“What could I do?” Mr Poe cried. “I am naturally law-abiding, and my instinct was at once to lay the matter in its entirety before the nearest magistrate. But nothing could bring my charming hostess back to life. I knew that circumstances were against me. All in all – for Mrs Johnson’s sake – for the reputation of the illustrious family to which she had the honour of being connected – it seemed wiser that I should slip modestly away. My presence would have served only to confuse matters.” He chuckled, as though challenging me to disagree with this interpretation of events; Mr Poe was a great tease.
“I did not have an opportunity to examine what Mr Frant and Mrs Johnson had concealed in the ice-house until I returned to London. I had expected gold – I had expected banknotes – I had expected more jewellery: and in all these I was not disappointed. I had also anticipated that there would be bills and other securities, though with less interest because I knew these would not be easy for a man in my position to realise for anything like their true value. But there is a profound irony here: the most valuable item of all was already in my possession, and it had been since November. That little box I found in Mr Frant’s pocket.”
“Would it have been made of mahogany, by any chance?” I said, remembering something Sophie had once asked me. “Inlaid with tulip wood, and with a shell pattern on the lid?”
“My dear Mr Shield! I find you remarkably well informed! Yes, Mr Frant must have had two of them made, one for his wife and one for his mistress. I had already removed the items of jewellery that Mrs Frant’s contained. But I had not suspected the existence of a secret compartment until Mrs Johnson had revealed the one in hers. If only Mr Frant had known! How delighted he would have been!”
David Poe paused and cleared his throat. He was an artist as well as a tease. He waited for me to say something, to encourage him to reveal what he had found. I tapped ash from what was left of my cigar and waited.
“The compartment held a letter,” Poe said at last. “Its contents were wholly unexpected. I immediately realised it altered everything. It brought great possibilities in its train. But in order to bring those possibilities to fruition, I would have to act, and act soon. There is a tide in the affairs of men, as the Bard so aptly says, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
81
Life is a topsy-turvy affair at best, and David Poe’s secret history was by no means life at its best. Here is the worst, and saddest, part of his narrative and mine.
You may picture me, sitting by the trap-door in the kitchen of that squalid little farmhouse with a pistol in one hand, a cigar in the other, and the acrid flavour of fear still twisting and turning in my stomach; and all the while the sound of Mr Poe’s whining yet oddly mellifluous voice, as beguiling as the serpent’s in Eden, was insinuating itself up through the cracks between the floorboards.
“Mr Shield,” said he, “none of us can argue with the immutable decrees of Providence. Fate has put you on one side of this trap-door and me on the other. But that is no reason why we should not discuss our situation like rational beings. I have a letter in my pocket which could bring you considerable benefit. Material benefit. It is of no use to me now. You, on the other hand, might derive much advantage from it.”
“I do not wish to listen to you.” I rose to my feet and ground out the cigar with my heel.
“Pray, Mr Shield – this will not take a moment. You will not regret it, I promise you. I may whet your interest by revealing that the letter is addressed to Mrs Frant.”
“Who was Mrs Frant’s correspondent?”
“Mr Carswall’s natural daughter, Miss Flora Carswall. She wrote the letter when she was little more than a child. She was then at a school in Bath whose address is at the head of the letter, as is the date, which is a circumstance of importance. October 1812. The contents of the letter suggest that during the summer she had spent several weeks with her father on a tour of various properties he owns, or owned, in Ireland.”
“I fail to see the significance.”
Poe’s voice rose in his excitement. “The letter is not such a letter as a daughter should ever write about her father, Mr Shield. No one who reads it can doubt its meaning. I shall be blunt – this is no time for delicacy. By my computation, Miss Carswall was at the time no more than a child of fourteen or at the most fifteen. Her letter suggests strongly that, one night when her father was inebriated, he had taken a terrible advantage of her innocence – indeed, one can place no other construction on it – and as a consequence of this she feared that she was with child. The motherless girl was clearly distraught, and she had nowhere else to turn – so she sought the counsel of her friend and cousin, Mrs Frant.”
For a moment I did not know where to find words to say. I felt horror, of course, and also a twisted anger towards that hulk of a man lying in the parlour next door. Most of all, though, I felt pity for Flora. For if this was true, it made clear much about her I had not understood before. I write if this was true.
“Show me the letter,” I said. “You may slip it between the boards.”
“Not so fast, my good friend. If I pass it to you, I pass you my sole means of negotiating. I have no wish to harm the reputation of the unfortunate lady, but you must see that I am in a difficult position myself.”
“Does Carswall know you have it?”
“Of course. He has known since February.”
“You were blackmailing him.”
“I prefer to say that we arrived at an agreement which benefited both of us.”
“It was he, perhaps, who arranged for a certain bill to be cashed in Riga?”
“Precisely.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Why, that you should let me go free. I ask for nothing more. If you wish, we shall contrive a struggle and make it look as if you had no choice in the matter. That is entirely up to you. You give me my freedom: I give you this letter, which will enable you to make what terms you wish with Mr Carswall, if he recovers his wits and his powers of speech, or with Miss Carswall, if he doesn’t.”
