The American Boy

9th June 1862

I

The foregoing account came into my hands after the death of my sister-in-law, Flora, the Dowager Lady Ruispidge, on the 21st of October last year. She had deposited a number of items in the strong-room of the lawyers who had served both her and her father.

"I do not trust banks," she told me once. "But lawyers go on for ever."

The items included a small wooden box, bound with iron hoops and secured with two locks. It was brought to my house at Cavendish-square to await the services of the locksmith. But there was no need, for the keys were found in a writing chest my sister-in-law kept by her, and which she had by her bed when she died. The box held a thick, closely written manuscript, divided into numbered sections. At the bottom was a five-pound note enclosed in a sheet of paper inscribed with the name "Miss Carswall".

As I sat by the library fire after dinner, I skimmed through the manuscript's pages, by turns amazed, fascinated, distressed and disturbed. Time does not heal all wounds and there are some indeed which fester and grow worse as the years slip by.

The identity of the author was evident to me from the beginning. When I met him, in the last weeks of the reign of George III, Thomas Shield was a schoolmaster. He records that meeting, in the churchyard at Flaxern Parva, and also our last encounter a few months later, when we passed each other at the door of the Carswalls' house in Margaret-street. (Until now I had no idea of the significance of his visit. How I regret that I allowed myself to speak so intemperately.)

It was not long before I realised that Shield's narrative threw a new and often shocking light on the Wavenhoe scandal and, in particular, on the American associations of this dark affair. Few remember it now but it was one of the precursors of the great banking crisis of the winter of 1825-6; over forty years ago, it set London by the ears and brought ruin to a number of families. The manuscript also tells us something of the unhappy sequels in Gloucestershire and later in London, though these episodes attracted little attention at the time.

Many questions have, perforce, remained unanswered until now; and questions that should have been asked have never been posed. There is small wonder in this, for much information was never put before the public. For example, the role of the little American boy was never mentioned, then or later, despite the mingled fame and obloquy his career subsequently attracted. Contemporaneous accounts also ignored the parts played by other North Americans, among them Mr Noak of Boston, Massachusetts, and the Negro Salutation Harmwell from Upper Canada. Yet, without them, events could not have unfolded as they did. Until now, I believe, not a whisper has emerged of the connection between the failure of a London bank in 1819 and that sad and unnecessary conflict which had divided the two great English-speaking nations, Great Britain and the United States of America, a few years earlier.

In other words, the Wavenhoe scandal was like the Breguet watch that Stephen Carswall cherished as he never did a child: simple enough on the surface, but its apparent simplicity concealing a complex arrangement of hidden springs, wheels, checks and balances; organised according to rational principles, to be sure, but too delicate and complicated a piece of machinery to yield its secrets to the profane. Carswall's watch lies before me as I write, still keeping perfect time, its inner workings as mysterious to me now as on the day it came into my possession.

Tom Shield was right, in one way at least, and so was that hardened reprobate Voltaire. We owe respect to the living, but to the dead we owe only truth.

II

How did Thomas Shield's narrative come into the hands of my sister-in-law? We may safely assert that he would not have given it to Flora of his own free will. I questioned her servants as discreetly as I could, but none of them could shed light on the matter. There was no hint in her letters or other papers. She did not keep a diary. Her lawyers knew nothing.

The little writing chest by her bed also contained her account book. Throughout her life, my sister-in-law recorded how her money ebbed and flowed, for she knew the value of money; she was her father's daughter in this and much else. I found in a drawer of her bureau a set of account books stretching back to her schooldays in Bath. It occurred to me that perhaps her accounts might hold a clue to the manuscript's provenance.

I believe I was right, though it took me many hours to find the trace of it. (But what else have I to do, now I am old? After all, this is a story of old men's obsessions, and what is one more obsession among the others?) In the June of 1820, there began a series of small irregular payments, never more than five guineas. These were identified only by the initials QA. In May 1821 there was a much larger payment of £80. After that date, QA continued to receive a payment of seven guineas each quarter. This arrangement continued until August 1852, after which it abruptly terminated. Occasionally the later payments were to "Q. Atkins" rather than "QA".

