The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector

by Lillian de la Torre

  Rich”

  “I made sure he had thrown himself into the sea,” whispered Cynthia.

  “Dear heart,” cried Jeremy, “on his wedding night, why would he so?”

  “Because,” said Cynthia, low, “he came to me with the French disease, and left me rather than infect me. He was half mad with remorse and drink taken, and I feared what he might do. ’Twas pure relief when I heard his mother had seen him and set him on his way.”

  “But had she?” asked Johnson gravely. “—Sit down, Lady Claybourne. You need not answer. I will answer for you. You never saw Richard that night. He was drowned. But you were determined still to rule Claybourne estate, and you had the wit and the will to invent a story to keep you there tho’ Richard was gone. How long, think you, Cynthia, could she have remained, had you displayed this everlasting farewell?”

  “I was but fourteen, and I wanted so to believe,” murmured Cynthia. “But now—I know not.”

  “Perhaps,” said Dr. Johnson, turning a stern face on the old Negro, “perhaps Bogie knows.”

  The dark eyes darted left and right. No sign came from my Lady, but Jeremy spoke with gruff gentleness:

  “Speak up, Bogie. Tell us the truth; it shall not be held against you.”

  “I know,” whispered the black painfully. “When Sir Richard was gone, none knew whither, I was set to search, and so ’twas I found at the cliff top his wedding coat folded, and a note held down by a stone.”

  “What said the note? Or can you not read?”

  “I can read. It began: Honoured Mother, When you read this I shall be dead—”

  Cynthia hid her face in her hands.

  “I read no more,” went on Bogie, “but took coat and note to my Lady in her chamber. She read it dry-eyed, and mused long. At last Bogie, says she, I learn by this billet that your young master has left England, and we are to keep all things in readiness for his return. Was I to gainsay her?”

  Lady Claybourne sat like a figure carved in ice.

  “Yet Sir Richard would never return,” went on Dr. Johnson, “and Jeremy’s guardians became more and more pressing. I suggest that as Jeremy approached his majority, a scheam was conceived to hold the estate, a scheam in which you three—you, my Lady, and Rollis and Bogie—had your parts to play.”

  “And you too, Dr. Johnson,” smiled Rollis, unabashed.

  “And I too,” said the philosopher wryly. “My part was to be the dupe, and lend my authority to the comedy of ‘The Return of the Long Lost Heir.’ ’Twas all too pat. He will be found, predicts my Lady like a sybil, and found he is, on her own ground, in Haiti. How? Because—as I now perceive—she arranged it—through a trusted messenger, her old slave from Haiti, our friend Mr. Bogie. Well, Bogie?”

  The old man almost smiled as he inclined his head.

  “But who was he, then, whom Bogie found in Haiti,” I demanded, “so miraculously suited to the part?”

  “I know not,” replied Dr. Johnson; “but I can guess. I think we shall find that there was someone in Haiti whom my Lady sent there out of the way long ago; someone whom she would gladly establish for life at Claybourne Hall; someone who so closely resembled her that he could win wide acceptance as the lost heir. To speak plainly: her son.”

  “Her son?”

  “Her bastard son, Sir Jeremy, whose existence your mother railed at in years past. Is that not so, Lady Claybourne?”

  My Lady disdained to answer.

  “Is that not so, Mr. Rollis?”

  “That is so, Dr. Johnson,” Mr. Rollis smiled thinly. “The lad was troublesome, and ’twas I who secretly shipped him off for her to the Haiti plantation. Thither my Lady sent Bogie, to instruct him and bring him back. Bogie is not as simple as he seems. Come, my Lady, say this is so, for our best course now is to compound the matter with Sir Jeremy.”

  “Compound, will you?” said Jeremy darkly. “I’ll look to the strong-box first.”

  “As to the strong-box,” said Rollis calmly, “you may set your mind at rest, for I have kept the keys. Tho’ in indifferent matters I was ruled by my Lady—”

  “D’you call it an indifferent matter, raising me up a false husband!” cried Cynthia indignantly.

  “As to that,” returned the solicitor coolly, “I never expected my Lady’s mad scheam to prevail; and as to the estate, I have kept it faithfully for whoever comes after.”

  “What impudence!” cried Jeremy. “Dr. Johnson, say, shall we not give these conspirators into custody, and send after the fleeing imposter?”

  Lady Claybourne spoke for the first time:

  “He’ll hang for it. Would you hang your brother, Jeremy?”

