Edgar lunched at the majestic Hotel Cecil, where the dining room looked across a wide stretch of the Thames, one of the world’s busiest waterways, along which hefty barges were towed by steamers uncorking genies of smoke. On what was only his second afternoon in London, he’d been a guest of the British Association of Rotary Clubs. Even at this private event, Chief White Elk’s celebrity attracted a reporter, who admired his “gorgeous” ensemble. Afforded the chance to talk about his mooted audience with the king, Edgar stressed the altruism of his own motives. “I want to convey to Great Britain first of all the renewal of our pledge of loyalty,” he said. “At all times we shall be ready, as during the war, to follow the tracks of our forefathers and to guard and protect the colors in which we pledge our loyalty to His Majesty and to Great Britain.”
Leaving the reporter with the impression that he was “one of the most picturesque personalities that has ever visited this country,” Edgar exited the hotel, which had a taxi turnaround in front of it. Doormen wearing military-looking attire stood outside establishments such as the Cecil, waiting for departing customers. In what tended to be genteel accents that failed to disguise their Cockney origins, the doormen would say to the likes of Edgar, “Keb, sir?”
Probably utilizing this service, Edgar and Eugene boarded a cab. It would have taken them past the platoon of aging tin toy vendors who treated the sidewalk beyond the taxi turnaround as their counter. Little clockwork horses and errand boys hauling miniature trunks made erratic, darting movements that forced Christmas shoppers to improvise ungainly dance steps.
Seated in the taxi, Edgar and Eugene were driven over to the gentle arc of Regent Street. Pricey clothes stores, furriers, and jewelers dominated the early-nineteenth-century premises on either side. Interspersed with these were gutted buildings, vacant lots, and construction sites—something Edgar must have noticed on most streets in the city’s West End, which vibrated with the hammering of demolition crews. A number of the surviving stores currently visible through the windows of Edgar’s cab displayed the royal coat of arms, indicating that they had the honor of supplying goods to the royal household. If Edgar’s plans worked out, he’d soon be a guest of that household.
He had already requested his much-trumpeted audience with King George V. To maximize the chances of having his request granted, Edgar couldn’t risk being seen around town in anything other than his interpretation of Cherokee costume. Over his normal outfit, he was now wearing a black lamb’s fur coat, necessitated by the plummeting temperature. Sharpening the chill was a wind fierce enough to wobble his taxi and jiggle the silver medallion that hung from his neck.
Hard to believe that the weather had been mild to the point of mugginess the day before. He hadn’t needed a fur coat when he’d found his way over to Trafalgar Square, then clambered onto one of the huge stone plinths at the base of Nelson’s Column. Sprawled across the plinth was a massive sculpture of a lion. Edgar had positioned himself in front of the creature’s paws and then addressed the big crowd forming around him. Among the crowd was a press photographer, whose picture of Edgar ended up featuring in many of the newspapers that people were reading on the afternoon of his cab ride. Edgar might not have been too pleased, though, by the Daily Sketch’s decision to juxtapose his photo with a shot of a troupe of Russian midgets.
A little further down Regent Street, natural preserve of silk-stockinged window-shoppers, Edgar’s cab pulled up. He and Eugene got out. Edgar—whose feathered headdress attracted the attention he craved—was instantly pounced upon by another reporter. She said she’d been hunting for him for the past couple of days.
He gave a hearty laugh. “Is that what women do in England?” he said, turning toward Eugene in a show of amusement. “Fancy women hunting men…”
Ditching his tone of jokey disbelief, he was soon talking about his favorite topic—himself. “I hope to have an audience with His Majesty, but please don’t imagine I have any grievance to talk about.” He added that his only son had died not long back, leaving him as the last hereditary chief of the Cherokee. “My people were the first real Canadians,” he said, his fruity voice cutting through the street noise. “We are descended from the Iroquois, who inhabited North America long before any European races.” Just in case he hadn’t won over the newswoman, he deployed a burst of flattery. “London is a great surprise to me. It is larger and much more wonderful than I imagined. I don’t think New York compares with it.”
