The Star of the Sea (65 page)

Small but not entirely worthless reforms were put in place in the British penal system as an extremely indirect result of the book’s success. Prisoners were given less humiliating work. The number of family visits was raised. Questions began to be asked of the ‘solitary incarceration’ practised at certain of Queen Victoria’s prisons, but it
was not to be ended for many years. No doubt these things would have happened anyway, and while I am glad they did, and salute their true authors, I would not be fully honest if I said altruism was my only motive, nor perhaps even my main one if it comes to that. I was a newspaperman. I wanted the story.

David Merridith was quite right to gibe at me as he used to. I think perhaps I wanted to be admired. It is such a brutalising thing, our need for admiration. How very wonderful to have learned that it fades with age.

Seamus Meadowes was arrested for Merridith’s murder but found not guilty in a unanimous verdict. I myself was called as a minor witness for the defence and testified that the accused had not composed the death note found in the First-Class quarters. I knew it for a fact and explained how I knew it. At that time Seamus Meadowes could neither read nor write, a fact he had confided with a bizarre kind of pride on the morning I had tried to interview him.

I was not invited to suggest another suspect for the murder; nor did I volunteer to do so. I had promised anonymity to Pius Mulvey and like any honourable journalist I intended to keep my promise. I answered every question, told no lies and was congratulated by the judge for the economy of my evidence.

The trial was a
cause célèbre
in Irish New York and the publicity made the defendant a hero to many. He made an unsuccessful attempt at a professional boxing career, entered the Police Department and then political life; first as an enforcer for Boss ‘Honey’ Maguire, then as fundraiser, election agent and finally candidate. As ‘Southpaw Jimmy Meadows, the working-man’s champ’,
²
he was elected eleven times to the East Bronx ward and was only narrowly defeated for Mayor in 1882, a result he always blamed on the inadequate numeracy of his henchmen rather than any desire of the electorate. The vicissitudes of democracy he
regarded as a minor inconvenience. Often enough, when they tallied up his votes, the total equalled the number of registered voters in the entire constituency; and on two famous occasions actually exceeded it. (‘A man should exercise his rights as often as possible,’ he used to say cryptically. ‘Ain’t that what America’s all about?’)

Two years later he was arraigned for fraud, having been discovered taking the written examination required of aspiring New York postmen, under the name of an illiterate constituent to whom he had promised a job. (The trial was abandoned when the main prosecution witness mysteriously fell out a window and broke his jaw.) Meadows was re-elected the following year, his already monumental majority increased by a third. ‘They don’t count my ballots, boys, they weigh ’em,’ he remarked to reporters. He died very peacefully, aged one hundred and one, in the neo-Regency mansion he had somehow managed to acquire on a lifetime of public representative’s wages.

At the time of his death he was said to have been considering an offer from the Edison Motion Picture Company of Orange, New Jersey. One of its executives, an Edwin S. Porter, wanted to produce a short fictional entertainment loosely based on Meadows’s life and many adventures. The provisional title was ‘The Wild Irish Rover’ but negotiations had been stalled in the preceding months. (Apparently the Rover had insisted on playing himself.)

His funeral was attended by an enormous crowd of the poor, many of whom idolised him and always had. If they saw him as a dirty fighter, as some of them did, they argued, convincingly enough, that a clean one would have left them to rot in the slums. The Marquess of Queensberry, Seamus Meadowes was not. (But as admirers of another flamboyant Irishman will know, neither was the Marquess of Queensberry.)

Mass was concelebrated by fifteen priests, including two of his five sons and several other relations. A piper played an ancient Connemara lament as the cortège stopped briefly at the Fulton Street dockside: the place where Southpaw Meadows first set foot on America. Archbishop O’Connell of Boston who led the obsequies remarked: ‘Jimmy was a democrat, first and last. All he had to do, to know what the people wanted, was to gaze steadily into the depths of his own magnificent heart.’

A number of matters had come out at his trial for Merridith’s murder which were extremely painful to the victim’s family. It was revealed that the strange man often seen tailing Merridith around the East End was not in fact an Irish revolutionary but an English detective hired by Laura Markham’s father, who had wondered how his son-in-law was spending so much of his money. Unaware that the Kingscourt estate was almost bankrupt, and that Merridith had been financially cut off by his own father, Mr Markham had suspected the existence of a mistress. The truth emerged in court about Merridith’s visits to brothels and it was a difficult time for Laura Markham and her sons. Inevitably the details of his medical condition were also revealed, and were pruriently reported in all the newspapers, the usual easy moral derived and explained as though such derivation or explanation were necessary by now. Never was it said that what he suffered was an ailment: not a curse, a revenge, a castigation, but a germ. So strong was the popular lust to attribute supernature to diseases (as much as to famines, perhaps not incidentally) that it was tempting when it came time to set down this story to leave out his illness, or edit its chronology, or change it, somehow, to some other thing. But that would have been wrong; a tacit approval of the game. He had what he had, and was pronounced guilty for having it, though he was not, in fact, on trial for anything. He was posthumously condemned by the violently pious judge, an ascendant star of New York politics who knew how to appeal to the avidity for a villain shared by a number of my saintlier countrymen. If he could have found Merridith guilty of murdering himself, he would have; and hanged his corpse outside a chapel.

As for the note intended to push Mulvey into the act of murder, the reader will already have identified the author; though I did not myself until shortly before the trial. But the moment I actually saw it, I knew who had made it. It was not Mary Duane, nor Seamus Meadowes, nor any of the abject poor who suffered on that ship.

As David Merridith used often to put it, everything is in the way the material is composed.

GET HIM. RIGHT SUNE. Els Be lybill. H.

