Andrew Taylor
The American Boy
© 2003
For Sarah and William. And, as always, for Caroline.
I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime.
From "William Wilson" by Edgar Allan Poe
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the small army of people who have helped this novel find its way into the world – so many that it is only possible to name a handful of them: Vivien Green, Amelia Cummins and others at Sheil Land; Julia Wisdom, Anne O'Brien and their colleagues at HarperCollins; Patricia Wightman; Bill Penn; and the long-suffering members of my immediate family to whom the novel is dedicated.
A historical novel inevitably depends on the unwitting assistance of the dead. I wish to record my particular gratitude to Clarissa Trant (1800-44), a remarkable woman whose journals deserve to be far better known than they are.
THE NARRATIVE OF THOMAS SHIELD
1
We owe respect to the living, Voltaire tells us in his Premiere Lettre sur Oedipe, but to the dead we owe only truth. The truth is that there are days when the world changes, and a man does not notice because his mind is on his own affairs.
I first saw Sophia Frant shortly before midday on Wednesday the 8th of September, 1819. She was leaving the house in Stoke Newington, and for a moment she was framed in the doorway as though in a picture. Something in the shadows of the hall behind her had made her pause, a word spoken, perhaps, or an unexpected movement.