His sidewalk interview concluded, he and Eugene headed for their destination. This was likely the Café Royal, on the fringe of Soho, a neighborhood associated with homosexuality and drug dealing. Edgar would have been able to buy cocaine from the young women who pounded the streets carrying drawstring handbags that subtly advertised their wares. Purchasing drugs was risky, though. If caught in possession of them, he could be arraigned on felony charges. And there was a certain amount of risk associated with picking up young men, too. Many of the established cruising grounds were kept under surveillance by the police, who targeted them with agent provocateur operations.
Through the doors of the perennially fashionable Café Royal, where many of the regulars shared Edgar’s taste for narcotics, were multiple bars and restaurants, all with red-plush-upholstered seating and tobacco-stained ceilings. Private dining rooms were also available, the tables swathed in crisp white damask and laid with floral-patterned Minton china and long-stemmed glasses brimming with vintage wines and champagne. Tall, gilt-framed mirrors reflected the movements of a disparate clientele. Aristocrats. Beautiful young women, employed as artists’ models. Groups of Frenchmen, playing dominoes. Leading figures from the arts, not least the suave playwright and actor Noël Coward.
By throwing parties at chic venues like the Café Royal and at the kind of nightclubs where dance bands provided a watered-down interpretation of jazz, first popularized in Britain not quite four years previously, Edgar began to infiltrate the world of moneyed London. On the understanding that he was about to receive a stupendous windfall from King George V, who was set to return to him a million acres annexed by the British government, he appears to have been able to borrow money from his wealthy new acquaintances—money that could fund his self-aggrandizing extravagance.
Edgar was in the audience watching The Private Secretary—not his own nominal secretary, but a newly revived Victorian farce, staged at a handsome and capacious theater just down the street from Trafalgar Square. Creaky though the play turned out to be, its rollicking portrayal of two rogues assuming false identities in order to thwart their creditors tickled Edgar, whose merriment must have been rather more knowing than that of most other members of the audience.
When he left the Playhouse Theatre and crossed the West End, he’d have seen the animated electric advertising signs that had become a prominent feature of every main road. People would sometimes pause in front of these signs, mesmerized by the free show. One of these advertisements, composed of hundreds of lightbulbs, was near Edgar’s hotel. The sign depicted a hand reaching toward a cabinet containing a gramophone and then placing the gramophone’s arm onto a record, crimson musical notes floating out of the cabinet as the record spun.
But Edgar’s chances of showing off his own musical talents on the London stage were not looking promising. He only had to talk to a theatrical agent or someone else in the business to discover how wrongheaded his original plan had been. Finding employment in the British equivalent of vaudeville, known as either “music hall” or “variety,” wouldn’t be easy, because he’d been unlucky enough to arrive when the business was in the middle of a protracted slump. Performers who once commanded sizable salaries had to accept a 50 percent pay cut. Others were reduced to selling combs and soap on the sidewalks. There were even tales of minor celebrities from the worlds of opera and movies working as buskers.
Suffice it to say it was no surprise that Edgar’s attempt to obtain bookings on Sir Oswald Stoll’s illustrious theater circuit met with disappointment. Edgar then turned his attention to what was, in the business, referred to as “the Gulliver Circuit.” Headquartered in a warren of offices at the Holborn Empire, a large nineteenth-century building on High Holborn, this comprised sixteen theaters run by Charles Gulliver. Conveniently for Edgar, most of these were in and around London, though the problems afflicting the business left him with few grounds for optimism. There was a surfeit of other out-of-work novelty acts into the bargain. Up against him were Victor Niblo’s Talking Birds; Chung Wang, the Chinese Magician; Zingaro, the Royal Gypsy Instrumentalist; to say nothing of Professor J. Raymond and His Electrically Controlled Automaton.
