Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

"I am sure your concern does you credit. But you need not have worried. I will not pretend that the prospect of living with him was agreeable to me. But I would not have had to endure it long." She raised her chin. "Captain Ruispidge has done me the honour of asking me to marry him."

I turned away. I could not bear to look on her bright face any longer.

"He asked me before my cousin Flora told me of her design to transfer the Gloucester property to me. His motives were of the purest."

I glanced over my shoulder. "I do not doubt it. I hope you will be very happy. He is a worthy man, I know, and I am sure it is a most prudent course of action."

Sophie came a step nearer, forcing me to look again at her face. "I have been prudent all my life. I married Henry Frant because it was prudent. I lived in my cousin Carswall's house because it was prudent. I am sick of being prudent. It does not agree with me."

"You have not always been prudent."

We looked at each other for a moment. In my mind I saw that little room in Gloucester, I saw her dear self wantonly displayed for my delight. Her face softened momentarily. She began to turn away but stopped and glanced up at me through her lashes. A coquette might have made the same movement, but she was not a coquette. I think she was afflicted by a sudden shyness.

"I was not prudent when Captain Ruispidge asked me to be his wife," she said. "I told him I was deeply sensible of the compliment he paid me, and would always consider him my friend, but that I did not love him. He said that did not matter, and he renewed his suit. I told him I wished to have time to turn his offer over in my mind before deciding."

"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 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.