by James Reese
“Would that it had been,” said he. “No, this was an advert offering…
“No, no: First let me backtrack and say, Bram, that, at twenty-one I was already unwell. Then, as now, my personal enjoyment of anything beyond the commonplace depended on the caprices of a torturing nervous temperament; however, I thought, then, that this might be righted. I thought…”
He fell silent, and maintained the state over-long.
“Caine? Continue, please.”
“I thought,” said he, finally, “that I’d done myself damage through…secret habits.”
“Self-abuse, do you mean?…Friend Caine, be assured: The thought crosses the mind of many a young man.” This I spoke over the lip of a teacup which might otherwise have hid a wry smile. Not so this day. “But whatever might a medical man have to say about that? And in a public advert, no less?”
“That consultations could be had in private…. That therapy of a sort was available.”
“‘Of a sort’ indeed,” said I, drawing a cross look from Caine. “And you sought out this…therapist?”
“Yes.” Caine shifted in his seat as criminals do in the docks.
“Whose therapy consisted of…?” But here I had returned to my barrister’s ways. I determined to desist, to let Caine tell the tale as he would; viz., slowly, and with a shame that elicited my sympathy.
“Tumblety,” said he, “had come from America with something of a reputation.65 He was known there as the ‘Indian Herb Doctor,’ and indeed much of what he prescribed did have a salutary effect. To that I can attest. So, too, did his company, at first; such that when—after my second consult—we repaired to his rooms and he told me he sought a travelling companion, the idea appealed, albeit briefly. As you know, I felt mired in Liverpool at the time. My life had stalled, yet I knew, knew I would prove a fine enough engine—ready to run the world, or London at least—if only I could find the fuel.”
Alas, amongst literary friends one runs the risk of spoken metaphor; as when I now say it was I who took up the needle & thread of our converse to stitch in my turn, so:
“‘Briefly,’ you say? What led to your disinterest in this post of…companion?”
As Caine sighed, and sighed again, I stood and stripped to my shirtsleeves. “Ring for water, won’t you, Caine? And some whisky to wet it?” This he was happy to do: it would afford him time whilst he waited for it, and fortitude once it was found. When each of us sat in possession of a tumbler poured two fingers high, we proceeded.
“What dissuaded me from the post of travelling companion, you ask. Well, it was his rooms; or rather, their contents.”
“Which were…?”
“Really, Bram, has Greeba been converted into a Court of Petty Sessions, then?”
“My apologies. Proceed.”
“Thank you, I shall.” Happily, he did so at an improved pace. “First I must say that Tumblety then—and perhaps now, perhaps still—cut quite a figure. He was a handsome man, despite his extremes of dress and deportment. When first I saw him in the streets of Liverpool, he sat astride a white horse, a pack of lashed hounds following behind.”
“Damn those miniature hounds of his,” said I.
“Then he has them still?”
“Two of the species, yes; and they have shat themselves silly in the Lyceum costumery.”
“Henry must have poured it into his ear then, surely? The Archbishop would better suffer dirt being discovered in Canterbury Cathedral than Henry would in his Lyceum.”
“And it was discovered, all right—by the boot-sole of a wardrobe mistress! But I didn’t even tell Henry, for he is hoodwinked at present and has given Tumblety the run of the theatre and the Beefsteak Club as well. Indeed, if one dines there now, one dines with Tumblety. Until late days, at least…. I fear that Henry may even have given him a key of his own.”
“‘Fear’?” queried Caine. “I must ask, Bram: Do you speak casually, or carelessly, or do you truly fear that Tumblety has a key of his own?”
“I am inclined, Caine, to neither careless nor overly casual speech,” said I somewhat huffily. “Yes: I fear.”
“I meant no insult. The matter is simply this: I fear the man myself, and with reason. Now it seems you’ve reasons of your own. I can only wonder at them.”
“You wonder, Caine, because the scales of conversation yet weigh in your favour: your reasons first, if you will, with mine to follow.”
Caine rose to change the waxen cylinder. I’d accustomed myself to the drone of this secondary Caine, but I was happy to hear the primary one say, as he retook his seat and reached for the whisky, “All right, then. Curiosity as to your reasons shall hasten me through mine.”
