The Pocket Handkerchief

The Pocket Handkerchief

Philip Kerr

(With Apologies to Edgar Allan Poe)

I cannot remember precisely when I met Scipio for the first time, but I have the strong sense he knew me before I ever came to live in the house of his master, Mister A–, in Richmond, Virginia, during the year of our Lord, 18–.

I was aged only two when that happened. My natural father having died of the consumption, my mother married Mr. A– with a haste that would have put Queen Gertrude to shame and which, to my mind, bordered on the indecent. For myself, I do not remember my own father at all but, if the reader will permit the apparent contradiction, I have never forgotten him. He was buried in the churchyard of St. John's Episcopal Church where, it is said, General Benedict Arnold, the ignominious traitor, quartered his troops and their horses during the War of Independence.

Another six years passed before my beloved mother, Elizabeth, also succumbed to the same malady as my father, leaving me and my brother, William Henry, alone with our stepfather. She was just aged twenty-nine. I was myself but eight years old at the time, yet not a day has passed since then when I have not thought of her or the cruelty of the God who took her from us so young. If I had any Christian faith at all, I think it probably died then, with my beautiful young mother.