The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  “We are here to talk about the slave. Will those same men do the job again but get it right?”

  “I don’t want to—”

  At that moment there was a creak. Lenox nearly touched the ceiling, he jumped so high. But it was only the other door in the hall, not the one he had been standing at. A servant came in and stopped.

  Lenox put a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said, whispering. “Trying to win a bet.”

  The servant nodded and walked on—without a word, or even so much as a change in his expression. The commonest thing in all of Christendom must have seemed to him to be a faceless aristocrat trying to win some daft bet worth a servant’s annual wages. He resumed his path up the back stairwell.

  Lenox, not daring to get caught twice, let himself back into the card room. There were now two gentlemen there, both older, who looked at him strangely. “Wrong turn,” he said, putting his hands up. “I’m meant to be dining with the Duke of Dorset.”

  “Through there,” said one of the men.

  “Thank you.”

  Turning his face to conceal it, Lenox went by the bar. He noticed Cobb, eating warmed cashews and looking at a racing form as if he didn’t have a care on earth.

  Lenox almost risked a glance back at Cads’ Corner—but forbore and, without haste, made his way down the stairs, carpeted in a rich crimson so deep it required some nimbleness.

  He left with what he hoped was a suave “good evening” to the porter at the door. But he was trembling. It was the first time he had ever overheard his life directly threatened, and taken all in all he thought he would have preferred to have it said to him directly. There was something dreadful about the coolness of Bert Smith’s—Forsythe Witt’s—voice as he proposed killing “the Lenox brother.” Him! Think how upset Edmund would be, his friends, his mother … even Kitty, he thought, glancingly. But of course, Gilman had friends and family, too, and he was gone, dispatched as casually as a brandy in the bar of the Carlton Club.

  Lenox didn’t know quite what to do with himself. Graham had yet to return. He hailed a hansom and asked the driver to stay there; he was waiting for a friend, he said. He gave him half a shilling as good-faith money.

  Ten minutes later, Cobb came out. Lenox inconspicuously saluted him from the hansom, and Cobb got in.

  “What happened?”

  “They dispersed. Sheridan is dining, Jonas went to the card room, and the third one—Witt—stayed at the bar.”

  “Did you overhear them?”

  “Barely a word,” said Cobb, with a look of deep frustration.

  “In that case it falls to me to tell you that I believe I owe you my life,” Lenox replied.

  Cobb raised his eyebrows. “Your life!”

  “If you hadn’t been assigned to come to England I would have believed to this day that Winfield Bell and his anonymous accomplice acted on their own. And I wouldn’t have overheard a Member of Parliament making plans to kill me. Nor two others considering it.”

  Cobb’s eyes had widened. Lenox explained the doorway that had enabled him to listen in on some of the men’s conversation.

  “Then they were meeting to plan what to do about Hollis,” said Cobb.

  “Yes. I would guess one of them must have seen the same advertisement I did. It’s all over London—I’ve spotted it several places.”

  Cobb nodded. “They had everything to protect, if Gilman wrote ahead that he knew about Jonas Hall. Jonas mentioned it by name?”

  “I think so. He may have called it simply the Hall.”

  “Then your theory was correct.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Lenox.

  There was a rap at the door. It was Graham, with a constable named Conover. Lenox knew him by sight, as he did many London police officers—a gigantic, skinny ginger fellow, with freckles all over. He was about as dim as they came, but he had the right uniform on.

  “I’m Charles—”

  At that moment, however, a gleam of bright light came from the Carlton Club. All four men looked up to see who it was, departing in the middle of the dinner hour.

  It was Witt, in company with another man. Not Jonas or Sheridan. They must have split up.

  “What shall we do?” asked Cobb.

  “I think we must get him now,” said Lenox, though he hardly felt the courage of his words. “Better than later.”

  Witt descended the few steps of the club with his friend, and Lenox stepped out of the cab and stood next to Conover. “Witt,” he called in a quiet voice.

