Burgess, locked in the windowless luggage van, knew by now the location of the train at any moment by the sound of the track. He heard first the smooth clacking of the wheels on the well-laid rails of the yard. Then, later, the hollow, more resonant tones as the train crossed Bermondsey on the elevated overpass for several miles, and, still later, a transition to a deader sound and a rougher ride, signaling the beginning of the southward run outside London and into the countryside.
Burgess had no inkling of Pierce's plan, and he was astonished when the coffin bell began to ring. He attributed it to the vibration and sway of the train, but a few moments later there was a pounding, and then a muffled voice. Unable to make out the words, he approached the coffin.
"Open up, damn you," the voice said.
"Are you alive?" Burgess asked, in tones of wonderment.
"It's Agar, you damnable flat," came the answer.
Burgess hastily began to throw the catches on the coffin lid. Soon after, Agar-- covered in a dreadful green paste, smelling horrible, but acting in normal enough fashion-- got out of the coffin and said, "I must be quick. Get me those satchels there." He pointed to the five leather valises stacked in a corner of the van.
Burgess hurried to do so. "But the van is locked," It said. "How will it be opened?"
"Our friend," Agar said, "is a mountaineer."
Agar opened the safes and removed the first of the strongboxes, breaking the seal and taking out the dull gold bars of bullion-- each stamped with a royal crown and the initials "H amp; B." He replaced them with small bags of sewn shot, which he took from the valises.
Burgess watched in silence. The train was now rumbling almost due south, past the Crystal Palace, toward Croyden and Redhill. From there it would go east to Folkestone.
"A mountaineer?" Burgess said finally.
"Yes," Agar said. "He's coming over the tops of the train to unlock us."
"When?" Burgess said, frowning.
"After Redhill, returning to his coach before Ashford. It's all open country there. Almost no chance of being seen." Agar did not glance up from his work.
"Redhill to Ashford? But that's the fastest part of the run."
"Aye, I suppose," Agar said.
"Well, then," Burgess said, "your friend is mad."
At one point in the trial of Pierce, the prosecutor lapsed into a moment of frank admiration. "Then it is not true," said the prosecutor, "that you had any experience of the recreation of mountaineering?"
"None," Pierce said. "I merely said that to reassure Agar."
"You had not met Mr. Coolidge, nor read extensively on the subject, nor owned any of the particular devices and apparatus considered vital to that activity of mountaineering?"
"No," Pierce said.
"Had you, perhaps, some past experiences of athletic or physical endeavor which persuaded you of your ability to carry out your intended plan?"
"None," Pierce said.
"Well, then," said the prosecutor, "I must inquire, if only for reasons of ordinary human curiosity, what on earth, sir, led you to suppose that without prior training, or knowledge, or special equipment, or athletic prowess-- what on earth led you to believe you might succeed in such a palpably dangerous and, may I say, nearly suicidal undertaking as clambering about on a swift-moving railway train? Wherever did you find the audacity for such an act?"
Journalistic accounts mention that at this point the witness smiled. "I knew it would be no difficulty," he said, "despite the appearance of danger, for I had on several occasions read in the press of those incidents which are called railway sway, and I had similarly read of the explanation, offered by engineers, that the forces are caused by the nature of swiftly moving air as shown in the studies of the late Italian, Baroni. Thus, I was assured that these forces would operate to hold my person to the surface of the coach, and I should be utterly safe in my undertaking."
At this point, the prosecutor asked for further elucidation, which Pierce gave in garbled form. The summary of this portion of the trial, as reported in the Times, was garbled still further. The general idea was that Pierce-- by now almost revered in the press as a master criminal-- possessed some knowledge of a scientific principle that had aided him.
The truth is that Pierce, rather proud of his erudition, undertook his climb over the cars with a sense of confidence that was completely unfounded. Briefly, the situation was this:
Beginning around 1848, when railway trains began to attain speeds of fifty or even seventy miles an hour, a bizarre and inexplicable new phenomenon was noted. Whenever a fast-moving train passed a train standing at a station, the carriages of both trains had a tendency to be drawn together in what was called "railway sway." In some cases the carriages heeled over in such a pronounced fashion that passengers were alarmed, and indeed there was sometimes minor damage to coaches.
