A bit of The Vanished ChildThe Baron Alexander von Reisden went mad after his young wife died, and in five years he had not got himself sane...
His friends were concerned about him. He had tried suicide once, early on, and had not succeeded; this was encouraging in a man who was usually both well-prepared and lucky. He still had the gun, in a box in his top drawer behind his collar studs, and he still suffered from what had led him to the act, his singular and inexplicable and apparently incurable madness. [Alexander von Reisden believes he meant to murder his wife. He has no reason for it; they had been married less than a year and he loved her; but he instinctively, inescapably knows it. {Casually, in a train station, he meets a man who tells him the story of another inexplicable crime, the double murder, long ago, of a rich man and his grandson. {Curious about the Knights, Reisden talks with Victor Wills, an English friend who writes true crime, and finds that he is connected to the Knights by more than his own curiosity.] "A boy," Victor said absently. "Yes, I know about Jay and Richard, and Charles Adair whom you met, and the Knight murder case, and I suppose, dear boy, that you had better know too." Victor Wills and Alexander Reisden were sitting in one of the little cafes by the Piazza San Marco. The glass shutters were up; outside, the New Year's rain stormed across the plaza, and the pigeons and the tourists had taken shelter. Inside, heat and heavy gilt held back the winter weather. White-haired Victor held his cup of caffe latte in two hands and stared happily about him. Victor was a friend from almost as far back as Reisden could remember, a British Museum gossip-monger now retired to Italy. When Reisden had been at English prep school, the London literary man Victor, newly converted to Catholicism, had seen him act in a school play and had invited him to his flat to discuss the Trinity. Victor had spoken rather oddly about Catholicism and, with some authority, about Havelock Ellis, Frank Harris, and Wilde. Reisden had been innocent enough then not to see immediately what Victor intended; but when he had caught on, a little before Victor's intentions would have become unmistakable, he had somehow distracted Victor from his initial purpose and got him talking about Wilde, Victor's own life as a professional writer, and finally about the poems of Mallarmé and the future of the British Liberal Party, about which they could agree. Victor had remained a friend, amusing Reisden inwardly with a succession of episodes involving Italian waiters, lost manuscripts, and the local government board on which Victor titularly had worked. He had retired to Italy in the aftermath of the Wilde affair. The love of Victor's writing life was poetry--privately published, tinted ink on tinted paper, Beardsleyesque illustrations--but since his retirement, he had become a hack writer "to keep the wolf, dear boy, if not from the door, at least not wholly upstairs with one and sharing the covers." His bread and butter was True Crime. "The infamous Knight case. I kept the Knights out of American Crimes, you know. My editor wanted to include the material, and I had photographs. But I wouldn't do it." "Oh?" "I told him it would inconvenience a dear friend. I shall give you quite the worst first. It's curious," Victor said delicately, "that Adair thought you were Richard. " Victor pushed a photograph over the table. "John Jay French," he said. "He and Richard were cousins." The image was small, about the size of a visiting card. Reisden recognized individual features: brow, nose, a jaw like the one he shaved every morning. Suddenly the features were a face and the face was his. Reisden shuddered violently and handed it back. "Are you sure you like this, my dear boy?" "Curiosity merely startles the cat. Go on." "Well, then, here is what happened to the Knights." First, said Victor, you must realize that the crimes of the rich have essentially to do with money. William Knight was made by money. Eventually the man who couldn't be his heir killed him. William Knight was the son of a poor Irish immigrant, born on the ship that brought him to America. He ran away to sea at ten and owned his first sailing ship at twenty. Much of his trade was in cotton goods. He was rich by the beginning of the American Civil War. Then he dealt with the Confederacy. He was already over sixty, but William Knight traveled to England and to the Confederacy itself, keeping up the cotton trade. He was completely ostracized. Trading with the South was simply not done, and three of his sons were fighting for the North. But he became very rich indeed. He's quite mad-looking in his photos: an evil ancient Lincoln, with the nastiest twisted mouth and great dark eyes like a cave full of spiders. He let his hair grow long because the Bible told him to. He held public prayer meetings in his offices, and sued his neighbors over trifles. He owned parts of thirty-six companies, but he always ate the same thing, meat loaf and toast and gravy at the nearest cheap restaurant. He married three women--they all expired, you can imagine--and sired enormous numbers of children, seven of whom grew to adulthood. And, quite