Surely this was the link I sought! For I had stumbled upon a Q. Atkins in Shield's narrative – Quintus Atkins, to be precise, Rowsell's clerk, a man who seems to have disliked Shield. The name is sufficiently unusual to place the identification beyond reasonable doubt. As Flora knew, Rowsell was Shield's lawyer. If Shield communicated with anyone other than Sophie after his disappearance, it would have been Rowsell. Atkins had acted as their go-between before, and perhaps had done so again.

Here at least is a solid foundation for a hypothesis: that Flora suborned Atkins, paying him what the lawyers call a retainer to feed her scraps of information about Shield and poor Sophie. More than scraps, I fancy – on one occasion a veritable banquet: for I cannot resist the conclusion that Flora's acquisition of Shield's narrative is connected with her payment of £80 to Quintus Atkins.

In her account book for 1819, Flora recorded the loan of five pounds to Thomas Shield in January. Later she put a line through the entry and added the words Debt repaid. But she kept the five-pound note in the box with Shield's manuscript.

I used to believe that the only person Flora loved was Sophie Frant. I was wrong.

III

I have before me a certified copy of the entry recording the baptism of Thomas Reynolds Shield in the Parish Register of St Mary's, Rosington. It is a strange, unsettling thought that Shield – or someone close to him – may have kept himself informed of my path through the world. The principal events of a man who moves in my sphere of society inevitably make their way into the public record. By now, however – considering the matter purely from the viewpoint of an actuary – Shield is more likely to be dead than alive. Indeed, almost all of those most nearly concerned in the Wavenhoe affair have gone to answer for their conduct before the highest judge of all.

I do not know whether Shield believed the story he tells to be, as far as he knew it, the truth. Much of what he writes is at least consonant with my own, more limited knowledge of the affair. I remember several incidents he describes, albeit in much less detail and with a number of differences. But I can confirm the essential accuracy of his descriptions.

Nevertheless, he may have had an ulterior motive in writing this account. It is impossible, at this remove, to corroborate the majority of the information he provides with material from other sources. (By its very nature, much of his story can never be corroborated.) Moreover, memory itself may, without conscious volition or awareness, clothe the naked form of truth in the garb of fiction. Why did Shield compose the narrative in the first place? To while away the days and weeks before Sophie was ready to leave with him? As a justification? As an aide-memoire, in case the authorities took a further interest in the activities of Stephen Carswall, Henry Frant and David Poe?

Shield's language appears artless, yet I wonder whether its superficial simplicity may not conceal an element of calculation, a desire to manipulate the truth for purposes unknown. At some points I have suspected a want of frankness, at others a willingness to embroider. I find it hard to believe that he could have recalled the precise words of so many conversations, or the nuances of expression on others' faces, or the restless manoeuvring of his own thoughts.

It irks me almost beyond endurance that so many questions remain unanswered. On the first page, Shield plunges his reader in medias res; and on the last page he abandons him there almost in mid-sentence. By accident – or design? Does his story break off at this point for the simple reason that Atkins stole the manuscript?

I shall never know. If truth is infinite, then any addition to our knowledge of it serves also to remind us of what remains unknowable.

IV

Carswall's Breguet watch ticks on, as it has for more than half a century. In the end, time is always our master. It is we who run down, we who wear out, we who stop.

There is much in these pages which has the power to shock a modern mind. It is regrettable that Thomas Shield did not moderate some of his language and draw a veil of modesty over some of the thoughts, words and actions that he records. Some passages reveal a want of taste which at worst degenerates still further into impropriety. It is true that he wrote at a time that was both more robust and less fastidious than our own but often he betrays a vein of coarseness which can only offend.

The publication of Shield's narrative, even in a very limited, private sense, is out of the question. I would not care for my wife or my servants to read it. But I do not intend to destroy his story. My reason is simply this: as Voltaire suggests, there are occasions when we must weigh carefully the competing demands of the living and the dead, when the former must yield precedence to the latter.

Does it not follow from this that, if we owe a duty of truth to the dead, then we also owe it to those who will come after us? It occurs to me now, as I write the sentence above, that perhaps Divine Providence has sent me Tom Shield's account in order that I may add to it.