  Witt stopped. He turned to the friend he had been walking with. “Parliamentary matter. I’ll catch you up there. Shouldn’t be a moment.”

  He came over to them and lit a small cigar, striking the match against a silver box, taking his time until its tip glowed a brilliant orange. Up close, he had a sinewy, defined face, starved out and pointed forward. A hunter’s face—a brutal, intelligent face.

  “You’re Forsythe Witt?” Cobb said. “We’d like to ask you some questions about the two men you just met with. About Jamaica and Jonas Hall. About the old days, and the crimes the three of you committed together.”

  Witt studied Cobb for a long moment. Then his gaze turned to Lenox. For his part, Lenox was watching for the lean, elegantly dressed fellow to produce a knife or a gun. Perhaps to bolt.

  Instead Witt shook his head once, as if thinking of a dozen regrets simultaneously.

  Then he said exactly what Lenox should have expected him to say: the savvy thing. “If you spare me hanging and let me out of the country, I’ll give you Sheridan and Jonas.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Two long days later, Lenox stood in Carlisle’s Bookshop amidst an excited crowd of people.

  Carlisle was a bookseller, small publisher, and advocate for various causes. He ran an excellent bookshop and a still better salon. On this evening, at a quarter past seven, the fifty or sixty people in the room—Lenox, for his part, was alone—quieted, because Josiah Hollis was striding into the room, tall and grave, though nodding politely to the people he passed who greeted him. He held his hands behind his back.

  He stood by as Carlisle gave him an introduction. After thanking the crowd and making a small joke about the weather, Carlisle said, “We are thrilled to be publishing Mr. Hollis’s true account of his early years, and hope many of you will order from the private first edition of five hundred to be published later this month, before it goes into general circulation in March. We are equally thrilled that Mr. Hollis has extended his stay in London to help complete and edit the book so that it will be available sooner than transatlantic mail would allow.”

  Ah! That was the explanation for Hollis’s ongoing presence in London.

  Carlisle went on then, talking about the book and its author in equally admiring terms. After a few minutes, Lenox’s mind drifted. He was tired. Somewhere in London at this very hour, if all went according to plan, Wilt Sheridan and Samuel Jonas were being placed under arrest.

  His fatigue was not purely physical. He had been involved in the grueling hours it had taken to interview Forsythe Witt and then verify his story. Yet it was more an emotional than physical drain he felt on his spirits.

  He knew more about slavery than he ever had before. This was no imposition on him—only it had involved a kind of permanent disillusionment, for while he had been staunch in his position as an abolitionist, like the overwhelming majority of Britons, it had been a position largely formed in theory theretofore. After their conversations at the Yard with Witt—after hearing about the life of a plantation—it all seemed too terribly real.

  His guesses about the crime had been right in some respects, it emerged, wrong in others.

  The first part he had missed was that Witt had been much more than just a man with a few boats. He was an active slave trader in America. This was part of the service he had provided to merit inclusion in the triumvirate with Sheridan, who had slaves to offload, and Jonas, who had capital. Witt was the muscle and the tal
ent. His birth was obscure, his fortune minimal, but he had been able to do what the indolent Sheridan and Jonas could only conceive. It also explained why it was he who had been chosen to play the role of Bert Smith. Of the three men, he was the only active one.

  “Take us back to the start,” Sir Richard Mayne had said at the outset of their interrogation. “Twenty years ago.”

  Though Lenox, Hemstock, Dunn, and Cobb were all present, Mayne was conducting the interview himself. Whatever he had done, Witt was still a Member of Parliament.

  He smoked continually throughout the questions, creating a fug in the small room where they all sat around a plain table. “Sheridan was young then. So was I. Even Jonas.” Puff. “Sheridan had about five hundred and forty hands on his plantation in Saint Elizabeth.”

  “Slaves, you mean.”

  Witt nodded. “Sure, if you like. Anyhow. Wasn’t hard to see which way the cat was going to jump. They were going to be freed. They were Sheridan’s inheritance. His elder brother would get the English property; the plantation was entailed upon the second male. Soon enough he knew it would be worth whatever you could get for the acreage. Not much at all.

