The American Boy

I was to be buried alive. I had no doubt of it whatsoever. I faced the prospect of a lingering and horrible death.

My captors transferred me to another conveyance, probably a closed cart. We drove for what seemed like hours but might have been as many minutes. Time means very little without a way of measuring it.

I tried to struggle – of course I did. Yet the dimensions of the coffin, the presence of my boots and hat with me, the shortage of air, and above all the tightness of my bonds made it almost impossible for me to move at all. All I could manage was the faintest of whimpers from my parched throat and an ineffectual knocking of my elbows against the sides of my prison. I doubt if the sounds I made could have been heard by anyone sitting directly on the other side of the coffin, let alone by those in the street.

My intellectual faculties were equally paralysed. I wish I could say that I faced what lay before me with calmness. In the abstract, it is perfectly true that if you cannot avoid death, you might as well look it in the eye. But the needs of the moment swamped such lofty considerations. To continue to breathe – to continue to live – nothing else mattered.

We came to another halt. I half felt, half heard a great clatter and then a jolt. There was a knocking on the roof of my little prison. Someone laughed, a high sound with an edge of hysteria. The coffin swayed and bumped and banged. It tilted violently to a sharp angle. This, together with a series of irregular thuds, told me that we were mounting a flight of stairs. The coffin levelled out and a few paces later I heard a man’s voice, but could not make out the words.

The coffin groaned and screeched: someone was raising the lid. Currents of air flowed around me. The tip of the crowbar came so far inside that it grazed my scalp. I felt a burst of intense happiness.

“Remove the gag,” said a man whose voice was familiar. “Then the blindfold.”

I retched when they pulled the rag from my parched mouth. I tried and failed to say the word “water”. A hand gripped my hair and pulled up my head. Fingers tugged at the knot of the blindfold. Light flooded into my eyes, so bright that I moaned with the shock of it. I could see nothing but whiteness. I closed my eyes.

A hand cradled the back of my head. A container made of metal rattled against my teeth. Suddenly there was water everywhere, flooding down my face, finding its way between my cravat and my neck, filling my mouth and trickling down my throat and making me gag. The mug withdrew.

I heard footsteps – two sets, I fancy – on a bare floor and the sound of a door opening and closing. There was water on my lashes, and I did not know whether it came from the metal cup or from my tears. My eyes were still screwed shut against the light. Slowly I opened them. All I could see was a sagging ceiling, fissured with cracks, with the lathes exposed on one side where the plaster had crumbled away.

I hooked my bound hands round the rim of the coffin and eventually managed to bring myself into a sitting position. The first thing I saw was a great, grey mass of hair below a black velvet skull cap, like a hanging judge’s. I lowered my eyes to the face, which was on the level of my own. Recognition flooded into me with a sense of inevitability.

“You will be more comfortable in a moment.” He leaned forward in his wheeled chair and studied my face. “Wriggle your limbs as far as you are able. Now lean back a little, now forward. Does that not feel better? Now, more water?”

I drank greedily this time. Mr Iversen refilled the mug from a jug on the table beside his chair. The cripple was attired as he had been before, in a black, flowing robe embroidered with necromantic symbols in faded yellow thread. His crutches were propped against the bottom of the coffin. On the table was a pocket pistol.

My eyes travelled on, and I discovered we were not alone. Seated by the window with his back to us was another figure in a dusty suit of brown clothes and an old-fashioned three-cornered hat.

“You’re a fool,” my host observed in a friendly tone. “You shouldn’t have come back. You should have gone far, far away. Seven Dials is not a safe place for the inquisitive. I tried to give you the hint on your last visit. Still, one cannot expect old heads on young shoulders, I suppose.”

“A hint?” Anger spurted through me. “You call those bullies of yours a hint? What do you want of me, sir?”

All my words might win me was a kinder way of dying. I was tired of the lies, so I told him the truth. “I came back because of that bird of yours.” I saw understanding leap into his eyes. “The one that says ayez peur.”

“That damned fowl.” Iversen’s fingertips tapped the butt of the pistol. “I put up with it for the sake of the customers, but I could stand it no more. I hoped I had seen and heard the last of it.”

“I’ve drawn up a memorandum,” I said. “It covers all the circumstances of this business, including my visits to Queen-street, since I first met Mr Henry Frant.”

“Ah yes. And you’ve had it witnessed by a brace of attorneys and sent a copy to the Lord Chancellor. Come, Mr Shield, don’t play the fool. You would have gone to the magistrates long before this if you had intended something like that.”