V

Flora's generosity in resigning the legacy in favour of her cousin was widely praised. Even my brother George, not the most open-handed of men, saw the justice of it; and he was not blind to the advantages of being so closely allied to such a philanthropic gesture. He and Flora were married, in a private ceremony, some months after they had originally intended.

By that time, Mrs Frant had left Margaret-street. After some months in the country, she settled at last in a pretty cottage in Twickenham, near the river. Her old servant, Mrs Kerridge, remained to nurse Mr Carswall. I now realise that Mrs Frant must have become aware of Mrs Kerridge's duplicity. The woman had been providing information about her mistress to both Salutation Harmwell and Mr Carswall.

As the year 1820 drew to its close, I visited Sophie in Twickenham, and ventured to renew my suit. She refused me. In Margaret-street, I had hoped that she was beginning to look kindly on me. But that was before Flora's gift and (as I now know) before that fateful meeting in the Green Park.

Nothing happened suddenly. I found Sophie at home in March 1821, but when I called at the cottage some three weeks later she was gone. The front room was shuttered and the furniture shrouded with dust covers. A little servant remained to look after the place. The girl was dumb. Now I can hazard a guess as to her name and history. She wrote me a note in a surprisingly neat hand to say that her mistress had gone away for a while and she did not know where. When I next passed by, in May, there were new tenants; and Mrs Frant had left no forwarding address.

I have not seen or heard from Sophia Frant from that day to this. In the first six months after her disappearance, I was sedulous in my attempts to discover her whereabouts. Flora said she had heard nothing of her cousin, and promised she would let me know if she did; she professed herself as puzzled as I.

Charlie had long since been withdrawn from Mr Bransby's in Stoke Newington, and they knew nothing of his present whereabouts at the school he had briefly attended in Twickenham. I tried Mr Rowsell, who informed me he was unable to put me in communication with either Mrs Frant or Mr Shield. When I passed through Gloucester on my way to Clearland, I inquired after Sophie's property, only to learn that the freeholds in Oxbody-lane had recently changed hands. I hired the services of others better qualified than I to make inquiries, but they were equally unsuccessful.

You must not fancy from this that my subsequent life has been one long, dying fall, that I have done nothing except mourn the loss of Sophia Frant. It would be true to say that I have always been aware, in some corner of my being, of her absence. I have found it fatally easy to dwell on what might have been: if, for example, I had had the courage to propose to her at Monkshill, despite her lack of fortune, despite her son and despite her first husband's notoriety. George and our mother had united to dissuade me, pointing out, though not in so many words, that I did not have enough to live comfortably as a married man, that I must look for a wife with a little money of her own, and that in any case I would be unlikely to find happiness in the arms of an embezzler's widow.

So I joined our diplomatic service and served first at several of the smaller German courts and later in Washington, a post which the climate of the American capital sometimes made profoundly disagreeable. While I was in the United States I met Mr Noak again, increasingly eccentric but so wealthy that he could not help but wield considerable influence. A year later he was dead, and it was found that he had dispersed the bulk of his enormous fortune to a number of charities, with the exception of one substantial legacy to his former chief clerk, Salutation Harmwell.

My diplomatic career, never distinguished, came to an end when my brother unexpectedly died in 1833. His marriage had been childless – and Mr Shield's narrative, of course, hints at a possible reason for that, as it does for other qualities that distinguished my sister-in-law. I was my brother's heir.

With a title and a fortune, I found myself the eligible bachelor. I married my second cousin, Arabella Vauden, a match considered advantageous for both parties. Our union has not been blessed with children, and when I die the title and the entailed part of the estate will pass to a cousin in Yorkshire. My wife regrets this circumstance extremely.

Flora did not remarry, though she had several offers. She could afford to please herself. She passed most of her long widowhood in London, where she entertained widely if not wisely in her house in Hanover-square. When she died of inflammation of the lungs, much of her wealth passed to me by the terms of her marriage settlement. Now she lies where we have laid her, in the cemetery at Kensal-green.

