Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

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-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.

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.