Life is a topsy-turvy affair at best, and David Poe’s secret history was by no means life at its best. Here is the worst, and saddest, part of his narrative and mine.
You may picture me, sitting by the trap-door in the kitchen of that squalid little farmhouse with a pistol in one hand, a cigar in the other, and the acrid flavour of fear still twisting and turning in my stomach; and all the while the sound of Mr Poe’s whining yet oddly mellifluous voice, as beguiling as the serpent’s in Eden, was insinuating itself up through the cracks between the floorboards.
“Mr Shield,” said he, “none of us can argue with the immutable decrees of Providence. Fate has put you on one side of this trap-door and me on the other. But that is no reason why we should not discuss our situation like rational beings. I have a letter in my pocket which could bring you considerable benefit. Material benefit. It is of no use to me now. You, on the other hand, might derive much advantage from it.”
“I do not wish to listen to you.” I rose to my feet and ground out the cigar with my heel.
“Pray, Mr Shield – this will not take a moment. You will not regret it, I promise you. I may whet your interest by revealing that the letter is addressed to Mrs Frant.”
“Who was Mrs Frant’s correspondent?”
“Mr Carswall’s natural daughter, Miss Flora Carswall. She wrote the letter when she was little more than a child. She was then at a school in Bath whose address is at the head of the letter, as is the date, which is a circumstance of importance. October 1812. The contents of the letter suggest that during the summer she had spent several weeks with her father on a tour of various properties he owns, or owned, in Ireland.”
“I fail to see the significance.”
Poe’s voice rose in his excitement. “The letter is not such a letter as a daughter should ever write about her father, Mr Shield. No one who reads it can doubt its meaning. I shall be blunt – this is no time for delicacy. By my computation, Miss Carswall was at the time no more than a child of fourteen or at the most fifteen. Her letter suggests strongly that, one night when her father was inebriated, he had taken a terrible advantage of her innocence – indeed, one can place no other construction on it – and as a consequence of this she feared that she was with child. The motherless girl was clearly distraught, and she had nowhere else to turn – so she sought the counsel of her friend and cousin, Mrs Frant.”
For a moment I did not know where to find words to say. I felt horror, of course, and also a twisted anger towards that hulk of a man lying in the parlour next door. Most of all, though, I felt pity for Flora. For if this was true, it made clear much about her I had not understood before. I write if this was true.
“Show me the letter,” I said. “You may slip it between the boards.”
“Not so fast, my good friend. If I pass it to you, I pass you my sole means of negotiating. I have no wish to harm the reputation of the unfortunate lady, but you must see that I am in a difficult position myself.”
“Does Carswall know you have it?”
“Of course. He has known since February.”
“You were blackmailing him.”
“I prefer to say that we arrived at an agreement which benefited both of us.”
“It was he, perhaps, who arranged for a certain bill to be cashed in Riga?”
“Precisely.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Why, that you should let me go free. I ask for nothing more. If you wish, we shall contrive a struggle and make it look as if you had no choice in the matter. That is entirely up to you. You give me my freedom: I give you this letter, which will enable you to make what terms you wish with Mr Carswall, if he recovers his wits and his powers of speech, or with Miss Carswall, if he doesn’t.”
“Why should I strike a bargain with you, Mr Poe? I have it in my power to compel you.”
“With that pistol? I think not. You do not strike me as having the temperament that allows one to kill a man in cold blood.”
“I would not be obliged to. Once help arrives, you can be overpowered and searched without any need to shed your blood.”
Mr Poe laughed. “I see two difficulties with that plan. In the first place, if a committee searches me – yourself and Mr Noak – that nigger of his, perhaps, the slut, the constable and any Tom, Dick or Harry who happens to be in the vicinity – then the whole committee will read the letter. Miss Carswall’s name will be sullied for ever and to no purpose. Is that really what you wish? In the second place, and this argument is even more cogent, if we cannot strike a bargain, I shall simply threaten to destroy the letter. It is only a sheet of paper, and not a large one. By the time you raised the trap-door and reached me, it would be in a dozen pieces and descending into my stomach.”
“Perhaps that would be best for Miss Carswall.”
“It would depend entirely on whether I had in fact carried out my threat. You could not be absolutely sure that I had eaten the letter without searching me, and for that you would need your friends’ assistance. Also, if the letter had been destroyed, there would be no chance of your deriving any benefit from it.”
“I do not understand you, sir.”
“I think that you do, Mr Shield. Forgive me if I trespass in places where I have no right to be, but I do not think you have prospered of late. This letter would give you the power to change all that.”
I felt light-headed, and as dry as a man in a desert, a man who sees a mirage trembling before him. “I would be a fool to let you out without seeing this letter. I have only your word that it even exists.”
“Ah – spoken like a man of sense. I applaud your caution. I believe I have a suggestion that will deal with the point you raise. Suppose that I tear the letter into two pieces of unequal size. I shall push the smaller portion through the crack. It will contain enough to confirm what I have said, though for it to be of any use to you, you will also need the larger portion, which I will happily surrender up to you when you release me. You will of course have me covered with the pistol at all times, so there will be no danger to you whatsoever.”
Poe’s audacity astonished me. Here was a man who had kidnapped and mistreated me, who almost certainly intended to have me killed, and who now was proposing in the coolest way possible that I should set him free in return for a compromising letter which would enable me to blackmail a lady. I licked my lips and longed for a pot of strong coffee.
I said, “Very well. Let me see part of the letter.”
He passed a scrap of paper through to me. It was four-sided, but only one side was straight, and contained a few scrawled words, the ink blotched as if with tears.
—ut Papa flew
—he fault was mine
— be whipped for
When I read those words I abandoned prudence. I wanted the whole of that letter. At that moment, I had no thought of self-advantage. I wanted the letter so I could avert the danger of others reading it. I wanted to show it to that old man lying in the parlour and kick his helpless carcass.
I opened the trap-door. Mr Poe blinked up at me. After that, matters moved swiftly and I observed them as one in a dream. A little later, I remember how Mr Poe leaned down from the horse and shook my hand with the utmost cordiality. “God bless you, my boy,” he murmured.
It cannot have been much more than twenty minutes after Mr Poe left the cellar that I found myself standing in the yard behind the farmhouse listening to a distant bell striking one o’clock in the afternoon. Nearer by far was the sound of hooves on the lane, gradually receding.
The sun came out and turned the mucky water in the horse trough and the puddles between the ruts into things of beauty. I turned and went back into the house. In the parlour, Stephen Carswall had not moved. Whistling and squeaking as the air slid in and out of his lungs, he lay on the floor near the dying fire. His eyes were open; they followed my movements. He knew what I was about.
I held up the letter so this rotting mound of flesh and bone could see it by the flickering light of the last candle. “I know,” I said. “I know.”
I crossed the room to the window, threw open the shutters and flung wide the casement. I looked across a little garden which had been given over to brambles, nettles and thistles. There were buds on the trees of the overgrown orchard, and somewhere a blackbird was singing.