Positioned only about a hundred yards from the raggedy hem of southeast London, where houses gave way to fields, 60a Leyland Road was one of a row of large detached two-story Victorian properties. It had a bay window facing the broad, silver birch–lined road.
Homes were in short supply throughout the capital, so Edgar had been fortunate to be able to move into these five upstairs rooms not long after Christmas. He rented them using the name Dr. Tewanna. With him were Eugene and two other young men Eugene had befriended. Eugene’s friends probably came from the city’s flourishing yet unobtrusive gay subculture, which revolved around specific pubs, restaurants, parks, theaters, and public toilets (the latter known as “cottages”).
Sharing the Leyland Road apartment, which backed onto a series of big, oblong gardens, was something of a comedown for Edgar after the luxury and metropolitan bustle of the Grosvenor Court Hotel. Still, he couldn’t expect the Canada Club to keep paying his tab indefinitely.
Whenever he strode out of the house in full regalia, complete with feathered headdress, he was bound to provoke stares. After all, he wasn’t just exotic—he was famous, thanks to yet more press coverage. Side by side with a picture of Britain’s deputy commissioner of police, his photo had featured in the “Personalities of the Week” section of the Illustrated London News. And he’d appeared alongside Andrew Bonar Law—the country’s prime minister—on the front page of the popular Daily Graphic.
Edgar’s new apartment was more than seven miles from the West End, making his fondness for traveling by taxi expensive. The most direct route took him past a billiard hall and then through the squalid blue-collar neighborhoods on London’s south side, row houses, pubs, small stores, and myriad businesses fringing the often-constricted streets, their sidewalks and slate roofs frequently coated by the chill sheen of winter drizzle.
In mid-January 1923—some two weeks after he’d taken the apartment—Edgar had his first taste of what locals called a “London particular,” a phenomenon so well-known he’d likely have heard about it back home. Leyland Road and surrounding districts were swathed in smog. Not the soft, damp mist that sometimes hung over American cities, but a noxious, yellowish vapor that rendered day indistinguishable from night. Crossing town to a children’s charity event, where Chief White Elk was the star attraction, would have been an unnerving and time-consuming experience for Edgar and Eugene. All over London, buses, cars, and trains were slowed to a nervous crawl. Watery eyes and coughing were other by-products of the smog. It lent the now-familiar sights and sounds an eerie unfamiliarity. Noises became strangely muted. People became ghosts, coalescing, then dispersing. And the steam-powered trucks that prowled the streets became sinister, fire-belching demons.
Mere smog wasn’t sufficient, though, to prevent Edgar and Eugene from getting to Westminster for the children’s charity event, where Eugene made himself useful. Not as a secretary, but as a minder, fending off scores of overexcited youngsters who were trying to pluck feathers from Edgar’s headdress.
Leaving the party, Edgar and Eugene may have passed the railings in front of Buckingham Palace, the London home of the monarch with whom Edgar had solicited a meeting. Soon after the trip to Westminster, his request triggered an announcement from the king’s offices at St. James’s Palace. King George V would, according to the communiqué, be granting Chief White Elk an audience. Edgar could now start thinking ahead to the moment when some royal flunky presented him to the king. For everyone but Edgar, his encounter with the king would appear to be a meeting of equals, of two hereditary leaders of their people.
Canadian, American, French, Swiss, New Zealand, and Australian newspapers had—unknown to Edgar in all probability—devoted space to the Cherokee chief’s mission to see the king. St. James’s Palace said the audience would take place as soon as His Majesty returned from his country estate at Sandringham. To ensure that the palace didn’t let the arrangement slide, Edgar appears to have written to the Duke of Devonshire, asking for his assistance. Formerly viceroy of Canada, the duke had been installed as secretary of state for the colonies. He apparently replied that he thought he’d be able to get the palace to schedule the audience for the beginning of February.
Addicted not just to drugs and alcohol but also to audiences of any kind, Edgar found himself conversing with a Daily Mail reporter, whose questions took a potentially uncomfortable turn. “Are you a Canadian Indian?” the reporter inquired.