He was in the right of it. I had indeed begun to write such a memorandum on my last evening at Monkshill-park. But it lay unfinished in my room at Gaunt-court.

“No,” Iversen went on. “I do not believe it for a moment. Not that it matters. We shall soon have the truth out of you.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. The room was heavy with a strange, sweet odour. I looked at the two figures before me, Iversen seated beside the coffin, and the old man in an elbow chair by the barred window. I heard as if at a great distance the sound of the world going about its business. There were noises in the house, too, feet on the stairs, a tapping from below and a woman singing a lullaby. There was life around me, and it was full of wonders, a sweet thing that I could not bear to part with.

“Sir,” I said to the man in brown. “I appeal to you. I beg you, help me.”

I turned back to him. “If you wish me to answer your questions with any coherence, sir, you would find me in a better condition to do so if I had something to eat. And I would be obliged if I might use the necessary house.”

Iversen laughed, exposing a set of false teeth made of bone or perhaps ivory, and clearly expensive; they reminded me of the tooth-puller and curious possibilities stirred once more in my mind. “You shall have your creature comforts, Mr Shield.” He levered himself to the edge of his chair, thrust himself upwards by exerting pressure on the arms and in one, practised movement seized a crutch and placed it under his right shoulder. For a moment he stood there, swaying slightly, gripping the side of the coffin with his free hand, with an expression of triumph on his face. He was a big man and he loomed over me like a mountain. “But first I must relieve you of the contents of your pockets.”

His big hands worked deftly and rapidly through my clothes. He removed my pocketbook, my purse, my penknife and the red-spotted handkerchief which the boys had given me on the eve of my departure from Monkshill. He gave each item a brief examination and then dropped it in the pocket of his robe. At last he was satisfied.

“I can see that would be inconvenient. There is no reason why you should not be lifted out. They will keep a watch on you, after all.”

“It will not be easy for me, or for them, if they do not untie my hands,” I pointed out.

“I do not think untying you will be necessary, Mr Shield. A little inconvenience to you or even to them is neither here nor there.” Mr Iversen picked up the pistol from the table and dragged himself towards the door. He glanced back at me. “Until we meet again,” he said with something of a flourish, a gesture that raised the ghost of a memory deep within my mind.

He dragged himself on to the landing, leaving me alone with the old man in the fading light of an April afternoon. I listened to his hirpling progress along the landing, and his clumping descent of the stairs.

“Sir,” I hissed at the old man. “You cannot sit there and permit this to happen. He intends to kill me. Will you be an accessory to murder?”

“Are you Mr Iversen’s father, sir? You would not wish your son to stain his soul with the blood of a fellow human being?”

Apart from my own ragged breathing, I heard nothing. The room was suddenly brighter, for the sun had come out. Motes danced in the air before the window. The arms and rails of the chair were grey with dust. A suspicion grew in my mind and became certainty. The man in brown could help no one.

I waited for relief for well over a quarter of an hour, to judge by the distant chimes of a church clock, while my need for the chamber-pot grew ever more pressing.

At length the door opened and the two men dressed in rusty black entered. They had kidnapped me today; and I believed that they had pursued me yesterday evening, though I had not seen their faces clearly so I could not be completely sure. I wondered whether they had also attacked me on my visit to Queen-street in December. The first man bore the chamber-pot, swinging it nonchalantly as he walked. The other carried a wooden platter on which was the end of a loaf, a wedge of cheese and a mug of small beer. He put the platter on the windowsill, close to the elbow of the man in the brown suit. Both men were clearly used to his silent presence, for they did not give him a second glance.

“You won’t see one of them at old Ma Salmon’s.” The first man put the pot on the table. “That’s Mr Iversen, Senior, sir, at your service.”

They heaved me from the coffin, which was resting on a pair of trestles. They derived a simple and ribald pleasure from my fumbling attempt to use the pot. Fortunately, in a moment they were distracted by something they could see from the window.

“It only looks like that because of the cuts,” said the other, jingling a bunch of keys in his pocket. “If you was nearer, you’d see the blemishes, you take my word for it.”

They continued discussing the subject in a detached and knowledgeable manner while I buttoned my flap as best I could with two hands tied. Their remarks were delivered with such an air of assurance that they might have been a pair of critics contemplating a portrait they did not much care for in the Exhibition Room at Somerset House. Still hobbled at the knees, I shuffled a little closer and found that, craning over their shoulders, I could look down into the yard.

