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in the papers, and the contradictory accounts which reached the ears of the public did not tend to throw much light on the mystery, but the display made by the claimant had dissatisfied and somewhat alarmed his advisers. It was considered absolutely necessary that he should revisit all the places where Roger had ever been, and repair as far as possible the ravages which time had made in his memory. In addition to this, there were soldiers and shipping-agents and many others to be hunted up all over England, and accordingly the claimant repaired to Poole and Bath, and Brighton and Colchester and Liverpool, and a vast number of places besides, always accompanied by Mr. Holmes, or Rous or Baigent. Though a certain number of refusals and disappointments were met with, a very fair crop of affidavits was garnered in, and at the beginning of the new year a most important accession was obtained in the shape of Miss Braine, who had been Miss Doughty's governess in old days, and who identified the claimant most decisively, and took up her abode under his roof. In one quarter, however, there was absolute failure; not a trace could be found of any other survivors of the Bella, nor of the passengers or crew of the Osprey, nor indeed of the existence of the Osprey itself. While the summer and autumn thus passed in strength- ening the case, the Dowager had gone back to Paris, and the claimant maintained his headquarters at Croydon, but not altogether to his satisfaction. He had been to Alresford in company with his wife, where they were received with all honour and with a merry peal of bells, and the joys of partridge-shooting with Mr. Bulpett -- for the claimant was a remarkable shot and no mean fly-fisher -- had fired him with the desire for a country life. It may have been suggested that his cause would be advanced if he took a house in the neighbourhood of Tichborne and mingled freely with the country gentry, so on the 23rd of September he wrote to Lady Tichborne :-- ` My dear Mamma I think it would be as well if I took a House down here. Inching Abys is to let. and I think it would suit me so much better than Croydon. I find I could live for half the money here. The rent is 3. per week. And everything is so cheap here, to what it is in Croydon, and Inchin Abys is so secluded. no Neaghbours to annoy us . . . . Mr. Haping1 is a going to try and rise some money for me.' Itchen Abbas, a name well known to Hampshiremen, may have been admirably adapted for the purpose; but the Dowager would have none of it, and she expressed her displeasure in a letter which is a curious revelation of her strange jealous nature :-- ` I am very sorry to find you have taken Itchen House so far from here, And it is a great pity you value Mr. Hopkins's society more than mine, and I feel very much that notwithstanding all that I do for you, that you have taken that house away from me. I believe, however, that Mr. Hopkins is not your friend so much as I am, as he refused to assist you with money when I asked him to lend you some, and I do not think Mr. Bulpett is so much your friend as I have always been to you. I beg you to break it off, and not take Itchen by all means. I cannot think how you can hurt my feelings to that degree. It is a cruel thing to me to consider that I have given you so many proofs of my affection, and you prefer Mr. Hopkins' and Mr. Bulpett's society to mine . . . your adversaries will take it as a proof against your identity your despising my society and preferring your Alresford friends, but you must get rid of Itchen at any price.' The claimant in vain tried to shake Lady Tichborne's resolution, `Inchin Abys' was disposed of, and he wrote despondingly : ` I am beginning to get very tired of so much worrat. Oh how much happier it would have been for me to have remained in Australia.' Meanwhile, a correspondence had been opened up with a distant quarter of the globe, from which very important results were anticipated. Mention had been made before Mr. Roupell of the little town of Melipilla in Chili, where the claimant alleged that he had spent three weeks in the house of Tomas Castro. The following letter was now written, translated into Spanish, and despatched to this gentleman; it was dated August 28,1867, from Mr. Holmes' office, and the English original ran :- ' DEAR TOMAS CASTRO ,-- I suppose I am about the last person, that you would expect to receive a letter from. But, my dear Friend, you see we know not what we have to do in this world. The fact is I have only just returned to England. That is to say last december. and I neglected to write to my Friends for several years. I have grown very stout, nearly so stout as Raymond Osago. I found when I arrived in England my property was and is now for the present in procession of my relatives who dispute my titles. I am very happy to say my mother is still alive and I have also many Friends who likewise do all they can to help me. But still all those beautiful estates that I used to tell you of are kept from me, until I prove that I am the same person I was thirteen years ago. Please remember me to Don Juan Halley the English Doctor, and to Clara and Jesusa my respects to Donna Natalia Salmento, or as I used to teach you to call her Mrs. Castro. Please remember me also to Don Ramon Alcalde Donna Hurtane and my old Compadre as I used to call him Senorita Matilda and also to Jose Maria Berenguel and his brother Would my dear Friend show this letter to them and ask them to write a few lines to me and also if not too much truble to my solicitor Mr. John Holmes. It is very hard for me my dear Friend to be kepp out of my estates, so I must therefore beg of you to help me all you can. really I was forgetting one old friend altogether I mean Mr. Toro Don Jose -- your Wife sister husband of Concumen. And a nother strange thing I have to tell you this and I have no doubt you will say I took a great liberty on myself. That is to say I took and made use of your name and was only known in Australia by the name of Thomas Castro for the thirteen years that I was there I also said I belonged to Chili. They might have known better than that. I can assure you my dear Friend I did not disgrace your name either in feats of Horsemanship, while there . . . I remain truly yeurs, `R. C. D. TICHBORNE.'
