Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

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.

I have not seen or heard from Sophia Frant from that day to this. In the first six months after her disappearance, I was sedulous in my attempts to discover her whereabouts. Flora said she had heard nothing of her cousin, and promised she would let me know if she did; she professed herself as puzzled as I.

Charlie had long since been withdrawn from Mr Bransby's in Stoke Newington, and they knew nothing of his present whereabouts at the school he had briefly attended in Twickenham. I tried Mr Rowsell, who informed me he was unable to put me in communication with either Mrs Frant or Mr Shield. When I passed through Gloucester on my way to Clearland, I inquired after Sophie's property, only to learn that the freeholds in Oxbody-lane had recently changed hands. I hired the services of others better qualified than I to make inquiries, but they were equally unsuccessful.

You must not fancy from this that my subsequent life has been one long, dying fall, that I have done nothing except mourn the loss of Sophia Frant. It would be true to say that I have always been aware, in some corner of my being, of her absence. I have found it fatally easy to dwell on what might have been: if, for example, I had had the courage to propose to her at Monkshill, despite her lack of fortune, despite her son and despite her first husband's notoriety. George and our mother had united to dissuade me, pointing out, though not in so many words, that I did not have enough to live comfortably as a married man, that I must look for a wife with a little money of her own, and that in any case I would be unlikely to find happiness in the arms of an embezzler's widow.

So I joined our diplomatic service and served first at several of the smaller German courts and later in Washington, a post which the climate of the American capital sometimes made profoundly disagreeable. While I was in the United States I met Mr Noak again, increasingly eccentric but so wealthy that he could not help but wield considerable influence. A year later he was dead, and it was found that he had dispersed the bulk of his enormous fortune to a number of charities, with the exception of one substantial legacy to his former chief clerk, Salutation Harmwell.

My diplomatic career, never distinguished, came to an end when my brother unexpectedly died in 1833. His marriage had been childless – and Mr Shield's narrative, of course, hints at a possible reason for that, as it does for other qualities that distinguished my sister-in-law. I was my brother's heir.

With a title and a fortune, I found myself the eligible bachelor. I married my second cousin, Arabella Vauden, a match considered advantageous for both parties. Our union has not been blessed with children, and when I die the title and the entailed part of the estate will pass to a cousin in Yorkshire. My wife regrets this circumstance extremely.

Flora did not remarry, though she had several offers. She could afford to please herself. She passed most of her long widowhood in London, where she entertained widely if not wisely in her house in Hanover-square. When she died of inflammation of the lungs, much of her wealth passed to me by the terms of her marriage settlement. Now she lies where we have laid her, in the cemetery at Kensal-green.

I run ahead: I must not forget her father. As soon as the law allowed, Flora closed down the house in Margaret-street and moved Mr Carswall and his nurse down to Monkshill. The mansion-house was let, so she settled them at Grange Cottage, where Mrs Johnson had dragged out the last years of her unfortunate life.

Stephen Carswall never recovered his powers of speech and movement. I saw him twice in his decline and he was as useless as fruit rotting on the tree. Mrs Kerridge bullied him mercilessly, and at the time I wondered that Flora did not intervene. He lingered for seven long years, until February 1827. At his demise, his fortune was found to be much depleted.

I come now to David Poe, Mr Iversen, Junior, of Seven Dials, the father of the American boy who when he grew to manhood was buffeted by fame and misfortune in equal measure. Having read Mr Shield's manuscript, I instituted inquiries about this gentleman, both here and in America. I found no certain trace of him whatsoever. As far as the world knows, he vanished in 1811 or possibly 1812.

But I did uncover an intriguing hint that, many years earlier, Mr Noak had attempted to trace David Poe's later career, and that the old gentleman had learned that there were those who preferred to let sleeping dogs lie. One of these was Mr Rush, who in 1820 had been the American Minister in London, a man with whom Noak had many dealings while he was in England, and whom he certainly would have pressed for information concerning David Poe.

Another gentleman who wished David Poe to remain buried in obscurity – and here we come at the matter from quite a different angle – was General Lafayette himself, the venerable hero of both the American and French Revolutions. Though of course Lafayette had no official standing in the United States, his reputation and achievements gave him influence in the most unexpected places.

My correspondent in the United States drew my attention to the fact that Lafayette and David Poe's father had been comrades in arms in the great revolutionary struggle. The connection between the two men was clearly close. When the old General visited the United States for his triumphal tour in 1824, he visited Baltimore, Maryland, where he singled out for particular attention the wife of his old comrade, who had died some years earlier. A few weeks later, Lafayette was in Richmond, Virginia, where he was assigned a guard of honour composed of boys in the uniform of riflemen; one of these was Edgar Allan Poe.

These are facts, but they prove nothing except that Lafayette had a kindness for the Poe family. But, if one takes this in conjunction with hints and whispers from other directions, it is impossible to ignore the suspicion that several surprisingly prominent gentlemen were perfectly happy that David Poe should remain a lost sheep.

It was, I suppose, the worst of ill luck for Henry Frant that his villainy led him to an even greater villain than himself. God knows, he paid heavily for his vices and suffered for his crimes. Before I allow David Poe to return to obscurity, however, I must record one speculation that occurred to me. Shield seems strangely well informed about David Poe's life. Is it possible that there were subsequent meetings between the two men?

I come at last to the American boy. Edgar Allan Poe was like the pintle of a hinge – barely visible, yet the still point around which the whole business revolved. He waits at almost every twist and turn of Shield's narrative.

The American boy knocks on Mr Bransby's door on the occasion of Shield's very first visit to the Manor House School. He is Charlie's particular friend and indeed champion. He is the unwitting cause of his father's introduction first to Tom Shield and then to Henry Frant, and hence brings Frant to his murderer. He is in the ice-house at Monkshill-park, desperate to search it for treasure. He and Charlie make their midnight expedition to the ruins, without which the events of that night must have turned out very differently. He helps to carry Charlie's parrot across London, and the bird with its cry of ayez peur is the clue that draws Shield back to Seven Dials and provides the link between Carswall and David Poe. It is Edgar who whispers to Shield that Sophie may be found visiting her late husband's grave in the burying ground of St George's, Bloomsbury. All in all, it is hard to quarrel with Shield's assertion that the boy "acted as the proximate cause of much that had happened".