  “My brother?”

  “Your father’s son.”

  “Of the blood on both sides!” exclaimed Dr. Johnson. “Small wonder he passed for the heir!”

  “And small wonder my mother railed,” added Jeremy.

  “Sir Jeremy will not desire a scandal at Claybourne,” said my Lady with perfect calm. “He will prefer that I should take my dower right and withdraw to Haiti. My son Paul—whom, as you say, I have not lost—shall join me. Now I will bid you good night. Come, Rollis. Come, Bogie.”

  “’Tis for the best. Let it be so, Sir Jeremy,” said my wise friend.

  My Lady, head held high, sailed out at the door, and Rollis and Bogie followed.

  “Be it so,” assented Jeremy gravely, and the constable let them pass. “Now,” he went on, his face softening, “there is but one more word to say. Cynthia (taking her hand)—Lady Claybourne, will you wed with me, and be Lady Claybourne still?”

  “Yes, Jeremy,” said Cynthia.

  [The 18th Century had its claimants, its “lost heirs,” notably James Annesley (1743) and Archibald Douglas (1767); but this story reflects neither. It may suggest rather the mystery of the Tichborne claimant a century later. You may recognize Lady Tichborne and Old Bogle and the Tichborne Dole; you may read Australia for Haiti; you may even discern a plausible explanation of the many inexplicable features of that puzzling affair. In certain fictitious elements, of course, including the outcome, my story differs widely from the Tichborne case.

  The best book on the Tichborne mystery is Douglas Woodruff’s The Tichborne Claimant (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957).]

  THE RESURRECTION MEN

  “Body-snatchers and Resurrection Men, ’tis a scandal!” growled Dr. Sam: Johnson in his loud bull’s mutter.

  “Oranges! Sweet Chaney oranges!”

  The call of the orange-girl rose, filling the theatre in the interval between the tragedy and the afterpiece. It was at the after-piece that my philosophical friend had taken umbrage, for it was announced as The Resurrection of Harlequin Deadman, a theme which Dr. Johnson considered both sacrilegious and inopportune.

  “What are these mountebanks thinking of,” he demanded, “to give us another dead man, when the whole town reeks with the grave and the vault, when ghouls and Resurrection Men lift our dead from the earth (shuddering) to be sacked and carried off by night, and carved like mutton by the Anatomist in the morning!”

  “Oranges! Sweet oranges!”

  The orange-girl was before us, a trim little piece with a dimple beside her bee-stung lip. I longed much to try her mettle, but set up there on publick view, so to speak, in a forward box at Drury Lane Theatre, between two weighty and well-known personages, I hesitated, and she passed on.

  Dr. Sam: Johnson, burly and broad, his little brown wig clapped carelessly askew on his head, was known to every tavern and tea-table in town as Ursa Major, the Great Bear, the Grand Cham of Literature.

  Our companion, Mr. Saunders Welch, tall, robust, and powerful, with his snowy poll and his round benevolent face, was recognized by the upper and the under world alike as the incorruptible Westminster magistrate, second in command to the Blind Beak of Bow Street himself. Often had the world seen him leading the procession to a Tyburn hanging, black-clad, stately on his white horse, bearing his black baton of office tipped wi
th silver.

  Nor was I, I flatter myself, unknown on the London scene: James Boswell, Esq:, of Auchinleck in Scotland, advocate and man of the world, chronicler of the detections of Dr. Sam: Johnson: very much at your service. Many an eye from the stalls was marking my elegant bloom-coloured attire, my swarthy visage set off by powdered clubbed wig, my genteel bearing and complaisant air.

  “And what does Bow Street,” my worthy friend was demanding, “to quell these grave-robbing scoundrels?”

  “What can Bow Street do?” rumbled Mr. Welch. “These involuntary levitations of inhumated decedents—” He paused impressively, for he loved to outdo Dr. Sam: Johnson himself in the matter of sesquipedalian terminology.

  “By which you mean, digging up the dead?” suggested Johnson with a half smile.

  “Just so, sir. We do what we can to prevent it. The vaults are concealed, but the Resurrection Men find them out; coffins are sealed, but somehow come unsealed; guards are set, but the Resurrection Men prove stronger. They are persistent, for the traffick is very profitable. The Anatomist pays high for the fresh bodies he dissects.”

  “Too much of this,” growled Johnson in revulsion. “Harlequin Deadman, pah! Let us go.”