“I am a hereditary chief of the Cherokee,” Edgar answered. “I am Cherokee royalty.”
“People are wondering why, as you are not a Canadian resident or Canadian born, you should come over on behalf of the Canadian Indians.”
Even that failed to catch out Edgar, who said quickly, “The Cherokee see no boundaries. We were there before the boundaries were made.” He must have been grateful that the reporter was querying only his nationality, not his race.
“When are you making your first appearance on the music hall stage in this country?”
Annoyance coloring his response, he replied, “Who told you about this?”
“But isn’t it true that you are starting a Stoll tour?”
“It certainly isn’t.”
“Have negotiations fallen through?”
“Well, they have,” he conceded. “I am opening at the Woolwich Hippodrome on Monday in ‘Native Dances.’ As a matter of fact, I am starting a Gulliver tour.” He then asked how the reporter had got to hear that he was a music hall performer.
The reporter explained that there’d been a tip-off from a Canadian who remembered him performing in Vancouver.
“It’s right,” Edgar said with mock frankness. “I have been in the theatrical business since 1901 when I opened in Antony and Cleopatra as a fan-bearer.”
“We have undertaken extensive inquiries through Canadian correspondents,” the ensuing Daily Mail article declared. “The results are given below. The Indian Department of the Canadian Government has no official knowledge of his visit. They say he is not a British Columbian Indian and has no authority to call himself one. Boy Scout headquarters in Canada say that he has not been entrusted by the general body of Canadian Boy Scouts to make any representations to the Prince of Wales.
“Certain English newspapers reported that White Elk accompanied the Prince of Wales on his visit to Canada, and escorted him when he was made Chief Morning Star. Prominent members of the Prince of Wales’s train on that occasion cannot recall anyone by the name of Chief White Elk.
“In authoritative quarters he is believed to be an American Indian and not a Canadian Indian, and therefore not entitled to make any representations of Canadian Indians to the King.”
Besides spawning similar pieces in newspapers across Canada, the article in the Daily Mail squelched Edgar’s impending audience with King George V.
IMPOSTOR UNMASKED shouted the headline that appeared the day before Edgar’s debut at the Woolwich Hippodrome. As an inveterate reader of newspapers, he may well have been confronted by it when he opened the News of the World, a widely read Sunday scandal sheet. But the story was about someone else.
Characterized by the prosecutor as a “clever, persistent and plausible scoundrel,” the man in question was being tried for the latest in a sequence of frauds that had seen him pose as an Irish freedom fighter and a lieutenant general in the Mexican army. His prosecution offered Edgar a reminder of the risks run by con men like them.
In Woolwich the next morning, Edgar would have been required to attend a rehearsal known as “band call.” To get there from his apartment entailed a four-mile journey through south London. Even though the smog wasn’t as bad as it had been, it was still pronounced enough to make Edgar feel like he was peering through a dirty windshield.
Shoulder to shoulder with the domed, classical-style Town Hall, Woolwich Hippodrome was a bulky redbrick building. It would already have been advertising that week’s show. Topping the bill was “White Elk, Chief of the Cherokee Indians.”
Edgar would have been instructed to report to the Hippodrome’s stage, which was separated from the steeply raked and multilayered late Victorian auditorium by an orchestra pit. Convention dictated that Edgar brought with him multiple copies of the score for his act’s musical accompaniment. He and the rest of the cast were obliged to place their scores along the lip of the stage in sequence of arrival. Each act then rehearsed with the Hippodrome’s band, the order of arrival dictating the order of rehearsal.
The main purpose of Monday morning band call was for the orchestra to master all the required musical cues. Joining Edgar would have been a juggler, a classical violinist, and a comedian who adopted the persona of a banjo- and ukulele-strumming vagrant. There was also a troupe of unicyclists, whose brisk and zany act involved performing tricks while playing drums, tambourines, and cymbals. Uncomplicated by comparison, Edgar’s routine featured nothing more than a couple of songs and a demonstration of a Cherokee war dance.
