The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector

by Lillian de la Torre

  “Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell, your servant!”

  It was the undertaker, swelling and grand in black broadcloth.

  “What, good Mr. Blackstock, sir, yours!”

  The man was known to us, for we had met at Dilly’s, under more congenial circumstances. Mr. Blackstock, the society undertaker, broad in the shoulder and short in the leg, had a face that reminded me of that pair of Greek masks, one broad grin alternating with a professional countenance of distress. He wore the latter now, mouth corners turned down and eyes turned up.

  “A sad occasion, sir,” he intoned; “and,” he added in a confidential murmur, “a strange one. These Irish are too much for me! No expense spared on trappings of woe—” He glanced with approval at the costly velvet hangings. “—night made hideous by heathenish howlings—” The pillaloo rose to a loud keen, wavered, and fell. “No wax figure to display as in my father’s time; no hatchment, no loved countenance preserved through my art; but shrouded, coffined and screwed down in haste, and hugger-mugger off to the grave in the morning! I’ll never understand the Irish!”

  “Lady Julia is apprehensive for the safety of the remains,” remarked Dr. Johnson. “And she has cause, sir, she has cause.”

  Mr. Blackstock looked put about.

  “Most unfortunate, that, sir, last year,” he muttered, “but I did all I could, the usual guards at the grave, spring-guns, and so on; and so I shall again, with close supervision too. Lady Julia may make herself easy.”

  “I will tell her so,” said Dr. Johnson.

  Mr. Blackstock bent his weeds in a bow that would have done honour to an archbishop, and we passed withinside.

  In a parlour hung with black, the coffin stood dark, covered with a rich sable velvet pall. Candles flickered at head and foot. Around it knelt the inferior Irish females of the household, tearing at their dishevelled locks and ululating with a will. Even ladies of the better sort moaned into their pocket handkerchiefs, and gentlemen stood by looking grave. A strong posse of rough-cut Irish footmen put about the consoling glass, and often retired to the kitchen, there presumably to console themselves with similar potations.

  In all the hullabaloo, little Lady Julia sat erect, silent, dry-eyed and grim. To my surprise, Dr. Hardiman the surgeon had ingratiated himself, for he stood by her, gently smiling, with hartshorn bottle at the ready, and when her duties called her away, he supported her steps.

  With doleful countenance, Mr. Blackstock tiptoed softly among us, distributing the trappings of woe. Elaborate “weepers,” white bows fluttering fringe, soon adorned every arm. Rich mourning garments were passed out, black shammy gloves, Italian crape hat-bands, silk mourning scarves, and the finest of funereal cloaks, black broadcloth from neck to heel, and deep-hooded, to hide the ravages of tears. Tearless, the bereaved mother submitted to be swathed in a long black crape veil.

  As the candles paled with the waning of night, the bearers shouldered the coffin and bore it out in the grey of dawn. At the door six black horses waited with the hearse, of carved wood black-painted, and surmounted by a sooty solemn crest of tall nodding feathers. The coffin was slid in. We mounted the mourning coaches, and the cortège paced off to the tolling of the church bells, bearing the slain boy to his resting-place in the churchyard of St.-Mark-in-the-Fields.

  St. Mark is no longer in the fields, for the city has moved out that way; but the churchyard still extends alongside, massy wall, ivied lych-gate, solemn yew-tree, old grey tombstones, all very fit for our melancholy obseques.

  Of the funeral sermon, whined out with a snuffle by a pursy divine, I say nothing; but at last we stood by the opened grave. A wall-eyed sexton and his muscular helper stood by, looking, I thought, rather too pleased for the nature of the occasion; but no doubt they had been well fee’d.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—” The first clods fell upon the coffin, and the sexton and his man wielded spades with a will to close the grave. I wondered how soon it would be opened in unholy resurrection.

  The mourning coaches departed, but a knot of us lingered: the sexton, Mr. Blackstock and his men, Mr. Saunders Welch, Dr. Johnson and myself. We remained to observe as Mr. Blackstock took his measures for the safety of the cadaver. With his own hands he set the mechanism of a wicked-looking spring-gun. As the wall-eyed sexton stacked his shovels against the wall, still grinning, two rough-clad fellows took up their post by the raw grave. Each was armed with a blunderbuss; but they looked neither intelligent nor resolute. Would they avail to stand off the body-snatchers?

