The American Boy (23 page)

“I have as yet heard nothing of this projected expedition,” I said. “I am not convinced that it will be perfectly convenient.” I watched Allan's face change, as though a cloud had passed over his good humour. “However, we shall have to see what Mr Bransby has to say about it.”

The boy took this as a form of agreement. He bounded happily away, leaving me to wonder whether his information was accurate, and, if it were, whether Mr Bransby would permit me to go, and whether it would be wise for me to do so or not. Wise or not, I knew what I wanted. Lofty thoughts about the taxonomy of love in general, and about pigs and troughs in particular, were all very well in the abstract but I no longer had any desire to pursue them.

The following afternoon, Mr Bransby relayed Mrs Frant's invitation.

“There is some uncertainty as to when you will return,” Mr Bransby went on. “Mr Carswall does not feel that young Frant has been minding his book with sufficient attention since he left us. He may desire you to remain longer with them, to coach the boys and perhaps to escort Edgar Allan back to school at the beginning of term – Charles Frant, of course, will not be rejoining us. You are not expected elsewhere, I suppose, on Christmas Day?”

“As a matter of fact, I was, sir. But it is of no importance.”

That evening, I sat down by the fire in the schoolroom to write to Mr Rowsell, regretting that I would not be able to eat my Christmas dinner with them after all. I had hardly begun when Dansey came in.

“Mr Bransby tells me you are taking young Allan down to the country,” he said abruptly. “Is it true you will remain there the entire vacation?”

“It's possible. Mr Carswall will decide.”

Dansey flung himself into a chair. “Are you sure this is wise, Tom?”

“Why ever not?” I spoke with more heat than I had intended. “A change of scene will be beneficial.”

“And a change of company, no doubt.”

I murmured that I was perfectly happy in my present situation.

“I beg your pardon,” Dansey continued after a moment. “I have no right to advise you. You will go with young Allan, I collect?”

“I wonder that Mr Allan has permitted him to go. It is only a month since Mr Frant's death.”

“I imagine he did it to oblige Mr Carswall. Wealth is a passport to esteem. Forgive me; I do not mean to pry – but are you altogether easy in your mind about this?”

“Why should I not be?”

Dansey hesitated. “I am a rational man, as you know. But sometimes I have an intuition when all is not well. I daresay I am being fanciful.”

He stood there for a moment, his lopsided mouth working in his Janus face as though he wanted to say something else but could not persuade his lips to mouth the words. He turned on his heel and slipped out of the room. I stared down at the sheet of paper, the few words on it flickering and shifting in the candlelight. It was another freezing evening, and I shivered.

Dansey had an intuition, but it occurred to me that I had more substantial grounds for caution: the manner in which first Mr Frant and now Mr Carswall had entangled me in their affairs; the codicil that had cost Mrs Frant an inheritance; the mutilated cadaver at Wellington-terrace; and the severed finger I had discovered in David Poe's satchel.

In 1819, Christmas Day was a Saturday. Mr Bransby decreed that term should officially end on the previous Tuesday. On the afternoon of that day, I travelled down to London with Edgar Allan. We put up for the night with his foster parents in Southampton-row. Mrs Allan, an anxious, vapourish woman with a hypochondriacal tendency, alternately caressed and ignored Edgar. In the late afternoon, Mr Allan returned from his place of business. He was a grim-faced man, much preoccupied. In their presence Edgar seemed to glow with vitality and intelligence; he was as different from them as chalk from cheese.

“If you go to Cheltenham,” Mrs Allan said over dinner in her high, wavering voice, “you must stay at the Stiles Hotel. Do you remember, my love?” she said to her husband. “The people there were most attentive.”

“But they're not going to Cheltenham,” Mr Allan said.

An uneasy silence settled over the dinner table, broken only by the clatter of cutlery and the footsteps of the servant. I had assumed until now that it was Charlie who needed Edgar's company. Now I recalled Edgar's enthusiasm for the proposal, and wondered if it might not be the other way round.

