A Fugitive Englishman

by Roy Lewis

  To take her mind from her ordeal, I asked, ‘Where is your husband at the moment?’

  She shrugged. ‘Mr Stocqueler? In Canada, I believe. Doing what, I am not certain. Recruiting soldiers. Journalism. Writing a book. Who knows? At least it keeps him away from the New York theatres.’ She glanced at me, sadly. ‘Do you know Miss Agnes Cameron?’

  I frowned, hesitated. ‘An actress, I believe. She’s given some benefit performances in aid of wounded Union troops, according to the New York Clipper.’

  Eliza nodded. ‘She is nineteen. I am past thirty. These things are important to Mr Stocqueler.’

  I had heard so. Your father had a penchant for young girls. There seemed little I could say further on the topic. We were silent; while refocusing, she at last gazed around the room, noting her surroundings. She took in the sight of the sagging bed with its single blanket, the grimy washstand, the faded pornographic prints on the wooden walls. Her eyes turned to mine.

  ‘You know this place well.’

  I shrugged. There was no point in dissimulation. ‘I have rarely been here, but it is one of the establishments where women can appear at the grocery downstairs. Most saloons are masculine retreats.’ I looked about me. ‘There are many such groceries in this area. My work . . . it brings me into the Five Points from time to time. But you will be safe here for a while. The mob won’t attack their own rat holes.’

  ‘Your work?’ she asked, puzzled.

  I could not elaborate too much. Colonel Baker’s was a secret employment. ‘My work in the police courts necessitates my talking to people in the Five Points. Much of the city crime emanates from this area.’

  ‘I can believe it.’ She shuddered.

  We stayed at the Crown Grocery, Eliza and I, for almost two hours. Downstairs, Susan Crown, drawing her own conclusions about our stay, must have marvelled at my stamina. But we just talked, Eliza and I, about the old days in London, the theatres, the success enjoyed for a while by the Diorama, and we got to know each other better. She spoke little of your father, but I knew his character well enough, and I felt sorry for her. I could guess where his regular absences were leading. It had happened before: he had left a wife and child behind him in India, before marrying Eliza Wilson. I wondered if he had ever divorced. . . .

  Then, in the early evening, I heard gusts of wind rise against the leaking old roof of the Crown Grocery and a brief hammering of rain on the grimy window. ‘That’ll cool things down,’ I opined, and after a little while I suggested we might venture out into the streets again.

  The rain did what the police and firemen and militia could not do: it dispersed the mobs, who began to stream back into their rat holes in the Five Points. We managed to make our way back uptown with little difficulty, apart from the sludge we were forced to trudge through, the hardened cake of faeces in the streets soon turning to filthy mud under the rain. I took your mother to the door of her home but did not enter. Nor did she invite me, as I now recall.

  After that, well, I didn’t see her again for . . . what? . . . two years or so. At least that. Our paths did not cross again until one day I met her as she came out of Judge Barnard’s court, as I was going in on Matt Brennan business. She seemed distressed, so I invited her to a nearby tearoom, where I learned she had that day obtained a decree of divorce on the grounds of adultery and desertion. Your father was back in England by then and I believe you were on your third voyage to South America. So I suppose one should not be surprised that your mother and I began to meet from time to time; innocently enough, I assure you. After all, we were both divorced, leading rather lonely lives – I was getting rather too old to continue cavorting with the Jolly Fellows and my work for Colonel Lafayette Baker had ended. I was finding my legal practice was beginning to have a somewhat disreputable reputation because of the stream of Matt Brennan clients who dragged me to defend them in the courtroom and when I finally agreed to go into partnership with Charles Blandy it did not seem to work out well. He was a jealous man, retaining the more interesting cases for himself, and I suspected he wanted me in his office merely for the Matt Brennan connection.

  I was able to talk freely about such problems with Eliza. You know, I found her, right from the beginning, a woman in whom I could confide. Not everything, of course. . . .

  So, yes, that’s how it came about, really. We married . . . when was it? That’s right, 1868. I don’t know where you were at that time . . . Melbourne, was it? Anyway, the marriage has proved to be a comfortable one: there have been none of the tumults of my time with Marianne, but perhaps that was inevitable since I was leading a quieter life. But both your mother and I, well, we each felt a longing to return to our roots: America had not come up to our expectations.

