The Trouble with Tom (23 page)

And with this final mystery, that should have been that: the end of Paine's travels.

But after giving a London lecture on Paine in 1876, Conway received a curious note in the mail from a London bookseller. "I remember a gentleman who had Paine's skull," it claimed. Once, in '53 or '54 and scarcely after the auction of Tilly's goods, a customer saw Paine's
Works
on display in his London shop and blurted out—maybe he couldn't help but gloat—"I have Paine's skull and right hand." When the shopkeeper pressed him for details, he clammed up. But clearly the customer felt safely anonymous in the first place, and figured the clerk didn't know who he was. Only—the clerk
did.
And years later, when the same man stopped by the store once again, the same shopkeeper recognized him again and pestered him anew for details.
Where's the skull? What did you do with it? Where'sthe.
. . ?
. . .

And the customer ? It was none other than the Reverend
Robert Ainslie.

When visiting Darwin a few years earlier Conway had walked
rightpast
the skull at Trowmer Lodge. It was absolutely maddening to realize, and he was determined not to miss it this time. The reverend now lived just steps from here, at 71 Mornington Road, and so Conway fired off a letter to him asking for details-but what he got back in reply was crushing. The reply was addressed in a feminine hand, and not in the writing of the reverend at all. Ainslie, it seemed, had died immediately before Conway's letter arrived. "Mr. Thomas Paine's bones were in our possession," a grieving daughter wrote back to Conway. "I remember them as a child, but I believe they were lost in various movings which my father had some years ago. I can find no trace of them . . ."

First Watson, now Ainslie: authors kept taking Paine's secret to their graves. And this latest lead made no sense at all. Why would this strictly conventional minister want the skull of the great infidel himself? Conway pondered the possibilities: was, he wondered, the Reverend Ainslie studying Paine's phrenology?

A trio of teens come up the sidewalk, bouncing a soccer ball on their way home from practice.

". . . and so it's shit then, innit?" one explains.

"S'not."

This dialectic is interrupted when the ball bounces wildly off one of the loose pavers and into the street; it's about as random a shot as any round of the Mornington Crescent game would be.

Ah—the Game. If you're an American, then I will have to explain. There is an ancient and honorable Mornington Crescent
game
, one which you will occasionally hear Brits speaking of: but when pressed for details of how the game is played, they not only wriggle out of an explanation, but will leave you more confused about it than when you started.
Oh
, they will say,
surely you already know
. Or:
The rules are easy tofind. Iwon't troubleyou with recounting them
. It is a game that seems to involve a strategic recitation of tube stops, the goal being the first to be able to utter "Mornington Crescent." The game's roots go back centuries, enthusiasts will tell you—perhaps even to the era of Roman occupation. And it has wildly proliferated over that time into innumerable stratagems and alternate rules: there's Crockford's Official Gambling Version, Lord Grosvenor's Original Metropolitan Rules, Tobermory's Stratagem, and of course Thornton's Controversial Third Amendment. There are books on Mornington Crescent, even an almanac, and yet somehow they get one no closer to understanding it. But when pressed, a veteran player did outline some of the rules once for the BBC:

* Boxing out the F, J,
0
and W placings draws the partner into an elliptical progression north to south.

* In a weak positional play, it is vital to consolidate an already strong outer square, eg Pentonville Road.

* The lateral shift decisively breaks opponents' horizontal and vertical approaches.

There. Now do you understand the game?

The glory of the Mornington Crescent game is that it is
complete
and utter nonsense.
It's an immense put-on: the product of a radio show where contestants sit stroking their beards and oracularly muttering tube station names, all while the host gives impenetrable play-by-play analyses befitting chess grandmasters. It ends when one player, at no particular prompting, shouts out "Mornington Crescent!"—and the audience goes wild. Any rube visiting Britain who asks what it all means, or what the rules are, is then methodically flummoxed with absurdly fake histories of the game and utter evasion as to its actual workings.