After dinner, Mr Allan retired to his private room on the plea of needing to cast up his accounts. Mrs Allan sat in the drawing room and played cards with Edgar. While she played, she talked incessantly of her friends and family, her homesickness for Richmond, Virginia, her fear of seasickness, and the number and nature of her ailments, which were, it seemed, matters of constant surprise and interest to her medical attendants.

After we had drunk tea, I made my excuses and went out. Like a sentimental fool, I walked up to Russell-square and stood for a moment on the pavement outside the house where the Frants had lived. There was a lantern above the door, and lights showed in the cracks between the shutters. A sense of my own folly overwhelmed me. I walked rapidly away, as though the faster I walked, the sooner I would leave my folly behind.

At length I found myself outside a tavern in Lambs Conduit-street. I spent forty minutes in the taproom, smoking and drinking brandy. All the while, I could not rid myself of the single thought that ran round my head like a rat in a trap:
tomorrow I shall see her
.

I walked back to the Allans' house, where I fell into a restless sleep. The human mind is a perverse creature. When I awoke, I realised the face I had seen most often in the magic-lantern show of my dreams was that of Flora Carswall.

In the morning, I had time to call at Mr Rowsell's chambers in Lincoln's Inn. It seemed churlish to be so close to him and not to pay him a visit; and I wished to say farewell and send my apologies to Mrs Rowsell. He welcomed me with his customary good humour and sent out Atkins, his clerk, for coffee.

His face lengthened, however, when I told him where I was going.

“I cannot pretend I like this plan, Tom,” he said, “though of course it is no concern of mine. But the children will miss you sorely on Saturday. Is Mr Bransby happy to see you go?”

“He is disposed to consider that on the whole the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.”

Rowsell nodded. “There are financial considerations, no doubt, and he would be fully alive to their importance. How long do you stay?”

As I was answering him, there was a knock at the door and Atkins ushered in the boy with the tray. The clerk glanced at me with tiny eyes like specks of mud and averted his round, pale face. Rowsell sat in silence until we were alone. I knew him well enough to apprehend that he was not easy in his mind. I thought his solicitude as misplaced as Dansey's.

He poured the coffee and handed me a cup. “You remember we were discussing Mr Carswall and Mr Frant's conduct in the late war with America?”

“Why, yes, sir.”

“I was in the City the other day and I heard another story about Wavenhoe's that I did not altogether like. In fairness, it may be no more than a story. But it came from more than one source, so I suspect there may be some truth in it.” He tasted his coffee and screwed up his face. “It concerns what precipitated this entire ugly affair – the collapse of the bank, that is, the discovery of Mr Frant's criminal dealings and his eventual murder. It appears that the bank was liable for certain bills, amounting together to a considerable sum, that became due at the end of October. Most of them concerned building speculations in which the bank had invested.”

I nodded, for Miss Carswall had told me something of this when she waylaid me in Stoke Newington. “There was no money to pay them?”

“That was not in itself the difficulty. In the normal run of things, Frant could quite reasonably expect to negotiate extensions to the terms of the bills. However, it appears that a few weeks before the debts became due, a number of the bills changed hands. They were purchased by a commercial house which often acts as a go-between in transactions where the principal does not wish to have his name known. At the end of the month, these bills were presented for payment, and Frant found he could not negotiate extensions to any of them.”

“So you believe that an enemy of Mr Frant's may have contrived his ruin?”

“Not contrived, not exactly – that's putting it too strong. Frant's corrupt dealings made the bank's eventual downfall inevitable. No, if true, what this circumstance suggests to me is that the collapse of the bank may have been brought forward, perhaps by several weeks, or even months.”

Rowsell paused to pour us more coffee.

“What would be the advantage in that?” I asked.

“At this point we cannot tell. But in order to put into effect such a scheme, a man would need to have the command of considerable wealth, and also to regard Mr Frant with inveterate malignancy. Why else would one buy control of the debts of a failing concern? On the face of it, the scheme's success would involve its perpetrator in considerable financial loss. Since Wavenhoe's closed its doors, those bills are hardly worth the paper they are written on.”

“Aye,” I said. “I see what you are driving at, sir.”

