Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector

by Lillian de la Torre

  “Ego te exorciso!” cried Dr. Johnson suddenly in a sonorous voice. The ghostly apparition stiffened by the bed.

  “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,” intoned my intrepid friend appropriately, “non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu …”

  The white-robed figure was gone. I saw this time how it went through the wall and up the stair, and the panel shut behind it with a squeak like a rat in a wainscot.

  “Quick, George,” cried Dr. Johnson, making a light, “the hammer and nails.”

  To my utter astonishment the sturdy carpenter lad proceeded to nail the panel shut and brace it with timbers laid crosswise.

  “Sir, sir,” I cried, “will you not pursue the marauder?”

  “I will not,” replied Dr. Johnson. “The unfortunate creature has been hanged once; let that suffice.”

  George knocked the last nail in place, and none too soon, for there was a mighty wrenching at the other side of the panel, and muffled voices raised in anger.

  “Now, my lad,” said Dr. Johnson, “let us detimbrify this accursed bed, and lay the spectre for good and all.”

  “Alas,” cried the carpenter’s boy in professional dismay, “’tis a shame of so stout a bed!—all of solid oak, and bound with brass besides!”

  “’Twill not be so difficult,” returned Dr. Johnson. “See, the spectre has made a start.”

  He pointed to a breach in the edge, where the side had been forced away. George inserted his crow and pulled mightily. The panel came away with a rending sound.

  “Let us see,” cried Dr. Johnson, directing the light, “what’s within this brass-bound chest.”

  “’Tis only a spare feather-bed,” said the carpenter’s apprentice.

  “An odd place to store an old feather-bed,” mused I, “while the sleeper lies cold above.”

  “Pull it out,” said Dr. Johnson.

  George and I seized each an end, and tugged. The thing was heavy. With a heave it came out onto the floor, clinking as it came.

  “Rip it up, my lad,” cried Dr. Johnson, “’tis Mally’s dowry, or I much mistake.”

  George wielded his case-knife, and cried out as he saw the golden guineas among the drift of feathers. He counted them swiftly.

  “Sixty-nine—ninety—one hundred and seventeen—’tis a fortune! Pray, Dr. Johnson, how came this money here? Whose is it? Is it Mally’s?”

  “’Tis ours, George, we found it,” replied my upright friend. “But were you to ask me, whose was it, I could only reply, it came out of well-lined pockets on the Great North Road. Come, I will divide it with you.”

  And sitting on the edge of White Will’s bed, holding up the single candle dangerously near to the foretop of his little brown scratch-wig, Dr. Johnson picked up guinea for guinea with the awkward young apprentice. I was too stupefied to protest against this high-handed appropriation of treasure trove, or even to ask for my share.

  “And the odd one for you,” concluded Dr. Johnson.

  “Come,” cried the overjoyed apprentice, “let us run and tell Mally.”

  “Run into Mincing Lane at midnight with a pocket full of guineas!” exclaimed Dr. Johnson loudly. “No, no, my lad! We’ll e’en stay here behind locks and bars till the day comes and the good sexton returns with the bailiffs. Pocket your guineas and lock the door behind you. We’ll lie in the lower room by the fire till day.”

  But when the haunted room was locked behind us, Dr. Johnson laid finger to lip and moved his powerful bulk quietly out at the back passageway. The stars were quietly shining in the moonless sky as he went easily over the courtyard wall. George and I scrambled after, and so we came out by the churchyard into Fenchurch Street.

  Strolling up Fleet Street the next morning, I met the sturdy Doctor walking out betimes in the sunny day.

  “Well met, Bozzy,” cried he. “Pray walk along with me.”

  “To what destination?” I enquired curiously.

  JOHNSON: “To Mincing Lane.”

  BOSWELL: “To what end? The family Gudgeon lie in lodgings in Stepney.”

  JOHNSON: “Not so; I have already advertized them that their ghost is laid for good.”

  Though I was eager to review the events of the night as we walked along, not a word would he say, but dwelt upon the advantages of emigration for those ambitious to reform their way and begin a new life. On this matter he was very fluent, until still discoursing eloquently he turned out of Eastcheap into Mincing Lane and knocked peremptorily at the door.