Rehearsals would have alerted him to the stylistic differences between American vaudeville and British variety shows. Once he and the other artistes were done with their Monday morning ritual, they were free to while away the afternoon preceding their 6:30 p.m. debut—the dreaded “first house” when performers felt under the most strain. Meager audiences, a high proportion of them on free tickets, their jollity yet to be unshackled by alcohol, didn’t make those shows any less taxing.
Being at the Woolwich Hippodrome rather than one of the higher-grade West End theaters, Edgar’s twice-nightly performances failed to attract any reviewers from the London evening papers. He had to be satisfied with a brief write-up in the less-than-exalted pages of the Woolwich Herald. It lavished praise on his singing and remarked upon how his “war dance as danced by his forefathers on the North American frontier is well worth seeing.”
After the final performance of his six-day engagement at the Hippodrome, Edgar had the chance to play the big shot. On those occasions, artistes were expected to tip the band, stagehands, and other employees at the theater, the size of the tips relative to the performer’s position on the bill. If he could afford it, Edgar always dispensed generous gratuities.
Entrusting the Leyland Road apartment to Eugene and the two other young tenants, he set out a short time later on his theatrical tour, surely armed with a stash of drugs. His tour began in Birmingham, a little under two hours from London via the Great Western Railway’s nonstop express. Toward the end of the journey, undulating farmland imperceptibly merged with factories and smoke-plumed chimneys, which served as a curtain-raiser to the drab industrial city beyond.
Before boarding the train, Edgar would have been issued with a list of Birmingham landladies who specialized in letting rooms to theatrical performers. Variety artistes customarily traveled on Sunday morning and spent that afternoon working through those addresses until they found accommodation. Trudging around wintry Birmingham in his Cherokee outfit, which had acquired a modish aura, similar costumes having been modeled in the British press by two of the figureheads of international fashion, he’d have been about as inconspicuous as a nudist strolling down a Manhattan street.
On Monday morning he’d have gone through the usual rehearsals prefacing his week at the Aston Hippodrome. Just to the north of the midtown area, this was another massive theater, at which he was headlining a different lineup. Away from the supervision of his booking agent, he cheekily expanded his time onstage by supplementing his routine with a speech about himself, about qualifying as a doctor and earning several other university degrees. He added that he’d come to England to campaign for members of Canada’s Indian tribes to be admitted to British universities.
While he was in Birmingham, he’d have been reminded of just how far removed provincial England was from everything that was coming to define the 1920s. Each mile from London carried him further into a world of rigid propriety that had barely been eroded by the atmosphere of youthful rebellion slowly transforming the capital. His indiscreet liaisons with younger men, whom he must have picked up during off-duty hours, scandalized the locals despite British show business’s reputation for open-mindedness toward homosexuals.
Tittle-tattle bubbling in his wake, he moved on to the attractive cathedral town of Worcester, where he had a Monday-to-Saturday stint at a luxurious, recently refurbished theater. He shared the bill with the normal hodgepodge of journeyman performers, their talents magnified by the lens of promotional hyperbole. They featured a pair of ballroom dancers, an all-girl song-and-dance troupe, a conjurer, some gymnasts, a comedian, and a man bearing the dubious accolade of being “England’s greatest singing ventriloquist.” Edgar’s contribution was loudly applauded, the local press hailing it as “the most outstanding turn” in the show.
He didn’t have far to travel to his next weeklong booking, which was at the Opera House and Hippodrome in the town of Dudley. There, he enthralled his audience with tales of his experiences, which purported to include playing one of the lead roles in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the movie that had swept Rudolph Valentino to celluloid stardom.
Almost unrelentingly wet weather providing little incentive for anything but indoor activities, Edgar’s offstage existence demonstrated amorous gusto worthy of Valentino’s persona as “the Latin Lover.” The sight of Chief White Elk frolicking with a succession of compliant young men outraged many of the people he encountered during his tour. So flagrant was his behavior that the manager of one of his tour venues threatened to call the police, who would then be likely to prosecute him for “committing unnatural offenses.”