“I shall not rue the advance in speed,” said I, holding out my glass for two fingers more. In truth, I feared my turn. Caine’s is a fine but sceptical mind, and though I knew he’d sat through séances and such when first he’d come to London, I’d no idea what he thought of all that nowadays. The tale I’d carried to the castle would tell me soon enough.
“All right, then,” said a chagrined Caine once more. “Onward through the facts, and faster.
“The Francis of my early acquaintance was, as said, a handsome man, the possessor of a certain appeal. A charismatic.”
“A quack, you mean. A charlatan.”
“On the contrary,” rejoined Caine. “I always found his diagnoses spot-on. Indeed, he ought to have kept to medicine proper and let lie those medicaments by which he prospered.”
“He is wealthy, then?” I had supposed he was, but to have this confirmed by Caine made me even more wary of the man. He had resources: unwelcome news, this.
“Quite,” came the confirmation. “I once knew him to draw sixty thousand dollars on a Rochester bank—this in a single draught, mind. And I had it from the man himself that in his heyday his practices brought him three hundred dollars a day.”
“‘Practices’? In the plural?”
“Indeed. He partnered with others, travelling to oversee it all. Things first boomed for him in Boston, I believe.66 In time, though, Tumblety’s Pimple Banisher was well known in New York, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, and points as far west as San Francisco; north into Canada, too, as I recall.”
“And by ’74 he had come over in search of…English pimples, English pence?”
“Pounds, more precisely,” corrected Caine. “And a companion.”
“But that was not to be you. You say you were dissuaded from his company.”
“I was; but not fast enough, I fear. You see, Francis was what the French call un beau-parleur. Gifts, too, were given”; the acceptance of which—to judge by Caine’s chin falling to rest on his chest—shamed him still. “Do you recall, Bram, those shepherd’s plaid trousers I was so fond of when first I went to Rossetti?”
“Too well,” said I.
“Well, I had them from Tumbelty, along with much else. We went about town together—dandified, the both of us; but yes, by the time a travelling companionship was spoken of, I’d decided against it, and squarely so.”
“Owing, you say, to his rooms?”
“In a way, yes.
“He had established rooms in Liverpool some years prior, when first he’d come. He is wont to keep rooms here and there. But, again, it was not the rooms proper that put me off so much as their contents.” A nervous Caine rose to draw the drapes against the dusk, leaving me to contemplate the coming catalogue: the contents of Tumblety’s rooms. And though my imagination tends towards the morbid, nothing imagined could compare to the true contents as told me by Caine; for:
“Wombs,” said he, returned to his chair.
“Rooms, yes,” said I. “You were about to tell me what it was in Tumblety’s rooms that dissuaded you from keeping his company, or leastways travelling with him.”
“I have told you,” said Caine, “just now: wombs. Not rooms.”
Whisky welled in my mouth. I swallowed it back to ask, “Whatever can you mean?”
And
Caine explained. “Francis had told me he’d long ago turned from surgery. He was, he said, ‘disinclined to cut.’ He’d an abhorrence of blood and blades, both. Yet one night, whilst we sat sipping sherry in the company of two other men of his late acquaintance, one of our party proposed we step out in search of…females. Of the hiring type. At this, Francis railed. I thought he’d ask the man to leave. In fact, he did soon effect the man’s departure, albeit indirectly, by…
“Balderdash! Now I find I’ve advanced my tale too far…. You’ve got me speaking in pamphlets, Stoker, when it’s novels I know!”
“This day does not allow for novelising, Tommy. Pamphlets it must be: precise and spoken apace, if you please.”
“As you wish, Bram. As you wish.
“…Let me first say this, then: I knew that Francis had put out word to the medical colleges that he sought wombs ‘for study.’ This aroused suspicion.”
“As doubtlessly it would.”
“And if enquiries were sent Stateside, the enquirers must have heard ill of Tumblety in return; for the rumours that arose may, I think, be dated to this time.”
“Rumours?”
