To Paradise

But where was her son? He seemed to have disappeared. Missus Bishop searched for him and even hired an investigator, but he had not been recovered by the time she was forced to return to Burlington.

All along, she had successfully concealed from her husband Edward’s lapses. Now, though, that Edward’s activities had crossed into the criminal, she was forced to confess. As she feared, her husband reacted violently, disowning Edward entirely, and, after summoning his daughters to tell them of their brother’s wickedness, forbidding them from speaking to him again. All three wept, for they loved their brother, with Belle especially distraught.

But Mister Bishop remained unmoved: They were never to speak to him again, and if he should try to contact them, they must ignore him. “We made a mistake,” his wife remembers him saying, and although he hastened to add, “Not you, Belle,” Missus Bishop says, “I saw her face and knew it was too late.”

Even if they had been allowed to contact Edward, however, they would have been unable, for he seemed to have vanished completely. The investigator his mother had hired continued to search but concluded he must have left the city, and likely the state, and, perhaps, the Free States altogether. For almost a year, there was silence. And then, about six months ago, the investigator wrote once more to Missus Bishop: Edward had been located. He was in New York and playing piano in a nightclub near Wall Street, one popular with moneyed young society people, and living in a single room in a boardinghouse on Bethune Street. Missus Bishop was perplexed by this revelation: A boardinghouse! But where had the money gone, the monies he had taken from her aunt? Was Edward a gambler, as his late father had been? There had been no signs of such behavior, but, given how much she apparently did not know about her son, it did not seem implausible. She ordered the investigator to monitor Edward’s comings and goings for a week to see if she might glean more information from his daily movements, but these too proved frustrating: Edward never went into a bank, nor did he visit any gambling dens. Instead, his movements were restricted to his room and to a grand house near Gramercy Park. Upon further investigation, this was determined to be the residence of a Mister Christopher D. (I have struck his name from this record to protect his and his family’s privacy), a well-born man of nine-and-twenty who lived with his aging parents, Mister and Missus D., who own a trading concern and are of considerable wealth. The young Mister D. was described by the investigator as “lonely” and “homely,” and it appears that Edward Bishop was able to quickly seduce him, to such an extent that Mister D. proposed marriage—and was accepted—three months into their acquaintance. It appears, though, that his parents, learning of their son’s proposal and strongly disapproving, called upon Edward for a meeting, during which they offered to secure him a job as a teacher at a charitable foundation of which they knew, as well as a quantity of cash, in return for his promise that he would conclusively end all relations with their son and heir. Edward agreed, the monies were delivered, and he ceased contact with young Mister D., who is said to this day to be “bereft,” and, the Bishops’ investigator told me, has made regular and increasingly desperate attempts to contact his former fiancé. (The charitable foundation, I am sorry to report, is The Hiram Bingham Charitable School and Institution, where until February Edward Bishop was employed as a music teacher.)

And here we come to Mister Bishop’s current state of affairs. According to the matron of the institution, Mister Bishop—whom she described, dismissively, as “fey” and “a flibbertigibbet” while admitting he was enormously popular with his students: “The most popular teacher we have ever had, I am sorry to say”—requested a period of leave toward the end of January in order to tend to his sick mother in Burlington. (Obviously, a lie, as Missus Bishop is and has always been in excellent health.) Edward did indeed venture north, but here again, his account diverges from the truth. His first stop was to friends of his in Boston, the Cookes, a brother-and-sister duo who pose as a young married couple for reasons I will return to later in this narrative. His second stop was to Manchester, where Belle was living in a respectable boardinghouse and finishing her training as a nurse. It appears that Belle, despite her father’s admonishments, had remained in communication with Edward since his banishment from the family, even sending him a portion of her monthly allowance. It is unclear what exactly transpired between the siblings, but late in February, at least a week past the date Edward told the matron he would return, the two traveled to Burlington, where, it seemed, Belle hoped to reconcile her brother with his father. Laura, the younger of their elder sisters, had recently given birth, and Belle must have assumed that her parents would be in a forgiving mood.