Undaunted, he found himself yet another young male lover when he reached Leamington Spa, a town distinguished by its elegant, white-stucco-fronted Regency houses. Though he’d thus far avoided punishment by the British legal system, his casual promiscuity around that time led to him contracting syphilis, which appears to have gone untreated.
At Leamington’s Theatre Royal, he and several of the other performers who had shared the bill with him earlier on his tour were reunited for a couple of shows, for which he was advertised as “the only living ruler over 16,000 Indians.” Further ornamenting his persona, he was now pretending to be an Oxford man—someone who’d attended Oxford University.
In his dressing room, he was interviewed by a journalist from the Leamington Spa Courier. His “subtle magnetism,” “quiet nobility,” and apparent reluctance to talk about himself rapidly made an impression upon his visitor. The journalist was conned into believing that adroit maneuvering was required before the modest Cherokee could be persuaded to mention his mastery of twenty-one languages, his educational attainments, his three round-the-world trips, and his careers as a marathon runner, footballer, singer, pianist, and surgeon. Edgar said he’d arranged to meet King George V in June of that year when he’d be renewing his people’s expressions of loyalty and allegiance to “the Great White Father,” as well as petitioning the king for better educational facilities for Indians. “I want my people to have a chance in life,” he explained. “I want them to have good schools.”
The published interview praised his “well-nigh perfect” English and referred to his face being “a little more expressive than that of the average Red Indian.” Edgar’s interviewer also commented, “Though in his fifty-eighth year, this remarkable man does not look a day over thirty-five.” He had, in truth, just turned thirty-five.
Edgar received a pitiful letter from Eugene, who announced he was starving to death. Eugene begged for money, but Edgar was surely too astute to fall for that. Far from being without food, Eugene was happily gadding about London with his two co-tenants. Edgar seems to have suggested that Eugene should join him for the next date on his tour.
By early April, Edgar and Eugene were sharing a bedroom at lodgings in the port city of Bristol, seventy-three miles southwest of Leamington Spa. The flow of illegal drugs through British ports likely enabled Edgar to restock with cocaine and morphine while he was there. Within a couple of weeks, though, he’d broken up with Eugene, who returned to the apartment they’d shared on Leyland Road.
From “a reliable source connected with the theatrical profession,” a complaint about Edgar’s homosexual dalliances had meanwhile been received by the Birmingham police. Since his home address was in the capital, they forwarded the complaint to Scotland Yard, headquarters of their London counterparts. Scotland Yard then launched an investigation of Edgar, placing the Leyland Road apartment under surveillance.
On Tuesday, April 17, 1923, Edgar went back up to the northwest of England, apparently for a booking at the Salford Palace Theatre. That night he broke up his journey in Liverpool, where he registered at a downtown hotel as Chief White Elk. He then traveled the remaining thirty-two miles to the densely populated sprawl of Manchester, where the distinctive soundscape combined the clacking of millworkers’ clogs, the ding-ding of streetcar bells, and the rattle of horses’ hooves on the cobbled streets, down which they hauled wagons piled with freshly woven cloth.
Reverting to the name of Dr. Ray Tewanna, Edgar took lodgings in the tree-lined suburb of Levenshulme, exactly the sort of neighborhood that became an obstacle course for adults, who had to dodge packs of boys playing street soccer with anything from balls of twine to tennis balls. His new home was a large semidetached Victorian house at 65 Albert Road, where he seems to have struck up a warm relationship with his landlord and landlady. Both Cockneys in their late fifties, the couple comprised a salesman named Billy Holmes and Rebecca, his heavyset wife. Living with them was their thirty-seven-year-old daughter, Ethel, and her seven-year-old son, Leslie. He had a long, melancholy face and a ski-chute nose, inherited from his mother. Ethel’s version of that nose came with high cheekbones, fashionably penciled-in eyebrows, an off-center smile, and dark, wavy hair. She fixed it in a short, center-parted style, sometimes hidden beneath a voguish cloche hat.
