The neighbours in the course of a few weeks made acquaintance with the newcomer, but none of them divined the being he was, although most of them seemed to have thought him singular.
He was a man of independent means, yet he had no servant. He was able to maintain a pony, and ride behind it in a gig.
Yet in the small house of two parlours and a kitchen and three bedrooms he had two women living, one of whom is conjectured to have been his wife, and who certainly had borne him a son, and the other had passed as Mrs. Thompson, Peace himself proclaiming that his name was Thompson.
How the real wife and the mistress, or how both the mistresses came to live in one house, is only to be explained by the knowledge that both of the women had of the convict, and their fear of being held accountable as accessories after the fact in his crimes. The mixed family did not live in harmony.
Mrs. Thompson had frequently a black eye, and indeed was rarely without one, and shrieking and cursing were not uncommonly heard proceeding from the house in the midnight hours and in the afternoon.
Peace was very rarely seen in the morning, or until late in the day. People in the vicinity who gave the matter any attention supposed he was busy with his scientific invention, of which he was fond of talking in an effusive manner.
He conveyed the impression that he was a man of moral tone.
“I would not do anything to injure the poor,” he said one day to the greengrocer, as he pulled out a handful of sovereigns, the number of which the greengrocer magnifies into seventy; and when in conversation with the landlord of some new houses near the “Railroad Tavern,” he informed Mr. Gosling that he did not approve of public-house fellows who went to the bar so early in the morning.
This was a reflection upon the milkman and the greengrocer, who had presumptuously saluted him.
Nevertheless, he occasionally invited his neighbours into his mansion to take something, and by all accounts he was a jovial host.