“Why should I strike a bargain with you, Mr Poe? I have it in my power to compel you.”
“With that pistol? I think not. You do not strike me as having the temperament that allows one to kill a man in cold blood.”
“I would not be obliged to. Once help arrives, you can be overpowered and searched without any need to shed your blood.”
Mr Poe laughed. “I see two difficulties with that plan. In the first place, if a committee searches me – yourself and Mr Noak – that nigger of his, perhaps, the slut, the constable and any Tom, Dick or Harry who happens to be in the vicinity – then the whole committee will read the letter. Miss Carswall’s name will be sullied for ever and to no purpose. Is that really what you wish? In the second place, and this argument is even more cogent, if we cannot strike a bargain, I shall simply threaten to destroy the letter. It is only a sheet of paper, and not a large one. By the time you raised the trap-door and reached me, it would be in a dozen pieces and descending into my stomach.”
“Perhaps that would be best for Miss Carswall.”
“It would depend entirely on whether I had in fact carried out my threat. You could not be absolutely sure that I had eaten the letter without searching me, and for that you would need your friends’ assistance. Also, if the letter had been destroyed, there would be no chance of your deriving any benefit from it.”
“I do not understand you, sir.”
“I think that you do, Mr Shield. Forgive me if I trespass in places where I have no right to be, but I do not think you have prospered of late. This letter would give you the power to change all that.”
I felt light-headed, and as dry as a man in a desert, a man who sees a mirage trembling before him. “I would be a fool to let you out without seeing this letter. I have only your word that it even exists.”
“Ah – spoken like a man of sense. I applaud your caution. I believe I have a suggestion that will deal with th
e point you raise. Suppose that I tear the letter into two pieces of unequal size. I shall push the smaller portion through the crack. It will contain enough to confirm what I have said, though for it to be of any use to you, you will also need the larger portion, which I will happily surrender up to you when you release me. You will of course have me covered with the pistol at all times, so there will be no danger to you whatsoever.”
Poe’s audacity astonished me. Here was a man who had kidnapped and mistreated me, who almost certainly intended to have me killed, and who now was proposing in the coolest way possible that I should set him free in return for a compromising letter which would enable me to blackmail a lady. I licked my lips and longed for a pot of strong coffee.
I said, “Very well. Let me see part of the letter.”
He passed a scrap of paper through to me. It was four-sided, but only one side was straight, and contained a few scrawled words, the ink blotched as if with tears.
—ut Papa flew
—he fault was mine
— be whipped for
When I read those words I abandoned prudence. I wanted the whole of that letter. At that moment, I had no thought of self-advantage. I wanted the letter so I could avert the danger of others reading it. I wanted to show it to that old man lying in the parlour and kick his helpless carcass.
I opened the trap-door. Mr Poe blinked up at me. After that, matters moved swiftly and I observed them as one in a dream. A little later, I remember how Mr Poe leaned down from the horse and shook my hand with the utmost cordiality. “God bless you, my boy,” he murmured.
It cannot have been much more than twenty minutes after Mr Poe left the cellar that I found myself standing in the yard behind the farmhouse listening to a distant bell striking one o’clock in the afternoon. Nearer by far was the sound of hooves on the lane, gradually receding.
The sun came out and turned the mucky water in the horse trough and the puddles between the ruts into things of beauty. I turned and went back into the house. In the parlour, Stephen Carswall had not moved. Whistling and squeaking as the air slid in and out of his lungs, he lay on the floor near the dying fire. His eyes were open; they followed my movements. He knew what I was about.
I held up the letter so this rotting mound of flesh and bone could see it by the flickering light of the last candle. “I know,” I said. “I know.”
I crossed the room to the window, threw open the shutters and flung wide the casement. I looked across a little garden which had been given over to brambles, nettles and thistles. There were buds on the trees of the overgrown orchard, and somewhere a blackbird was singing.
82
April gave way to May. I remained at Mrs Jem’s house in Gaunt-court. I earned enough for my keep and a little more. I should have been happy, for a great fear had been lifted from me, but I was not.
I dined once or twice with Mr Rowsell who thought he might be able to put me forward for a clerkship with a friend of his. It would be respectable employment, with the hope of something better in the long run. I saw Salutation Harmwell on several occasions – we would stroll through the parks and watch the world go by, neither of us feeling the need to speak very much.
It was Harmwell who told me that Mr Carswall’s life was no longer despaired of. But the old man had not recovered the use of his limbs, and he was still unable to speak. His physicians believed it probable that the apoplexy had affected his mind as well as his body.
“He has become a great baby now,” Harmwell said. “He does nothing but lie in his bedchamber. Everything is done for him.”
“And Miss Carswall’s marriage?”
The Negro shrugged. “She and Sir George are still willing, but it is now a question of settlements and of who is to assume the direction of Mr Carswall’s affairs. A matter for the lawyers, in other words. So in the meantime Miss Carswall and Mrs Frant remain with the old man in Margaret-street. Though how long that will last for I cannot tell.” He hesitated and added, “Mrs Kerridge tells me that Captain Ruispidge is in town and has called on several occasions.”