I run ahead: I must not forget her father. As soon as the law allowed, Flora closed down the house in Margaret-street and moved Mr Carswall and his nurse down to Monkshill. The mansion-house was let, so she settled them at Grange Cottage, where Mrs Johnson had dragged out the last years of her unfortunate life.

Stephen Carswall never recovered his powers of speech and movement. I saw him twice in his decline and he was as useless as fruit rotting on the tree. Mrs Kerridge bullied him mercilessly, and at the time I wondered that Flora did not intervene. He lingered for seven long years, until February 1827. At his demise, his fortune was found to be much depleted.

I come now to David Poe, Mr Iversen, Junior, of Seven Dials, the father of the American boy who when he grew to manhood was buffeted by fame and misfortune in equal measure. Having read Mr Shield's manuscript, I instituted inquiries about this gentleman, both here and in America. I found no certain trace of him whatsoever. As far as the world knows, he vanished in 1811 or possibly 1812.

But I did uncover an intriguing hint that, many years earlier, Mr Noak had attempted to trace David Poe's later career, and that the old gentleman had learned that there were those who preferred to let sleeping dogs lie. One of these was Mr Rush, who in 1820 had been the American Minister in London, a man with whom Noak had many dealings while he was in England, and whom he certainly would have pressed for information concerning David Poe.

Another gentleman who wished David Poe to remain buried in obscurity – and here we come at the matter from quite a different angle – was General Lafayette himself, the venerable hero of both the American and French Revolutions. Though of course Lafayette had no official standing in the United States, his reputation and achievements gave him influence in the most unexpected places.

My correspondent in the United States drew my attention to the fact that Lafayette and David Poe's father had been comrades in arms in the great revolutionary struggle. The connection between the two men was clearly close. When the old General visited the United States for his triumphal tour in 1824, he visited Baltimore, Maryland, where he singled out for particular attention the wife of his old comrade, who had died some years earlier. A few weeks later, Lafayette was in Richmond, Virginia, where he was assigned a guard of honour composed of boys in the uniform of riflemen; one of these was Edgar Allan Poe.

These are facts, but they prove nothing except that Lafayette had a kindness for the Poe family. But, if one takes this in conjunction with hints and whispers from other directions, it is impossible to ignore the suspicion that several surprisingly prominent gentlemen were perfectly happy that David Poe should remain a lost sheep.

It was, I suppose, the worst of ill luck for Henry Frant that his villainy led him to an even greater villain than himself. God knows, he paid heavily for his vices and suffered for his crimes. Before I allow David Poe to return to obscurity, however, I must record one speculation that occurred to me. Shield seems strangely well informed about David Poe's life. Is it possible that there were subsequent meetings between the two men?

VI

I come at last to the American boy. Edgar Allan Poe was like the pintle of a hinge – barely visible, yet the still point around which the whole business revolved. He waits at almost every twist and turn of Shield's narrative.

The American boy knocks on Mr Bransby's door on the occasion of Shield's very first visit to the Manor House School. He is Charlie's particular friend and indeed champion. He is the unwitting cause of his father's introduction first to Tom Shield and then to Henry Frant, and hence brings Frant to his murderer. He is in the ice-house at Monkshill-park, desperate to search it for treasure. He and Charlie make their midnight expedition to the ruins, without which the events of that night must have turned out very differently. He helps to carry Charlie's parrot across London, and the bird with its cry of ayez peur is the clue that draws Shield back to Seven Dials and provides the link between Carswall and David Poe. It is Edgar who whispers to Shield that Sophie may be found visiting her late husband's grave in the burying ground of St George's, Bloomsbury. All in all, it is hard to quarrel with Shield's assertion that the boy "acted as the proximate cause of much that had happened".

I have followed Edgar Allan Poe's subsequent career as a poet and critic with interest. I heard with regret of his tribulations in later life and his death. I wondered whether traces of his boyhood experiences in England may be descried in some of his work. With the help of American correspondents, I even attempted to explore the circumstances of his death, which was shrouded in mystery. I failed to dispel the mystery. But I did acquire a piece of information that Flora never had.

