“Probably all the speculation with which the newspaper columns have teemed will prove creations of … impalpable fabric,” one jaundiced critic observed, while the Daily Express mocked the experts’ furious debating with a doggerel Ballad of Georgiana (with apologies to Tennyson’s Oriana), which was almost as bad as some of the odes to the duchess during her lifetime:
Our hearts were wasted with our woe—
’Twas five-and-twenty years ago,
You left us in the winter snow,
And didn’t even let us know,
The next address to find you—oh,
Georgiana!
And now, when we have got you back,
We get this very nasty smack,
From folks who surely culture lack,
Or like a silly joke to crack—
That you’re no better than a quack—
Georgiana!
They say that if you are the same
You really sneak another’s fame,
In fact, they venture now to claim
The picture stolen from the frame,
Was Lady Hetty What’s-her-name,
Georgiana!
And worse than all, they loudly bawl,
You’re not a Gainsborough at all,
The expert’s proof they blandly call,
That black is white, and short is tall,
That Paul is Peter, Peter Paul,
Georgiana!
So if you are not you, ’tis clear,
You’re not the party who was here,
And if of Gainsborough’s you’re a mere
Rough sketch, I think it must appear,
You’re neither lost nor found, my dear,
Georgiana!
The return of the Gainsborough had breathed new vigor into the mythology surrounding the Duchess of Devonshire. It had precisely the opposite effect on Adam Worth. Sensing that time was short, he set about reclaiming his children with a determination he had never shown while the painting held him back. Hitherto, Worth’s life had been defined by his possessions, but now he struggled to capture something more valuable and intangible: the Duchess had symbolized what he aspired to take and own, but his children might finally be a reflection of what he now wanted to be.
His first act on returning to London had been to send money to his brother in Brooklyn with instructions to send over young Harry, now aged fourteen, and his younger sister as soon as possible. But even this was proving elusive. His sister-in-law, sensing that Worth was once again “in the money,” flatly refused to release the children to their father without a substantial payment. Worth was livid, and wretched. In June 1901, he wrote to Pinkerton, excoriating “that brother and sister-in-law of mine” for their disloyalty and greed, and suspecting that his children’s minds had been poisoned against him.
“I have kept them all my life, and they expect me to continue. She is a dirty, hypocritical cow; she professes to be religious, but as I told her every rag on her body, the house she lives in, are the proceeds of—[he was careful not to use the word “crime,” lest the letter should fall into the wrong hands]. She has been cunning enough to get a hold on the children and probably frighten them by hints, so they will not come over here; but that is done for their own selfish interest, not for the children’s sake. Three years ago, when I had no money, they wrote me that they could keep them no longer … There is only one way to do [it], and that is to starve them out. When no more money is forthcoming, the children will be glad to come over.” Worth, ever the “roast,” still held to a residual belief in the ultimate controlling power of money.
Lonely, drunken, and plaintive, Worth cut himself off from all human company. Word had reached the underworld of his return to London, and some of his colleagues from the criminal past looked him up for money, as in the old days, or to see whether Worth had anything profitable afoot. He sent them away with a little loose change and the firm impression that the onetime master criminal was now firmly in retirement.
William Pinkerton, once his sworn enemy, was now the only human being in whom Worth placed any trust. He wrote the detective long, distressed letters, usually in cryptic “secret writing” and signed with the alias “Robert R. Bayley.” On his better days Worth gossiped about mutual acquaintances in the criminal world, but for the most part his missives were, as Worth admitted, “boozy” rants against his ill fortune, his mercenary relatives, and his failing health. “I am little better on the chest,” he wrote of the coughing fits that left him shivering and weak. “Not so much blood but I am afraid it is only temporary, as I have these awful night sweats and cough.” Pinkerton wrote back with genuine concern, more like an anxious brother than a world-famous detective to an elite member of the criminal fraternity.
Their relationship had long passed beyond the merely professional. Both were hard men—the Pinkertons’ union-busting techniques had made William a hate figure for many working Americans—but both had psychological weaknesses that seemed to find release in their friendship. Perhaps Pinkerton saw in Worth the rebellion against authority that eased some of his resentment against a dour father and a life spent obeying the rules. The detective had risked his professional reputation in the Gainsborough affair, for if Agnew’s or Scotland Yard ever learned how closely he was in league with Worth he would have been hard put to defend himself. Worth, conversely, seemed to look on his friendship with the detective as a justification for his past, proof that during their long battle on opposite sides of the law they had played by the same rules of honor and respect—a tribute that meant more to Worth now than all the fake “respectability” he had stolen. The Eye had long protected Worth from prosecution; now he sought to protect him from himself.
“Friend H.,” the detective wrote from Chicago. “You have no idea how sad it made me feel to have you write in the despondent manner in which you do … the sooner you get out of the atmosphere of London, the better it will be, and would advise that you come at once to this country and go to Colorado, where the altitude is very beneficial for people suffering from pulmonary trouble.