  My gorge rose as I imagined to myself the horrid scene—the loose earth shovelled away in hurried silence in the dark of the moon, the rending sound as the coffin is riven, the pallid form torn from its winding-sheet, huddled by brutal hands into a sack; the chink of the Anatomist’s coin as he pays off the criminals, his indecent satisfaction as he bares his scalpel and carves his silent victim like butcher’s meat. No endeavour, no expense, seemed too much to avoid such a fate.

  These gloomy reflections haunted me as the daylight hours passed in indifferent affairs. Waiting on Dr. Johnson in Bolt Court as twilight fell, I found that he had apprehensions as gloomy. Trusting as little as I to the abilities of the fellows on guard, he proposed that we should add ourselves, unheralded, to the churchyard watch. Sore against my inclination, but much by my will, I repaired with him to St. Mark’s.

  There, unseen, we took up our watch in a corner of the ivy-covered church wall, where in a niche some by-gone vicar had concealed a chill stone seat in the yew-tree’s dusky shade. Our mourning cloaks cloathed us from top to toe in impenetrable shadow. In the moonless night I dimly saw the shape of the fresh grave close by, where in silence the watchers passed and repassed like centinels.

  As the hours rolled around, to my imagination the darkness seemed astir all around us. Vapours arose like ghosts and walked among the gravestones. Once I thought I saw a knot of cloaked figures flit through the lych-gate and silently enter the church porch. Once a black-swathed shape rose tall like a spectre behind me. My hair stood up on my head, and my tongue clove to my palate.

  “Abate your horripilation, Mr. Boswell,” breathed the apparition, “for I am no noctambulant, only your friend, Saunders Welch, come to bear you company.”

  We sat on. The church bell’s solemn chime told hour upon hour. At the dead time of night, at last, a chaise drew up outside the churchyard wall. A moment later, dimly seen figures came over the wall, there was a stir by the grave-side, and we heard the whisper of shovels in loose earth.

  “The body-snatchers!” I gasped. “What, sir, shall we not fall upon them?”

  “No, sir. To abate this nuisance, we must take them red-handed. Let them dig.”

  Mr. Welch growled in his throat, but made no move. In the faint starlight, shovels swung. Piled earth rose. At last, we heard shovel strike upon plank. Then followed the shriek of riven wood. Hands reached down, and slowly the sheeted form rose out of the earth, gleaming with an eerie light. One of the body-snatchers cried out.

  “Pah! Afraid of moonlight?” sneered a voice. “Off with the winding, man, make haste!”

  Many hands tore at the winding sheet. The gleaming cerements fell away, and there appeared a thing of horror—not a body fresh in its youthful beauty, but a skeleton shining as with the phosphorescent light of decay.

  There was a scream, an oath, and the Resurrection Men scattered.

  “After them!” I cried.

  “Be easy, sir,” said tall Welch. “My men are ready for them. Come along.”

  Outside the lych-gate there was a confused scuffle, oaths, the sound of blows. As we passed through, we were surrounded by dark forms of captors and captured.

  “You mistake me, good fellows,” cried a resonant voice, “I am no body-snatcher, but Lady Julia’s friend, Dr. Hardiman, come hither in her interest.”

  “The surgeon! A friend!” exclaimed the Bow Street man who held him pinioned. “A likely story!”

  “See,” said the surgeo
n with a smile, “my hands are clean.”

  In that darkness it was hardly to be seen whether they were or no; but Dr. Johnson assented at once: “They are so. Unhand him, good fellow.”

  “And me,” exclaimed another captive whose voice I knew. The starlight fell on the lugubrious face of Mr. Blackstock the undertaker.

  “Mr. Welch!” he cried. “Bid these boobies release me, for I come on the same errand as you and the surgeon, to see to my dead-watch and baffle the Sack-’em-up Men, and I desire you’ll release me at once.”

  “Stay,” said Dr. Johnson, “look at his hands.”

  “They are clean!” cried Mr. Blackstock.

  They may have been clean of graveyard mold, but as tall Welch turned up the palms, they glowed weirdly in the dark.

  “’Tis enough,” said Dr. Johnson with satisfaction. “You are caught, sir, if not red-handed, yet with traces on your palms put there by Harlequin’s chymically glowing shroud. You are detected, sir; you have gone about to rob your own grave!”