  And it was not long after our marriage that the past loomed up against me once more. I found myself face to face at last with my dreaded Nemesis.

  The leader of the Cork Revengers.

  3

  ‘So, how’s your eyesight now, Mr James?’

  As I’ve explained to you before, a good lawyer never asks a question to which he does not know the answer. Don’t press a question on a witness if you aren’t certain what he’s going to reply. Trap him by all means, lead him into an indiscretion, or a downright lie. But be always on your guard: you might hear something that could blow your case apart. And it’s the same in life outside the courtroom, that’s my contention, and with answering a question you don’t quite understand. Consider the motivation behind the question before you answer it – and if that motivation is not clear, prevaricate until the clouds of indecision clear.

  ‘My eyesight. . . ? It’s well enough, sir.’

  ‘The eye surgeons in Europe, then, they know their business.’

  ‘They have the highest reputation,’ I replied carefully, not knowing where this conversation with a stranger was leading.

  We sat there in my office in Charles Blandy’s premises and looked at each other silently for a little while. I wondered what on earth he was talking about regarding my eyesight. But overriding that question was the more dangerous one: why was this man here in my office?

  My mind drifted back to the day when John Sadleir had asked me to assist in his death. I could smell again the stink of the Dead House where I went to view Sadleir’s body and agreed, lied, that it was indeed his corpse. The money he paid me had helped me into Parliament, but then there was that evening of my inquiry before the Benchers of the Inner Temple when I received the message from Ben Gully.

  ‘Get out of London. NOW.’

  The Cork Revengers were seeking me . . . and in the dark London streets there had been the scuffling, the throat-cutting, the dumping of Cork Revenger Patrick O’Neill into the stinking sludge of the oily Thames.

  At first sight, my visitor Seamus O’Gonagle did not present a threatening sight. He was about my age, thick at the waist, dressed in a somewhat outmoded fashion with his yellow waistcoat and pale-grey trousers. He sported a black satin cravat and a breast pin that glittered in the slanting sun that filtered into the office. His features were ruddy, mastiff-jowled, his stubbly beard greying, and if his gnarled knuckles, tightly gripping the heavy-knobbed stick he carried, were thickened from old battles his body, slumped in the chair facing me, was relaxed, legs crossed at the ankles in casual fashion. But I was never a man to be misled by casual appearances. There was a hint of steel in this dandy Irishman’s eyes. O’Gonagle, Matt Brennan had assured me, was the acknowledged head of the Cork Revengers, the group of Irishmen determined to avenge – with blood if not monetary compensation – the frauds of the swindler John Sadleir . . . and anyone who had conspired with him to avoid his deserved end. Which, as far as I knew, deserved or not, happened to be a comfortable and obscure retirement in Venezuela or some such place.

  ‘You are intimate with my friend Comptroller Matt Brennan, I understand,’ O’Gonagle said at last.

  ‘I have undertaken many briefs in his court,’ I agreed carefully.

  O’Gona
gle nodded. ‘I understand you were a great man in England, sir, a decade ago. But fortune does not seem to have smiled on you to the same extent in the United States.’

  ‘I am not unhappy with my lot,’ I lied. ‘And I am happily married.’

  If I was hoping to soften his steely glint with a mention of my marital state, I failed. He grunted, nodded again, grimaced. ‘I’m not a married man, meself. Though that does not mean I am not an admirer of the female form.’ He glared at me as though daring me to contradict him. Perhaps his mother in Ireland had wanted him to do the traditional thing and become a Catholic priest.

  We sat once again in a strained silence. O’Gonagle continued to observe me, but the steely glint was fading and an odd sadness seemed to appear in his face. He shook his grizzled head after a while, and sighed.

  ‘There is one woman I would have married, without a single moment’s hesitation had I obtained the opportunity. I remember when I first saw her – the perfection of womanhood. She was dressed in boyish fashion but there was no hiding the sublimity of her figure, and the flashing of her eyes struck at me heart, I have no hesitation in telling you. And she bestrode the stage as no woman has ever done before – or could ever do again, in my opinion. Later, in London and in Paris and in Albany I saw her again and again – yes, I travelled like a besotted swain – just for the thrill of seeing her and enthusing over her performance and her beauty. I was overcome by her performance on the back of that galloping steed, her seemingly naked body, her agonized features, the way she held her arms to the skies . . . thrilling, thrilling. . . . And to think, at the end, she left us so young, and with no Dumas, no Swinburne, no Barclay, no Menken, no Newell, no husband, no lover at the graveside to mourn her passing. Deserted by the world.’