  “It was Jonas and I who approached him. Jonas had a cousin in South Carolina who owned a property with about thirty slaves. That’s quite a lot in America. A prosperous family might have two or three. More than five hundred—well, that’s a large, large number.”

  “How much does a slave cost?” Hemstock asked.

  It was Cobb who replied. “Something like fifteen hundred dollars,” he said.

  Hemstock whistled. It was a small fortune in itself. “Multiplied by five hundred and forty,” said Lenox, squinting up at the ceiling as he calculated. “Eight hundred and ten thousand dollars? Is that right, Mr. Witt?”

  This was a vast fortune—enough, even split three ways, to make them some of the richest men in the world.

  Witt shrugged. “As for your math, I daresay it’s roughly right. But we worked very hard, you know.

  “I started taking them over thirty or forty at a time. Of course, you have to keep them alive. That’s not free. Then you have to find the right market. Sometimes for a large male you might get more than two thousand dollars. But a female is worth less, and a child less still. As time went on we figured out that the skilled ones sold for much more. A good blacksmith under thirty could fetch twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “A child less still,” repeated Dunn. “But they stayed with their parents.”

  Witt looked at him scornfully. “They’re not like us; they don’t care. They put on a show, but they don’t care.” Puff. “We were able to buy Jonas’s cousin’s farm and slaves off him, overpaid for it—since it can be difficult for the British to own land in America.

  “Soon enough, his American slaves and our Jamaican ones were assimilated, without anyone noticing. We bought some of the surrounding land. We didn’t farm it very hard, which some thought peculiar. Instead we had the cook train cooks, the blacksmith train blacksmiths, the cooper train coopers. And so on.”

  Sir Richard looked up. “To increase their value on the auction block.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sheridan and Jonas were conscious of all this?”

  “Jonas was. He was there, for heaven’s sake—there more often than I was, for I traveled constantly. But Jonas loved the place. He took one of the slaves as a mistress. Filthy. Moved her into the house, wouldn’t let anyone touch her, though he whipped her himself when she tried to escape. As for Sheridan, he only ever asked about the money. Obsessed by it, he was. Finally by 1836 we’d gotten all of his men out. But he never lost the fear that we were shorting him.”

  “Were you?”

  “Here and there. About as fair a partnership as you’re like to find in that trade. He held out a carrot for us, you know: seats in Parliament. To his credit he made good on them. Found us the races, at least. We had to win them on our own. Jonas is about to lose. If he did, I told him, I thought he should go back to America. But there was never such a one for London, now that he’s back.”

  “Did no one in Jamaica notice?”

  “People in Jamaica become less observant if you gave them a few dollars,” said Witt. “More outlay, you see? Before you think we’re so rich as all that.”

  So it went on. He was a brutally unsympathetic man. He recounted the death of slaves and friends without compunction or remorse. When they came to Winfield Bell, he was outright derisive.

  “A fool.” That was his verdict. “A few pounds he cost me. Not more.”

  “What was the plan, then?” Cobb asked. “Why did you kill Gilman?”

  But here Witt stopped. It was the first detail that Cobb and Lenox hadn’t told him before he’d told it back to them.

  “Thus far I haven’t seen a paper guaranteeing my safe passage off this island,” he said. “When I do, I’ll tell you whatever else you like.”

  Lenox, reflecting on this exchange as it had passed late two nights before, stirred only when there was a loud round of applause. Carlisle was coming offstage; Hollis inclined his head and approached the dais.

  He thanked his friends the Thompsons first. He then gave a eulogy for Gilman and Tiptree, one that was moving to all present, or so it seemed at least to Lenox; tears stood in the eyes of the woman next to him as Hollis described the friendship the three had made on their crossing of the Atlantic, three men from very different backgrounds, Tiptree urbane and bright, Gilman fiery and brilliant, Hollis himself seasoned and wary, distant at first.

  This formed a natural transition to his own history.