  “Sir, sir,” I cried, “see how events repeat themselves! This is again the wrong house!”

  Already the surly surgeon had wrenched open the heavy black door and was scowling truculently at my venerable companion.

  “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “it has come to my ears that you and your friend have in mind to emigrate and mend your fortunes, which no longer can prosper in London.”

  “Emigrate!” cried the bonesetter with an oath. “No such thing!”

  “You amaze me,” replied Dr. Johnson, “for as I hear it, an information is about to be laid against you, and ’twill go hard with you if you and your friend are found in London.”

  The black scowl grew blacker, but with belated courtesy the burly surgeon stepped back and invited us to enter. I bowed and advanced, but a touch from my intrepid friend deterred me.

  “I thank you,” replied Dr. Johnson courteously, “but my errand is almost done. There remains only to have a word with your friend.”

  “I have no friend,” said the body-snatcher sullenly.

  “I mean your friend,” said Dr. Johnson patiently, “who last year was brought to you from Tyburn in a basket, and astounded you by being still in life. You have been a good friend to him. You have kept him in the country this twelve months past, have you not, for the easing of his throat.”

  “What if I have?” cried Harkebus hoarsely.

  “Come, man, lay aside this stubbornness,” said Dr. Johnson with asperity. “If I meant harm to your friend I would come with a pack of bailiffs at my back. I mean him only good; but what I have for him I will lay in no hands but his own.”

  The surgeon favoured my friend with a long searching scrutiny, then bellowed “Will!” There was a light step in the passage, and the sunlight from the open door fell on the veritable apparition of Mincing Lane. I saw the gaunt white face, with the marks of St. Andrew’s fire reaching along the cheek from the ear like a map of the Peloponnesus; the head on one side and the twisted neck swathed in white cloth. The gaunt creature was wrapped in a dirty fawn-coloured night-gown and wore a kerchief on his cropped head.

  “What’s to do, cully?” he croaked hoarsely.

  Dr. Johnson extended to him a knitted purse weighted down with something heavy.

  “For your journey,” said he.

  “Journey?” croaked the gallows-bird.

  “You are leaving London,” said Dr. Johnson, “and I counsel you to amend your ways in your new life.”

  “The old fogram’s honest!” gasped White Will, hefting the purse of gold.

  “Middling,” replied Dr. Johnson with a smile. “Pray, Mr. Harkebus, satisfy my curiosity.”

  “If I can, sir.”

  “How had your friend the good fortune to be brought to you from Tyburn?”

  “Why, sir, as an accommodation to a business associate of long standing—I bought the anatomy in advance.”

  “Did you so? Who was the gentleman’s heir?”

  “Mumping Mag,” said the surgeon, “my friend’s—ah—doxy.”

  White Will let slip an incomprehensible oath.

  “Ay,” he croaked bitterly, “but she was lagged on Tyburn Hill that very day.”

  “The better, I tell you, Will,” said Harkebus, “or you’d have seen your brass-bound bed no more.”

  Footsteps came around the corner into Mincing Lane. Promptly the burly surgeon slammed the door, and we stood gaping on the door-step as George Tucker stepped proudly towards us.

  He wore his Sunday su
it, with a fire-new fire-coloured neckerchief and on his head a cocked hat with lacing. In his hand was something wrapped in a white silk handkerchief, which he handled tenderly.

  “For Mally,” he said with a grin. “I reckon to be a welcome suitor now.”

  I thought the fat stepmother scowled at the metamorphosed apprentice, but Gudgeon’s melancholy smile gave him candid welcome, and Mally was wearing her Sunday gown. All greeted Dr. Johnson respectfully, and besought him to narrate the laying of the ghost.

  “There’ll be a ballad made on it,” declared Miss Gudgeon fervently.

  At the instance of the philosopher we mounted to the back bedroom.

  “Alack,” cried Miss Gudgeon, “’twas the Devil after all!”

  The brass-bound bedstead was torn apart. In the wall where the sliding panel had been a great hole gaped; on the floor lay George Tucker’s timbers in splinters. The circle of chairs was flung about in disorder.

