The Four Hundred

by Stephen Sheppard

  Pinkerton interrupted. "And?"

  "Well, I always gave his 'at a brush, sir," Williams went on, "and I always looks inside at the labels of good 'ats, sir.

  It's only professional curiosity, of course, sir," continued Williams righteously. "The first time he came to us, he 'ad on his uncle's American custom-made 'at, and perfect, if I say so myself." He paused. "A white Stetson." The room was quiet.

  Pinkerton repeated slowly: "A white Stetson."

  "Yes, sir," Williams said, "with curled sides and a black leather band."

  "You remember very well, Mr. Williams." The tailor's assistant nodded.

  "I do, sir 'cause he never wore it again. Always fine English 'ats thereafter." He paused, actually considering. "Dark toppers is very distinguished," he said (having difficulty over the words), "but more imposin', to my mind, is a white Stetson."

  Pinkerton sighed deeply and looked into Williams' eyes.

  "Then the initials we now have, it appears." He paused. "But the names, sir—do you know them?"

  "Why, yes, sir," said Williams, and grinned. "They was writ clear inside the white 'at."

  "Then tell us, Mr. Williams," said Pinkerton, slow and patient, "just the names and no more."

  "Why, Austin, sir, and Bidwell." Williams checked himself. There was complete silence.

  "Austin Bidwell," repeated Pinkerton slowly.

  "Yes, sir," corroborated Williams.

  "The uncle's—full name," Pinkerton said to himself.

  "On the mother's side," said Williams helpfully.

  "The mother's side," said Pinkerton, disbelieving. Williams was now unsure of himself for the first time.

  "As . . ." He hesitated. "... I knew him to be, sir," he said.

  The English detective inspector leaned on the table toward Williams. "And you never thought to question the veracity of this supposition?" said Spittle ponderously. Williams was now embarrassed.

  Pinkerton answered for him with some appreciation of the young man's trusting nature. "He obviously did not, Spittle."

  Pinkerton looked, now kindly, at the young tailor's assistant.

  "About this man before you, and his associates—Mr. Hills, as you know him to be—we shall ask you to make a full statement. I hope you will not object?"

  Mr. Williams shook his head at the turn of events, and his belief in his Mr. Warren began to fade.

  Suddenly all in the room relaxed as if their tension had been forcibly withdrawn. All eyes came to rest eventually on the prisoner. For a moment, Mr. Robert A. Pinkerton was actually sorry for Mr. Edwin Noyes. Then the unwanted emotion passed and the steady gaze toward the young man intensified.

  "Mr. Noyes." Pinkerton spoke clearly for the record. "You may now take it that you are a guest of Her Majesty ..." Pinkerton glanced at the dumbfounded Spittle. ... "officially." He paused. "The thread," he finished, "has begun to unravel."

  "Oh, Mr. 'Ills," said Williams, quite distraught at the realization that he might have had something to do with this poor man's incarceration. "I am sorry."

  "The name, Mr. Williams," said Edwin, with the resigned calm of a condemned man; "the name," Edwin repeated to the honest eyes of the upset tailor's assistant, "is Noyes, with aY.E.S."

  §

  The two women, Ellen and May, were held at Bow Street Police Station. They were kept apart, in separate cells. No official arrest had yet been made, and suspicion was all the police could put forward as a reason to detain them overnight—of what, as yet they did not reveal. The clothes and other contents of their luggage the women had with them at the time of apprehension, the police hoped, would provide some proof; enough, at least to permit them to charge the women, in some degree, with something—officially.

  Then they found Mac's gold in May's luggage. Even though she was utterly confused by what had come to pass, she said: absolutely nothing; it was as if she were awaiting Mac's arrival, explanations and her instant release.

  Ellen, equally uncomprehending, could only think that she had been cruelly jilted. She betrayed her former lover as soon as the police maliciously painted crude pictures to her of George with other women, laughing at his erstwhile love. Of George the police soon had a full description. She said it all.

