The American Boy (58 page)

As any actor knows, we rarely study the faces of those we encounter. We remember them by their salient features, which are often accretions, not essentials. Thus, for example, we do not have a clear mental image of a person's face: instead – for the sake of illustration – we see a tangled beard, a pair of blue spectacles, a wheeled chair and a robe embroidered with magical symbols. In my mind, I stripped away the accretions and considered what I knew of the essentials.

“I believe, sir,” I said in a voice that shook, “that I have the honour of addressing Mr David Poe as well as Mr Iversen, Junior?”

I strained my ears to hear the reply. The seconds passed. Then, at last, I heard the sound of a low chuckle.

The whole truth about David Poe, late of Baltimore, Maryland, and Mr Iversen, Junior, late of Queen-street, Seven Dials, did not emerge on that morning. I do not suppose anyone will ever know it. Nature may have framed Mr Poe to be candid but life had taught him to dissimulate.

“What's in a name, Mr Shield? Time is not on our side at present. Let us not quibble about trifles. I have in my pocketbook a document that –”

“But you are Poe, are you not? You are Edgar's father?”

“I cannot deny either charge. Indeed, having seen the lad, I challenge you to find a prouder parent in Christendom. I do not wish to appear importunate, but –”

“Mr Poe,” I interrupted, “even if Mary Ann meets no obstacles on her way, we shall be able to enjoy each other's company for hours. I think we should occupy ourselves with your story. We have nothing else to do.”

“There is the matter of the document I mentioned.”

“The document can wait. My curiosity about you cannot.”

I sat smoking on a chair by the trap-door, and never did a cigar taste so sweet. From below my feet came David Poe's rich, drawling voice – now Irish, now American, now genteel, now Cockney, now whispering, now declaiming. Principally from that conversation, but also from later observations and information provided by others, I believe that at last I built up a tolerably accurate picture of his life, though by no means a comprehensive one. It goes without saying that he was a loose and vicious man who cared not how low he had to stoop in pursuit of his own base ends. But we are none of us made of whole cloth. Like the rest of us, he was a quilt made up of scraps from many materials, some of which sat well beside their neighbours, some of which did not.

Yes, he was cruel and dissolute and often a drunkard. He was also, I believe, a murderer, though in the case of Henry Frant he claimed to have acted in self-defence, a plea which may have some truth in it. The death of Mrs Johnson he attributed to an unlucky accident, and this I found harder to credit.

Nor do I find it likely that David Poe and Mr Carswall intended that Mary Ann and I should remain alive. Poe told me that the coffin had merely been a method to bring me discreetly from Seven Dials to this place where Stephen Carswall might interrogate me without fear of prying eyes. I believe it was to have served a further purpose. It would have been easy enough to slip another coffin or two into the private burial ground attached to the workhouse next door; the Sexton was Poe's creature, and in an establishment of that nature it is never long before there is a need for an open grave where two may lie as comfortably as one.

I have leapt ahead of myself. The point I had begun to make with my talk of quilts and cloth is simply that Mr Poe could be an agreeable companion if he wished. He was a man of parts, who had travelled the world and observed its follies and peculiarities. Of course he had every reason to make himself agreeable to me while I had him imprisoned in the cellar.

His story, in brief, was this. As a young man, his father had put him to study the law, but it had not answered and he had become an actor instead. He had married Miss Arnold, the English actress who became the mother of Edgar and of two other children. Alas, an actor's life is a precarious one, with many temptations. He had been very young, he told me, and he had quarrelled with managers and critics. He had drunk too deeply and too often. He had failed to husband his few resources.

“And I was not, perhaps, as good an actor as I thought myself. My Thespian talents do not shine at their brightest on the boards, sir: they are better suited to the wider stage of life.”

The open mouths of his young family added to his cares. At length, the young man could shoulder his burden no more. At that time he and his wife were in New York. A chance-met acquaintance in a tavern offered to procure him a berth on a boat sailing for Cape Town where, he was told, there was such a hunger for dramatic entertainments that no actor worth his salt could fail to make himself a fortune within a very short time indeed. There was not a moment to be lost for the ship was to sail on the outgoing tide. According to his account, Poe had scribbled a note explaining his intended absence to his wife and had entrusted it to a friend.