Viewed as an exercise of memory, after the lapse of thirteen years, this letter is in striking contrast with those despatched from Australia by the claimant, and that it was sufficiently accurate is shown by the reply sent on the 27th of October by Don Pedro Castro, in which he explained that his father, Don Tomas, was in a lunatic asylum, and that his mother, Donna Castro, and several others of those mentioned, were dead or gone away, but that a good many of the inhabitants of Melipilla had a clear recollection of his correspondent. Amongst these was Don Josh Miguel Valdivieso, the present regidor of the municipality, who, `directly he read your letter, went into an account as to who you were, of your stay in this place, etc., expressing great pleasure at hearing from you'; `and,' he added, 'Dona Fran- cisca Ahumada, the mother of the Azocares, retains a lock of your hair. I recall the fact to your attention in case of your being able to turn it to any account.' On the 1st of January the claimant acknowledged the letter, and asked him to beg Dona Francisca to send him a small portion of the hair which she had kept. The ensuing correspondence is of the utmost importance, but its perusal must for the moment be postponed. All this time the defendants had been pursuing their inquiries pertinaciously. Long before the claimant's affidavit had been filed, they had despatched an agent to Australia, who made the interesting discovery that there were people out there who asserted that Castro, the butcher at Wagga Wagga, had at one period or another during his colonial career passed under the name of Orton. Further inquiries connected one of Castro's associates with the east end of London and with the butchering trade there, and in the autumn of 1867 a long investigation in that quarter revealed a family called Orton, one of whose mem- bers named Arthur had disappeared in the colonies many years before. Arthur Orton's father, old George Orton, vas a respect- able shipping butcher of High Street, Wapping. He had a numerous family, eight sons and four daughters, of whom Arthur was the youngest, born on the 20th of March 1834. He had had a little schooling at Wapping, but his educa- tion made small progress, for when a boy of nine or ten he had been afflicted with St. Vitus's dance, which pre- vented him from learning anything. His father took him from school and placed him in.the shop, but the nervous affection continued, and it was determined to send him to sea for its cure. Accordingly, when he was about fifteen, he was apprenticed to Captain Brooks of the Ocean, and in that capacity made the voyage to Valparaiso. The hard life of a ship's apprentice was not to his taste, and in June 1849 he deserted from that port and did not reappear there for about eighteen months, when, the danger of arrest being over, he engaged himself on board the Jessie Miller, and was back in London on the 11th of June 1851. He was now seventeen years old, and had become a good- sized, fair-haired lad, though of somewhat clumsy build; indeed he incurred the sobriquet of ` bullocky Orton,' and the family generally were known as `the buffalo breed'; but he was cured of the St. Vitus's dance, of which all that remained was an involuntary raising of the eyebrow, and for his rank of life he was a presentable young. fellow. He resumed his occupation in his father's shop, and selected a certain Miss Mary Ann Loder, with whom he ' kept company' and `walked out.' They considered themselves an engaged couple, but Arthur was ` owre young to marry yet,' and in November 1852 a favourable opportunity pre- sented itself of making his way to Australia and there seeking fortune. A gentleman in Hobart Town required a couple of Shetland ponies, a commodity in which old Mr. Orton dealt, and Arthur agreed to sail in charge of them on board the Middleton, and to act as ship's butcher. Though his education had been neglected he was still a letter- writer of sorts, and Miss Loder was consoled for the agony of parting by the following epistle :- Sunday, Dec. 12/52.
