for all eternity in a room above the shop. Better than a pair of mastiffs, eh? Those dogs at Monkshill were no use as guards when they were dead, but with my late wife’s father being dead was in fact an advantage.”
Mr Poe had taken over not only the business of the old man but also something of his identity. “Only an American, sir, can truly appreciate the value of tradition.” He called himself Mr Iversen. He wore his father-in-law’s professional garb – that is to say, the gown with its strange symbols and the skull cap; he even pretended to be crippled, as Mr Iversen, Senior, had been.
“There is much to be said for distinguishing one’s professional activities from one’s private life,” Mr Poe said. “If I slip on a beard and a pair of blue spectacles I become another man altogether. People come and go in Seven Dials. In a year or two, most of them had forgotten there had ever been another Iversen, especially after my poor Polly followed her pa to the grave.”
He was understandably reticent about the precise extent and nature of the business he had inherited from his father-in-law and then built up himself. I think it probable that there was a great deal more to it than quack medicines and spells for the credulous. I cannot forget the bully boys in their rusty black clothes, the firm of undertakers who worked so assiduously for him, and the tumbledown farm so close to a workhouse, a lunatic asylum and a private burial ground.
In all probability, David Poe would have continued to prosper in Queen-street if he had not learned that Mr and Mrs Allan were in London, with their foster son Edgar. Over the years he had naturally paid attention to the news from America, and in particular to Americans visiting London. According to his own explanation, he had been possessed by an overpowering desire to see his son, whom he had last laid eyes on when the boy was not much beyond two years old and still in petticoats.
I see no reason to doubt at least the partial truth of this. As I said, we are all a patchwork of emotions. Why should David Poe not have felt a sentimental attachment to the children he had seen so little of? Absence and ignorance encourage such tender feelings. But an act may have more than one motive. Knowing Mr Poe, I suspect that he may also have borne in mind the possibility of deriving pecuniary advantage from Mr Allan, for he must have known that Allan was accounted a rich man.
Whatever his purpose, Mr Poe visited Southampton-row, where I unwittingly confirmed his son’s identity, and where he learned that Edgar was to be found in Stoke Newington. Later he came to the village, where he accosted the boys and had his altercation with me. He had indeed been more than a little tipsy on this occasion – “if ever a man had need of refreshment, it was I on that day.” Another layer of confusion was added by the fact that Mr Poe was short-sighted, and his vision was further hampered by the blue glasses: therefore he found it hard to distinguish between Edgar Allan and Charlie Frant, which brought about the initial assumption that the object o
f his interest was not Edgar but Charlie. It was this misunderstanding which led, through my good offices, to his acquaintance with Mr Frant.
Frant saw what David Poe wished him to see: an Irish-American with a taste for gin and no visible means of support; no threat to Frant or to anyone else. Frant saw all this, and he also saw that David Poe was approximately the same height, weight, age and build as himself. Leaving aside the superficial dissimilarities, Poe made a perfect substitute for Henry Frant in the rôle of murder victim. Urged on, no doubt, by Mrs Johnson, he retained Poe’s services. In the late afternoon of Wednesday 24th November, Frant lured Poe up to Wellington-terrace with the intention of murdering him.
“He told me we were to meet a gentleman there, and gave me a suit of his clothes, saying I must look the gentleman, too, or the design he had in mind would be doomed. By God, he thought me a prime flat, but in truth it was the other way about. He told me to get to Wellington-terrace early, where he would explain the design. So I walked there from the turnpike road, and he sprang on me, with a hammer in his hand.” David Poe coughed. “I had been half expecting it. We had a bit of a set-to, and I happened to get hold of the hammer. I didn’t mean to kill him, as God’s my witness, but he would have killed me given half the chance. I must have hit him a little harder than I thought. There I was, Mr Shield, in something of a difficulty, as I think you will agree.”
“You did not mean to kill him?” I cried. “Mr Poe, you forget I saw the body.”
“On my honour, Mr Shield, I had no more intention of killing him than I have of killing you, as you will see when I explain those injuries. When he died, he was almost entirely unmarked, apart from the back of the head, that is. But I knew that no jury in the land would believe that my blows had been struck in self-defence, that I had not wished to kill him. While I considered what to do, I searched him, and I struck lucky with his pockets, at least. Frant planned to run away, you see, after he’d killed me. He was carrying plenty of money, a case of jewellery, and also a letter from his fancy woman down at Monkshill. Shockingly indiscreet, she was, sir, quite shocking.”
“So you knew what they planned?”
“Not then. I didn’t have time to read the whole, but I saw enough to discover what my part was to be, enough to realise there was plenty of money in this, far more than Mr Frant had in his pockets. I was to stand in for Frant himself – Frant as a dead man, you understand, so that he would not be pursued. Can you credit such evil ingenuity! Of course I needed time to contemplate the pros and cons. Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I decided my best course of action was to follow at least some of the design that Mr Frant had laid out for me. So I knocked his face and hands about so his own mother couldn’t have been absolutely sure who he was – I had to do the hands, because of the finger – and then I slipped away. I knew there’d be questions asked, and I’d have to find a way to deal with them. With your assistance, Mr Shield, as it happened.”
Mr Poe had laid the trail for an investigator to follow, the trail that led to the finger in the satchel at the dentist’s. “Maria at the Fountain in St Giles is one of mine. If anyone came asking for Frant, she was to direct them to Queen-street and ensure I knew they were coming. And along you came, Mr Shield, not Mrs Johnson or a runner, as I’d been half-expecting. So we played out our charade – I thought it a neat touch to have Mary Ann give you the drawing that led you to my dentist, eh? If you had not asked to see the girl, she would have accosted you as you left. Then off you went to find the satchel with the finger.”
