Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector

by Lillian de la Torre

  “Clem Sedge has got such a dose of it,” said Dr. Johnson bluntly, “as killed him.”

  My Lady quietly fainted, and not a lady-like swoon neither, for she slumped in a heap with her mouth open.

  We left Hepzibah applying restoratives.

  Dr. Johnson applied himself to tracing the history of the marchpane, but little enough did he learn. Every woman in the house had had a finger in it, even Sally and her mother; Bob Hosyer had been about the kitchen, exchanging banter for almonds; even Breed Hosyer, passing through, had paused to sample the confection. Dishes of comfits had stood in every room. Sally and Bob had filled their pockets. Poor Clem Sedge had been the only one to fill his maw.

  These researches were cut short in mid-kitchen by loud screams of despair. We hurried towards their origin, and found the morning-room a scene of frenzy. Bob and Sally were missing.

  No one had seen them since Clem had perished. My Lady was in a hideous taking, swearing ’twas all the fault of the little vixen, the—Her language astounded me. Mr. Hosyer said nothing, but he looked volumes. Mr. Breed Hosyer was cool as he ordered the grounds searched. The young people were not to be found.

  “Then,” says he, tight-lipped, “drag the millpond.”

  The brewer’s wife upon this went into fits.

  My friend looked unutterably grave. He was not content to lament supinely, but himself instituted another kind of inquiry, which soon bore fruit. Master Bob, said the groom, was off in the light chariot; but whether alone or accompanied he could not say.

  Upon this we left the servants to drag the millpond, and took horse, the two fathers with us.

  At the crossroads we had the luck to encounter a carter who had seen the chariot. He had been forced to take to the ditch as the vehicle passed him in a cloud of dust; it was pelting north as fast as the horses could gallop, and the driver had a companion. More the carter could not say.

  Upon this intelligence we whipped up our horses and rode Hell-for-leather out the highroad, Hiram Hosyer swearing he would horse-whip the whippersnapper to the parson, Breed Hosyer keeping his own counsel, Dr. Johnson gallopping ever recklessly in front. ’Twas by good luck that when we encountered a rough lad clattering along on an old plug of a horse, we drew rein to question him. He carried a scrap of a note in his hat-band. ’Twas addressed to Dr. Sam: Johnson:

  “He has carried me off against my will. I am mortally terrified. We have turned in at the Swan. For God’s sake come before it is too late.

  S. Hosyer”

  “The lady said,” said the stolid boy as we set spur, “that you’d give me a guinea.”

  “Here’s your guinea, boy,” cried Breed Hosyer, tossing it to him, “the child’s life is cheap at the price.”

  With no further word said we pelted on to the old Swan Inn.

  The landlord of the Swan suppressed a grin as he pointed to an inner room. Thither we all stormed, and burst in in the nick.

  I shall never forget that tableau—the table on the hearth spread with untouched viands and an emptied decanter—Bob Hosyer swaying beside it with the carving-knife in his hand—and on the floor at his feet, her garments disarrayed and her white throat bared, in a swoon like death lay Sally Hosyer.

  It was Breed Hosyer who pinioned his son’s arms; I had not suspected the strength in his wiry frame. It was I who took the knife from the boy’s slackened hand.

  No effort could restore Miss Sally; she lay like the dead. In the end we were fain to wrap her in blankets and carry her to the landlord’s covered cart. We found, when we spared him a glance, that we had Master Bob on our hands too; he snorted stertorously with his head on the table, and no exertion could rouze him.

  Murderer and victim we laid them side by side in the cart, and father and uncle rode beside. The look on Breed Hosyer’s face terrified me.

  There was little left of the night. Bob Hosyer was lifted like a log to his bed. I noted that Breed Hosyer settled himself by it, his grim visage never lightening; while a bewildered groom with a blunderbuss made his appearance beside the door.

  Dr. Johnson never left Sally’s side. Towards morning she came to herself and fell to screaming. Mrs. Hosyer fetched the sleeping-powders, but the box was empty; we were harrowed by the child’s terror until she cried herself out and fell into a natural sleep.