DEAR MARY
ANN, -- I now take the first opportutity of
wrighting to you which i hope will find you and your mother quite well as it leaves me the same. We have been lying here ever since we came away. We went away once but had to come back again it blew so hard. I hope you will write to me as soon as you can. If you write to me to day i shall get it as we are lickely to lay here 3 or 4 days more yet. you must excuse my writen as the ship is piching very much. we lost one of our anchor last night it blew so hard that it very near blew us on the sand. I hope you will not show this to any one as it is wrote so bad. if i get a letter from you i will write again so Good-bye. give my Love to all enquireen friends and except the same from your affectionate Friend, Arthur Orton. You must put them directions on the Letter Dear. Mr. A. Orton, on board the ship Middleton, Capt. Storie, for Hobart Town now at Deal.' Hobart Town was reached in May 1853, and Orton, after disposing of the ponies, got employment as a slaughterman with a local butcher, and then drifted into the service of a Mr. Johnstone as drover and stock-keeper. He wrote to his old sweetheart in September 1853 in fairly affectionate terms; -- 'I ham very Glad my Dear you did not come out when i wanted you because this is a Dreadful place to live in. I should not been able to have make you comfitable and I would sooner luse all i got than made you un so.' This was his last letter to her, however, and some time afterwards, in the month of March of 1854, he wrote to his sister Elizabeth:- ' I receved a Letter from Mary Ann Dated 30 Deer. she say they receved a Letter from you so i suppose by that you have been a long while there. Mary ann says she wrote Four times. but this is the first i receved. Capt. Angel was here some time ago, but he brough no Letters . . . . I have wrote to George several times but never receved an answer let me know my Dear sister weather you have heard from him or not. i feel very ancius to know . . . . I shall never go to England again Dear lisy. I have made my mind to that. I am now living with Mr. W. Ladds of Elizaberth Street.' He appears to have resided in Hobart Town for some time after this, and to have borrowed money, which he failed to repay, from a Mrs. Mina Jury, whose husband was related to two men of that name, who had married two of the Ortons, but he held no further communication with the folks at home, and became lost to all knowledge of them. The defendants, on directing their investigations to Wapping, discovered that old George Orton and his wife were dead, but that inquiries had recently been made after them under mysterious circumstances. Whicher, the detective who has already figured in these pages in connection with the story of Constance Kent, was now being employed by Lord Arundel of Wardour, and he made the following important discovery. It appeared that on the evening of Christmas Day 1866, Mrs. Jackson, a widow woman who kept the Globe Inn, near the High Street, was at the bar with her mother, Mrs. Fairhead, when a big man in a pea-jacket, with a muffler about his throat and a peaked cap on his head, entered the parlour, called for a glass of sherry and a cigar, and began con- versation by saying, ' What has become of the Ortons ? I have been knocking in the High Street, and cannot get in.'-` Oh no,' said Mrs. Fairhead ; ` they are all gone. Old Orton and his wife are dead and the family dispersed.' `Where is Mary Ann ?' -- 'Oh, she was married to a Mr. Tredgett, but is a widow, and keeps a lodging-house in the East India Road.' Mrs. Jackson offered to get the address from a neighbour; and the stranger asked her if she had taken the house from Mrs. Macfarlane; and, looking through a little glass door which opened on to the street, he inquired about the Cronins and others who used to live about the place and declared that the house had not altered a bit. Mrs. Fairhead was so surprised that she exclaimed, `Why, you must be the Orton who left some twelve or fourteen years ago, and has not been heard of since.'