“Alas! I trusted too well. My letter was never delivered. My poor Elizabeth went to her grave a few months later not knowing whether I was alive or dead, leaving my unfortunate children to depend on the charity of strangers.”

David Poe's misfortunes had only just begun. The ship in which he was to work his passage to Cape Town was a merchantman sailing under British colours – at that time, our two countries were not yet at war. But the Union flag proved Mr Poe's undoing for the ship was snapped up by a French privateer out of Le Havre. Mr Poe was reticent about how he had spent the next few months, but by the summer of 1812 he had moved to London.

“I know a man of your sensibility, Mr Shield, will have no difficulty in picturing my distress when I discovered, by a circuitous route, that my beloved Elizabeth had died. My first impulse was to rush to the side of my motherless children and provide what comfort a poor widowed father might bring. But on second thoughts, I realised that I could not afford the luxury – I might say the selfishness – of indulging in my paternal sentiments, not for my own sake but for the sake of my children. To get a passage to the United States at that time would not have been easy, since Congress had declared war on Great Britain in June. I understood, too, that my children were being cared for by the most amiable of benefactors: indeed, even if I could get to the United States, their material circumstances would immediately worsen. I blush to admit it, but there had been a little temporary embarrassment just before I left New York, in the shape of unpaid debts. No, though every generous feeling urged me to rush to the side of my children, prudence restrained me.” Here I imagined him on the other side of the trap-door, standing at the foot of the stairs with his hand on his heart. “A father must place his children's welfare above his own selfish desires, Mr Shield, though it break his heart to do so.”

Fortunately, the grieving widower was not obliged to grieve in solitude. He had wooed and won the heart of a Miss Iversen, who lived with her father in Queen-street, Seven Dials, and assisted him in his business.

“She was not in the first flush of youth,” Mr Poe told me. “But then nor was I. We were both of an age when one woos with the head as much as with the heart. Mr Iversen's health was failing and he was anxious to secure the future of his only child in the event of his death. She was a most amiable lady, with the additional attraction that she brought not only her delightful self to our connubial bower but also a means of earning my living – by honest toil, the sweat of my brow, but I did not mind that. There can be no higher calling than to heal the ills of one's fellow men. I firmly believe we have had more success in that department than the entire College of Physicians. We doctor their souls as well as their bodies.”

“You tell fortunes?” I inquired. “You give them coloured water and pills made of flour and sugar? You interpret their dreams, sell them spells and help women miscarry?”

“Who is to say that is wrong, sir?” Mr Poe replied. “You would not believe the cures I have effected. You would not credit the number of sorrows I have soothed. I give them hope, sir, which is better than all the money in the world. In my way I am a philanthropist. Tell me, which is worse? To live as I do, an honest tradesman, a broker of dreams. Or to prey upon widows and hard-working men, and prise away their little fortunes and give them nothing in return. A splendid establishment and a carriage with a crest on the door are no guarantee of moral probity. I need refer you only to Mr Henry Frant and Mr Stephen Carswall as evidence of that.”

I believed him – or rather, I believed some part of him meant what he said: no man is a monster to himself, not entirely. And he spoke no more than the truth: the distance between Seven Dials on the one hand, and Margaret-street and Russell-square on the other, is shorter than the world realises.

When old Mr Iversen died in 1813, his daughter had been plunged into a melancholy so profound that her doting husband had feared she would never emerge. She could not bear to be parted from her papa. In the end Mr Poe had suggested that his body be embalmed.

“It is done in the best families now. And the old man, despite his trade, was an out-and-out Rationalist. Why should he wish for the grave or the attentions of worms? And of course the solution was also eminently practicable. My patrons are, by and large, a superstitious crew. They do not care to play foolish tricks on a man whose father-in-law keeps guard for all eternity in a room above the shop. Better than a pair of mastiffs, eh? Those dogs at Monkshill were no use as guards when they were dead, but with my late wife's father being dead was in fact an advantage.”