  What had Lenox been expecting? Well, what he heard was a litany of horrors. Lives lived in intense heat, hunger, and pain. Flayings at the post—or in the case of pregnant women, Hollis said, facedown, their bellies in holes they had dug themselves, so as not to endanger the master’s property—illness untreated, near starvation. Bodies that gave up life in the rows of sugarcane and were merely pushed to one side of the furrow.

  “Were none of the slave owners kind?” one man interjected from the second row at one point.

  The American took the question in good faith. “Some are, to be sure, sir,” he said. “These I consider the most evil and least Christian of all—for they make the practice easier to justify, with their slight humanities.”

  Lenox admired the undramatic, unadorned, straightforward way that Hollis told his story. It made him wonder if the book was just as plain—or if Carlisle would help to make it less political, more personal. The single moment when the whole crowded bookshop held its breath was when Hollis described his mother being caught out by the local patrollers one night while she was collecting herbs, and sold off as punishment.

  He had still never found to whom, despite years of trying.

  After the speech, there was a long line of people who wanted to meet Hollis. Lenox was content to wait. He sat, reflecting on the case. Not with satisfaction. As he had told Cobb, only the American’s arrival had saved his life. And it had been Cobb, too, who isolated the three men involved in the plot from Gilman’s calendar. That was the crucial thing to have missed, and Lenox a well-connected Londoner, too, with a brother and several other relatives and a dozen friends in Parliament, Lenox, who could tell Disraeli from a backbencher far more easily than Cobb might ever hope to.

  “Mr. Lenox!” said Hollis, when at last the store had mostly emptied.

  Lenox stood and smiled. “Good evening, Mr. Hollis. I was hoping to buy you supper, but now I see that you are grown very famous.”

  “Yes, I am pleased to have found a British publisher for my memoir. And after it appears here I will go to France, where it is being translated even now.”

  “My dear sir, congratulations!”

  “But I would be happy to dine with you, if you have half an hour to wait.”

  “Please take whatever time you need,” said Lenox. “As it happens, there is some further news about your attack.”

  “I hope nothing al
arming?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then I shall be with you shortly.”

  Lenox went and ordered Hollis’s book from Carlisle. He’d had a good night and happily took the order, thanking Lenox, who then waited among the tables full of gleaming red leather books, their pages still uncut—each still unread, with the chance it might contain any story at all. Thinking of Kitty Ashbrook, he bought a copy of Ivanhoe to be sent back to Hampden Lane.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “And they’re being arrested now?”

  Lenox nodded. He and Hollis were dining in a public house called the Rose and Crown.

  Hollis’s entrance had drawn several stares, but they had ignored these, and now were warming themselves by a large fire after the icy walk from the bookstore. Hollis drank claret; Lenox, a strong cup of tea, for he was tired, and besides that not sure whether more work might lie ahead of him that night.

  “That is the hope. Mr. Cobb, the American investigator, says the embassy is raring to prosecute them in America for importing slaves to the country.”

  “That is what I believe men call ironical,” Hollis said.

  Lenox nodded. It was indeed, for all that it had its own queer logic. “Regardless, they have committed crimes enough for the gallows here. Witt finally admitted all of that. In fact, he was rather proud. He instructed Bell to cut the labels out of the clothing in the hopes that it would be mistaken for a random death. He hired the white horse so that blame could plausibly fall on the Patriots Abroad if anyone saw Bell leave the scene. He bought all of the newsboy’s goods so that nobody would recognize Bell as being out of place as conductor. He shoved Bell over the edge of the building when he knew they were caught and then disappeared. It explains why all of the Patriots Abroad were so vehement in their denials. They knew nothing. It was all between Smith and Bell.”

  “In its way it was ingenious,” said Hollis, looking down at his food. “Witt must be a man of abilities.”

  “I think so, yes. Sometimes strong trees grow crooked and gnarled. My impression is that he kept Jonas and Sheridan together in their scheme; neither is notable for his character. But it’s remarkable that you can look at it so objectively.”