There were two women below, one old, one young. The elder was tall, with a curved back like a bow. She was a grey shadow over the other, who was as small as a child, and whose gown and shift had been pulled down from her shoulders so she was naked from the waist upwards. I knew at once that she was not a child because I saw the swell of her hips and the curve of a breast. A moment later, I recognised her as Mary Ann, the dumb woman who lived in the kennel at the back of the yard.

“Once: but they threw water over her until she woke and then he began again.”

I found it hard to suppress a gasp of horror as I stared at the network of weals on that white back. Mary Ann winced and trembled as the other woman applied what I assumed was a healing ointment to her wounds. The back of her shift was a mass of blood, some rusty, some fresh.

He rattled the window, a casement, until one leaf of it flew open. He pushed me aside as though I had been a chair and picked up the chamber-pot. The bars were fixed horizontally and there was just space between them to allow the chamber-pot to pass through. He extended it to the full length of his arm and turned it upside down.

I was now too far back in the room to see down into the yard; and I was glad. I forced myself to pick at the bread and cheese, knowing that I needed nourishment, for I had eaten nothing since the sandwich Mr Harmwell had given me. The men stayed by the window, hooting with mirth. Gradually their laughter subsided, and I gathered the women had spoiled their sport by taking shelter in the kennel.

It had gradually been borne in upon me that both of them were very drunk. The smell of spirits filled the room, slicing through the unwholesome blend of other odours. Men such as these might always be a little drunk; but their behaviour now was clearly a long way from habitual tipsiness. One of them lowered his breeches, lifted his coat-tails and placed his posterior on the windowsill, no doubt hoping that the women below would be looking at him. But as one grew more boisterous, the other became quieter, and the colour gradually drained from his face, which was scarred with the pox. At length he murmured some excuse and bolted from the room. His colleague dragged me to the window, upsetting my beer in his hurry, and lashed my bound hands to one of the bars with a length of rope.

“Now don’t run away, my pretty,” he said hoarsely. “I got an errand to run, but I won’t be a minute. You tell me if the ladies come back, eh?”

He clapped me across the shoulders in the most good-humoured manner imaginable and left the room, slamming the door behind him and turning the key in the lock. I waited for a moment. The yard below was empty. The door of the kennel was closed. Blank walls of smoke-stained brick reared like cliffs on every side. The man had spoken of an errand, and I thought it likely he had gone to fetch more gin, perhaps from the establishment across the road where I had waited yesterday evening.

I flexed my hands. The knots that held my wrists tied together were as firm as ever. But this latest knot, fastening the cord which passed between my wrists and round the bar of the window, was a more slapdash affair. For a start, the position was wrong, for the cord had not been drawn tight, allowing my hands at least a limited mobility. In the second place, the knot itself was far from impregnable. I contrived to curve one hand round until the fingers had a grip on part of the knot, while I tugged at another part with my teeth. With my ears straining to hear the sound of footsteps outside the door, I worried away at the coarse, tarred cord, which chafed my skin like glass-paper. The precious minutes slid away. At last the knot loosened; and a moment later I pulled my hands away from the bar.

My wrists were still bound together, so tightly that the flow of the blood was impeded, and held with a knot that I found impossible to undo with my teeth. My legs were still tied at the knees, with the knot beyond my reach at the back. I was able to move only with painful slowness, shuffling and hopping with noisy inefficiency across the floor, an inch or two at a time.

It took me an age to reach the door. I tried the handle and confirmed it was locked. I bent my head down to the keyhole and saw that my captor had withdrawn the key so there was no possibility of my pushing it through the door and somehow retrieving it from the floor of the landing. It was a stout door, too, reinforced with iron, which made me wonder whether Iversen used it as his strong-room.

I hobbled over to the window and looked out. Mary Ann had emerged from the kennel and was now huddled in the doorway with a smouldering clay pipe in her hand. The casement was still slightly ajar. I heard footsteps immediately below, which meant I dared not call out to her.

I glanced about me. There was no fireplace in the room. Apart from the two chairs, the trestles, the coffin and a large iron-bound chest, there was no furniture. My eyes came at last to the body of Mr Iversen, Senior. He sat with his legs slightly apart, his yellow, sunken face towards the window, and his gloved hands resting on his thighs. The fabric of his coat was riddled with moth-holes and both the man and his coat were covered with a fine, feathery powdering of dust. The coat was undone, revealing the waistcoat beneath. My eyes lingered on the old man’s left-hand waistcoat pocket. The stub of a pencil protruded from it.