  The instinct for revenge was strong in Ellen, and she sought now only to destroy her former love, if love she knew, and have him entrapped in the net, which for her had already fallen (albeit upon aggressive innocence and therefore only temporarily depriving her of freedom).

  "It's Wilson, that's the name" flowed from her tongue as if she were hungrily awaiting thirty pieces of silver and to get it were determined to please. "Most of his luggage is gone abroad," she said, "so I doubt you'll find much amongst mine. You ask 'em at the Terminus Hotel."

  The fact that Ellen remembered the name Warren, used by George during the Paris journey, caused tremors of excitement amongst the Bow Street police. This news was quickly conveyed to the American inquisitor at Newgate Prison. The police also discovered that May was known to Ellen and that she thought the man for whom May had waited in vain was called Mac; more she could not say, as more she did not know.

  §

  Pinkerton absorbed all this information on arrival at Bow Street.

  There Pinkerton and the ever-amenable Williams confronted Ellen—the erstwhile "Mrs. Wilson." She smiled defiantly. Williams shook his head toward Mr. Pinkerton, as instructed if he were to find the woman not of his acquaintance. He left the cell. Pinkerton remained—silent; merely observing the woman. When he felt sure he had her measure, he stood and began to take his leave.

  "Madam," said Pinkerton, and he bowed slightly.

  "It is Mrs. Wilson," said Ellen aggressively.

  Pinkerton smiled with what George's woman always remembered (perhaps wrongly) as a cruel expression.

  "It is not," he stated simply.

  Ellen's face was a vision of surprise.

  "The name, if indeed it is yours by legal right," said Pinkerton, and paused, "is Bidwell."

  Ellen began to stutter.' "What?" she finally managed to say—but Pinkerton was gone, and the cell door slammed shut.

  May continued to say absolutely nothing. She cried incessantly for several hours, then became ominously calm and remained utterly silent until Mr. Pinkerton arrived at her cell. He just stood still, feet planted slightly apart, the door behind him wide. Robert A. Pinkerton had time for an assessment of the woman before she looked up at him and stared defiantly into his eyes. The gaze was as strong as Pinkerton had ever encountered: May's instinct for survival was emerging fast. Time enough to relax when Mac returned, as she believed without question he would; whatever this trouble was; now was for coping. She was prepared for anything but what Pinkerton said with a smile.

  "We've made a mistake, May; you're free to go home."

  This broke the lovely woman, and her tears, now of joy, after she herself had assessed the truth of the statement in Pinkerton's face, brought the man to her side, and she eventually, sobbing, whispered to him the address of the Red Lion, for the cab that would take her home. She was still so obviously upset that Mr. Pinkerton insisted, as a gentleman would, that he accompany her the entire way to her very door—-and of course, this he did, overstepping the bounds of propriety only when the door to May's rooms above the Red Lion was actually open and she had begun to light the gas bracket on the wall.

  Pinkerton pushed past her. This alerted May immediately to the fact that here was more than manners and consideration, qualities to which she had started to become accustomed. May fell onto the bed sobbing once more; her anguish was that of the dreamer awakened to the harsh realities of a familiar world.

  Pinkerton wandered in the rooms. He tried to imagine himself as the man of this lovely and obviously loyal woman. At the rolltop bureau, Pinkerton paused. The oil lamp was still in place on the metal arm.

  Absently the American detective reached behind himself and found a chair; he pulled it toward the bureau and sat down. Taking from his
side pocket a packet of Lucifers, he struck one and lit the oil lamp.

  The lamp they'd used to climb the stairs was beside May on the bedside table. The single gas bracket on one wall which May had lit on entry was the only other light in the rooms; this threw a shadow from Pinkerton's bulk onto the bureau. He pulled out the sliding table and locked the arm beneath it. The jumping flame in the lamp threw a pool of light directly onto the spot below.