“It was only when I saw your late father-in-law in Queen-street, when a glove fell off his left hand, that I realised what had happened.”
“I needed a finger,” Mr Poe said with a trace of embarrassment. “His was to hand, if you excuse the vile wordplay. I regretted the necessity of removing it, of course, but the result was so particularly ingenious that I could not resist: it suggested, did it not, that the body at Wellington-terrace was indeed mine, whoever I might be, and that Henry Frant was alive and well – and not only an embezzler but a murderer.”
Having secured his own safety, as far as was possible, Mr Poe then turned his attention towards Monkshill-park. By that time he had studied Mrs Johnson’s letter. She had not only made it clear that she and Mr Frant hoped to elope, and that their nest-egg was hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the ice-house at Monkshill-park and unlikely to be accessible until January: she had also dropped a broad hint about the value of the nest-egg, a sum so substantial that, as Mr Poe put it, “even the angels would have been tempted.”
So Mr Poe had travelled down to Monkshill-park, arriving on St Stephen’s Day. His had been the face that had peered at me through the window of Grange Cottage on the day that Edgar sprained his ankle.
“You gave me quite a fright, sir,” he said reproachfully. “All in all, I did not have a happy day. You had hardly left the cottage when a chaise called for Mrs Johnson and took her away, and I knew by her luggage that she planned a visit of some length. The servant locked up and walked up to the village. I explored the garden and the outbuildings, and later I slipped into the park with the intention of discovering the ice-house. But a gamekeeper took me for a vagrant and threatened to set his dogs on me.”
Later, Mr Poe learned from alehouse gossip in the village that Mrs Johnson was spending a fortnight with her cousins at Clearland, a circumstance which made a private conference with her difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Urgent business called him back to London. But after the two weeks had elapsed, he returned.
“I hired a hack in Gloucester and rode over. You will imagine how mortified I was to find the cottage quite deserted. I slipped away –”
“Not before you were seen,” I said. “I came over to the cottage myself to look for traces of you.”
“If only I had known,” Mr Poe replied courteously. “I should have been only too glad to renew our acquaintance.”
On his return to Gloucester, however, a solution to his difficulty presented itself. The assembly at the Bell was only two days away and not unnaturally it formed the principal topic of conversation at that establishment. Mr Poe supped there on the Monday evening and discovered that a party from Clearland-court was among those expected to grace the occasion. It did not take him long to establish where the Ruispidges lodged. He witnessed their arrival on Wednesday and sent up a note to Mrs Johnson, begging the favour of an interview.
“I mentioned in my letter that I had something to communicate in relation to Mr H.F. – a matter of life and death, and discretion was of the utmost importance. I ventured to suggest we met on the morrow, but in her reply she insisted on an interview that very evening, and proposed that we meet in the gazebo at the bottom of the garden of the house where the Ruispidges lodged.”
Mrs Johnson had been in a pitiable state, not knowing whether Henry Frant were alive or dead. Indeed, it was by playing upon the possibility that Frant was still alive that Mr Poe was able to induce her to co-operate with him. He told her that Frant had been attacked by a ruined creditor; that Mr Poe had acted the Good Samaritan and come to his aid; that Frant was lying dangerously ill in London, unable even to write; and that he had begged Mr Poe to fetch both Mrs Johnson and what was hidden in the ice-house.
“This was cruel indeed, sir,” I said. “To play upon the poor woman’s weakness.”
“Upon my life, sir,” Mr Poe protested, “she received only what she deserved. The letter I discovered in Mr Frant’s pocket enabled me to form the opinion that Mrs Johnson was the originator of the scheme to have me killed in Mr Frant’s place. Both she and Frant were ruthless and reckless, sir, and as impulsive as children; but she was immeasurably the stronger character. I can safely assert that it was she who was truly to blame for those ghastly events at Wellington-terrace.”
“Did you tell her who you were?”
“Indeed I did not! That would have been the height of folly. The success of my scheme depended on the lady believing that it was I, Poe,
not her lover, who had been murdered, just as she had planned. I led her to understand that I was a former associate of Mr Poe’s, a man who had reason to hate him, a man who could be trusted as long as he was generously rewarded.”
Mrs Johnson had needed desperately to believe him because he alone offered her the hope of finding Henry Frant. She agreed to return to Grange Cottage after the ball, not to Clearland as she had previously intended; Mr Poe would join her there to retrieve what was in the ice-house. As they talked in the gazebo, however, she became much agitated, and also very cold and, according to Mr Poe, suggested they take some refreshment. Her cloak and hood granted her anonymity, and they patronised a hostelry at a distance from both the Ruispidges’ lodgings and the Bell.
“But the liquor went to her head,” Mr Poe cried. “She wept on my shoulder! She became quarrelsome! She led me a merry dance! And then at last you and Mrs Frant appeared and I feared that all was lost.”
Fortunately for him, Mrs Johnson had kept her own counsel, and he had come to the cottage according to plan. I myself had seen him on his skewbald mare. Mrs Johnson took a daily walk to the lake to ascertain when the men began to empty the ice-house.
“Her lover had given her a key to the door, which she had concealed in a secret compartment at the bottom of a small jewel box. Now I come to a most curious circumstance, my dear sir: I had the identical twin of that box in my own possession! But I shall return to this in a moment.”
All had at first run smoothly on the night of their expedition. According to Mr Poe’s version of events, their difficulties had begun only after Mrs Johnson had retrieved the valuables from the sump of the ice-house. In her excitement, she had missed her footing on the ladder and fallen to her death in the pit. To add to his troubles, he had nearly perished when he blundered into a mantrap on his way back to Grange Cottage.
The American Boy Page 45