  By Dr. Johnson’s desire we all met in the morning-room betimes. Tea and coffee was laid out, but truth to tell we had mighty little stomach to break our fast. My Lady looked haggard in the morning light; Mrs. Hosyer’s eyes were red. Hiram Hosyer brought Sally in his arms; she lay on the sopha with her eyes closed. She wore a negligee garment of sky-blue silk richly laced. Clearly by giving her the garment my Lady had made her the best amends an empty head could conceive.

  Last of all Bob Hosyer stumbled in, blood-shot of eye and heavy of head. His father stalked implacably behind him, and the groom and the blunderbuss made him look more than ever like a culprit approaching Tyburn.

  Lawyer Sedge spoke. In twenty-four hours he had whitened and shrunk, and he spoke tonelessly.

  “The document of the tontine can avail little now, but ’tis here, at your service.”

  Johnson shook his head.

  “We must have signatures, and quickly. I have here a document that will serve till a better can be engrossed.”

  He read from a single sheet:

  “I do hereby renounce my right in and expectation from the Hosyer tontine. It is right that I do this, as I now confess that it was I who killed—”

  Bob Hosyer lifted his heavy head.

  “—it was I who killed my late twelve fellows of the tontine—”

  Bob Hosyer stood to his full height and folded his arms on his breast. The groom levelled the blunderbuss, and I tightened my muscles for trouble.

  “—and I had in train to kill my cousin at the Swan, which was only prevented by the premature arrival of my father and my uncle.”

  Dr. Johnson dipped the pen.

  “I am innocent!” cried Bob Hosyer desperately. “Father! Uncle!”

  “Quiet, boy,” said Dr. Johnson; and extended the pen to Miss Sally Hosyer.

  The girl on the sopha lifted her lids and looked Dr. Johnson full in the face. Suddenly she snatched the pen and flung it to the floor, where it stuck and quivered like a thrown poignard. Then she fell back and went off in a swoon. It brought her thunderstruck parents to her side.

  “Let her swoon,” said Dr. Johnson indifferently. “She has a pretty talent of swooning. She swooned so soon as she had tipped the boat and drowned her cousins; you thought her in a swoon when she mixed arsenick with the nursery victuals; she swooned when the work of smothering her cousin and pulling down the tester was done; and she executed a very pretty swoon when we arrived at the Swan too soon for her plans, and her final victim, not yet completely subdued by the draught she had put in his wine, took the murderous knife from her hand.”

  “Will you believe this mad tale?” cried Mrs. Hosyer. “Who dosed the child with arsenick here at the Priory? Why should she first save Susan’s life and then take it? How did she poison Clem, when they ate marchpane out of her pockets together? How could she hope to bring safely off the murder of a great strapping chap twice her size?”

  “The child dosed herself with arsenick, in imitation of my Lady, for the complection; but being green at it got a swallow too much. She was well enough for the Lord Mayor’s Show next day. As to Susan, ’twas her first venture; perhaps when the child clung to her, she lost her nerve. But it had to be done finally, lest Susan tell how Sally herself launched that unlucky voyage. The apothecary’s sleeping draught that she had by her made it the easier. ’Twas the sleeping draught that was to put Bob in her power, once she had lured him away from prying eyes. As to sharing the marchpane with Clem, Miss Sally has two pockets; I think she never made a mistake as to which pocket she ate out of.”

  “But why? Why? Why? Is the child mad?”

  She lay rigid as a statue. Dr. Johnson looked on her
with regret.

  “You may put it that way. These long and deep swoons are akin to what the learned call the catalepsy, to which misses at the age of the greensickness are much subject. Sally was just of that age when her sister died, and dying impressed upon her the misery of being without dower in this heartless age. After that she heard from her mother naught but the tontine. To drown her cousins was a sudden quick impulse, a surge of the will so frightful that a catalepsy followed. When it succeeded, and its companion impulse to arsenick the nursery viands, her succeeding murders became easier and more calculating. That of Bob was the hardest, had he not made it easy by yielding to her new-found power of charming, and forming dishonourable designs upon her.”

  My Lady had the grace to look put about.

  “You may convince yourselves,” said Dr. Johnson with compassion to the distraught parents, “as I was convinced, by the missing apothecary’s powders. You have but to search the girl’s room, you will find her hidden stock of both the sleeping and the complection powders.”

  ’Twas done. Hiram Hosyer looked pitifully on the packets in his hand, and then on the still rigid girl.