“I want to say to you, Harry, that the excessive use of liquor has a good deal to do with your trouble. I know that you were on one or two big sprees, and they must have considerable to do with the bringing about of your present condition. I find that nobody can drink in sociability without taking liquor to excess, and it is bound to create no end of trouble, therefore I have stopped the use of it entirely.”
Pinkerton sent his friend poems cut from the local paper, snippets of underworld news, and the latest racing results. He tried to buck Worth up with news about the Duchess of Devonshire, perhaps inadvertently reminding him of his loss. “I have had several nice letters from the client for whom I worked in connection with the picture, and he is very well satisfied with everything that was done for him.” So friendly had the correspondence become between the two that William’s more cautious brother was alarmed. “I think you write this man too fully,” Robert Pinkerton told William. “He is liable to be arrested and his mail gotten hold of. I am aware that it is written in typewriting and signed by an initial and nothing could be proved back, but there are things said in this letter that would enable any shrewd detective to guess who the probable writer is … If this letter was to fall into Scotland Yard hands, would they not think that we ought to inform them of any such man being in Europe at the present time and living in London?” William was contrite. He promised his brother he would “stop this correspondence entirely,” and did no such thing. His imprudent loyalty to Worth now far outweighed that to Scotland Yard.
As the letters passed back and forth, the detective and the criminal discussed how Worth could best use his remaining money. “I urged upon him to invest … in securities, and leave the same in my care,” for the benefit of his children, Pinkerton later recalled in a letter to Worth’s son. “I urged upon him at that time to quit Europe and come back here … and with the means he had to settle down to some little business … he took seriously
to the matter and thought he would like to locate at Hot Springs, Ark., and I told him that would be a good idea and to bring yourself and your sister out here and with the means he then had he could easily have started himself in a nice little business in Hot Springs and made a good living for you all, and his health would have been much improved. I feared his return to London among genial companions would be too much for him in the state of health he was then in.” The genial companions Pinkerton referred to, of course, came in bottled, not human form.
In a late burst of his old ingenuity, Worth began to discuss again his ideas for making a burglar-proof safe alarm, a gadget he was uniquely qualified to perfect. But as his battle to secure his children dragged on, and crippling headaches beset Worth (Pinkerton ascribed them to a “tumor”), both he and the detective seem to have realized that the talk of moving to Arkansas, of investments and burglar alarms, was mere dreaming. Time was running out, and Worth’s need to bring together his family had become desperate. Finally he swallowed his pride and agreed to send his avaricious sister-in-law as much money as she wanted, if only she would send his children to England. She agreed, but the price was high. Worth was now virtually penniless once again.
Late in 1901, the children finally arrived in Camden where their father, according to Pinkerton, “had fitted up a nice home.” For almost the first time in his life, Worth was at the center of a family. He was determined to prevent his children from finding out about his crimes, and Pinkerton remained convinced that they “knew nothing of his past career.” But the younger Harry Raymond was no fool; the teenager may have caught more than an inkling of his father’s unorthodox profession. “He told me little or nothing about his affairs,” the young man later confided to Pinkerton, but in the same letter he stressed his intention “to put my shoulder to the wheel and earn an honest living, which will always be my desire to do.” Would a young man take so much trouble to emphasize his honesty if there was no reason to doubt it?
Even his children knew Adam Worth as Henry Judson Raymond, and to the end the master crook kept up the façade that had served him so well for years. If his children suspected he was other than the respectable if ailing businessman he appeared to be, they at least had the generosity to grant him this one last delusion and disguise.
On December 31, 1901, Agnew’s Seventh Annual Exhibition came to an end and was pronounced a rousing success by all. Pierpont Morgan prepared to take possession of his trophy. Despite being seriously ill, Worth “would consult no doctor” and insisted on leaving the house to visit his old friend in Old Bond Street one last time. When the Duchess was finally taken down and out of his life, Worth’s spirit crumbled at last and he took to his bed. Weak, but in a spirit of liberation, he wrote to Pinkerton for the last time, enclosing a package—containing what little money he still possessed after his sister-in-law’s final demands had been met—and thanking the detective for his many acts of kindness. Pinkerton was free to speak about him after his death, but, if possible, Worth asked him to avoid causing his son and daughter any embarrassment. He also told his son to contact Pinkerton when the end came. His family later reported that he seemed oddly elated, his gray cheeks flushed a little, as if some weight had been removed from his emaciated shoulders.
On January 4, Pierpont Morgan, Worth’s unencountered soul mate and fellow expert in elegant double standards, transferred to Agnew’s the sum of $30,000 and arranged for the Duchess to be delivered to 13, Princes Gate, his great five-story neoclassical mansion south of Hyde Park (which would later become the ambassadorial residence for Joseph P. Kennedy and home to the future American President, John F. Kennedy). Morgan would prove just as jealous a protector of the Duchess as Worth had been. He declined to exhibit the portrait again, and flatly refused permission for engravings to be made—to the fury of Morland Agnew, who had hoped to give one to Pinkerton as an expression of thanks for his role in its reappearance. “Mr Morgan will not allow the painting to be engraved at all, and we are powerless to do anything,” spluttered the enraged art dealer. “I trust he will relent later.” But Morgan didn’t. He was determined to keep the Duchess for his private pleasure.