“Many,” said Caine; “but I can either speed or stray, Bram. Which shall it be?”
“Speed,” said I, “if you please.”
“Denied by the colleges, Tumblety sought his ‘samples’ amongst the body-snatchers and death-dealers and lesser surgeries, and the result was a cupboard crowded with jars of sundry size and shape, in all of which swam the matrices, the uteri…the female organs of generation. And as this cupboard—more of a wardrobe, I suppose it was: broad and tall—stood quite conveniently beside the table at which we four had lately dined, Tumblety threw it open to his guests, having first asked the one—a randy sailor up from Limehouse—if he’d ever seen a woman’s diseased…
“Oh, I know not what it was, but it was horrid, horrid! And, standing, he slammed down onto the table a jar in which there sloshed a yellowed—”
“Great God,” I said. “Surely your supper party disbanded at that.”
“You jest,” accused Caine. “I hardly think—”
“I jest or I retch.”
“May I continue?” And he did, explaining that Tumblety had once been affianced to, perhaps had even married, a woman whose dissolute ways he was late to discover. A prostitute, in point of fact.67
“I see,” said I. “And the sailor types were…solace?” For one hadn’t to squint to read between the lines of Caine’s account. However, in phrasing the question so, I had impugned my friend, who answered in his own defence:
“If you’ve been in Francis’s company—”
“As indeed I have been.”
“—then you know he can charm.”
“I have seen him do so, yes. I have wondered if he mightn’t be a mesmerist.”
“He may be, for all I know. Years have passed since I saw him last, you understand…. Would that I could attribute my having kept his company beyond that evening to something as surreptitious as hypnosis.”
“So, though you declined to accompany Tumblety on his travels, still you saw him?”
“I cannot explain,” said Caine. Of course he meant he’d rather not be made to. “Suffice it to say I’d grown…fearful, yes. I was afraid to quit him cold. Amongst the rumours were some concerning another companion…a prior companion.”68
“No need to explain, friend,” said I. “No need.” Thereafter we sat some while in silence, in sympathy. “Do, though, tell me what else you know of the man. Facts, if you please. Night falls fast, and I’ve much, much to tell when it is my turn.”
“You’ve your satchel. Surely you’ll stay the night?…Breakfast is fried bacon and brawn, served at eight, if that suits.”
“It suits, yes, and nicely so. I thank you, Hommy-Beg.”
“There’s breakfast seen to, then; but what about dinner? Shall we dine now, and thereby speed ourselves toward cigars and port?”
“Capital,” said I, “capital indeed.” Whereupon bells brought the requisite help, and all was seen to. Within the half-hour, we were at table, bent over baked whiting and other such non-stuffs—spiceless, sauceless; for Caine says his stomach cannot abide the least culinary nuance. The table was long, but Caine had had our places set side by side: himself at the head, myself to his right. On the panelled walls hung portraited ancestry—someone’s ancestry, though not Caine’s—and the broad antlers of an elk. It was the latter that drew my eye, as if the truths yet to be told depended from its horns.
“Why,” I asked, finally, “has Tumblety returned to London after all this time?”
“I haven’t a clue,” said Caine. “My best guess is that he has lately rendered some other city too hot to hold him. Scandals pursue the man. Or rather, he they. So it came to pass in ’74, ’75.”
Before Caine returned to talk of the past, I had another question regarding the present. “You say you have not seen Tumblety since his return?”
“I have not,” said he. “And I shall not. I told him so in terms quite emphatic.”
“‘Told him so’?”
“Very well: wrote him. You splice my words too fine…. Been reading Conan Doyle again, have you?”
“Wrote him, perhaps, in that same letter via which you foisted the fiend off on me?” Touché.
“He is hardly a fiend,” said Caine, at which I could only clear my throat, tellingly. My turn would come. “I simply do not wish to see him again.”
“And have armed both yourself and your steward to ensure that you do not.”
“Our parting,” said Caine after a pause, “was unpleasant. So, too, I fear, would our reunion be.”