  “What is to be done?”

  “I know not,” said my humane companion, distressed. “How can I bring so young a maid to the gallows? Yet if she lives, who is safe from her wrath?”

  “Give me,” said the brewer sadly, “twenty-four hours before you move.”

  I looked once more on the exquisite countenance as her father carried her away. In the afternoon she came out of her swound, for again I heard her screaming. Then the apothecary’s powders were brought into play, and the screams were stilled.

  They were stilled forever. Her father’s unaccustomed hand had mixed the dose too strong, and Sally Hosyer woke no more. Dr. Johnson grasped the brewer’s steady hand, and looked into his tearless eyes.

  “Sir, you are a Roman parent.”

  Bob Hosyer, who needed it not, had the tontine.

  “Let uncle have his own again,” he said. “I had liefer have had Sally.”

  [Every eighteenth-century tontine was an invitation to multiple murder; the Hosyer Tontine is typical rather than historical. Boswell and Johnson did not in fact visit Bath together in 1779; but I have not hesitated to place them anywhere, at any time, as the convenience of a plot might dictate.]

  THE STROKE OF THIRTEEN

  (London, 1780)

  “Captain Donellan,” said the soldier at the bar, “and gentlemen all, I assure you I was not asleep at my post; and to proof, as I stood there, I heard the great bell of St. Paul’s strike 13.”

  The officers of the court-martial took this with blank amazement, which was broken when their senior broke into a roar of laughter, and the entire assemblage felt free to follow suit. A bull-throated sergeant laughed the loudest.

  “Struck 13, my—,” he sneered coarsely. “It struck 12, and I caught you napping, my dainty gentleman.”

  “You lie!” cried the accused soldier angrily.

  The sergeant up with his cane and struck the young redcoat a savage slash across the face. In a trice the culprit had caught him by his thick throat, and the al fresco court was in confusion.

  Two soldiers pulled off the raging young fellow. The thick-necked sergeant stood his ground with a sneer.

  “That will do, Sergeant Thacker,” the icy voice of the officer presiding dominated the tumult. “You have been heard, and your evidence will be attended to.”

  The rebuked sergeant saluted. Out of the corner of his mouth he grinned wolfishly at his adversary, who now stood scowling between his guards.

  “As to the stroke of 13, Macdonald,” the captain said to the redcoat, “never a clock in this world struck 13 save in dream. Your own mouth has condemned you. How say you, gentlemen of the court?”

  “Guilty. Death,” breathed an exquisite young ensign, fingering his ruffles.

  “Death,” grunted a thick-set lieutenant with a blue jowl, and yawned prodigiously.

  “Guilty, death. Death,” mumbled the other two officers hastily.

  “Guilty, and so say we all. Private Allan Macdonald!”

  The unfortunate youth stiffened to attention. He was a fine figure of a soldier, in the first bloom of his manhood, his red coat with its buff facings setting off his graceful tall form to perfection. The torchlight flickered on his tawny hair and marble-white, marble-handsome face. The mark of the sergeant’s cane burned on one cheek like a brand.

  I regarded the scene with emotion. A drumhead court-martial! At such stirring scenes might my days have been passed, as Captain James Boswell, had my scheam of life prevailed. But alas, ’twas mine to propose, my father’s to dispose; so now, as Advocate James Boswell, I was in attendance at this military drama by pure chance. I had risen before dawn to ride in Hyde Park and admire, as it first stirred awake, the encampment of the military that graced the greensward there in that war summer of 1780. The light of the torches had drawn me, with many another early wanderer, to the scene.

  As I saw it from the vantage-point of my light chaise, the picture is engraved on my memory. Before the white tent with its red top the officers of the court were ranged upon a crude bench, brave in full uniform, sashed, cockaded, splendid. To one side, a lanky soldier sat upon a three-legged stool and wrote with scratching quill. His desk was a tall regimental drum, and as he attacked a more difficult passage, the drum murmured with the impact. The young soldier stood death-still. The burly sergeant crossed his arms and sneered.

  The presiding officer spoke. I much admired him. His powdered wig set off his fresh-coloured, handsome face, with the high nose of a soldier, the curved lip of a lover, and the well-opened, clear grey eye of a scholar. I envied him his red coat with gold braid, his officer’s sash, his white breeches without a wrinkle, his polished gorget and silver-hilted sword. Just such a military figure would I have desired to be.