  “Why,” says Dr. Johnson with a smile, “this was a determined ghost; but I think you’ll see him no more.”

  He poked his head through the aperture; I was not far behind him. We gazed at a pair of shallow steps leading up to a narrow, dusky, airless chamber running the length of the wall.

  “’Tis the priest’s hole,” said Dr. Johnson. “See yonder niche at the end. This was the Clothworker’s oratory.”

  “How knew you it was there?”

  “Why, I was looking for it.” His sonorous voice resounded in the enclosed space. “The Master of the Clothworkers had a priest in the house when they took him; in the days of Elizabeth that argues a priest’s hole.”

  Over our shoulders the elder Gudgeons were craning their necks. When we had stared our fill, we turned to the room again. The young folks were sitting demurely, six feet apart, but something was in the air. George’s face was all one grin. Though Miss Mally’s long lashes were dropped, her cheeks were pink; she wore a posy ring and cradled in her hands a kerchief of white silk.

  She seemed to know that the apparition had been White Will in the flesh, and that the young apprentice had been enriched from the highwayman’s ill-gotten hoard. I was curious to learn by what processes of ratiocination my astute friend had penetrated the deception practised on her, and Dr. Johnson was ready to enlighten us.

  “Sir,” said he, “though I am ready to believe in the supernatural origin of the manifestations of such spectres as Scratching Fanny and White Will, yet I am ever as ready to seek out a more natural explanation. ’Twas clear to me, when I had talked with Mally and her kin, that the rapping, the moaning, and even the apparition, might have been engineered from the priest’s hole by someone desiring to frighten the child.”

  “By whom?” I enquired with interest.

  “Nay, it was too soon to know. I noted Miss Gudgeon’s eagerness to engender belief in the spirit; I noted Mrs. Gudgeon’s eagerness to engender belief that the child was somehow responsible; and I resolved—pray excuse me, ladies—to watch the proceedings of both.”

  “Pray how did I escape notice?” asked Gudgeon in his melancholy voice.

  Dr. Johnson smiled.

  “You did not escape,” he replied, “for though you courted investigation, I bore in mind that perhaps ’twas all done to gain notice to yourself.”

  “Surely,” said I, “those without access to the priest’s hole were not under suspicion.”

  “This is true,” replied Dr. Johnson, “but though it was easy to locate the priest’s hole, I could not know that it did not have means of entrance from every room in the house, ay, and even out of the house, for when it was made, the surgeon’s lodging next door was part of the Clothworker’s domain.”

  “Therefore you summoned Harkebus to watch with us!” I exclaimed.

  “Therefore,” agreed Dr. Johnson. “Watching with Miss Mally, I had every suspected person under my eye. I was able to make sure that no one of them was actually doing the rapping. There was, then, an accomplice in the imposture—or we had to do with a genuine shade. But before the sitting was over, I was sure I knew who was at the bottom of it, and why.”

  “I made sure that it was a ghost indeed,” said Miss Gudgeon, rather regretfully, I thought. “What told you otherwise?”

  “The conduct of Harkebus. Under his guidance we wasted no time in learning the purpose of the imposture. He led us to ask exactly the right questions for his purposes. It must have jolted him when Miss Gudgeon asked who it was, and White Will, not expecting the question, rapped out the truth in answer.”

  “What was their purpose?” asked Mrs. Gudgeon.

  “Why, to frighten Miss from the room, better still from the house. Consider: the first night there come frightening noises only. Miss screams out in terror that she will not sleep here again. Taking her word, the second night a man with a candle enters the supposedly empty room, only to be frightened away by screams. The third night, piloted by Dr. Harkebus, the spirit bids you abandon the house, and by blood-curdling howls frightens you into declaring you will do so. What is bound to happen the fourth night?”

  “The man with the candle will again enter the room through the priest’s hole. But what for?”

  “It seemed as if the departed highwayman had left something behind him of interest to his former neighbour Mr. Harkebus. I determined to watch and know what it was. You know the rest. Recognizing White Will for a living man, I knew the answer to the last question which had puzzled me.”

  “What was that?” enquired Gudgeon.

  “Why Harkebus had not entered the room at his pleasure at any time while the lodgings stood empty.”