  Silence fell once more between us as he grieved. I had stiffened. I now guessed who he was talking about . . . but why was he discussing her death with me? The last time I saw her, it was when I arranged for her passage to London after her attempted suicide.

  ‘You knew her . . . intimately, of course,’ O’Gonagle said with a slight edge to his tone that I understood instinctively.

  ‘We were . . . we were close friends,’ I stammered.

  ‘Closer than many,’ he replied, and the edge to his tone faded, softened. ‘And, I understand, the only one who was loyal to the end.’

  I was staggered to see that his eyes had misted over again, this violent Irishman, head of the Cork Revengers. And you know what happened then, my boy? This murderous Irishman thrust his hand into the breast pocket of his yellow waistcoat and drew out a ragged pamphlet, which he began to read to me! I listened, stupefied, still not understanding what on earth this interview was all about. But the pamphlet – I was so taken aback that later, I obtained my own copy. I have it here somewhere, still . . . let me think, the drawer over there, yes, that’s it! Listen to this! Seamus O’Gonagle sat in front of me in Blandy’s office in New York and read out this passage from the pamphlet. Let me read it to you now from my own dilapidated copy. . . .

  ‘I was losing my sight through an incurable affliction of the eyes, contracted while going to the funeral of Harry Lazarus, who was murdered in New York by Barney Friery. I went to Europe to seek a specialist who might save my eyesight. It occurred to me that the trip might be made commemorative by placing a monument over the remains of Adah Isaacs Menken, who died a few months previous. The great heart had passed away and neither Dumas nor Swinburne, nor any of the thousands of leeches who drank her champagne in life and revelled in her society and manifold charms, knew her in death!’

  ‘So true,’ O’Gonagle sighed, ‘so true!’ Then he continued reading.

  ‘It was with the greatest secrecy and difficulty I managed to carry out my plans as it is strictly against the Jewish customs ever to remove the dead once buried but I finally accomplished my object. The day set apart for the exhumation began with a heavy rainstorm but at eleven the sun shone out in a blaze of glory and at 12.15 I set out from the old cemetery for Cemetiere Montparnasse and the coffin was lowered into the vault. I placed two little mementoes in glass cases – a pansy and a forget-me-not – on the granite cover and arranged about the monument and railings. I arranged, in compliance with her last dear wish, for the inscription. . . .’

  At this point O’Gonagle stopped, his voice breaking slightly, while I remained silent and still bemused. His eyes were glistening with tears.

  ‘The inscription,’ he said at last, ‘was Thou Knowest! You, Mr James, you will know what that means, and I will not intrude upon your patent grief over the loss of a dear friend to enquire of you its meaning!’

  He droned on for a while longer but I hardly heard him. I did not know how to react to his sentimental outpourings about the woman I had known briefly – well enough to cause the breakdown in my first marriage, but nevertheless briefly. When he had finished, he leaned back in his chair, folded the pamphlet, replaced it with exaggerated care in his coat pocket and wiped the back of a knotty-knuckled, hairy hand over each eye, blurred with tears. As I sat silent, stunned with continued incomprehension, he went on.

  ‘When I first read what you had written, Mr James, I was overcome. The way the world treated her! I had seen her in triumph, the glorious Adah, the wonderful, courageous Mazeppa! She had stormed New York, Baltimore, London, Paris . . . the whole world was at her feet! Loved by princes! Befriended by high society! She had Mark Twain and Bret Harte as her admirers, and Dumas, Swinburne and Dickens were held in the palm of her tiny hand. And I adored her! A distant swain! An unrecognized lover! But for all that, she was destined to die alone in a Parisian garret, to be interred without ceremony, disregarded by those she had rewarded. Disregarded, forgotten, ignored by all . . . except by you, Mr James.’