Mr Poe had taken over not only the business of the old man but also something of his identity. “Only an American, sir, can truly appreciate the value of tradition.” He called himself Mr Iversen. He wore his father-in-law's professional garb – that is to say, the gown with its strange symbols and the skull cap; he even pretended to be crippled, as Mr Iversen, Senior, had been.

“There is much to be said for distinguishing one's professional activities from one's private life,” Mr Poe said. “If I slip on a beard and a pair of blue spectacles I become another man altogether. People come and go in Seven Dials. In a year or two, most of them had forgotten there had ever been another Iversen, especially after my poor Polly followed her pa to the grave.”

He was understandably reticent about the precise extent and nature of the business he had inherited from his father-in-law and then built up himself. I think it probable that there was a great deal more to it than quack medicines and spells for the credulous. I cannot forget the bully boys in their rusty black clothes, the firm of undertakers who worked so assiduously for him, and the tumbledown farm so close to a workhouse, a lunatic asylum and a private burial ground.

In all probability, David Poe would have continued to prosper in Queen-street if he had not learned that Mr and Mrs Allan were in London, with their foster son Edgar. Over the years he had naturally paid attention to the news from America, and in particular to Americans visiting London. According to his own explanation, he had been possessed by an overpowering desire to see his son, whom he had last laid eyes on when the boy was not much beyond two years old and still in petticoats.

I see no reason to doubt at least the partial truth of this. As I said, we are all a patchwork of emotions. Why should David Poe not have felt a sentimental attachment to the children he had seen so little of? Absence and ignorance encourage such tender feelings. But an act may have more than one motive. Knowing Mr Poe, I suspect that he may also have borne in mind the possibility of deriving pecuniary advantage from Mr Allan, for he must have known that Allan was accounted a rich man.

Whatever his purpose, Mr Poe visited Southampton-row, where I unwittingly confirmed his son's identity, and where he learned that Edgar was to be found in Stoke Newington. Later he came to the village, where he accosted the boys and had his altercation with me. He had indeed been more than a little tipsy on this occasion – “if ever a man had need of refreshment, it was I on that day.” Another layer of confusion was added by the fact that Mr Poe was short-sighted, and his vision was further hampered by the blue glasses: therefore he found it hard to distinguish between Edgar Allan and Charlie Frant, which brought about the initial assumption that the object of his interest was not Edgar but Charlie. It was this misunderstanding which led, through my good offices, to his acquaintance with Mr Frant.

Frant saw what David Poe wished him to see: an Irish-American with a taste for gin and no visible means of support; no threat to Frant or to anyone else. Frant saw all this, and he also saw that David Poe was approximately the same height, weight, age and build as himself. Leaving aside the superficial dissimilarities, Poe made a perfect substitute for Henry Frant in the rôle of murder victim. Urged on, no doubt, by Mrs Johnson, he retained Poe's services. In the late afternoon of Wednesday 24th November, Frant lured Poe up to Wellington-terrace with the intention of murdering him.

“He told me we were to meet a gentleman there, and gave me a suit of his clothes, saying I must look the gentleman, too, or the design he had in mind would be doomed. By God, he thought me a prime flat, but in truth it was the other way about. He told me to get to Wellington-terrace early, where he would explain the design. So I walked there from the turnpike road, and he sprang on me, with a hammer in his hand.” David Poe coughed. “I had been half expecting it. We had a bit of a set-to, and I happened to get hold of the hammer. I didn't mean to kill him, as God's my witness, but he would have killed me given half the chance. I must have hit him a little harder than I thought. There I was, Mr Shield, in something of a difficulty, as I think you will agree.”

“You did not mean to kill him?” I cried. “Mr Poe, you forget I saw the body.”

“On my honour, Mr Shield, I had no more intention of killing him than I have of killing you, as you will see when I explain those injuries. When he died, he was almost entirely unmarked, apart from the back of the head, that is. But I knew that no jury in the land would believe that my blows had been struck in self-defence, that I had not wished to kill him. While I considered what to do, I searched him, and I struck lucky with his pockets, at least. Frant planned to run away, you see, after he'd killed me. He was carrying plenty of money, a case of jewellery, and also a letter from his fancy woman down at Monkshill. Shockingly indiscreet, she was, sir, quite shocking.”