All That Glitters: A Maggie Power Adventure (Maggie Power #2) *Unedited version*

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

As is it is with all such events which, at the outset, engender much attention and great public excitement, the case of William Templeton-Wells was soon forgotten. It appeared to me that the Metropolitan Police, along with the shadowy agency of government which employed Whitmore, did its best to recast and retell the story of William Templeton-Wells as a simple one of robbery, abduction and murder.

    Morelle had kidnapped and killed Templeton-Wells, along with his accomplice, Penny, for the most base and obvious motives: greed. Morelle was an ungrateful partner to Templeton-Wells’ innocent, yet naïve banker. To bury the truth of the men’s true intentions helped them to construct their own subsequent narrative. It helped explain the missing money, the bankrupting of the Town and Country Joint Stock Bank, and made it easier to disconnect the deaths of both Penny and Eastman from Morelle/ Templeton-Wells.

    That Blake went along with the fiction was most dismaying to me. He knew, like I did, that Templeton-Wells was involved in the robbery of his own bank. That he was a murderer, a fraud, an adulterer.

    I had always looked upon Blake as an upholder of a far more nobler cause, that of truth and justice. But he later told me that he had no option but to go along with Whitmore’s version of events. The version the public would pick over for a time, then accept it to be the truth, then move on to other lurid sensations which the newspapers did such a fine job of bringing to light.

    Blake’s obedience to Whitmore’s narrative revealed to me that he held something over Blake, some knowledge, something both damning and damaging to Blake’s career. It had something to do with Blake’s ability to pay for the home I shared with Emily – a subject neither was willing discuss, and one which I feared to broach.

    Of Jack, Charlie, the Countess and all those other individuals who entered my life during the tumultuous year of 1842, there is much, much more to add. But alas those stories, and the subsequent adventures, are for another time.

    However, the unravelling of William Templeton-Wells’ mysterious disappearance seemed only to lead to other, more impenetrable mysteries. For one, how had William Templeton-Wells  alighted upon his plan to deceive and defraud? Who was the family governess? Was she really the same woman claiming to be married to Morelle? And, most pressing of all, what had become of her?

    A few weeks after the culmination of the events I have described here, just as the first frost of winter began to bite, Blake took me out to St Mary’s Church in Islington. At the rear of the church, he took me to the graveyard. Flanked by skeletal trees, he guided me to where a small gravestone lay. He knelt down and brushed away a thicket of sodden leaves to expose a name: Daniel Morelle – Born April 11th 1820. Died June 2nd 1822.

    “This is our phantom,” said Blake. “Dead these past twenty years. A boy, just two years of age. Poor Daniel, his name has been much abused of late.”

    A chill wind blew through the cemetery.

   I imagined William Templeton-Wells walking around this graveyard, two years or so before, wondering, thinking deeply about his current predicament: his loyal wife and children or his children’s beautiful governess, with whom he had begun an affair, and without whom he had persuaded himself he could no longer live.

    Did he look at the name upon that headstone and, perhaps, dare to think of bringing it back to the daylight again? Were these thoughts circulating around his mind before or after the visit of Mr Penny and his revelation that he had gained access to his bank’s vault via the sewers? Whatever the chain of events, he had stood here and, like the springing buds of blossom that would eventually return to the trees above him, a plan began to burgeon in his mind.