I eased the pencil gently from the pocket. There was still a point on it, albeit a blunt one. I looked wildly round the room for something to write on. My eyes returned at last to the corpse. I touched a corner of his hat gently with my finger. It did not move. I took a grip with both hands and lifted it, hoping I might find a label attached to the band. The wig rose a few inches and then parted company with the hat and fell back on to the bald skull, sending up a puff of dust. The movement dislodged a few yellow flakes which drifted down to Mr Iversen Senior’s shoulders.

I glanced inside the hat and discovered that it had been wedged on to the head with scraps of paper. All were brittle, some had crumbled, but a few were still whole. I picked out the largest fragment and gently unfolded it. It was a receipted bill, attesting to the fact that Francis Corker, a butcher, had received the sum of seventeen shillings and three pence three farthings from Mr Adolphus Iversen on the 9th of June 1807. The other side of the receipt was blank.

I smoothed out the paper on the windowsill, holding down one corner with the platter and most of one side with what was left of the cheese. I would not have believed it possible to write with one’s hands tied, but desperation is a fine teacher. Letter by letter, word by word, I scrawled this message:

If the bearer takes this to Mr Noak or his clerk the Negro Harmwell they will receive the sum of £5. They lodge in Brewer-st, north side, second house west from Gt Pultney-st. I am held captive at Iversen’s, Queen-street, Seven Dials.

I pushed the window as wide as it would go. Mary Ann still sat smoking, her face turned away from the house. I heard voices below, though whether from the yard near the house or through an open window or door I could not tell; in any case, I dared not call out to attract her attention. I tried waving my bound arms from side to side, standing as close as I could to the window, in the hope that the movement would register at the edge of her vision. Then, to my horror, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and approaching along the landing.

I had nothing to lose. I pushed my arms through the bars and let the note flutter from my fingers. As I did so, Mary Ann turned her head, perhaps attracted by a burst of laughter or a sudden movement from the door to the back kitchen. As she turned, she saw me and her eyes widened. The paper fluttered from my fingers and her eyes followed its fall.

The key turned in the lock. The door burst open. The man who had left me tied to the window shouldered his way into the room. His bloodshot eyes roved swiftly over the room, taking in the changes that had occurred since his departure. He lurched across the floor and gave me a backhanded blow that sent me sprawling across the coffin.

“Get back in there, you God-damned swab.” The words were harsh but he spoke in a whisper, as if he were afraid of being overheard, that his dereliction of duty might be discovered. “In there, I say.”

He bent down and manhandled me back into the coffin, cramming me in so I lay awkwardly on my side. He pushed my head down, catching my nose on the wood, and the blood began to flow. I heard him scurrying around the room in his heavy boots. I raised myself on an elbow. He restored the wig and the hat on to the corpse’s head, sending up another cloud of dust as he did so. He did not notice the pencil. He looked out of the window, but saw nothing there to cause him anxiety.

As he turned away, however, he knocked against the outstretched left leg of the corpse. The blow dislodged the dead man’s gloved hand from his thigh. There was an audible crackling sound, like tearing cloth. It was not much of a movement, but enough for the hand to hang down below the seat of the chair.

One would expect an embalmed body to be rigid. It was only some time later that I realised the significance of the movement, of the fact that it was possible when so little force had been brought to bear. The rigidity of the limb in question had already been broken. The first time, it had not been an accident.

At first, my captor did not realise what he had done. He felt the blow, of course, and turned back, looking askance at Mr Iversen, Senior as though he suspected the old man of hitting him.

The glove was slipping downwards. It was clearly much larger than the hand – perhaps the latter had shrunk – and it fell to the ground, leaving the hand beneath exposed. I saw yellowing, waxy skin, long nails, and spots of what looked like ink on the fingers. In some corner of my mind, some corner that remained remote from my present anxieties, I knew I had observed something very similar to that hand before. Then, my vision clearing, I saw with the kind of clarity which is almost like a physical pain that the top joints of the forefinger were missing. All at once I remembered the tavern in Charlotte-street, and the contents of Mr Poe’s satchel on the scrubbed table top, and the maid’s gasp of shock.

A rare specimen of digitus mortuus praecisus, lent me by the professor himself. Except that now it was no longer quite so rare.

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