“Not
what
,” Mr Rowsell said, spreading out his arms so vigorously that a few drops of coffee flew out of his cup and splattered in an arc of black spots on the floor. “
Who
.”

“Oh. You – you cannot mean Mr Carswall?”

Demure as a maiden, he looked at me over the brim of the tiny cup. His big pink face was empty of guile, empty of all emotions except a generalised benevolence and a mild curiosity.

In the freezing, fog-bound evening, Edgar and I boarded the Gloucester Mail. I was grateful that Mr Allan had indulged us in the luxury of inside seats. As we inched our way down Piccadilly, I stared at the throngs of people on the pavement, their faces lit by the unhealthy glare of the street lights. Edgar sat very still, his eyes huge in his face, watching and listening, yet deaf to my attempts at conversation; he was like one under an enchantment.

Slowly we picked up speed. By and by the motion and the monotony set the boy's head nodding to and fro on his shoulders, bouncing between me and a grocer's wife, between sleep and wakefulness. One by one, our fellow passengers followed his example. I wished I might do the same. A journey is full of excitement when one leaves or arrives, but the intervening period is commonly characterised by discomfort and boredom.

The coach whirled through the darkness. A dwarfish clergyman snored on the seat opposite mine. The windows were tightly closed, at the request of the grocer's wife, who slumbered steadily, rousing herself when she heard the screech of the horn at turnpike gates and recruiting her strength from a bottle in her reticule. The interior of the coach filled with the fumes of Jamaica rum and water. The clergyman had a nightmare; his limbs twitched helplessly; and his tiny feet pushed their way out of the blanket that covered him and kicked my shins.

The only moments of interest came as we clattered through the silent country towns along the road. I raised the blind, rubbed the glass and looked out at empty streets. Here and there a light would burn in an upper window. There is something mysterious about a sleeping town; like a ship abandoned by its crew, it becomes an entirely different entity when bereft of human purpose and human animation.

Then the coach would swing under an archway into the inn yard, and suddenly all would be light and bustle, the shouting of ostlers and tap-boys, the changing of horses, passengers climbing down and climbing up, voices rising and falling with jokes, curses, advice and farewells. So perverse is the human mind that within seconds of entering an inn yard I would begin to hunger for the darkness and the solitude of the countryside.

Once the horses were changed, we were on our way, mile after mile. All the inside passengers were going to Gloucester or further still to Hereford or Carmarthen. At some point in the dark hours before dawn I fell into a deep slumber, from which I was rudely awakened, along with the other passengers, when the coachman misjudged the turn into an inn yard and jarred the nearside rear wheel against the jamb of the arch.

After that I did not go back to sleep. The night slowly gave way to the long grey twilight of a winter dawn. One by one, my travelling companions woke to face the day. All the excitement of the previous evening had gone. We were unwashed, unshaven, unfed and unrested. Our bodies ached from the hardness of the seats.

We reached Gloucester before midday and were set down with our luggage at the Bell Inn in Southgate-street. Mr Carswall's carriage had already arrived. The horses were baiting and the groom was anxious to leave. We snatched a late breakfast in the coffee room. Afterwards I risked the groom's displeasure and found a barber to shave me. Curiosity moved me as much as vanity; barbers know everything.

“By the way,” I said as the man was stropping his razor, “I believe the late Mr Wavenhoe owned property in this city.”

“Wavenhoe? Oh yes, sir. Though the old gentleman lived in London mostly. He died last month.”

I jingled the coins in my pocket. “What was the property?”

“Oxbody-lane, sir – a pretty little inn, and also some of the neighbouring freeholds. It's all let, of course.” Head on one side like a robin, he darted a glance at me. “If you're interested, I could give you the direction of an attorney who would be able to tell you more.”

“No,” I said abruptly. “There is no need.”

Mr Carswall's seat, Monkshill-park, lay some ten or twelve miles south and west of Gloucester in the direction of Lydmouth. We made good time when we left the city because the first part of our journey lay along turnpike roads. The last few miles lay on smaller roads and lanes. Time dragged. Edgar fidgeted. My body ached with the undeserved weariness of the sedentary traveller.