  I had got my friend to vist the theatre by promise of a tragedy of a moral tendency, The Distrest Mother; and now it was over he was little disposed to wait for the harlequinade. But I found myself reluctant to leave my bee-stung charmer unattempted.

  “Do, sir,” I perswaded, “do sit on with us, for they say Mr. De Loutherbourg back stage has outdone himself with his scenes and his transformations, his opticks and his mechanicks, his grand effects of light and dark.”

  “Well, well, I’ll humour you, Bozzy. Let us see what this Dutchman can do.”

  This complaisance enabled me to close with the pretty orange-girl, and privily purchase from her at an inflated rate not only a regale of oranges, but a rendezvous for a later hour at a bagnio hard by Covent Garden. I devoured my orange well pleased.

  Suddenly, with a loud groan of the tuba, the musick banged up a grotesque dead march. Salt-box and cleaver beat time, and nimble fingers made the marrow-bones to rattle. Ropes creaked, and the scene-curtain rolled up in Mr. De Loutherbourg’s new manner. The stage lay in darkness. All the candles, at the front and in the wing-ladders alike, had been snuffed. Only a large opal moon gleamed of itself in a black velvet sky.

  “’Tis some chymical substance makes it glow,” observed Dr. Johnson, his interest engaged, for he dabbled in chymical experimentation himself.

  The dead march swelled, torch-light appeared, and a grotesque funeral procession stalked into view. The children of the company, inappropriately attired as Cupids, capered on first, scattering flowers. Harlequin’s bier was borne on shoulder high, under a diamond-chequered pall. There followed his friends and enemies as mourners, Columbine in her gauzy skirts supported by the noted Grimaldi as Pantaloon, Clown with white-painted face wringing his floury hands, and the rest of the farcical rout. Dr. Johnson snorted. He hates to be reminded that man—even Harlequin—is mortal.

  Harlequin under his pall was laid in his grave—that is to say, in the Grave Trap, depressed just deep enough—and the mourners footed it off to a quickstep. De Loutherbourg’s opal moon precipitously declined and set.

  In the dead darkness there was a stir. A sheeted figure, gleaming with a luminous moony glow, sat up in the grave. It was startling. Ladies shrieked, men cursed in admiration. Then the figure straightened and stepped up, the glowing cerements were cast aside, and Harlequin stood before us—a skeleton! Every bone gleamed with that same mysterious moonlight glow, the palms of his hand shone, and where the face should have been shimmered the grin of a skull.

  “Bravo, De Loutherbourg!” muttered Welch.

  “Tschah!” said Johnson, “black body hose and bright paint!”

  The musick struck up a weird melody. Wright was Harlequin that night, and his Deadman’s Dance was a triumph of loose shank-bones and prodigious leaps. But Dr. Johnson, finding in it no moral content, could not sit still. When the foolery ended, we hardly stayed to hear tomorrow’s bill announced (Venice Preserved and Harlequin Cherokee) before we escaped ahead of the press.

  Outside the theatre, as usual, a mob of riff-raff was gathered, chairmen, link-boys, night-walking wenches, ready-handed rapparees, pimps and pickpockets.

  Past us as we left the play-house strolled a youth who engaged my regard, fresh of face, erect of form, lace-ruffled, clad in ivory brocade. Striding easily forward, he came up against a knot of blackguards. There was a jostle. The boy seized a collar and shouted. I thought the word was “Murder!” He was fatally right. A knife flashed, the boy fell, the brawlers melted from sight.

  “Halt!” shouted Welch, and gave chase, but in vain. They were gone.

  “Zookers, my cousin!” ejaculated a flash-looking bystander in a bag-wig, starting forward. “He’s in a fit! Quick, lads, bear him to the tavern!”

  Several hands were reaching for the boy, when past my elbow sped a lady in rose-coloured lutestring, small and daintily formed, her grey eyes enormous in her pale delicate face.

  “Stand off!” she cried, and the would-be helpers fell back.

  “Patrick!” she breathed, and knelt beside him. He lay as the dead, no breath, no motion. She wrung her hands.

  “My son!” she wailed. “What shall I do? He’s dead as his father died, and the body-snatchers will have him as they had his father, and what will become of me?”

  “Give place,” said a resonant voice. “I am a surgeon, madam, John Hardiman, at your service. Pray permit me, milady.”

  He knelt beside her, a military-looking man of middle height. Soon he rose, shaking his head.