The world knew nothing of what had transpired in that tumbledown farmhouse beyond Kilburn. It was given out that Mr Carswall had hired a gig and taken Mr Noak to view the building land nearby, as a prospect for a joint investment. Mr Carswall had been taken ill on the way, and the two gentlemen had found shelter in the farmhouse. No one questioned this story. No one had any reason to do so.
Early in May, Mr Noak invited me to dine with him in Fleet-street, at the Bolt-in-Tun. We ate a frugal meal of mutton chops and caper sauce, washed down with thin claret. Mr Noak looked careworn.
“There is no news of the man Poe,” he said abruptly as he pushed aside his empty plate. “I have had a constant watch on the premises in Queen-street and instituted other inquiries. The place is in great confusion – the bailiffs have been in. But the man himself has vanished. I suspect he has fled abroad.”
“What of the stolen bills?”
“I have found no trace of them. We must presume that Poe took them with him. None has been presented for payment since the one in Riga earlier this year. I am tolerably certain how that was managed, by the way. Carswall has – or had – a man of business in Paris. He has a clerk named Froment: and it was a Monsieur Froment who passed the bill to the notary in Brussels, who then passed it on to the others whom I had already traced. But of course Poe does not have the advantage of Carswall’s commercial connections on the Continent. That is –” He leaned across the table and said in a low, urgent tone, “You are perfectly convinced as to the identity of the man in Kilburn?”
“Yes, sir.” I was saddened by the desperation I detected in his voice. “There is no possible doubt. The man I talked to was David Poe, not Henry Frant.”
Noak leaned back against the settle. “It is a thousand pities you allowed him to escape.”
I smiled, affecting a nonchalance I did not feel. “He tricked me, sir. But perhaps it is for the best. What matters, surely, is that the finger I was encouraged to find in the satchel had been removed from the hand of the corpse of his father-in-law. There can be no doubt about that. In that case, it was simply designed to throw me off the scent, to make me believe it possible that the corpse in Wellington-terrace was not that of Henry Frant. But of course it was.”
“I wish I had brought Frant to the gallows as he deserved,” Noak said after a silence. “I shall regret it always. My son’s murderer unpunished.”
I repressed a shudder. “If you had seen Mr Frant’s body, sir, you might not think him unpunished. All in all, he did not have a happy ending. He had been reduced to a bankrupt, an embezzler in fear of the gallows: and then, at the last, he lived to see his schemes confounded, and when he died he was beaten to a pulp. No, he did not die an easy death.”
Noak sniffed. He took up a toothpick and toyed with it for a moment. Then he sighed. “Carswall, too: I do not think I can touch him.”
“Surely Providence has already judged him? He is living imprisoned in his own body, and under sentence of death.”
Mr Noak did not reply. He summoned the waiter and paid our reckoning, carefully counting out the coins. I thought I had angered him. As we were walking out into the Strand, however, he stopped and touched my arm.
“Mr Shield, I am sensible of the great service you have done me. The matter has not turned out exactly as I would have wished, but I have achieved most of what I set out to do, one way or the other. I shall return to America in a week or two. And what do you intend to do with your life?”
“I do not yet know, sir.”
“You cannot afford to leave the decision too long. You are a young man of parts, and if you should find yourself in the United States, I may be able to put you in the way of something. I will write to you before we sail, and give you my direction.”
I bowed and began to thank him. But he turned on his heel and without even a handshake walked rapidly away. In a moment he was lost to sight among the crowds.
83
At the end of May, after Mr Noak and Mr Harmwell had sailed from Liverpool, I presented myself at the house in Margaret-street. I was freshly shaved, my hair was trimmed, and I had bought a fine black coat in honour of the occasion.
The door was answered by Pratt. I saw doubt flare on his thin, sallow face; perhaps there was a tinge of fear, too. I took advantage of his hesitation and stepped past him into the hall. I held out my hat and gloves and, without thinking, he received them.
“Is Miss Carswall at home? Pray give her my compliments and inquire if she can spare me a moment or two.”
He considered me for a moment, his eyes narrowing.
“Do not delay,” I said softly, “or I will reveal to her the lengths you were prepared to go to satisfy Mr Carswall.”
He dropped his eyes and showed me into the parlour where Mr Carswall had questioned me, and drunk his wine, all those months ago. Though the furnishings were unchanged, the atmosphere had altered entirely. The room was lighter and airier. The masculine paraphernalia of cigars, glasses and newspapers had been swept away and the furniture was uncluttered and freshly polished. I had not waited more than a couple of minutes when the door opened. I turned, expecting Pratt, and saw Flora Carswall.
Careless of convention, she was alone. She closed the door behind her and advanced towards me with her hand outstretched. “Mr Shield, I am rejoiced to see you. I find you well, I trust?”
We shook hands. She sat on a sofa, and patted the seat beside her. “Pray sit here, where I can see you.” She was dressed soberly in grey, as befitted her situation, but there was nothing sober about her face and she had an assurance about her that was new. “Charlie is at school, of course – he will be mortified to miss you.”
The American Boy Page 46
