A Fugitive Englishman by Roy Lewis

Author:Roy Lewis
Language: ara, eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2014-10-24T09:22:51+00:00

PART 4

1

She was dead by the age of thirty-two, you know.

Who? Not Marianne – she was a survivor! No, Adah Menken, of course.

Shortly after my divorce in 1863, I saw Adah for the last time. It was not in pleasant circumstances. You could say she was somewhat addicted to marriage, though not divorce. She got married four times, it seems: first to the strait-laced Mr Menken, who objected to her smoking, then to my pugilist client J.C. Heenan, thirdly to the infatuated poet Robert Newell and finally to the rather shady Captain Barklay who turned out to be one of Colonel Lafayette Baker’s Secret Service agents, like me. Not that I was aware of it at the time.

What happened was that a pregnant Adah married Barklay, changed her mind after three days and tried to commit suicide. I got a message from her maid – a former actress I knew – and hurried down to her hotel. We pumped the pills out of her, and a few days later I booked her passage to Europe. Never saw her again. But she was a roaring success on the stage in London, Charles Dickens became a friend, that pretentious idiot Swinburne became her lover to much ridicule and speculation about what they actually got up to together in view of his sado-masochistic tendencies, and then she went off to Paris. I saw a copy of the rather risqué photographs of her with the elderly Alexandre Dumas, from which it was clear they had become lovers, and then, just a year or so later, she was dead. Alone. In a Paris boarding house. There was some confusion about the cause of death: some said it was the result of an accident, earlier, when she had fallen from her horse on stage. But it was a low-key funeral, anyway. Apart from the pall-bearers, no one turned up, it seems.

What? The plot against the president? Yes, sorry, my mind has been wandering again, though it’s all part of a pattern, really. Time and consequences. Better minds than mine have puzzled over the concept of time – they argue whether it really proceeds always in a forward direction, or whether it can turn back on itself, return to the past. . . . My experience of life makes me believe it’s even more complicated – the events in my life have tended to return in a kind of loop to further complicate my existence. Adah, John Sadleir, the Cork Revengers, Mrs Grimshaw and the Reverend Pease, it’s all about loops in time and their consequences. . . .

What? Yes, yes, all right, the plot against Lincoln. . . .

I met Charles Di Rudio in Washington and he explained to me what Colonel Lafayette Baker wanted. The former Italian assassin sat there in his Union uniform with his peaked cap placed jauntily over one eye, as he gabbled excitedly in his heavily accented English.

‘The Colonel was never very happy about Stanton’s concerns regarding the invasion of Canada. He thought we were largely wasting our time when more important issues were raising their heads.

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