  “Private Allan Macdonald!” he pronounced. “Insomuch as it is provided by the sixth article of the fourteenth section of the Articles of War that ‘whatever Centinel shall be found sleeping upon his Post, shall suffer Death’; insomuch as you have been found guilty of that offence; it is the sentence of this court-martial that you be summarily shot. And since you are so adept at counting the strokes of St. Paul’s,” added the officer with macabre humour, “let it be at the stroke of noon, this very day, before Cumberland Gate, where the offence was committed. Take him away.”

  As the officers rose, my attention was diverted from the doomed soldier by a disturbance among the riff-raff and hangers-on.

  “He’s in a fit!” screamed a brawny milk-woman, pointing to a figure at her feet.

  “Give him air!” cried a bony scavenger besmirched from head to foot, naming the commodity most to be wished for in his vicinity.

  “Stand back!” commanded a watchman, jerking his staff.

  “Ye’ll murther the lad,” cried a brawny Irish porter with noseless face, “for ’tis kilt he is already!”

  I looked down from my chaise and saw the lad in question, fallen among them like a bundle of slops. He was a pretty boy, shabbily cloathed in someone else’s waistcoat and breeches, a world too wide for him. In lieu of wig he wore a clout tied tight about his head, and his hat was fallen to the sward.

  “Hand him up here, good fellows,” cried I, “and I’ll carry him to a surgeon to be blooded.”

  Twenty willing hands heaved the light form into the chaise, and the milk-woman threw his hat in after.

  “Loose his headkerchief before he choaks,” cried she, so positively that I complied with her wrong-headed admonition instanter.

  By this means I made a discovery of a most interesting nature. No sooner was the clout loosed than down tumbled a cloud of palest gold ringlets—’twas no boy, but a girl of the most fragile and feminine beauty!

  This discovery put me into a quandary. I could not abandon this delicate creature to some coarse surgeon, still less turn her back to the mercies of the rough crowd. I resolved to
carry the child to Bolt Court and put her under the care of Mr. Levett the surgeon—the more that thither I was already engaged to go betimes to break my fast with my learned friend Dr. Sam: Johnson.

  As I pulled up my chaise at Bolt Court, the sun was risen. So was not Dr. Johnson, who held strongly to the opinion, as I have elsewhere set forth, that the happiest hours of a man’s life are those he spends lying in bed in the morning.

  But Levett was stirring, the kitchen surgeon whom Johnson maintained in his motley establishment. The trembling girl, conscious now and sobbing, became his charge. As he ministered to her, they seemed to me most like some old woodcut of Miranda and Caliban, she so fair and young, he like an old Brownie, with his seamy, dusty countenance, his matted old dark wig, his swarthy skin, his square-toed shoes, and his ancient, full-skirted coat. As he brandished the hartshorn bottle, he might have been taken for some old-time alchemist, tanned like a bull’s-hide in the fumes of his own crucible.

  Miranda was sitting up in the great winged chair, still white as porcelain, but composed and calm, and Caliban was regarding his handiwork with satisfaction, when the door opened, and there entered the bulky form of the Prospero of Bolt Court—Dr. Sam: Johnson, philosopher, lexicographer, and detector of crime and chicane.

  Dr. Johnson was now in his seventy-first year. That year was a rosy sunset for him, what the Colonists would call his Indian Summer. Never have I seen him so gay and good-humoured, so sociable and comfortable. Benevolence played on his craggy features and beamed from his piercing light-grey eyes. He shewed in his attire the unwonted haste of his rising, for his brown waistcoat was skip-buttoned, and his bushy grey wig, that knew the comb no more than a quickset hedge, rode precariously over one ear. But grandly unmindful of wig and waistcoat, the great Cham entered the room like a King to his courtiers, and he handed in his companion as if she had been a Queen.

  His companion was a pale shrunken little old lady, ceremonially decked in scarlet of a by-gone fashion. Her face was meagre and her china-pale eyes were sightless. This was Miss Anna Williams, the blind poetess, who had long presided over Dr. Johnson’s tea-tray. The tea-tray itself followed hard on her heels in the black hands of the servant Francis Barber.