The facts, such as they are, appear to be these. On the 26th of September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe dined at a restaurant in Richmond, Virginia. Friends and associates believed that on the following day he intended to set out for Baltimore, a voyage of some twenty-five hours by steamer. Not only is the precise time of his departure disputed, but so are his means of travel and the time of his arrival.

In short, Poe vanished. There are no confirmed sightings of him whatsoever between the evening of 26th September in Richmond and his reappearance, a week later, in Baltimore. A printer named Walker noticed him at Gunner's Hall, a tavern in East Lombard-street. The city was in the throes of an election which brought with it a drunken orgy of corruption and intimidation. Gunner's Hall was one of the polling stations.

Poe was "in great distress", and asked Walker to notify a friend, Joseph Snodgrass, who arrived in due course with several of Poe's relations. They assumed that Poe was drunk. "The muscles of articulation seemed paralysed to speechlessness," Snodgrass recorded in 1856, "and mere incoherent mutterings were all that were heard."

They arranged for Poe to be taken to the Washington College Hospital where he was treated by the resident physician, Dr John J. Moran. According to a letter Moran wrote a few weeks afterwards to Poe's aunt Mrs Clemm (the sister of David Poe), his patient was at first unconscious of his condition. Later his limbs trembled and he was seized with "a busy, but not violent or active delirium – constant talking – and vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects…" By the second day, he was calm enough to listen to questions but "his answers were incoherent and unsatisfactory".

Dr Moran tried to cheer his patient by saying that soon he would be well enough to receive friends. Edgar Allan Poe "broke out with much energy, and said the best thing his friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol." Soon he became violently delirious – despite his weakness, two nurses were required to hold him down.

Poe continued in this state until the evening of Saturday the 6th of October, "when he commenced calling for one 'Reynolds', which he did through the night up to three on Sunday morning." Then, "enfeebled from exertion", he became quieter for a short time. At last, "gently moving his head he said 'Lord help my poor Soul' and expired!"

The precise cause of death is unknown – no death certificate was issued. No one, then or now, knows who "Reynolds" is or was. My agents state that, while neither Snodgrass nor Moran may be entirely trustworthy as a witness, there seems no reason to doubt the essential veracity of their accounts. They add that Poe appeared in good spirits in Richmond, where he had lectured to great applause and become engaged to be married. They also drew my attention to rumours current in Baltimore to the effect that when Poe arrived in the city he fell in with old friends, who persuaded him to take a drink to celebrate their reunion. Poe had eschewed alcohol for some months, and it is said that he was yet another victim of mania a potu.

Perhaps. But may there not be another explanation for Edgar Allan Poe's disappearance and for the extraordinary prostration that led to his collapse and death? Remember Poe's despair – his wish for suicide – his repeated calls for "Reynolds". Remember that according to the Parish Register, Tom Shield's middle name was Reynolds, the surname of his mother's family.

Was Shield in Baltimore in 1849?

As a man, Edgar Allan Poe was frail in mind and body. What if he had suddenly learned the true history of those months in England in 1819-20? Above all, what if he had come face to face with the terrible truth about his father?

It could drive a stronger man to drink. It could drive a stronger man to death itself.

VII

It is time to lay down my pen. I shall lodge this narrative with my lawyers and leave instructions that it is to be opened by the head of the family seventy-five years after my decease. After such an interval of time, neither Shield's account nor these notes I have appended to it will have the power to hurt anyone.

The older I become, the more I wonder about Sophie herself. Is she alive? Is she with Thomas Shield? If they were lovers, and I think there can now be little doubt of that, did they marry? If they married, what became of their lives? Which continent gave them a home? Are there children, grandchildren? Is she happy?

Mr Carswall's watch has informed me with its tiny chime that it is two o'clock in the morning. If I blow out the candles and pull back the curtains of the library's bow-window, I shall look out over mile after mile of nothing, a night without boundaries.

I wrote earlier that if truth is infinite, then any addition to our knowledge of it serves also to remind us of what is unknowable. And that of course brings me back to what might have been, to Sophie, for ever unknowable, for ever hidden in the illimitable darkness.

JRR

Clearland-court