  A blotter showed up white and unsoiled; no ink stain marked its surface. It was just large enough to be of use to a letter writer. Pinkerton slid back the roll top of the bureau. He found no pen or ink immediately, but a pencil was on hand in one of the drawers. He began to rub the blotting paper lightly with the pencil. May watched as this other American sat where such a short time ago her lover had been occupied creating, as he always said, a new life for them both. Her beautiful eyes were wide and tears still fell, but she saw the concentration of Pinkerton, and instinct told May that he was destroying her—and she could do nothing.

  As the white surface darkened with the patterns he made, Pinkerton listened to May's world around him. Holborn at night: the seemingly always falling rain; a distant, out-of-tune piano; voices singing bad lyrics to dull melodies, prompted by cheap alcohol; shouts from below, in the street; the fading scream as from a struck child or woman, the sudden boisterous laughter from a passing group exchanging shouted abuse. A baby started crying across the way; a man roared at his wife or daughter, and she patiently assuaged, with sweet words, a child's fears of darkness; the crying ceased. A cart passed in the street, rattling on the cobbles, splashing in the puddles; feet sounded on boards; urgent calls between several men penetrated the night. Then, suddenly, silence came—but for the steady rain outside and faintly hissing gas within: a background to the soft sobbing of May in the bedroom.

  A watchman passed along an adjacent street, and his call was just discernible. Pinkerton's ears did not hear the hour, but dearly spoken came the words ". . . and all's well." He looked down at the dark patch he'd just finished on the white blotting pad.

  It was as if a pale spider had trailed spoor over an ebony mantel. There, as Pinkerton peered toward his work of art, were the words, quite discernible, Alphonse de Rothschild, six thousand pounds, F. A. Warren—two signatures, one sum of money. Pinkerton smiled.

  Outside, a last cry from the night watch—as the "Charley" rounded a corner of the Red Lion—was swallowed; sound, shut off by bricks and mortar, as if a door had slammed closed on the man. "All's well," he'd said, "all's well."

  Pinkerton stood up, crossed into the other room, then sat down on the bed beside May and shook her gently. She rolled over, stifled her sobs, sighed deeply and propped herself on an elbow, looking at the American with all the signs of warning a woman gives out to a man she believes is about to "take advantage of a situation," without encouragement.

  "Read that for me, would you, May?" said the American, continuing in May's mind to be unpredictable. She looked at the blotting pad held before her eyes, under the glow of the bedside oil lamp.

  "I can't," said May.

  "I know it's difficult in this light," said Pinkerton, angling the pad so that it was better lit, "but look again."

  "I can't," said May, and tears began once more at the thought of Mac's attempted lessons to add literacy to beauty.

  As the realization dawned on Pinkerton, he smiled, then handed May the pencil. "Write me your name," he asked of May softly. She took the pencil angrily and scored two short lines on the blotting pad, one over the other, at right angles, meeting in the center.

  Pinkerton looked up from the cross, his eyes full of compassion for May; her defiance in adversity was to be admired, not fought.

  "Do you rent this place, May?" he asked.

  "I owns it," May said, after a pause with more than a hint of pride.

  "Then where," asked Pinkerton coolly, "are the deeds?" May's eyes involuntarily turned toward the other room, where she knew the bureau to be. She concealed the look, a fraction too late. Pinkerton stood up and took the blotting pad back to the occasional table. He sat down again and began opening the small drawers, one by one. Third time lucky, he found the folded document. Opened, it revealed the usual formalities and conditions of sale: the rooms had been assigned to May.

  Robert A. Pinkerton was mumbling to himself as he sought for the signature, eventually found it and, without trouble, deciphered it. "Edwin Noyes," he was saying under his breath; "Austin Bidwell, brother George and—whom have we here?" He found the name and compared it with the writing on the blotting pad. It was different, but he'd bet his last dollar that a real expert would be able to make a match. "Writing can't lie," he'd been told; study had proved that a man's scrawl revealed a great deal about his personality, and like fingerprints, to an expert it was unique.

  Pinkerton looked again at the signature on the deeds of "rooms above the Red Lion, Holborn, City of London, England," and smiled with satisfaction.