  “Why did he not so?”

  “Because he knew naught of what the room contained till White Will returned—in the body-snatcher’s basket lest he be seen and recognized—from the Surrey side, where he had been rusticated for the recruiting of his health, since Harkebus received his anatomy more dead than alive from Tyburn Hill.”

  “Sir,” said Gudgeon, “I am your debtor in this matter.”

  “And I,” cried George Tucker, “for I took up my indentures this morning, and I mean to commence undertaker for myself—at All Hallows Staining, if Mally will name the day and father-in-law will have me.”

  “Done,” cried Gudgeon. Mally said nothing, but looked sidewise and for a moment showed a dimple.

  “Pray, Dr. Johnson,” enquired Tucker, “to what use will you put your share of this treasure trove?”

  “I have applied it,” replied my philanthropick friend, “to eleemosynary purposes.”

  “Ah,” said the pious sexton, “worthy purposes, I make no doubt.”

  “Mammy, mammy,” cried the little Fragonard, running into the room in excitement, “the men are riding away on big horses, and the skinny one, mammy, his face is all white like flour.”

  “Worthy purposes?” repeated Dr. Johnson. “Well, no.”

  Prince Charlie’s Ruby

  “Pray, Mr. Boswell,” said Flora Macdonald, “what did you do for the Bonnie Prince in the ’45?”

  “In the ’45, ma’am,” I replied, “I was a fine boy of five; I wore a white cockade and prayed for Prince Charlie.”

  “Well done, Bozzy!” exclaimed Dr. Sam: Johnson approvingly.

  “But,” continued I, “one of my uncles, General Cochran, gave me a shilling on condition that I should pray for King George; which I accordingly did.”

  “Now I perceive,” cried my Tory companion, “that Whigs of all ages are made the same way!”

  The company enjoyed a hearty laugh at my expense, for all those present were of the old interest, and rejoiced to find the learned Dr. Sam: Johnson kindly affectioned toward the lost Stuart cause; while I looked airy, and whistled a bar or two of “Charlie Is My Darling.”

  We had but just arrived at Kingsburgh in the Isle of Skye, and now we sat in our host’s comfortable parlour by a good fire, comforting ourselves with punch and conversation before taking our rest. In the elbow-chair by the chimney-piece sat our host, Allan Macdonald
of Kingsburgh, quite the figure of a gallant Highlander. He wore a brown short coat of a kind of duffle, a tartan vest with gold buttons and gold buttonholes, a bluish filibeg, and tartan hose. He had jet-black hair tied behind and with screwed ringlets on each side, and was a large stately man, with a steady sensible countenance. By his side in a straight chair sat his sister Margaret, a stout-built clever-looking woman with merry dark eyes.

  On the opposite side of the fireplace, at Dr. Johnson’s right hand, the cynosure of all eyes, sat the wife of our host, the celebrated Flora Macdonald. She was a little woman, of a mild and genteel appearance, mighty soft and well-bred; elegantly attired in tabby, with a gold locket on a chain about her neck.

  To see Dr. Sam: Johnson salute Miss Flora Macdonald with a flourish of his glass was a wonderful romantick scene to me. The great lexicographer regarded the Jacobite heroine with reverence, and bent to her level from his ponderous height with a deference touching to see.

  The apartment in which we sat might have been in St. James’s, rather than in this remote corner of the Hebrides. Two pretty French figurines adorned the delicate scroll-work of the mantel. The room was softened by hangings of damask, and elegantly lighted by wax candles in sconces. Dr. Johnson could not forbear to comment.

  “Why, sir, we are not such savages here,” said Flora Macdonald with a smile. “I had the damask from Paris; and we never lack for wax candles, for my father-in-law was factor to Sir Alexander Macdonald, and made all the candles for the big house, and we have the use of the forms to this day.”

  I looked at the well-formed tapers. Two of them burned in sconces beside a bracket whereon stood a busto in plaster, representing a young man of singular beauty. Something about it was strangely familiar to me. I covertly studied the oval face, the beautifully cut mouth not quite smiling, the broad lofty sweep of the brows, the keen expression and proud lift of the well-shaped head. A sly word from my observing friend brought me out of my reverie.