Want to know where Tom Paine is? You might as well consult the
Mornington Crescent Game Almanac.
Tom Paine is lost: Tom Paine is found: Tom Paine is destroyed: Tom Paine is preserved: he is here: he is there. Tom Paine is everywhere and Tom Paine is nowhere. Where is Tom Paine?
You didn't know?
Where . . .
I
have
buried his skeleton but can't tell you about it.
Where is he?
Well, we had
his bones but lost them.
Where is . . .
Well, we won't trouble you wit6
an explanation of w6ere he is, since sure4 you already know
. . .

Of course Tom Paine's bones got off at Mornington Crescent.

Ha bloody ha.

That year Conway made one of his occasional forays back to the United States, where the Centennial was now in full swing. The minister felt ambivalent about the celebrations, and the halo that martyrdom had placed upon Lincoln's head did not impress him much either. He had met Lincoln: the man was not a mythical figure to Conway, nor could he be. "Lincoln decided that the fate of the country should be determined by powder and shot," he wrote bitterly. "In the canonization of Lincoln there lurks the canonization of the sword . . . By the same method Booth placed in the presidential chair a tipsy tailor from Tennessee, who founded in the South a reign of terror over the negro race.''

But Conway rallied in the genial company of Mark Twain. The two had met in London years earlier, and now, staying in Twain's house in Hartford, Conway found the author in fine mischievous form.

"Here's a fellow"—Twain quietly stole into Conway's guest room, flourishing a letter—"who has for some time been trying to get my autograph under the pretense of business. I have to answer his notes, but have been playing a game.
Mrs.
Clemens has been writing my replies, but just for a change we want
you
to write one." Conway had already been writing, and so with his pen at the ready he scratched out a reply to the correspondent, signed: S. L.
Clemens
. . .
per
M.
D.
C.

"Mark," he wrote afterward, "went out with a triumphant smile."

The two enjoyed simple pranks and entertainments, and the billiards room got plenty of use any time Moncure visited. Once, when a friend brought Twain a mechanical hopping frog she'd found in Paris, Conway watched Twain "more amused than I had ever seen him. He got down on his hands and knees and followed the leaping automaton all about the room." On the pretext of introducing Moncure, they visited next door, where Mark's neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe was piously writing her book
Biblical
Heroines;
the men pretended to be surprised when their sober conversation was interrupted by an invasion of costumed neighborhood children. Twain had conspired with them to stage a "Mrs. Jarvis's Wax Works'—a living tableau of famous historical scenes and paintings that was one of the great parlor games of the time. Twain proceeded to narrate each scene illustrated to Stowe and Conway, drolly instructing, "Bring on that tin-shop!" to introduce one boy in clanking knight's armor.

But Twain and Conway were both writing prolifically that summer too—indeed, Twain trusted the minister's moral and literary judgment so implicitly that he now appointed him as his British literary agent. It was an auspicious time to do so. Twain had just composed a tale based upon his own childhood, much of it written in an octagonal study. If Twain found the Fowler brothers and their phrenology suspect—he'd once visited a Fowler office months apart, under an assumed name and then as his own famous self, and amused himself with the utterly contradictory head-readings they gave him-he certainly seemed to find their architecture productive for writing. He gave Conway a handwritten manuscript to take back to London with him, in the hope that publishing the book there first would help secure copyright for its American publication.

Conway was to be one of the book's very first readers. And as his steamboat made its way back across the Atlantic, he read the manuscript and realized with awe that his friend was now something much more than a humorist. 'Twain," he wrote, "had entered upon a larger literary field." But fellow passengers who spied the unfamiliar title scrawled across the sheaf s first page would hardly have any notion of what they were seeing:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
.

The ball goes back and forth, from one side of the court to the other.
Pock
, bounce,
pock
. Bounce. Pock. I can never quite get used to the sight of a tennis court in Lincoln's Inn Field: central London is an area of such density that it seems almost fanciful. But I finally turn my back on the players and face a brutal modern building that elbows aside the line of brick Georgians. Ah, now
that's
more like the dog's breakfast of a city that I expect.