Like her parents, Ethel had been reared in the poverty-stricken East End of London. These days she worked on a telephone switchboard—a job that had become available to postwar women, now that their employment options extended beyond the confines of domestic service. Before long, she was romantically entangled with the lodger whom she addressed as “Ray,” his high-alcohol-content cocktail of attractiveness blending charm, good looks, a life rich in anecdote, and a mellifluous voice, redolent of money and culture. Pepping up this already potent mix were slices of stardom and exoticism, sure to stand out from the prosaic, rainwashed surroundings.
For an unmarried mother with shaky financial prospects and a child to look after, Edgar’s talk of how he was in line for a fabulous inheritance that was being blocked by the British government wouldn’t have done any harm to his prospects as a suitor. Convenient endorsement of his talk about being a Cherokee chief was supplied by an official meeting with the city’s Lord Mayor.
When his employment in Manchester tailed off, Edgar chose not to return to London. Instead of abandoning Ethel, toward whom he seems to have felt a powerful sexual attraction, he settled for some unglamorous work performing at the Star Picture House in the suburb of Stockport. During the Saturday children’s matinee, dedicated to showing adventure serials featuring villains such as “the Hooded Terror,” whose identity was concealed by a black hood and goggles, Edgar positioned himself in front of both the screen and the orchestra pit where the pianist played a medley of popular songs. Arms folded like a footballer posing for a team photo (“Tewanna, Thomas, Carlisle, 1909”), he maintained a posture of taciturn dignity. The children responded by clapping and cheering. Further endearing himself to his audience, which probably included Leslie, Edgar distributed complimentary candy and comics.
His rapport with children and his paternal affection toward Leslie, combined with his ready embrace of Ethel’s parents, whom he called “Dad” and “Mother,” must’ve made him seem still more of a catch for her. He told her that he was a widower, bereavement lending them an additional bond. Ethel’s handsome younger brother—photographed in a Royal Artillery uniform, a peaked cap pulled over his forehead and a bandolier stretched across his chest—had been wounded in Flanders and later died in a hospital. Edgar was well-rehearsed for talking about the experiences that he and her brother had shared in the mud and blood of wartime Europe.
Tightening the connection with her, Edgar said to her that Leslie reminded him of his own son, who had passed away two years earlier. Even though Ethel felt the intense social stigma of being an unmarried mother, she confided in Edgar that she’d given birth out of wedlock. Inside three months of becoming her parents’ lodger, Edgar supplied the antidote to this stigma. At the pretty Wesleyan Methodist Church in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a district not far from their home, they entered into a bigamous marriage one unseasonably cool, breezy June day when fat clouds skittered across the blue sky.
On the marriage certificate, Ethel described herself as a widow. Yet this falsehood was eclipsed by Edgar’s contribution to the paperwork. Besides marrying under his assumed identity and presenting himself as a “doctor of medicine,” he named his father as “Chief Wolfrobe” and his father’s rank or profession as “ruler,” the loftiness of that title contrasting with the mundane entry of “salesman” next to his father-in-law’s name.
But marriage wasn’t the only good thing that happened to Edgar. Not that he’d have been aware of the other significant piece of luck from which he benefited. It consisted of Scotland Yard’s decision to drop their investigation of him, because “nothing of an improper nature” had been witnessed during the surveillance of his Leyland Road apartment. Of course, Edgar’s perceived moral rectitude owed everything to his absence from that address.
Soon he’d be absent from his Manchester address, too. His ego, ambition, and wanderlust militating against any temptation to settle for an ordinary job and establish a conventional life there, he had—most likely through the booking manager at Charles Gulliver’s firm—secured employment in France. He was due to appear at the casino in Étretat, a fashionable seaside resort where the summer season had just begun.