-` No,' was the reply, 'I am not; but I am a friend who has come to assist the family.' ` Well,' said Mrs. Fairhead, `you are very like the family, you are very like the old gentleman; you seem to know all the people about here.' The stranger accounted for this by saying that he had been at Wapping twelve or fourteen years ago; and then Mrs. Fairhead went out and returned shortly with Mrs. Tredgett's address, after which the visitor departed. Whicher showed to these women a photograph taken of the claimant in Australia, and they identified it as that of the man who had come down to them on Christmas Eve. And the claimant, though not till long afterwards, admitted that the first thing he did on arriving in England, after ensconcing his family in the seclusion of Ford's Hotel, had been to rumble down to Wapping in a four-wheeled cab and prosecute inquiries about the Ortons at the Globe Inn. The account he gave of the interview differed materially from that of the two women, but he also admitted that, as far back as April 1865, he had got the schoolmaster at Wagga Wagga to write a letter for him to a Wapping tradesman named Richardson, asking him to oblige Thomas Castro with any information in his power relating to Mr. Orton or his family or his son Arthur. The news of the line, of inquiry taken up by the defen- dants could not fail to reach the ears of the claimant and his advisers, and on the 20th of October 1867 we have him writing to his friend Rous :- ` We find the other side very busy. With another pair of Sisters for me, one of them has been to see Mr. Holmes. they had been three days at them, and they are quite sure of success. Only there is this difference which they cannot make out. The brother of these young womans is dark and very much marked with smalls pox . . . . The man they think I am is still living at Wagga Wagga under an assumed name . . . . They say I was born in Waping. I am glad they have found a Respectable part of London for me. I never remember having.been there.' It seems strange that the claimant should not have hastened to inform Lady Tichborne of this move on the part of his opponents, but it was not until the following February that he wrote to her:-- ' It appears that the other side are trying to make out that I am not myself but a person named horton. This person that came happened to be a schoolfellow of this Horton, and in cause of business mentioned it to Bloxam1 and told him he could swear to this person Horton wherever he seen him. As soon as he saw me, he said. I have never seen this person before, he certainly is not Horton, my old schoolfellow.' It was a disastrous day for the claimant when he parted from Lady Tichborne in the summer of 1867. He was in the hands of the money-lenders, he complained that his friends were playing him false, and in spite of the £20 a week allowed him by the Dowager, he was in constant pecuniary trouble, was thinking of declaring himself a bank- rupt, and lived in daily dread of being arrested for debt. In the March of 1868 matters reached a crisis; and though Lady Tichborne had come over to London so as to be near him, he was compelled to take refuge at Boulogne. He had scarcely done so when a tragic event recalled him. On the 12th of March Lady Tichborne died suddenly at Hewlett's Hotel in Manchester Street, and the claimant hurried back, took possession of her effects, and made the preparations for the funeral. An inquest was held, which he attended as her nearest relative, though a formal protest was made by the legal representatives of the Seymours, and he did not hesitate to assert his belief that she had been poisoned. Not a shadow of proof was alleged, and a verdict of death from failure of the heart was returned. The funeral was to be at Tichborne, but while the body was lying at the hotel Mr. Alfred Seymour arrived there, in hopes of a farewell glance at his dead sister. A painful scene took place; the claimant assailed him in unmeasured terms before several strangers. ` I know you, Alfred Seymour; you are a damned blackguard, who is trying to keep me out of my rights.' At the funeral the claimant was chief mourner, sup- ported by Mr. Guildford Onslow and Mr. Scott. None of the deceased lady's relatives were invited, but Mr. Henry Seymour and Lord Arundel of Wardour attended the service, and it was with difficulty that something like an unseemly scuffle was avoided. The defendants had adopted the not very fortunate plan of bringing down to the ceremony a large number of their witnesses to give them an opportunity of seeing the claimant, who con- tinued to shield himself as much as possible from the public gaze. Amongst them was a strong Wapping con- tingent, including Miss Mary Ann Loder. The death of Lady Tichborne was an irreparable loss to the claimant, but for the moment its full effect was mainly felt in regard to his pecuniary position. Her jointure of course died with her, and his allowance of £1000 a year came to an abrupt termination ; she possessed, however, some personalty of her own, and he was pro- ceeding to take out letters of administration when he was promptly anticipated by the defendants, who com- menced a fresh Chancery suit, Tichborne v. Castro, to prevent him from impounding the property. On the 1st of May an order was made appointing a receiver of Lady Tichborne's estate, and restraining the claimant from touching it until the prior Chancery