  Then the light slowly dawned upon me. And believe me, my boy, I was so shaken at that stage that I was on the point of opening my mouth to explain his error, the mistake he had made in identities, when I remembered my legal training, my years at the Bar, my understanding of human nature and my appreciation of the weaknesses and foibles that can drive a man to decision. So I closed my lips tightly, and did not explain Seamus O’Gonagle’s error to him.

  He thought it was I who had written the twenty-four page pamphlet, The Life and Times of Adah Menken. I had not.

  You see, when I became an associate editor of the New York Clipper, engaged to produce sporting and theatrical pieces, I was not the only Ed James on the staff! There was also the deputy editor, of the same name! Normally known as Ned James, twenty years younger than me, a follower of pugilistic endeavours and an acquaintance, like me, of John Heenan and Tom Sayers, among other fighting luminaries, he had from an early age been afflicted with worsening eyesight – he ended up blind, in fact, for no European ophthalmologist could do anything for him – but he had one thing in common with me. In the 1860s he had been swept off his feet by Adah Menken – I told you she collected admirers. Indeed, I understand he carried on a long correspondence with her, much more extensive than mine, and even acted as a sort of press agent on her behalf, placing notices in various newspapers, eulogizing her performances. I never doubted that he wanted to be her lover, but though she used him, she never admitted him to her boudoir. Nor for that matter did I achieve that honour, I admit, though there was that one time when we came close. . . .

  But O’Gonagle was not a close reader of the New York Clipper . . . I doubted whether he was inclined to read anything other than accounts of pugilistic endeavours and reviews of his adored Mazeppa. And he had not realized he was talking to the wrong man: it was Ned James who had written Adah’s life story, not I.

  So I sat there, tight-lipped, as the head of the Cork Revengers mopped his glistening eyelids and sighed.

  ‘Your account of her passing affected me deeply, Mr James. Your loyalty, your affection, your love over the years . . . all this spoke to me from your account of her life and death. It’s why I still treasure your account, keep it close to my breast, read it in t
he twilight hours, over and over again. . . . It moves me, sir, it moves me!’

  The Irish were always a remarkably sentimental race. All those sad songs about the Old Country even while they were battering someone with boots and fists and shillelaghs. All those missing Marys, half-remembered hills sweeping down to the sea, sparkling streams and lonely valleys, and their ridiculous beliefs about the Little Folk. . . . Sentimental, but still addicted to murderous violence, rampaging drunkenness, and a deep-seated desire for revenge against the English lords who had trampled on them for centuries . . . and the swindlers of their own kind who had ruined thousands of tenant farmers’ lives. . . . Like John Sadleir.

  O’Gonagle straightened in his chair and fixed me with a clear glare, from which all moisture had now been erased.

  ‘So there you are, Mr James, it’s all over, so it is. Adah. . . . A beautiful life, finished, extinguished before it had given all it could have done to the world. Her inestimable poetry . . . her stage performances. . . .’ He paused, nodded slowly. ‘An immeasurable loss. The light of the world – snuffed out!’ He paused again, sniffing, his eyes welling once more with tears. Then he straightened his shoulders, seemed to regain control of his emotions. ‘You will be aware, sir, I don’t doubt, that we are still on the trail of James Sadleir, for we are certain he was involved with his swindling brother in the destruction of hundreds of livings in Cork. He has disappeared in Europe, but we shall find him one day. And when our sadly-lamented colleague Patrick O’Neill was carrying out his enquiries in London, in 1861, eight and more years ago now, he did transmit certain suspicions to the brethren regarding your role in the business. . . .’

  I was again tempted to speak, but frantically resisted the temptation as my panicked fingers curled around the Navy Colt I carried under my tailcoat.

  ‘We’ve followed your career in New York with a view to one day getting from you the truth – whatever it is – of your association with that scoundrel John Sadleir. But Matt Brennan . . . well, his interests did not coincide with ours and he kept you at arm’s distance from us, for you’ve been useful to him. And now . . . well, I’ve thought long about the matter, and reflected upon it, and I tell you true, Mr James, a man who could write what you did about Miss Adah Menken, the trust and truth and loyalty that shines from those pages, the fact that even though half-blind from your own ocular weaknesses you yet found the time and energy and devotion to seek her out, to retrieve her remains, to arrange for her proper burial. . . . Such behaviour tells a great deal about a man.’