Is
that
where Conway went looking? It's hard to tell sometimes. Walking around London after Conway had returned bearing
Tom Sawyer
, Twain's editor Laurence Hutton would occasionally interrupt his own obsessive hunt for famous death masks—of Words- worth, Paine, Cromwell, and the like—to marvel at how utterly changeable the city's addresses were. "It is easier to-day to discover the house of a man who died two hundred years ago, before the streets were numbered at all, than to identify the houses of men who have died within a few years, and since the mania for changing the names and numbers of streets began," he complained.

Lincoln's Inn Fields is quite the reverse: the addresses have stayed the same while the use of the place has changed over time. They used to hang people here, back before it was remade into a lush green space. And even then, as one of the largest open spaces in the neighborhood, this field became a favorite spot for staging duels. But now—
pock
, swish,
pock
—it has become rather less violent. Office workers eat their cheese-and-pickle sandwiches out here, loll on the grass, and watch the little tennis ball bouncing. A great many of them are from that monstrous newer building—the Cancer Trust—and more are from the old building next to it, the Royal College of Surgeons.

The Reverend Ainslie's daughter, it seems, hadn't been quite right when she wrote back to Conway. The skull of Paine wasn't lost at all—it was still with Reverend Ainslie when he died. As he went through his late father's belongings, the Reverend Ainslie's son Oliver innocently took the bones back to his own house here at 48 Lincoln's Inn Fields. Given that he was next door to the Royal College of Surgeons, it seemed rather a shame not to have someone look at these curios—and so, bones in hand, that's just what Oliver did.

They raised an uncommon interest in the building next door. Their examiner, John Marshall, was rightly regarded as one of the best surgeons and anatomists in the country. He was particularly noted for his interest in the shape of people's limbs and bodies, and had published theories on bodily proportion and the "perfect human form." When presented with the bony hand of Tom Paine, though, Marshall did not quite consider their form those of an ideal man.

This
looks
like the
hand of a woman.

Closer examination of the hand and skull showed that it was indeed a man, albeit a rather delicate one. 'The head was also small for a man," Oliver reported of Marshall's findings, "and of the Celtic type I might say, and somewhat conical in shape, and with more cerebellum than frontal development." But beyond that, Marshall could not say much-her all, the rest of the body was missing.

Where
was
Paine's body?

"Haaauuuck."

The two young schoolgirls in hijabs duck in and out of the doorway of a chip shop, engaged in the tender feminine art of hawking loogies at each other. THE CONFIDENTIAL ANTI-TERRORISM HOTLINE exhorts the header of a defaced poster behind them; nobody cares, and the spittle of ten-year-old girls screaming with comically horrified laughter at each other is flying everywhere. This goes on until the shopkeeper, noticing them—or noticing me noticing them—yells with exasperation at his girls to knock it off. Mouths frowning closed, they disappear.

I walk onward, facing in the distance the immense gray torpedo-shaped building known universally as the Gherkin—though I have heard substantially ruder names for it. But there is no such modern flash in this neighborhood. Stepney Green has been a London home for immigrants for as long as anyone can remember, its old Jewish population now giving way to a thriving Muslim one. Victorian tenements still bear faint painted advertisements on their brick sides—DAREN BREAD, BEST FOR HEALTH, announces one—and in front of them, the bricks of Stepney Green Road sometimes shine an almost iridescent blue, the telltale sheen of a neighborhood built partly of mining slag.

There is indeed a tiny green along this stretch of streee—not
the
Stepney Green, which is farther down the road—but a rather sorry block-long patch featuring a bench missing every single one of its slats. So you can't sit here: but if you stand, you can look right into 23 Stepney Green, a respectable old brick house on a charitable block of good works and good intentions. When Conway first moved to London, number 23 housed a neighborhood Shoeblack Society, which found homeless urchins a place to live and fitted them with uniforms, brushes, rags, and blacking—this was a noxious brew of vinegar, treacle, and charred ivory—and sent them swarming into streets teeming with dirtily shod Londoners. A few houses down lodged Dr. Thomas Barnardo, the best known and most controversial of London crusaders for poor children—he was not above faking dramatic photos of squalor, and his "Dr." title proved to be equally fanciful.