  Other glowing palms told the same tale and soon the whole squad of Sack-’em-up Men stood detected. Among them, not at all to my surprise, grinned the sexton. Of course it was he who had disconnected the spring-gun.

  “Bravo, Dr. Johnson!” cried a soft voice, as a black-cloaked figure emerged from the church porch. “Your strategem has succeeded!”

  Putting back the mourning hood, Lady Julia stood revealed, smiling and sparkling in the faint light that began to grey the East.

  “Shall I have no credit?” A second form stood forth. I stared in disbelief—the fine eyes, the fair face—there stood young Patrick Fitzpatrick, whom I thought I had seen laid in the grave!

  “I’m not so easy killed,” the boy grinned at my astonishment, “more especially when I find a skilled surgeon to nurse my wound—”

  “A meer scratch,” murmured Dr. Hardiman. “And the heart’s in the right place too.”

  “To nurse me like a friend,” said the youth with emotion, “nay, like a father—”

  “Which I yet shall be,” smiled the surgeon, and the Lady Julia gave him smile for smile.

  “So I mended, and ’twas but lying low for some thirty hours by Dr. Johnson’s plan. Nay,” said the youth with a schoolboy’s relish, “’twas a splendid bam! Building up a dummy inside Harlequin’s gear, with my lady mother’s wig stand for a head—and so trapping the villain that stole my father’s body!”

  The undertaker cursed to himself.

  “And there—” The young voice hardened. “—here stands the scoundrel that murdered him!”

  The body-snatcher he pointed to started back with an oath.

  “I recognized him in the throng at the theatre, lying in wait for me, I doubt not. But before I could dollar him, he nicked me and got away; and hence comes all the rest of this comedy of Dr. Johnson’s devising.”

  “Retribution shall be exacted,” said Mr. Welch. “Conduct them to the round-house.”

  “So, boy,” said Dr. Johnson, “our task is done. Thanks to Mr. De Loutherbourg’s chymical paint, which I had of Davy Garrick along with Harlequin’s gear, Mr. Blackstock’s villainy is detected. He will snatch no more by night the bodies he buries by day; and so farewell to the Resurrection Men!”

  [The gruesome profession of the Resurrection Men—digging up dead bodies to be sold for anatomical specimens—was a matter of supply and demand. In Dr. Johnson’s day, dissection was legal—if you could get a subject to dissect. Surgeon’s Hall got the cadavers of certain criminals condemned to hanging and anatomizing, but with many private anatomical schools going full blast, there were never enough of them to go round. Resurrection Men supplied the rest.

  Contests between the bereaved and the Sack-’em-up Men were macabre. It is told in my husband’s family how his grandfather and great-uncles in Glasgow, armed, stood guard over their mother’s grave by night until they were sure the body had mouldered. Guards, spring-guns, patent-lock iron coffins, “mort-safes” of iron bars, nothing was certain. My story deals with such a contest.

  Grave-robbing was worth the effort. A full-grown fresh cadaver might bring four guineas “smalls” one guinea or more according to size. Unique specimens brought more. One anatomist ordered up the body of a man he had operated on twenty-four years before (to see how the patching held up), and it cost him £. 13/12. To obtain the Irish Giant in 1783, Surgeon John Hunter had to pay the dead-watchers a bribe of £500 and transport the naked cadaver in his own coach.

  In time, several ingenious Sack-’em-up Men decided it was easier to murder than to dig—Bishop, Williams and May in London, and the famous firm of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh. The exposure of their activities finally brought reform, which put the Resurrection Men out of business. But that is another story.

  For more about the Resurrection Men, see James Moore Ball, The Sack-’em-Up Men (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1928).]

  MILADY BIGAMY

  “I have often thought,” remarked Dr. Sam: Johnson, one Spring morning in the year 1778, “that if I kept a seraglio—”

  He had often thought!—Dr. Sam: Johnson, moral philosopher, defender of right and justice, detector of crime and chicane, had often thought of keeping a seraglio! I looked at his square bulk, clad in his old-fashioned full-skirted coat of plain mulberry broadcloth, his strong rugged countenance with his little brown scratch-wig clapped on askew above it, and suppressed a smile.