Railway engineers; after a period of technical chatter, finally admitted their perplexity outright. No one had the slightest idea why "railway sway" occurred, or what to do to correct it. One must remember that trains were then the fastest-moving objects in human history, and the behavior of such swift vehicles was suspected to be governed by some set of physical laws as yet undiscovered. The confusion was precisely that of airplane engineers a century later, when the "buffeting" phenomenon of an aircraft approaching the speed of sound was similarly inexplicable, and the means to overcome it could only be guessed at.
However, by 1851 most engineers had decided correctly that railway sway was an example of Bernoulli's Law, a formulation of a Swiss mathematician of the previous century which stated, in effect, that the pressure within a moving stream of air is less than the pressure of the air surrounding it.
This meant that two moving trains, if they were close enough, would be sucked together by the partial vacuum of air between them. The solution to the problem was simple, and soon adopted: the parallel tracks were set farther apart, and railway sway disappeared.
In modern times, Bernoulli's Law explains such diverse phenomena as why a baseball curves, why a sailboat can sail into the wind, and why an airplane wing lifts the aircraft. But then, as now, most people did not really understand these events in terms of physics: most jet-age travelers would probably be surprised to learn that a jet flies because it is literally sucked upward into the air by a partial vacuum over the wings' upper surface, and the sole purpose of the engines is to propel the wings forward fast enough to create a stream of passing air that produces this necessary vacuum.
Futhermore, a physicist would dispute even this explanation as not really correct, and would insist that a rigorous explanation of events is even further from the public's "common sense" idea about these phenomena.
In the face of this complexity, one can readily understand Pierces own confusion, and the erroneous conclusion. he drew. Apparently he believed that the airstream around the moving carriage, as described by "Baroni," would act to suck him down to the carriage roof, and thus help him to maintain his footing as he moved from car to car.
The truth is that Bernoulli's Law would not operate in any way on his body. He would simply be a man exposed to a fifty-mile-an-hour blast of rushing air, which could blow him off the train at any moment, and it was absurd for him to attempt what he did at all.
Nor was this the extent of his misinformation. The very fact that high-speed travel was so new left Pierce, along with his contemporaries, with very little sense of the consequences of being thrown from a fast-moving vehicle.
Pierce had seen Spring Heel Jack dead after being thrown from the train. But he had regarded this with no sense of inevitability, as the outcome of some inexorable physical laws. At this time, There was only a vague notion that to be thrown from a speeding train was hazardous, and somewhat more hazardous if the train was moving rapidly. But the nature of the hazard was thought to lie in the precise manner of a person's fall: a lucky man could pick himself up with a few scrapes, while an unlucky man would break his neck on impact. In short, a fall from a train was regarded pretty much like a fall from a horse: some were worse than others, and that was that.
Indeed, during the early history of railroads, there had been a sort of daredevil's sport called "carriage-hopping," favored by the kind of young men who later scaled public buildings and engaged in other madcap escapades. University students were particularly prone to these amusements.
Carriage-hopping consisted of leaping from a moving railway carriage to the ground. Although government officials condemned the practice and railway officials flatly forbade it, carriage-hopping enjoyed a brief vogue from 1830 to 1835. Most hoppers suffered nothing more serious than a few bruises, or at worst a broken bone. The fad eventually lost popularity, but the memory of it bolstered the public belief that a fall from a train was not necessarily lethal."
In fact, during the 1830s, most trains averaged twenty-five miles an hour. But by 1850, when the speed of trains had doubled, the consequences of a fall were quite different, and out of all proportion to a fall at slower speeds. Yet this was not understood, as Pierce's testimony indicates.
The prosecutor asked: "Did you take any manner of precaution against the danger of a fall?"
"I did," Pierce said, "and they caused me no little discomfort. Beneath my ordinary external garb, I wore two pairs of heavy cotton undergarments, which had the effect of making me unpleasantly heated, yet I felt these protective measures necessary."
Thus, wholly unprepared and entirely miscalculating the effects of the physical principals involved, Edward Pierce slung a coil of rope over his shoulder, opened the compartment door, and clambered up onto the roof of the moving carriage. His only true protection-- and the source of his audacity-- lay in his complete misunderstanding of the danger he faced.