young, they began to die off. Of the seven, William Knight Jr., John, and Alphonsus died in the Civil War and left no known children. Isabella died of some female disease, unmarried, no children. Clement Knight committed suicide, unmarried, no children. William's fifth son, Gilbert Howard Knight, refused either to marry or to go into the business. He was disinherited and forgotten, and when William Knight died, Gilbert was an itinerant used-book seller, of all things. Late in life William sired a sixth son, Thomas Robert Knight. And Thomas Robert died with his wife Sophie, in a boating accident in 1883, leaving one son, Richard Knight. The Richard, dear boy, that Charles Adair took you for. I do like Richard Knight and by all accounts he didn't have a pleasant life with William. From the day Richard was his, William started training him to be a millionaire. Tutors in mathematics and finance and deportment. William wanted Richard to succeed, you see, to wipe the stain from the Knight money. Then came Jay French. Jay French came from the South. No date of birth, no birthplace, no next of kin. He must have been born right after the war, or during it, to have been in his twenties in 1887. So he might have been a chiild of one of the Knight sons who died in the war, or for the matter, of William himself. He looked like a Knight, dark-haired, good bones. Like you. He appears first in the Knight Company ledgers in 1884 as a clerk-secretary, but by the beginning of 1885 he was William Knight's private assistant. He was short and thin, as though he had grown up starved, and was something of a dandy in a quiet way. A little, thin young man, cool and competent and always there. From all one hears, he was a very good man of business and almost the only man who got on well with William Knight. Alexander, can you imagine them together? William needed an adult, responsible heir. Richard was only a boy. But Jay was illegitimate, and bastards cannot inherit under American law. After Jay arrived, Richard seems to have spent more time away from Boston, at the family's house in New Hampshire. It was a house by a lake. Often Jay went with him. Richard seems to have quite suddenly become a sickly little boy, because in 1886 William hired for him a personal doctor. You met him, Alexander. His name was Charles Adair. Now, my dear, things get interesting. Here is Jay the illegitimate and Richard the legitimate. And here is a lake convenient for drowning. Oh, wouldn't you have, if you were the villain of the piece? It would have been so easy. A little push, the tiniest accident with a boat, the poor child would have been among the angels. And there, inevitably, at William's dark and bony side, would have been the mourning, the so-deserving Jay. But of course Jay murdered William first. On the night of August sixth, 1887, William Knight and Jay French were staying at the house by the lake. They ate dinner with Dr. Charles Adair in attendance. He says there was no disagreement between them. Richard had been sent to bed as being unwell. After the meal Jay French went upstairs to his office, at the head of the stairs opposite Richard's bedroom, to examine accounts. William Knight spoke with Adair and then began to clean a collection of some pistols and revolvers that he kept mounted on a board in the parlor. He was sitting in a large rocking chair, the guns on a table beside him and the windows open. Dr. Adair had left the house and was on the road toward the village. The road led by the lake. By looking back over his shoulder, he could see the lights of the Knight house over the water. He heard a sharp bang, like the sound of a dictionary being dropped. A man called out. Adair began running back toward the house. Whenever the trees were thin, he looked through them toward the house. Jay French banged open the front door and ran away from the house. "I'll get you for this!" Jay shouted; really, you would think people would have some imagination. He fired back at the house, a window broke. Jay ran off toward the woods beyond the barn. Silence, silence, silence. The doctor ran down the path and reached the house. Servants were coming downstairs, screaming and crying. William Knight was dead, shot dead, in the front room. A bloodbath, a shambles. Richard Knight was downstairs, by his grandfather's body, deep in shock. (Prepare to be astounded, my dear.) The doctor asks the child, "Richard, did you see anything?" And what does Richard say? "I won't tell," says Richard. "I'll never tell." The sleety rain rattled the glass. Victor leaned back, watching Reisden. "And he never did. Three days later, under almost impossible conditions, Richard Knight was kidnapped. He was with the doctor and his uncle Gilbert in seclusion at the town's hotel. Guards in the corridor, guards downstairs. At one in the afternoon, Dr. Adair and Gilbert Knight left the room together. The boy was alone. Not five minutes later the guard checked the room. "Richard was gone. "And they never have found him." ...And the rest of the story can be found in The Vanished Child. Enjoy! |
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New edition January 15, 2020.
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