  “I say, sir, if I kept a seraglio, the houris should be clad in cotton and linen, and not at all in wool and silk, for the animal fibres are nasty, but the vegetable fibres are cleanly.”

  “Why, sir,” I replied seriously, “I too have long meditated on keeping a seraglio, and wondered whether it may not be lawful to a man to have plurality of wives, say one for comfort and another for shew.”

  “What, sir, you talk like a heathen Turk!” growled the great Cham, rounding on me. “If this cozy arrangement be permitted a man, what is to hinder the ladies from a like indulgence?—one husband, say, for support, and ’tother for sport? ’Twill be a wise father then that knows his own heir. You are a lawyer, sir, you know the problems of filiation. Would you multiply them? No, sir: bigamy is a crime, and there’s an end on’t!”

  At this I hastily turned the topick, and of bigamy we spoke no more. Little did we then guess that a question of bigamy was soon to engage my friend’s attention, in the affair of the Duchess of Kingsford—if Duchess in truth she was.

  I had first beheld this lady some seven years before, when she was Miss Bellona Chamleigh, the notorious Maid of Honour. At Mrs. Cornelys’s Venetian ridotto she flashed upon my sight, and took my breath away.

  Rumour had not exaggerated her flawless beauty. She had a complection like strawberries and cream, a swelling rosy lip, a nose and firmset chin sculptured in marble. Even the small-pox had spared her, for the one mark it had left her touched the edge of her pouting mouth like a tiny dimple. In stature she was low, a pocket Venus, with a bosom of snow tipped with fire. A single beauty-spot shaped like a new moon adorned her perfect navel—

  I go too far. Suffice it to say that for costume she wore a girdle of silken fig-leaves, and personated Eve—Eve after the fall, from the glances she was giving her gallants. One at either rosy elbow, they pressed her close, and she smiled upon them impartially. I recognised them both.

  The tall, thin, swarthy, cadaverous apparition in a dark domino was Philip Piercy, Duke of Kingsford, once the handsomest Peer in the Kingdom, but now honed to an edge by a long life of dissipation. If he was no longer the handsomest, he was still the richest. Rumour had it that he was quite far gone in infatuation, and would lay those riches, with his hand and heart, at Miss Bellona’s feet.

  Would she accept of them? Only one obstacle intervened. That obstacle stood at her other elbow: Captain Aurelius Hart, of H.M.S. Dangerous, a third-rate of fifty guns, which now lay fitting at Portsmouth, leaving the gallant Captain free to press his suit.

  In person, the Captain wa
s the lady’s match, not tall, but broad of shoulder, and justly proportioned in every limb. He had farseeing light blue eyes in a sun-burned face, and his expression was cool, with a look of incipient mirth. The patches of Harlequin set off his muscular masculinity.

  With his name too Dame Rumour had been busy. He had won the lady’s heart, it was averred; but he was not likely to win her hand, being an impecunious younger son, tho’ of an Earl.

  So she passed on in her nakedness, giving no sign of which lover—if either—should possess her.

  A black-avised young fellow garbed like the Devil watched them go. He scowled upon them with a look so lowering I looked again, and recognised him for Mr. Eadwin Maynton, Kingsford’s nephew, heir-presumptive to his pelf (tho’ not his Dukedom), being the son of the Duke’s sister. If Bellona married his uncle, it would cost Mr. Eadwin dear.

  The audacity of the Maid of Honour at the masquerade had been too blatant. She was forthwith banished from the Court. Unrepentant, she had rusticated herself. Accompanied only by her confidential woman, one Ann Crannock, she slipped off to her Aunt Hammer’s country houe at Linton, near Portsmouth.

  Near Portsmouth! Where lay the Captain’s ship! No more was needed to inflate the tale.

  “The Captain calls daily to press his suit.”

  “The Captain has taken her into keeping.”

  “There you are out, the Captain has wedded her secretly.”

  “You are all misled. The Dangerous has gone to sea—the Captain has deserted her.”

  “And serve her right, the hussy!”

  The hussy Maid of Honour was not one to be rusticated for long. Soon she was under their noses again, on the arm of the still infatuated Duke of Kingsford. Mr. Eadwin Maynton moved Heaven and earth to forestall a marriage, but only succeeded in mortally offending his wealthy uncle. Within a year of that scandalous masquerade, Miss Bellona Chamleigh was Duchess of Kingsford.