____________________
The wind struck him like an enormous fist, screaming about his ears, stinging his eyes, filling his mouth and tugging at his cheeks, burning his skin. He had not removed his long frock coat, and the garment now flapped about him, whipping his legs "so fiercely that it was painful."
For a few moments, he was totally disoriented by the unexpected fury of the shrieking air that passed him; he crouched, clutching the wooden surface of the coach, and paused to get his bearings. He found he could hardly look forward at all, because of the streaking particles of soot blown back from the engine. Indeed, he was rapidly covered with fine black film on his hands and face and clothing. Beneath him, the coach rocked and jolted in an alarming and unpredictable fashion.
He very nearly abandoned his intent in those first moments, but after the initial shock had passed he determined to go forward with his plan. Crawling on his hands and knees, he moved backward to the end of the coach, and paused at the space over the coupling that separated his carriage from the next. This was a gap of some five feet. Some moments passed before he gathered the nerve to jump to the next car, but he did so successfully.
From there he crawled painfully down the length of the car. His frock coat was blown forward, covering his face and shoulders and flapping around his eyes. After some moments of struggle with the garment, he shucked it off and saw it sail away, spun twisting in the air, and eventually fall by the roadside. The whirling coat looked enough like a human form to give him pause; it seemed a kind of warning of the fate that awaited him if he made the slightest error.
Freed of the coat, he was able to make more rapid progress down the second-class coaches; he jumped from one to the next with increasing assurance, and eventually reached the luggage van after a period of time he could not estimate. It seemed an eternity, but he later concluded it had not required more than five or ten minutes.
Once atop the van, he gripped an open slapper, and uncoiled his length of hemp. One end was dropped down the slapper, and after a moment he felt a tug as Agar, inside the van, picked it up.
Pierce turned and moved to the second slapper. He waited there, his body curled tight against the constant, unyielding blast of the wind, and then a ghastly green hand-- Agar's-- reached out, holding the end of the rope. Pierce took it; Agar's hand disappeared from view.
Pierce now had his rope slung from one slapper to the next. He tied the loose ends about his belt, and then, hanging on the ropes, eased himself over the side of the van until he was level with the padlock.
In that manner he hung suspended for several minutes while he twirled the padlock with a ring of picks, trying one betty after another and operating, as he later testified with considerable understatement, "with that degree of delicacy which circumstances permitted." Altogether, he tried more than a dozen keys, and he was beginning to despair that any would turn the trick when he heard the scream of the whistle.
Looking forward, he saw the Cuckseys tunnel, and an instant later he was plunged into blackness and churning sound. The tunnel was half a mile long; there was nothing to do but wait. When the train burst into sunlight again, he continued working with the keys, and was gratified when almost immediately one of the picks clicked smoothly in the mechanism. The padlock snapped open.
Now it was a simple matter to remove the lock, swing the crossbar free, and kick the door with his feet until Burgess slid it open. The morning train passed the sleepy town of Godstone, but no one noticed the man dangling on the rope, who now eased down into the interior of the luggage van and collapsed on the floor in absolute exhaustion.
Agar testified that in the first moment that Pierce landed inside the luggage van, neither he nor Burgess recognized him: "I cool him first, and I swear I granny he's some muck Indian or nigger, so black he is, and his dunnage torn all about, like he'd gone a proper dewskitch"-- as if he'd had a thorough thrashing. "His min's a rag of tatters, and black as all the rest of him, and I says, the cracksman's hired a new bloke to do the lay. And then I see it's him himself, right enough."
Surely the three men must have presented a bizarre picture: Burgess, the guard, neat and tidy in his blue railway uniform; Agar, dressed splendidly in a formal suit, his face and hands a cadaverous bloated green; and Pierce, sagged to his hands and knees, his clothing shredded and sooty black from head to foot.
But they all recovered quickly, and worked with swift efficiency. Agar had completed the switch; the safes were locked up again, with their new treasure of lead shot; the five leather satchels stood by the van door in a neat row, each laden with gold bullion.
Pierce got to his feet and took his watch from his waistcoat, an incongruously clean gold object at the end of a soot black chain. He snapped it open: it was 8:37.
"Five minutes," he said.
Agar nodded. In five minutes, they would pass the most deserted stretch of track, where Pierce had arranged for Barlow to wait and pick up the flung satchels. Pierce sat down and stared through the open van door at the countryside rushing past.
