The American Boy (62 page)

“So you might be prudent after all?”

“I had to think of Charlie.” She hesitated. “I still do. Then Flora told me that she was going to make over the property to me and – and I wrote to Captain Ruispidge with my decision. Flora heard I was not to marry him, and that was when she told me it had been at your suggestion that she had made over the legacy to me. And you had asked her to conceal your part in the matter. I ask you again: why did you do that?”

“My answer is the same: I did not wish to put you under an obligation.”

“I am under a much greater obligation to my cousin Flora.”

“I do not doubt it.”

“She has made over what amounts to an income of nearly two hundred and fifty pounds a year.” Sophie looked up at me. “So – tell me then: why should I not be grateful to you, as well as to her?”

“I had no intention of deceiving you. I wished to help you secure an independence, nothing more. If you had felt beholden to me, if you had known that I was concerned in any way – I – I feared it might cloud your judgement.”

“With regard to what?”

I did not answer. As if by common consent, we walked on, towards St James's Park, and it seemed to me that she walked a little closer to me than she had before. I could not see her face because of her bonnet, only the plumes nodding and swaying above her head. She murmured something. I was obliged to ask her to repeat it.

She stopped again and looked up at me. “I said thank you. You showed true delicacy. I would have expected no less of you. Yet there are occasions when delicacy outlives its purpose. It is a virtue, undoubtedly, but it is not always appropriate to exercise it.”

I said, “In that respect, it sounds strangely like prudence.”

We stood for a moment watching three magpies squabbling over a piece of bread and emitting their raucous, grating cry, like beans rattling in a gourd.

“How I detest magpies,” Sophie said.

“Yes – scavengers, thieves and bullies.”

“But do you know the rhyme that country people have about magpies? One for sorrow, two for mirth –”

“Three for a girl and four –”

“Three for a girl?” she interrupted. “That was not what they said when I was a child. Besides four must be boy and it would not rhyme with mirth. No, when I was a child it was always three for a marriage.”

The magpies took fright and flew away.

“And four for a birth,” she added in a very low voice.

“Sophie?” I said, and held out my hand to her. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she replied, and laid her hand in mine. “Yes.”

9th June 1862

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 rôle 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.

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.

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-mémorie,
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.

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.

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.