An expert in doohulla would have noticed the anagram.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Ellis Bell.

With the ‘M’ in ‘get him’ an inverted W.

It was the victim who assembled that fatal note, fashioned his own warrant for execution. His raw material was the novel I had given him, the gift of the man who had already stolen what was his. The volume was indeed found in one of his suitcases with the jags clearly visible where the title page had been torn out. As to why he made his choice, we can only surmise. Cowardice had been mentioned but I think that insults him. Vaguely Roman suggestions have also been advanced: the falling of the noble on his sword and so on. I think he loved his children too much for imperial gestures.

My own belief is that David Merridith was a remarkably brave man who knew that his life would end very soon and wanted to spare his family the shame of a pariah’s death. Perhaps he had other understandable thoughts, too, for the papers found in his desk pertained to the Royal Naval Relief Trust, a fund which supported the private education of the sons of deceased officers whether serving or retired. (Not their daughters, only their sons.) Like all such schemes in that riotously respectable era, it was void in the event of either suicide or syphilis. But not of murder. Murder voided nothing. Murder would give his children some kind of inheritance.

The dividend was to be seized by his creditors anyway, almost his entire estate being swallowed up by debt; the remainder by lawyers’ fees, taxes and death duties. It was only discovered after his assassination that bankruptcy proceedings had already been initiated in London, but had been briefly delayed on the entreaties of his lawyers. (They had pointed out that as a bankrupt he would have to resign from the House of Lords. An appalling vista, as somebody said.) The lands at Kingscourt were purchased by Commander Henry Edgar Blake of Tully Cross who broke them up, rack-rented the last few tenants off them, and replaced the farmers and smallholders with sheep. The sheep proved more profitable than the troublesome human beings and less inconveniently solicitous of the right not to die. He made the enormous fortune his grandchildren now enjoy. One of them is active in Irish politics.

On a visit to Connemara in 1850 I met with Captain Lockwood again. He and his wife were living at that time in the village of Letterfrack, near Tully Cross, with other members of the Quaker Society who had gone there to stand in solidarity with the Irish famished. His wife was a cousin of a woman named Mary Wheeler, who had moved with her husband, James Ellis of Bradford, to northern Galway in 1849, hoping to help the local people. They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way. They built homes, roads, drains, a school; paid their workers fairly and treated them with respect. Lockwood was working with some of the local fishermen, mending nets and repairing boats. He was a modest-hearted man, Josias Lockwood of Dover, and he would have scoffed at being called a hero. And yet he was one of the greatest I have known. He and his sisters and brothers of the English Quakers – he always insisted gently on his preferred word, ‘Friends’ – saved hundreds and possibly thousands of lives.

It was on the final night of that visit that he made me a gift. Naturally I was more than reluctant to accept it, but once again his gentleness had insistence behind it. Or perhaps he could see that my reluctance was feigned. We had often debated matters of religion – he knew I was not a believer and I knew he was a passionate one – and it was that language he used the last time I saw him; still forging connections as he always had before. ‘You are a Jew. Of the people of the book. Here is my book,’ he quietly said. ‘The things that happened are all written down.’ And he added with a look I have never quite forgotten: ‘Never let people forget what we did to each other.’

It was as though he knew what I myself had done.

Perhaps I thought his register might contain some clue to what had happened among us on the ship; a thing that was not at all clear at the time. Perhaps I saw it as a grisly souvenir of the thirty days that set the course for the rest of my life. Perhaps – why not say it now, since an old man must confess all his shames – I thought it might make the bones of a story. The novel I had always wanted to write but had failed to.

But take it I did, and I have it by me yet; that terrifying ledger
of human suffering, its pages withered and yellowed with time, the calf-skin of its cover blanched with saltwater stains. The reader has seen the words of Josias Tuke Lockwood, who died of famine fever in Dover, England, fourteen months after the last night I saw him. Those words have the advantage of being contemporaneous, where my own recollections, still bright as they seem to myself, must inevitably be questioned so long after the event. That is entirely and properly as it should be. I have tried not to distort but no doubt have not always succeeded.

I would like to think I am objective in what I have put down, but of course that is not so and could never have been. I was there. I was involved. I knew some of the people. One I loved; another I despised. I use the word carefully: I did despise him. So easy to despise in the cause of love. Others again I was simply indifferent to, and such indifference is also a part of the tale. And of course I have selected what has been seen of the Captain’s words in order to frame and tell the story. A different author would have made a different selection. Everything is in the way the material is composed.

From papers found, from documents discovered, from certain investigations and recollections and interviews; from enquiries made among others who sailed that ship, from questions asked on many return visits to those rocks which maps call ‘The British Isles’, other matters came to light which may safely be lodged in the column of fact. For the benefit of the curious, let me set them down:

There was once a Galwayman called Pius Mulvey, another named Thomas David Merridith. They sailed to America in search of new beginnings. The first had been charged to murder the second, a man who was blamed for the crimes of his fathers. In a different world they might not have been enemies; at a different time, perhaps even friends. They had far more in common than either of them realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither of these was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.

There was once a beautiful woman called Mary Duane, who came from a village called Carna in Connemara; the middle child of Daniel Duane and Margaret Nee, the former a fisherman and sometime small-farmer, the latter a nanny and mother of seven. She once loved a boy she didn’t know to be her brother. Before
knowing she was his sister, he loved her in return; or would have done, maybe, were he capable of loving her. He and the girl who once cherished him so dearly were separated in the end, as perhaps all are, not by what divided them, but by what they had in common – the tangled facts of a past they did not make. What is sometimes called in Ireland: ‘the he of the land’.