"Are you well, then?" Agar asked.
"Well enough," Pierce said. "But I don't cherish going back."
"Aye, it's frazzled you proper," Agar said. "You're a sight and no mistake. Will you change when you're snug in the compartment again?"
Pierce, breathing heavily, was slow to comprehend the meaning of the words. "Change?"
"Aye, your dunnage." Agar grinned. "You step off at Folkestone as you stand now and you'll cause no end of stir."
Pierce watched the green, rolling hills flash past, and listened to the rumble of the carriage on the roadbed. Here was a problem he had never considered and had made no plans for. But Agar was right: he couldn't step out at Folkestone looking like a ragged chimney sweep, especially as Fowler was almost certain to seek him out to say goodbye. "I have no change," he said softly.
"What say?" Agar said, for the noise of the wind through the open van door was loud.
"I have no change of clothing," Pierce said. "I never expected…" His voice trailed off; he frowned. "I brought no other clothing."
Agar laughed heartily. "Then you'll play the proper ragamuffin, as you've made me play the stiff." Agar slapped his knee. "There's a daffy of justice, I say."
"It's nothing funny," Pierce snapped. "I have acquaintances on the train who will surely see me and mark the change."
Agar's merriment was quashed instantly. He scratched his head with a green hand. "And these same of your acquaintances, they'll miss you if you're not there at the station?"
Pierce nodded.
"It's the devil's own trap, then," Agar said. He looked around the van, at the various trunks and pieces of luggage. "Give me your ring of tickles, and I'll break a pit or two, and we'll find some square-rigged duns to fit you."
He held out his hand to Pierce for the ring of picklocks, but Pierce was looking at his watch. It was now two minutes to the drop-off point. Thirteen minutes after that, the train would stop in Ashford, and by then Pierce had to be out of the luggage van and back in his own compartment. "There's no time," he said.
"It's the only chance-- " Agar began, but broke off. Pierce was looking him up and down in a thoughtful way. "No," Agar said. "Damn you, no!"
"We're about the same size," Pierce said. "Now be quick."
He turned away and the screwsman undressed, muttering oaths of all sorts. Pierce watched the countryside. They were close now: he bent to position the satchels at the lip of the open van door.
Now he saw a tree by the roadside, one of the landmarks he'd long since set for himself. Soon there would be the stone fence… There it was… and then the old abandoned rusty cart. He saw the cart.
A moment later, he saw the crest of a hill and Barlow in profile beside the coach.
"Now!" he said and, with a grunt, flung one satchel after another out of the moving train. He watched them bounce on the ground, one by one. He saw Barlow hastening down the hill toward them. Then the train went around a curve.
He looked back at Agar, who had stripped to his underclothes, and held his fine duds out for Pierce. "Here you are, and damn your eyes."
Pierce took the clothes, rolled them into as tight a ball as he could manage, wrapped the parcel with Agar's belt, and, without another word, swung out the open door and into the wind. Burgess closed the van door, and a few moments later the guard and Agar heard a clink as the bolt was thrown, and another clink as the padlock was locked once more. They heard the scratching of Pierces feet as he scrambled up to the roof; and then they saw the rope, which had been taut across the roof from slapper to slapper, suddenly go slack. The rope was pulled out. They heard Pierces footsteps on the roof a moment longer, and then nothing.
"Damn me, I'm cold," Agar said. "You'd best lock me back up," and he crawled into his coffin.
____________________
Pierce had not progressed far on his return journey before he realized he had made still another error in his planning: he had assumed it would take the same amount of time to go from the van to his compartment as it took to go from his compartment to the van. But almost immediately he recognized his mistake.
The return trip, against the blast of the wind, was much slower. And he was further burdened by the parcel of Agar's clothing, which he clutched to his chest, leaving only one hand free to grip the roofing as he crawled forward along the length of the train. His progress was agonizingly slow. Within minutes he realized that he was going to miss his intended schedule, and badly. He would still be crawling along the rooftops when the train reached Ashford Station; and then he would be spotted, and the jig would be up.
