He had been introduced to Phoebus Daunt at the Varsity by a mutual friend, a Kingsman* by the name of Bennett. They had hit it off straight away, and quickly cemented their friendship by discovering a shared, though largely untested, enthusiasm for the turf. Off they would go to Newmarket, whenever occasion offered, where they got in with a rather dangerous set of men up from London. These flash coves knew what they were about, and they welcomed Daunt and Pettingale with open arms. Bets were placed by the pair and, in short order, money was lost. No matter; their new friends were more than willing to advance them a little credit; and then a little more. At last, with the touching optimism of youth, our heroes determined on a rather risky course: they would hazard all that they had – or, rather, all that they had been advanced – on a single race. If their choice came in, all would be well.
But it did not come in, and all was not well. However, their benefactors took a statesman-like view of the situation. If the gents would co-operate in a scheme that this company of obliging family men* had in view, then they would be pleased to consider the debt paid. There might even be a little something in it for them. If not … The offer was quickly taken up, and one of the gang, an impressive party with a prominent set of Newgate knockers,† was deputed to assist the noviciates in the prosecution of a little well-planned fraud.
The two young scholars took to the business with a certain aptitude for what was required, particularly on the part of the Rector’s son. I need not repeat what was told to me by Dr Maunder, about how the fraud was accomplished; I will only say that Pettingale revealed that the shadowy person who had employed the dupe, Hensby, had been Daunt, and that it was Daunt also who, after demonstrating to the gang a remarkable facility to replicate signatures, had actually carried out the forgeries.
‘And who was Mr Verdant?’ I asked. ‘He was part of the dodge, wasn’t he?’
‘Certainly,’ said Pettingale. ‘A leading light in the little fraternity we got mixed up with at Newmarket. He was the one appointed to shepherd us through the business. Couldn’t have done it without him. Burglary was his trade. None better than Verdant. He broke into the solicitor’s office and got us the blank cheques.’
‘Verdant, now,’ I said. ‘Uncommon name, that.’
‘Pseudonymous,’ Pettingale came back. ‘Not his own, though few people knew his real one.’
‘But you did, I think?’
‘Oh, yes. His mother knew him as Pluckrose. Josiah Pluckrose.’
I said nothing on hearing Pluckrose’s name, but inwardly exulted that the suspicions that I had been harbouring as to the identity of Mr Verdant had been proved correct. The origin of his pseudonym was nothing more than this. At Doncaster, in the year ’38, he had put twenty stolen guineas on a rank outsider called Princess Verdant, who rewarded his faith in her by coming in at extremely favourable odds, though her victory may have been assisted by the fact – barely worth mentioning – that she was a four-year-old entered in a race for three-year- olds.* No matter. Thereafter, he was known as ‘Mr Verdant’ to his friends and associates amongst the capital’s criminal fraternities.
After the dodge on the solicitors had been successfully brought off, Pluckrose fell out with his former colleagues over the division of the spoils and quit the gang in high dudgeon, vowing to be revenged on them all. And revenged he was. Not one of his confederates – five in number – lived to see the year out: one was found in the river at Wapping with his throat cut; another was bludgeoned to death as he left the Albion Tavern one evening;† the three that remained simply disappeared from the face of the earth, and were never seen again. Pettingale could not conclusively say that Pluckrose had done for them all himself; but that he had signed their death warrants, as it were, seemed certain.
‘The last to go was Isaac Gabb, the youngest member of the gang – elder brother kept the public-house down in Rotherhithe where the gang used to meet. Rather a decent fellow, young Gabb, despite his roguery. The brother took it hard, and takes it hard still, as I hear. He’d have come down on Pluckrose if he could, not a doubt of it, but he knew him only as Verdant, you see, and as such he’d disappeared, like Master Isaac, without a trace, and was never heard of again. Verdant was dead. Long live Pluckrose.’
Then Pettingale’s story turned to the subject in which I was most interested. After making a little money from the original fraud, Phoebus Daunt developed a taste for criminality, and began to look upon himself as quite a captain of the swell mob. Having no clear idea of what he would do in the world when he had taken his degree, though he might babble to Lord Tansor about the prospect of a Fellowship, and feeling that a man of his genius needed a certain minimum amount of capital with which to establish a position in society, which he could not at that moment lay his hands on, he conceived the practical, though by no means original, notion of taking what he needed from other people. To assist him in the enterprise, he enlisted his friend and fellow fraudster Pettingale, for his legal brain, and their erstwhile companion-in-arms Josiah Pluckrose, alias Verdant, for his brawn, as well as his demonstrable skills with the jemmy and the other tools of the ken-cracker’s art.*
I own that I could not have been more astonished if Pettingale had told me that Phoebus Daunt was none other than Spring-Heeled Jack himself.† But he had even more to tell.
The extraordinary head for business, which Lord Tansor believed that he had discovered in his favourite, was in reality nothing else but a low talent for devising schemes to relieve the gullible of their money. I might have regarded this as harmless enough, for a man must live, and there are a million deserving fools in the world ready and willing to be fleeced; but when he practised his deceits on my father, who was not in the least gullible, only properly trusting of someone to whom he had shown an uncommon degree of preference, and from whom he had a right to expect loyalty and deference – then the case was very much altered. And it was all to ingratiate himself still further with his Lordship, with the object – duly attained – of insinuating himself ever more closely into the latter’s affairs.
The ‘speculations’, to which he had freely confessed to Lord Tansor, were nothing but gimcrackery; the ‘profits’ that he returned to his protector were only the proceeds of various swindles and chicaneries. Some were epic in conception: imaginary gold-mines in Peru; a projected tunnel under the Swiss Alps; proposed railway lines that were never built. Others were more modest, or were merely confidence tricks performed on the unwary.
False documents of all kinds, concocted with superlative skill and aplomb by Daunt, were their principal weapons: inventively convincing references and recommendations ascribed to men of known character and reputation; fictitious statements of assets from distinguished banking-houses and accomptants; counterfeit certificates of ownership; dexterously produced maps of non-existent tracts of land; grandiose plans for buildings that would never be built. Daunt, with help from the young lawyer Pettingale, began to attain a certain mastery of the spurious, whilst Pluckrose was retained to encourage the faint-hearted amongst those they preyed upon, and to discourage those inclined to squeal about their losses to the authorities. They chose their victims with infinite care, adopted clever disguises and aliases, hired premises, employed dupes like the unfortunate Hensby, and conducted themselves always with gravity and sobriety; and then, when all was done, they evaporated into thin air, leaving not a wrack behind.
Now I had the measure of Phoebus Rainsford Daunt indeed, and what a joy it was to have the truth revealed at last! The insolent and preening scribbler was also a deep-dyed sharp: a practised chizzler, no better than the