With arching brows, I begged for more, and had it, so:
“All talk of Tumblety turned to rumour,” said Caine, “and scandal ensued.” As Caine offered no details, neither can I.69 “I tell you: The man draws detractors like no-one I’ve known. Soon Liverpool had shrunk for him, owing, said he, to the machinations of certain medicos jealous of his money. And though he hot-footed it to London, he did not leave Liverpool without a fight—a fight in which, unhappily, he involved me.”
Caine explained that Tumblety relished such tussles, the more so if they could be played out in the press. “Sales…” said Caine; “he was ever mindful of sales. And scandal drove sales, for Francis was very crafty at attributing all accusation, all calumny to professional jealousy.”
“I see,” said I. “If others were jealous of his nostrums, then surely they worked. Up went sales.”
“Precisely. And so no matter the enemy, Francis made it seem as if some cabal of medical men were behind it all.” From London—to which Tumblety tried to lure Caine, and half succeeded: Caine was often with him in London, yet retained his Liverpool life—the older man convinced the younger to write in his defence. Their efforts progressed from passages in the newspapers to pamphlets. “Quite the pamphleteer, he was,” said Caine; “but our joint effort was as naught compared to these.” And from a portfolio which he’d earlier drawn from the locked drawer of his desk and carried to table, Caine now slid two specimens:
The first was entitled The Kidnapping of Dr. Tumblety Upon Orders of the Secretary of War of the US, and bore an imprimatur reading St. Louis,
1866. “A jest,” said I, “surely.”
“Not at all,” said Caine, sliding toward me the second pamphlet: Dr. Francis Tumblety—Sketch of the Life of the Gifted, Eccentric and World-Famed Physician.
“My word,” I marvelled, “the man is a megalomaniac.” I forbore adding that that was the least of the problems he posed at present.
“The kidnapping pamphlet,” said Caine, “is of an earlier date, and I have it from the subject himself. The second I secured on my own, as eventually it came to seem…prophylactic, if you will, to keep tabs upon Tumblety.”
I sit now upon this London-bound train in possession of both pamphlets.70 I have read them through with astonishment, as Caine had promised I would; more so the fir
st, in which Tumblety exculpates himself from charges of involvement in no less an event than the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Extraordinary, this.
It seems Tumblety—having abandoned New Brunswick and now Boston—had settled in the American capital. There he set about establishing himself.71 Just what he did during the war the pamphlet does not say; but on 6 May 1865, Tumblety was arrested for complicity in the President’s assassination some weeks prior. Evidently, a boy who’d once served John Wilkes Booth as a messenger had testified that one of Booth’s companions was a known associate of the infamous Indian Herb Doctor. A case of mistaken identity, it seems.
Tumblety’s adoption of the alias J. H. Blackburn—one among many—had led to his being confused with a Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn. The latter was being vilified in the day’s press as a Confederate, yes; but, worse still, he stood accused of having gone to Bermuda the year prior to secure fever-infected clothing which he then shipped to Northern cities and camps. One such place was said to be New Bern, North Carolina, where a subsequent yellow fever epidemic took the lives of two thousand civilians and soldiers. Whether the real Dr. Blackburn was guilty or innocent of such charges is not of import here.72 For our present purposes, suffice it to say that it was the Blackburn confusion that led to Tumblety’s arrest. And upon his release, Tumblety the Maligned made of himself a cause célèbre.
“My arrest,” he writes in the pamphlet, “appears to have grown out of statements to the effect that the Dr. Blackburn who has figured so unenviably in the hellish yellow fever plot was no other person than myself. In reply to this absurd statement, I would most respectfully say to an ever-generous public that I do not even know this fiend in human form.” A fiend in human form indeed.
“I do hope that the papers which so industriously circulated the reports connecting me with these damnable deeds, to the very great injury of my name and position, will do me the justice to publish the fact of my having been entirely exonerated by the authorities, who, after a diligent investigation, could obtain no evidence that would in the least tarnish my fair reputation,” &c. Sales, it may be imagined, skyrocketed. And from this most profitable lesson—for which a prison stay may have seemed fair payment—Tumblety learned: thereafter he wooed scandal wherever he went, and often he won her.