Pierce had a moment of profound rage that this final step in the plan should be, in the end, the only thing to go irretrievably wrong. The fact that the error was entirely his own doing merely increased his fury. He gripped the pitching, swaying carnage roof and swore into the wind, but the blast of air was so loud he did not hear his own voice.
He knew, of course, what he must do, but he did not think about it. He continued forward as best he could. He was midway along the fourth of the seven second-class carriages when he felt the train begin to slow beneath him. The whistle screamed.
Squinting ahead, he saw Ashford Station, a tiny red rectangle with a gray roof in the far distance. He could not make out any details, but he knew that in less than a minute the train would be near enough that passengers on the platform could see him on the roof. For a brief moment, he wondered what they would think if they did see him, and then he got up and ran, sprinting forward, leaping from one car to the next without hesitation, half blinded by the smoke that poured from the engine funnel back toward him.
Somehow he made it safely to the first-class coach, swung down, opened the door, dropped into his compartment, and immediately pulled the blinds. The train was now chugging very slowly, and as Pierce collapsed into his seat he heard the hiss of the brakes and the porter's cry: "Ashford Station… Ashford… Ashford…"
Pierce sighed.
They had done it.
Twenty-seven minutes later, the train arrived at Folkestone, the end of the South Eastern Railway line, and all the passengers disembarked. Pierce emerged from his compartment, appearing, he said, "far better than I deserved, but far from sartorial correctness, to put it lightly."
Although he had hastily employed handkerchief and spittle to clean his face and hands, he had discovered the soot and grime on his flesh to be most recalcitrant. As he had no mirror, he could only guess at the condition of his face, but his hands were no cleaner than a kind of pale gray. Furthermore, he suspected that his sandy-colored hair was now a good deal darker than previously, and he was grateful that most of it would be covered by his top hat.
But except for the top hat, all his clothing fitted poorly. Even in an age when most people's clothing fitted poorly, Pierce felt himself especially noticeable. The trousers were almost two inches short of an acceptable length, and the cut of the coat, although elegant enough, was of the extreme and showy fashion that true gentlemen of breeding avoided as indecently nouveau riche. And, of course, he reeked of dead cat.
Thus Pierce stepped out onto the crowded Folkestone platform with an inner dread. He knew that most observers would put down his appearance as a sham: it was common enough for men who aspired to be gentlemen to obtain secondhand goods, which they wore proudly, oblivious to the ill fit of the garments. But Pierce was all too aware that Henry Fowler, whose entire conscious being was attuned to the nuances of social standing, would spot the peculiarity of Pierce's appearance in an instant, and would wonder what was amiss. He would almost certainly realize that Pierce had changed clothing for some reason during the ride, and he would wonder about that as well.
Pierce's only hope lay in keeping his distance from Fowler. He planned, if he could, to make off with a distant wave of goodbye, and an air of pressing business that precluded social amenities. Fowler would certainly understand a man who looked after business first. And, from a distance, with the intervening throng of people, Pierce's bizarre dress might possibly escape his eye.
As it happened, Fowler came charging through the crowd before Pierce could spot him. Fowler had the woman beside him, and he did not look happy.
"Now, Edward," Fowler began crisply, "I should be forever in your debt if you would--" He broke off, and his mouth fell open.
Dear God, Pierce thought. It's finished.
"Edward," Fowler said, staring at his friend in astonishment.
Pierce's mind was working fast, trying to anticipate questions, trying to come up with answers; he felt himself break into a sweat.
"Edward, my dear fellow, you look terrible."
"I know," Pierce began, "you see--"
"You look ghastly near to death itself. Why, you are positively gray as a corpse. When you told me you suffered from trains, I hardly imagined… Are you all right?"
"I believe so," Pierce said, with a heartfelt sigh. "I expect I shall be much improved after I dine."
"Dine? Yes, of course, you must dine at once, and take a draught of brandy, too. Your circulation is sluggish, from the look of you. I should join you myself, but-- ah, I see they are now unloading the gold which is my deep responsibility. Edward, can you excuse me? Are you truly well?"
"I appreciate your concern," Pierce began, "and--"
"Perhaps I can help him," the girl said.
"Oh, capital idea," Fowler said. "Most splendid. Splendid. She's a charmer, Edward, and I leave her to you." Fowler gave him a queer look at this last comment, and then he hurried off down the platform toward the luggage van, turning back once to call, "Remember, a good strong draught of brandy's the thing." And then he was gone.
