My dear Count von Berchtenwald:
Reply from London to my letter of the 28th, which accompanied the
dispatch case and the other papers, has finally come to hand. The
papers which you wanted returned--the copies of the statements
taken at Perleburg, the letter to the Baron von Krutz from the
police captain, Hartenstein, and the personal letter of Krutz's
nephew, Lieutenant von Tarlburg, and the letter of safe-conduct
found in the dispatch case--accompany herewith. I don't know what
the people at Whitehall did with the other papers; tossed them
into the nearest fire, for my guess. Were I in your place, that's
where the papers I am returning would go.
I have heard nothing, yet, from my dispatch of the 29th concerning
the death of the man who called himself Benjamin Bathurst, but I
doubt very much if any official notice will ever be taken of it.
Your government had a perfect right to detain the fellow, and,
that being the case, he attempted to escape at his own risk. After
all, sentries are not required to carry loaded muskets in order to
discourage them from putting their hands in their pockets.
To hazard a purely unofficial opinion, I should not imagine that
London is very much dissatisfied with this dénouement. His Majesty's
government are a hard-headed and matter-of-fact set of gentry who do
not relish mysteries, least of all mysteries whose solution may be
more disturbing than the original problem.
This is entirely confidential, but those papers which were in
that dispatch case kicked up the devil's own row in London, with
half the government bigwigs protesting their innocence to high
Heaven, and the rest accusing one another of complicity in the
hoax. If that was somebody's intention, it was literally a
howling success. For a while, it was even feared that there would
be questions in Parliament, but eventually, the whole vexatious
business was hushed.
You may tell Count Tarlburg's son that his little friend is a
most talented young lady; her sketch was highly commended by no
less an authority than Sir Thomas Lawrence, and here comes the
most bedeviling part of a thoroughly bedeviled business. The
picture was instantly recognized. It is a very fair likeness of
Benjamin Bathurst, or, I should say, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, who
is King's lieutenant governor for the Crown Colony of Georgia. As
Sir Thomas Lawrence did his portrait a few years back, he is in
an excellent position to criticize the work of Lieutenant von
Tarlburg's young lady. However, Sir Benjamin Bathurst was known
to have been in Savannah, attending to the duties of his office,
and in the public eye, all the while that his double was in
Prussia. Sir Benjamin does not have a twin brother. It has been
suggested that this fellow might be a half-brother, but, as far
as I know, there is no justification for this theory.
The General Bonaparte, alias the Emperor Napoleon, who is given so
much mention in the dispatches, seems also to have a counterpart
in actual life; there is, in the French army, a Colonel of
Artillery by that name, a Corsican who Gallicized his original
name of Napolione Buonaparte. He is a most brilliant military
theoretician; I am sure some of your own officers, like General
Scharnhorst, could tell you about him. His loyalty to the French
monarchy has never been questioned.
This same correspondence to fact seems to crop up everywhere in
that amazing collection of pseudo-dispatches and pseudo-State
papers. The United States of America, you will recall, was the
style by which the rebellious colonies referred to themselves, in
the Declaration of Philadelphia. The James Madison who is
mentioned as the current President of the United States is now
living, in exile, in Switzerland. His alleged predecessor in
office, Thomas Jefferson, was the author of the rebel Declaration;
after the defeat of the rebels, he escaped to Havana, and died,
several years ago, in the Principality of Lichtenstein.
I was quite amused to find our old friend Cardinal
Talleyrand--without the ecclesiastical title--cast in the role of
chief adviser to the usurper, Bonaparte. His Eminence, I have
always thought, is the sort of fellow who would land on his feet
on top of any heap, and who would as little scruple to be Prime
Minister to His Satanic Majesty as to His Most Christian Majesty.
I was baffled, however, by one name, frequently mentioned in
those fantastic papers. This was the English general, Wellington.
I haven't the least idea who this person might be.