suits had been decided, and a few days later the Court of Probate ordered his claim for administration to stand over to the same period. The claimant and his family would have been reduced to absolute beggary had not Mr. Scott, Colonel Lushington, and others come forward with liberal aid. But this was not the full extent of his misfortunes. All property which could be identified as belonging to the deceased had to be surrendered up to the receiver, and among the objects thus taken possession of was a mass of letters, including the early correspondence of Roger Tichborne with his mother, and the major part of the communica- tions she had received both from the claimant himself and his entrepreneurs in Australia, Messrs. Gibbes and Cubitt. Money was forthcoming from one source or another to keep on foot the great lawsuit which was now reaching a critical phase, and it is time to return to the correspon- dence which had been opened up with the Castro family in Melipilla. The last letter cited was that of the 1st of January 1868, in which the claimant begged Don Pedro to send him a small portion of the lock of hair which the Senora Ahumada had cut from the head of their English visitor many years ago. Towards the end of April a letter was received enclosing the hair, and expressing Don Pedro Castro's desire to possess a portrait of the claimant, but containing a curious and rather disquieting passage:- 'An agent named Cevera Barra has come over to Meli- pilla on behalf of your opponents. He endeavoured to make out that you were an impostor -- that Mr. Arthur Horton, who was staying here, was the son of a London butcher, whose father had sent him to sea, in order that he might, by means of sea voyages, cure himself of a disease in the head called San Vito ; that in the year 1863 he returned to England, whence he came back to America; that Sir R. C. D. Tichborne, finding himself in the year 1852 in a certain port of England in command of his regiment, threw it up and likewise came over to America; that after travelling about he embarked at Rio Janeiro on his return to England on board a vessel that was wrecked before reaching her destination; that on board this vessel there happened to be Mr. Arthur, likewise shipped as a passenger; that he made his acquaintance and got posses- sion of his papers, and that Mr. Arthur then went to Australia to await there the death of Sir Roger Tich- borne's father, in order to present himself in England and claim the inheritance. Bring all this to the knowledge of your worthy defender. This story of your being the son of a butcher (carniciero) in London springs from the fact, probably, of your wishing to say that your father was Chancellor (canciller) of the Queen, and that, being ignorant of Spanish, you having scarcely then begun to speak it, you said he was a butcher (carniciero).' This was acknowledged by the claimant with due thanks, and with a reference to the flourishing prospects of his claim, but a letter from Mr. Holmes by the same mail is deserving of closer attention :-- `The lock of hair which you have enclosed to Sir Roger is of considerable importance, because it is identical with his hair at the present moment . . . . I cannot clearly make out whether you yourself personally knew Orton. Be so good as to inform me particularly whether you really knew him, or whether his name was not first men- tioned to you by Barra. The opposing party here have been making inquiries after a person named Orton; but I have the clearest evidence that they are distinct persons, and that Orton is now .in Western Australia, and I have sent for him to come over to England. I send you copies of the affidavits.' Mr. Holmes must indeed have felt that the sudden appearance of the name of Orton in a quarter of the globe where it was least expected, and where their case was apparently meeting its strongest confirmation, was an ominous coincidence, and the letter received in answer, bearing date July the 15th, can have done little towards reassuring him. ' In reply to your letter I have to inform you that Don Cevero Barra is the person who has endeavoured to show that Sir Roger was an impostor; that he had assumed that name in the place of his true Christian and surname of Arthur Orton -- having borrowed the same in order to usurp the inheritance -- and that he is the son of a butcher and not of a nobleman belonging to the English aris- tocracy. No one has known here that very Arthur Orton; and, although Sir Roger bore that Christian and surname, he himself communicated to Don Josh Miguel Val- divieso and to other persons that they were not his own, that he belonged to the English aristocracy, and that in England he had played with the Queen's children.' |