  “Lend a hand here,” he cried, “and bear him to my surgery in White Hart Yard, where I may apply my skill to restore him.”

  “Never!” cried the lady. “He shall go home, for my house is hard by. Summon a chair!”

  “A chair for Lady Julia Fitzpatrick!” voices took up the cry.

  “Who is this lady?” I wondered aloud. “And what means her talk of the bodysnatchers?”

  “Why, all the world knows Lady Julia Fitzpatrick,” replied Dr. Johnson, “sister to an Earl, wife to the late Fighting Fitzpatrick, the notable Irish duellist. He died last year in a brawl at a tavern, and yon boy, his son, saw him fall. The tale they tell is strange. Fitzpatrick had, they said, his heart misplaced in his breast, an opponent could never nick it. You may imagine how the Anatomist would desiderate such a rarity.”

  “Preposterous!” I ejaculated.

  “That may be; but preposterous or no, what the world believes, as I observed in the matter of the Monboddo Ape Boy, is a sharp-edged fact upon which a man may cut himself. So it was, perhaps, with Fighting Fitzpatrick. As the story goes, an assassin, instructed by the Anatomist, put a quarrel on him and struck the right spot, ending his days and producing the desiderated cadaver. I know the Sack-em-up Men lifted him, for I saw the empty grave myself, passing by the churchyard of St.-Mark-in-the-Fields, with the coffin riven and empty and the winding-sheet thrown down beside. Small wonder if Lady Julia dreads the Resurrection Men.”

  “A shocking story!”

  “It is so. And who knows? If Fighting Fitzpatrick proved in fact an anatomical rarity, might not the same Anatomist have a mind to have the boy on his dissecting table, to see if such misplacement runs in families?”

  As we spoke thus, two burly bearers edged a sedan-chair with difficulty through the press. Many hands lifted the fallen boy, his brocades now blotched with crimson. The lady ascended the chair, received the inert form beside her, the half-door was fastened, and the chairmen heaved up the poles. The attentive surgeon walked beside.

  “Let us go along,” said my benevolent friend with concern, “for I perceive this lady needs a friend.”

  I followed along towards Covent Garden; but I had another kind of friend waiting in a bagnio there, and at Lady Julia’s door in Russell Street I
parted for the night.

  Frustration ensued. My little Cytherean with the dimple, after all, embezzled my gold and left me standing, no doubt following some deeper purse to a more fashionable bagnio; and thus she passes from my story. I went late to my lodging in an evil mood, slept but ill, and rose to melancholy. Then when I called in Bolt Court, looking for the consolations of philosophy, Dr. Johnson was from home.

  Not until evening did we meet. We dined together at the Mitre. I was silent as to the perfidious orange-girl; but over a mighty cut off the joint, my benevolent friend adverted to the tragedy at the theatre, and imparted something of its consequences.

  “At my urging,” he remarked with satisfaction, “little Davy Garrick at Drury Lane has consented to lay upon the shelf the resurrection of Harlequin Deadman as long as the publick is shocked by the doings of the real Resurrection Men.”

  “And what of the bereaved mother, Lady Julia?”

  “Calling in Russell Street, I found her resolved that these ghouls shll not have the remains of Patrick. She fears that they may snatch him from the very house of mourning, and perhaps justly so, for certain it is, that it was a body-snatcher’s trick, almost successful, when yon bravo in the bag-wig claimed kin and would have carried him off but for Lady Julia’s arrival. She is made wary. The body has been shrouded and coffined, and the lid made fast, by her own hands. The wake is in progress, and in the morning the body will be consigned to earth, to be kept under strong guard while the cadaver is fresh. Pah! It destroys the appetite!”

  My sturdy friend, falling silent, applied an undestroyed appetite to the demolishing of a toothsome veal pye. I lent a hand. Not ’til it was consumed did he lean back with a sigh.

  “Come, then, Mr. Boswell, we are expected at Lady Julia’s.”

  “What, sir, will you make one at a wake, and join in the pillaloo or Irish howl?”

  “I will do more than that for a distrest mother.”

  We found Lady Julia’s house decked in deep mourning. Sable crape draped the doorway and muffled the knocker. The door was opened to us by a sombre-clad footman with a pugnacious bog-trotter’s face, and we stood in an entrance hall hung from ceiling to floor with rich mourning trappings laced with silver. From within sounded the low moans and loud howls of the Irish pillaloo.