The American Boy (59 page)

“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.

“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.”

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.”