Pierce gave an enormous sigh, and turned to the girl "How could he miss my clothes?"
"You should see your countenance," she said. "You look horrible." She glanced at his clothes. "And I see you've a dead man's dunnage."
"Mine were torn by the wind."
"Then you have done the pull?"
Pierce only grinned.
____________________
Pierce left the station shortly before noon. The girl, Brigid Lawson, remained behind to supervise the loading of her brother's coffin onto a cab. Much to the irritation of the porters, she turned down several waiting cabs at the station, claiming she had made arrangements in advance for a particular one.
The cab did not arrive until after one o'clock. The driver, an ugly massive brute with a scar across his forehead, helped with the loading, then whipped up the horses and galloped away. No one noticed when, at the end of the street, the cab halted to pick up another passenger, an ashen-colored gentleman in ill-fitting clothes. Then the cab rattled off, and disappeared from sight.
____________________
By noon, the strongboxes of the Huddleston amp; Bradford Bank had been transferred, under armed guard, from the Folkestone railway station to the Channel steamer, which made the crossing to Ostend in four hours. Allowing for the Continental time change, it was 5 pm. when French customs officials signed the requisite forms and took possession of the strongboxes. These were then transported, under armed guard, to the Ostend railway terminus for shipment to Paris by train the following morning.
On the morning of May 23rd, French representatives of the bank of Louis Bonnard et Fils arrived at Ostend to open the strongboxes and verify their contents, prior to placing them aboard the nine o'clock train to Paris.
Thus, at about 8:15 a.m. on May 23rd, it was discovered that the strongboxes contained a large quantity of lead shot, sewn into individual cloth packets, and no gold at all.
This astounding development was immediately reported to London by telegraph, and the message reached Huddleston amp; Bradford's Westminster offices shortly after 10 a.m. Immediately, it provoked the most profound consternation in that firm's brief but respectable history, and the furor did not abate for months to come.
Predictably, the initial reaction of Huddleston amp; Bradford was sheer disbelief that anything was amiss. The French cable had been composed in English and read: GOLD MISSED NOW WHERE IS, and was signed VERNIER, OSTEND.
Confronted by this ambiguous message, Mr. Huddleston announced that there had been, no doubt, some silly delay with the French customs authorities and he predicted the whole business would be unraveled before teatime. Mr. Bradford, who had never the slightest attempt to conceal his intense and lifelong loathing for all things French, assumed that the filthy Frogs had misplaced the bullion, and were now trying to fix the blame for their own stupidity on the English. Mr. Henry Fowler, who had accompanied the gold shipment to Folkestone and seen it safely onto the Channel steamer, observed that the signature "Vernier" was an unfamiliar name, and speculated that the cable might be some sort of practical joke. This was, after all, a time of increasingly strained relations between the English and their French allies.
Cables requesting-- and later demanding-- clarification flashed back and forth across the Channel. By noon, it appeared that the steamship crossing from Dover to Ostend had been sunk, and the bullion lost in the mishap. However, by early afternoon it was clear the steamer had had an uneventful passage, but almost everything else was vastly more confused.
Cables were now being fired off to all conceivable parties by the Paris bank, the French railway, the English steamship line, the British railway, and the British bank, in dizzying profusion. As the day wore on, the tone of the messages became more acrimonious and their content more ludicrous. The whole thing reached a sort of pinnacle when the manager of the South Eastern Railway in Folkestone telegraphed the manager of the Britannic Steam Packet Company, also in Folkestone: QUI EST M. VERNIER. To this, the steamship manager shot back YOUR SCURRILOUS ALLEGATIONS SHALL NOT GO UNCHALLENGED.
By teatime in London, the desks of the chief officers of Huddleston amp; Bradford were heaped with telegrams and cables, and office boys were being dispatched to gentlemen's homes to inform wives that their husbands would not be home for dinner, owing to urgent matters of business. The earlier atmosphere of unruffled calm and disdain for French inefficiency was now fading, replaced by a growing suspicion that something might actually have happened to the gold. And it was increasingly clear that the French were as worried as the English-- M. Bonnard himself had taken the afternoon train to the coast, to investigate the situation in Ostend at first hand. M. Bonnard was a notorious recluse, and his decision to travel was viewed as a most significant event.
