Professor Newcroft, who lectured in natural history, remembered Lawrence Paltrow very well — so well, in fact, that he was utterly certain that the fellow who had called upon him and asked him to sign a statement, likable though he may have been, was certainly not the student he had known a decade before. The two men, magistrate and professor, talked at length about the true Lawrence Paltrow and his impostor, Sir John felt that at the end of their conversation he knew both much better than before. Once they had completed their business, Professor Newcroft accompanied Sir John to Merton College that he might introduce him to Professor Fowler, who was known throughout Europe for his knowledge in virtually every area of the natural sciences.
Professor Fowler was by nature more severe than any of the faculty members Sir John had met till then, and he proved to be less generous to Lawrence Paltrow and his counterfeit than all the rest. As Professor Fowler told it, immediately following young Paltrows graduation, the professor had recommended him for an enterprise in the colonies. Paltrow, it seemed, had disappointed him — and his employer, as well. “A bright student,” said the professor to the magistrate, “is sometimes simply unprepared for the demands of real life. In any case, he dropped out of sight shortly after this failure. Humiliation, perhaps, may have played some part.” Sir John had been intrigued by this anecdote, alluded to rather than told; he asked to hear the details of the matter and was fascinated by what he heard. As for the visit paid to him by the claimant, the professor simply dismissed it as “a crude charade, not at all worth discussing.”
Unable (or perhaps unwilling) to conduct him personally to the next and last on the list of the appointments made by Lord Mansfield for Sir John, Professor Fowler assigned the task to an eager undergraduate who was apparently there at his beck and call. The lad, hardly older than Jeremy by Sir Johns estimate, knew precisely where and to whom he might convey the magistrate, for it was by chance that he had the same tutor, Mr. Inskip, that Lawrence Paltrow had had earlier. The lad gave it as his opinion, however, that it would do little good to ask Mr. Inskip about any student from a time so long past, for the tutor had considerable difficulty fixing names correctly even to his present charges.
As it proved, however, the lad’s opinion was not worth much, for the tutor remembered Lawrence Paltrow perfectly — or, “as if he were here but yesterday,” as he had put it. He remembered him as “altogether brilliant’’ and “as clever as ever a young man could be.’’ He certainly did not concur with Professor Fowler’s opinion that young Paltrow had in some way failed in the great world. Though he asked that what he said be kept confidential, he offered it as probable that his former student had been enlisted in some search for precious metals. He had, however, no idea whatever what had become of him after his last visit to Oxford in the early fall of 1763, near Michaelmas, it was. As to the claimant, the tutor had received no visit from him. “I doubt,’’ said he, “that my judgment would have been thought of sufficient worth to be solicited. From what I heard from Professor Fowler, however, the man who recently visited Oxford could not possibly have been Lawrence Paltrow, as he sought to present himself. I understand he could not even identify nor explain the composition of iron pyrites.’’
Thus Sir John could look upon his day with some satisfaction. He had learned a great deal, and what he had learned gave him food for speculation. But food for his empty belly was what he craved! He could, he was sure, eat a whole middle joint of beef — and he would, by God, as soon as that lad returned. Where could Jeremy be?
Indeed, he did wonder at that, and he continued wondering for hours until he reluctantly found his way to the chop house and dined alone upon a small end chop, which was all that remained of that quarter of beef by the time he allowed himself to eat. The end chop, small as it was, caused him indigestion, for by the time he had eaten it, his stomach was all a-tumult from worry over Jeremy. He asked at the desk as he left the chop house and found no message had been left for him; no calamity, at least, had overcome the boy. Thinking it best to do so, he chose to sit in the parlor of the inn that he might be nearby should any word on Jeremy come to the inn. He could not wait in the room.
Where was that boy?
Sir John sat bowed, brooding upon Jeremy’s absence, a blind man crumpled upon the parlor sofa. Those who passed through the room must indeed have supposed that he slept, so still was he. Yet his mind raced as he sought to consider every reason why the lad was so late in returning. There were really not so many possibilities.
The first was that he was the victim of villains of one sort or another; that he had been beaten and robbed and left for dead — or perhaps indeed he was dead. Who could tell?
There seemed a possibility, though certainly not a likelihood, that he had been recognized by the claimant and that brute, Eli Bolt, and been detained for some bizarre purpose which Sir John could not at that moment imagine. Yet that seemed unlikely, for Jeremy had been warned explicitly against presenting himself to them in such a way that he might be recognized, and Jeremy was a sensible lad.
He, of course, might simply have met with some accident — been run down by a coach or wagon, taken a fall from a considerable height, or quite suddenly fallen ill. All of these, of course, might have happened, as well as other events which could in no wise have been expected, or planned for. But the chances of such occurrences were so vague, so faint, that there seemed little need to consider them with the rest.
Finally, Sir John had to admit it as potentially possible that Jeremy had drunk himself insensible with gin, rum, or some other such substance and was presently asleep in some gutter in or near the heart of Oxford. And why potentially possible? Well, because Sir John was forced to confess (to himself, of course) that he had treated the lad rather shabbily that day. Their parting before All Souls College had been particularly unfortunate. “Do not make the mistake of thinking you are indispensable. .” Had he really said that? Why, it sounded cruel, even now to him. Nor was it the only occasion at which he had lately brought the boy down with a harsh word, a cutting remark or two. What possessed him to treat him so?
He considered that at some length and decided at last that he both envied him his youth, and at the same time sought to deprive him of it, Sir John felt he had squandered his own youth on the navy — and lost his sight in the bargain. He had wandered in life rather aimlessly until his brother took him in hand, read law with him, and installed him as his successor at the Bow Street Court. Thus he had lost near a decade of his life before it had truly begun. Jeremy, on the other hand, seemed to know from the moment he stepped into the courtroom that he would be a lawyer — a barrister, no less — and he had not deviated from that goal during the past three years. How he envied him that single-minded resolve! The lad had even inveigled him into beginning his education in the law — reading Coke, et cetera. Certainly he was far too young for such an endeavor. Yet just as certainly he had shown a talent for it right from the beginning, so much that from time to time (and now more often) Sir John succumbed to the schoolmaster’s temptation and sought to trip him up in various ways. As he grew more approving of Jeremy, he seemed, oddly, to be less. And so, by finding fault, by assigning him tasks too difficult for him (and for most others), and by refusing his help when it was offered in good spirit, he was robbing the boy of his youth, giving him the uncertainties and the frustrations of a premature adulthood. And that, thought Sir John, would be sufficient to drive any boy to drink.
He knew his Jeremy, however, and knowing him, he felt certain that this could not be the case. Yet it was, in most ways, the least drastic of the possibilities he had considered, was it not? Dear God, what if the lad had been killed by accident, or by evil purpose? The weight of such a thought seemed near to crushing him. Was this what it meant to be a father? All this worry? Then what a miserable state it must be.