Morgan brought the same absolutism to picture-hanging that he sought in every other aspect of his life. Some years later King Edward VII came to tea at Prince’s Gate and noticed another great portrait, the Countess of Derby by Lawrence.
“The ceiling is too low in this room for that picture. Why do you hang it there?” demanded the King.
“Because I like it there, sir,” snapped the magnate.
Nobody, monarchs included, told Pierpont Morgan where to put his pictures, and there was no doubt in his mind where the Duchess of Devonshire should now reside. The great Gainsborough was hung in pride of place above the mantelpiece, the most prominent position in the house. The Duchess was a badge of social prominence and sexual conquest, and a symbol of worldly success, for a second time and for another man.
On January 8, 1902, four days after Morgan finally took possession of the Noble Lady and just a few miles away in Camden, the man who had kept her for twenty-five years lay quietly, his son and daughter near at hand. The pain throughout his body had slowly ebbed, leaving Adam Worth pathetically feeble, but exuberant. “I left his room to go down to my supper and he seemed to be in the best of spirits,” young Harry Raymond reported. “When I came back to his room he was, as I thought, sleeping; several hours afterwards the landlady went into the room and came out to me and said that she did not like the looks of my father and requested me to go in, and I did so, but my father had quietly passed away without a struggle.”
The death certificate described Henry Judson Raymond as a man of “independent means” whose death, at the age of fifty-six, was the result of heart failure, disease of the liver, and, in the coroner’s disapproving phrase, “chronic habits of intemperance.”
Harry Raymond, Jr., buried his father in Highgate Cemetery, where he lies still in an unmarked, “common” grave, overgrown by a thicket of brambles, and without headstone or any other marker. The burial register for plot number 34281 is made out in the name of Henry Judson Raymond. Even in death, Adam Worth was someone else, and perhaps it is only right that a man who adopted and shed so many aliases lies forever without a sign to betray his whereabouts.
Young Harry Raymond, still bearing the name his father had filched thirty years before, sold off the furniture in 2, Park Village East, and headed back to America with his younger sister. Two weeks after Worth’s death, the Pinkertons received a note, postmarked St. Paul, Minnesota: “I beg to state to you that my father (Harry J. Raymond) passed away on the 8th January between six and seven in the evening,” signed H. J. Raymond.
Robert, the more cynical of the Pinkerton brothers, was inclined to suspect another ruse on the part of the arch-counterfeiter, who had, after all, faked his death before. “Do you think it could possibly be a trick on the old fellow’s part to deceive us before he went into some other scheme of robbery?” he wrote to his brother. But William was convinced, and immediately penned a reply, making no mention of Worth’s past:
Yours of the 24th informing me of the death of your father, came to me in the light of a shock. I had a letter from your father about the first of the year, telling me he had been quite ill … I wrote him stating I hoped he would take good care of himself and get himself fully restored to health.
I have known your father for over 30 years, and though our lives were very different, yet there was always a warm friendship between us. I hope he has left you in some sort of condition to take care of yourselves. I regret your father’s death very much. It seems incredible that a few months ago your father was here with me and enjoyed his visit very much … Your father used to talk very much about his children, and his whole life seemed centered in you two. Nobody wishes you better luck than myself. In deep sympathy, believe me,
Sincerely yours,
W. A. Pinkerton
According to one account, Worth left a will
, “proved in the autumn of 1907, [which] showed that he died possessed of about £23,000.” There is no evidence to corroborate this, and plenty to suggest that Worth died with nothing. Young Harry soon wrote to Pinkerton again: “My father left little or no money, and after paying the funeral expenses and our passages back to America, we are practically penniless … but I am working for the future so that it will enable me to provide both for myself and my sister who is entirely dependent on me for support.” Clearly suspecting that there was more to his father’s past, the young man pressed the detective for information: “My father often used to speak of you … you will no doubt be able to enlighten me to things regarding my father that I do not know and that would interest me greatly.”
The detective kept both sides of his bargain with the dead thief. He sent Worth’s final package, which at least ensured that the two young people would not starve, and over the coming years he stood as guardian to each of them. He never directly discussed Worth’s criminal past with them, describing Worth only as “a man of great inventive ideas” and stressing his “kindness of heart.” His decorous observation to Worth’s son that their lives had been “very different” was as far as he was prepared to go.
“I shall always have a kind remembrance of your father, for while we had not met in years up until two years ago, and then again a year ago, still we always had a kindly feeling for each other and I would willingly do anything consistently in my power to aid either you or your sister.” It is a tribute to the affection Worth could inspire, and the size of Pinkerton’s heart, that the letters betray genuine grief at the loss of his old enemy and friend. “I was very sorry, indeed, to hear of the little fellow’s death,” he wrote to his brother. “I think we were about the only people he ever trusted. His prolonged sprees undoubtedly helped to shorten his life.”
NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime Page 31