By seven o'clock in London, when most of the bank's derks went home for the day, the mood of the officers was openly pessimistic. Mr. Huddleston was snappish; Mr. Bradford had the smell of gin on his breath; Mr. Fowler was pale as a ghost; and Mr. Trent's hands trembled. There was a brief moment of elation around 7:30 pm., when the customs papers from Ostend, signed by the French the previous day, arrived at the bank. They indicated that at 5 pm. on May 22nd the designated representative of Bonnard et Fils, one Raymond Vernier, had signed for nineteen sealed strongboxes from Huddlestdn amp; Bradford containing, according to the declaration, twelve thousand pounds sterling in bullion.
"Here is their bloody death warrant," Mr. Huddleston said, waving the paper in the air, "and if there's been any irregularity, it is wholly upon French heads." But this was an exaggeration of the legal situation, and he himself knew it.
Soon after, Mr. Huddleston received a long cable from Ostend:
YOUR CONSIGNMENT NINETEEN (19) STRONG BOXES ARRIVED OSTEND YESTERDAY 22 MAY AT 1700 HOURS ABOARD SHIP "ARLINGTON" SAID CONSIGNMENT ACCEPTED BY OUR REPRESENTATIVE WITHOUT BREAKING SEALS WHICH APPEARED INTACT CONSIGNMENT PLACED IN OSTEND STRONG SAFE WITH GUARD NIGHT 22 MAY FOLLOWING OUR CUSTOM NO EVIDENCE TAMPERING SAFE GUARD CHARACTER RELIABLE MORNING 23 MAY OUR REPRESENTATIVE BROKE SEALS YOUR CONSIGNMENT FOUND CONSISTING QUANTITY LEAD PELLETS FOR GUN BUT NO GOLD PRELIMINARY INQUIRY REGARDING ORIGIN PELLETS SUGGESTS ENGLISH MANUFACTURE REVIEW OF BROKEN SEALS SUGGESTS PREVIOUS BREAK AND SECONDARY SEALING SKILLFUL NATURE NOT AROUSING SUSPICION AT ORDINARY INSPECTION IMMEDIATELY NOTIFYING POLICE OFFICIALS ALSO GOVERNMENT IN PARIS REMINDING ALL OF BRITISH ORIGIN BRITISH RAILWAY BRITISH STEAMERSFIIP BRITISH SUBJECTS GUARDING THROUGHOUT REQUEST YOU INFORM BRITISH AUTHORITIES I AWAIT YOUR SOLUTION TO THIS TRUE PUZZLE
LOUIS BONNARD,
PRESIDENT BONNARD ET FIL3,
PARIS ORIGINEE: OSTEND
Mr. Huddleston's first reaction to the cable was reported to be "a heated and forceful expletive, provoked by the stresses of the moment and the lateness of the hour." He is also said to have commented extensively on the French nation, the French culture, and the personal and hygienic habits of the French populace. Mr. Bradford, even more vociferous, expressed his belief in the unnatural French fondness for intimacy with barnyard creatures. Mr. Fowler was obviously intoxicated and Mr. Trent was suffering pains in the chest.
It was nearly ten o'clock at night when the bankers were finally calm enough for Mr. Huddleston to say to Mr. Bradford: "I shall notify the Minister. You notify Scotland Yard."
____________________
Events of subsequent days followed a certain predictable pattern. The English suspected the French; the French suspected the English; everyone suspected the English railway officials, who in turn suspected the English steamship officials, who in turn suspected the French customs officials.
British police officers in France, and French police officers in England, rubbed shoulders with private detectives hired by the banks, the railroads, and the shipping line. Everyone offered some sort of reward for information leading to the arrest of the villains, and informants on both sides of the Channel quickly responded with a dazzling profusion of tips and rumors.
Theories about the lost gold shipment ran the gamut from the most mundane-- a couple of French or English hooligans stumbling upon a fortuitous opportunity-- to the most grandiose-- an elaborate plot by the highest officials of French or English government, engaged in a Machiavellian scheme intended simultaneously to line their own pockets and to sour relations with their military allies. Lord Cardigan himself, the great war hero, expressed the opinion that "it must surely be a clever combination of avarice and statecraft."