  There, of course, written "large as life," "bold as brass," "confident as you like"—whatever the cliche—was the signature of May's lover and benefactor, the highly regarded friend of George Bidwell, Austin's admired companion and Edwin Noyes's loyal ami—a son of American soil, of excellent education, quick-witted, talented, knowledgeable, with a natural sharpness and cunning—qualities that would need only the hint of adversity to hone this man into an elusive quarry.

  Pinkerton spoke out the name loud: "George MacDonald."

  "Corked"

  THE wreck of the White Star Liner Atlantic, on the first of April 1873, was a great disaster. Off the coast of Nova Scotia, fifteen miles from Halifax, the ship ran onto the promontory of Meagher's Head, at the entrance of Prospect Harbour. Almost six hundred people perished, including all the women and children. The cause was, beyond question, an error in reckoning of the distance run and of the course and position of the ship and mistaking of one lighthouse for another; magnetic interference with the compass was not proved.

  Though she had crossed the ocean after which she was named according to schedule, it appears that the ship's Captain became worried, in the worsening weather, that the remaining coal supply would not be sufficient; thus a change of course was agreed upon and Halifax made the new destination.

  The night of the catastrophe was dark and the sea rough. The ship struck at two in the morning, west of Sambro. The impact was felt several times, and the officers and crew, immediately alarmed, rushed on deck and endeavored to clear away the boats with axes; rockets were fired off by the Second

  Officer. Suddenly, not ten minutes having elapsed since her going aground, the Atlantic heeled heavily to port, fell onto her beam ends and sank. The women and children who were asleep at the time the ship struck were prevented from coming on deck by the seas washing over the fast-sinking ship. A portion of the rigging remained above water, in which all who were able took refuge.

  The Third Officer, Mr. Brady, managed to swim with a halyard to a rock, thence to a second and at last to the shore. Some passengers were therefore able to escape by using the rope as support, but the rising tide and heavy sea made the situation perilous. Many died on the rocks from exhaustion and exposure; others became maniacs and chattered like children.

  At about six o'clock in the morning, the first boats from the shore were able to take off those who remained clinging to the ship and rigging.

  The Chief Officer had taken hold of the only surviving female and secured her in the rigging, making himself fast also against the cascading seas and flying spray. The day dawned, but it was not until two o'clock in the afternoon that the Reverend Mr. Ancient fought out to the ship with a crew of four men, pulling against the huge waves, and rescued the officer, who was swept from the wreck, numb and exhausted, saved only by a line thrown him by the clergyman. The woman, after bearing up with remarkable strength amidst the surging foam, died moments before the small boat managed to approach; her half-naked body was still fast in the rigging as the crew o
f the small boat pulled away, holding off from the dangerous rocks over which the sea churned and broke; the woman's eyes protruded, her mouth continued to foam and the ghastly spectacle, it was reported, was made more so by the sight of numerous jewels which still sparkled on her hands.

  Throughout America, papers were full of accounts, both of the accident itself and of the reception and hospitality extended to those passengers who escaped. The wreckage was fully documented; the cruel and abundant plunder was not.

  Official investigation into the cause of the disaster commenced in Halifax on April 6. Gross neglect on the part of

  Captain Williams was declared, and incompetency was the accusation flung at the man whose watch it had been, the Fourth Officer.

  In Great Britain no inquiry was made—opportunely, for at least one man. As the registration officer, all records and half those aboard had been lost beneath the waves, and tickets issued for the voyage included one to Mr. Bidwell, George—who could not be found amongst the survivors of the wreck—it was assumed that he too had drowned.

  Thus on April 3 The Times of London declared quite clearly the demise of said suspected criminal. Alphabetically, he was high on the published list.

  It had all begun on March 20....

  Mac and George had split up and declared a rendezvous in New York. With the women taken, they felt sure their true identities would be discovered eventually, but not having allowed for the entrapment of their ladies, they had retained only their own—genuine—passports, all others now destroyed. There was certainly no time for Mac to make forgeries; so understanding the chance they took, both men had fled as fast as they were able. Mac to France—first Paris, then Brest. George to Ireland—Cork and Queenstown.