Nevertheless, the most widespread belief, on both sides of the Channel, was that it was some kind of inside job. For one thing, that was how most crimes were carried out. And, particularly in this case, the complexity and neatness of the theft surely pointed to inside information and cooperation. Thus every individual who had the slightest relationship to the Crimean gold shipment came under scrutiny, and was interrogated by the authorities. The zeal of the police to gather information led to some unlikely circumstances: the ten-year-old grandson of the Folkestone harbormaster was tailed by a plainclothesman for several days-- for reasons that no one could quite recall later on. Such incidents only increased the general confusion, and the process of interrogation dragged on for months, with each new clue and possibility receiving the full attention of an eager and fascinated press.
No significant progress was made until June 17th, nearly a month after the robbery. Then, at the insistence of the French authorities, the safes in Ostend; aboard the English steamship, and on the South Eastern Railway were all returned to their respective manufacturers in Paris, Hamburg, and London for dismantling and examination of the lock mechanisms. The Chubb safes were discovered to contain telltale scratches inside the locks, as well as traces of metal filings, grease, and wax. The other safes showed no signs of tampering.
This discovery focused new attention on the luggage-van guard Burgess, who had been previously questioned and released. On June 19th, Scotland Yard announced a warrant for his arrest, but the same day the man, his wife, and his two children vanished without a trace. In subsequent weeks of searching, Burgess was not found.
It was then recalled that the South Eastern Railway had suffered another robbery from its luggage van, only a week prior to the bullion theft. The clear implication of generally lax management by railway authorities fed the growing public suspicion that the robbery must have occurred on the London-Folkestone train. And when the South Eastern Railway's hired detectives came forth with evidence that the robbery had been carried out by French villains-- an allegation quickly shown to be groundless-- the public suspicion hardened into certainty, and the press began to refer to The Great Train Robbery.
All during July and August, 1855, The Great Train Robbery remained a sensational topic in print and conversation. Although no one could figure out quite how it had been done, its evident complexity and audacity soon led to the unquestioned belief that it must have been carried out by Englishmen. The previously suspect French were now deemed too limited and timid even to conceive such a dashing endeavor, to say nothing of bringing it off.
When, in late August, the police in New York City announced they had captured the robbers, and that they were Americans, the English press reacted with frankly scornful disbelief. And, indeed, some weeks later it was learned that the New York police were in error, and that their robbers had never set foot on English soil, but were, in the words of one correspondent, "of that erratic turn of mind, wherein a man will seize upon a publicized event, even if it be notorious, to gain the attention of the wider public, and this to satisfy his demented craving for a moment in the limelight."
The English newspapers printed every shred of rumor, hearsay, and speculation about the robbery; other stories were slanted to consider the robbery. Thus when Victoria made a visit to Paris in August, the press wondered in what way the robbery would affect her reception in that city. (It apparently made no difference at all.)
But the plain fact was that throughout the summer months no single new development occurred, and inevitably interest began to wane. People's imaginations had been captured for four months. During that time, they had progressed from hostility toward the French, who had obviously stolen the gold in some sleazy, underhanded fashion, to suspicion of the English leaders of finance and industry, who were at best guilty of gross incompetence and at worst culpable of the crime itself, and eventually to a sort of admiration for the resourcefulness and daring of the English rogues who had plotted and carried out the escapade-- however it was actually done.
But in the absence of fresh developments The Great Train Robbery became tedious, and eventually public opinion turned distinctly sour. Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police. In short, they wanted the culprits caught, and quickly.
But the culprits were not caught. Officials mentioned "possible new developments in the case" with ever less conviction. In late September there was an anonymous story to the effect that Mr. Harranby of Scotland Yard had known of the impending crime but had failed to prevent it; Mr. Harranby vigorously denied these rumors, but there were a few scattered calls for his resignation. The banking firm of Huddleston amp; Bradford, which had enjoyed a mild increase in business during the summer months, now experienced a mild decline. Newspapers featuring stories of the robbery sold fewer copies.
By October, 1855, The Great Train Robbery was no longer of interest to anyone in England. It had come full circle, from a topic of universal and endless fascination to a confused and embarrassing incident that nearly everyone wished very much to forget.