‘By his scheming and forgeries, the issue of false balance-sheets, the overissue of railway shares, the pledging of false securities and obligations, he had deprived widows, single women, army and navy officers on half-pay, and others equally helpless and unwary, of all they possessed. The victims of his iniquitous and gigantic frauds were to be counted by thousands, from shareholders to the poorest depositors, till at last, hemmed round by an inextricable network of multitudinous crime, and seeing no means of escape from the near crisis of discovery, he had stolen by a perilous short-cut out of sight and hearing of the cries and curses of those who had trusted him, to find oblivion in a suicide’s grave.’[36]
There were many who firmly believed his apparent death a forgery also, and long afterwards reports were current that he had been met with in America, whither his brother, the manager of the Tipperary Bank, had absconded. It is certain that a large sum of money which John Sadleir had received only on the day previous to the discovery of the dead body on Hampstead Heath was not forthcoming, nor was its disappearance in any way accounted for.
It appears singular why, having possessed himself of the poison, and knowing its almost instantaneous effect, he should have left his home, and gone out into the wild, dark night and distant solitude of Hampstead Heath, to perpetrate the despairing sin of self-murder. Perhaps the wretched man was goaded by the scorpion-stings of conscience to affinities closer to the condition of his mind than the conventional and ill-gotten luxuries around him. The cold damp earth, the sharp furze spines, the buffeting winds, the all-aloneness—save for the ghosts of lost opportunities, of great talents turned to infernal uses, of high respect and honours thrown away—seemed more in sympathy with the fierce frenzy, the unutterable horror, of his unmasked soul. Assuredly, no more terrible proof could be required that ‘sooner or later sin is its own avenger,’ than the suicide of John Sadleir.
CHAPTER II.
THE WAYS TO HAMPSTEAD.
The oldest maps of London extant show two roads to Hampstead; Aggas’s (time of Elizabeth) has four. The most easterly of these roads ran out by Gray’s Inn Lane, past old St. Pancras and Battle Bridge, through Kentish Town and part of Holloway to Highgate, touching Caen Wood, and so by Bishop’s Wood and Wild Wood Corner to Hampstead. Later on a branch of this same Gray’s Inn or Battle Bridge Road ran off by St. Pancras a little to the west, into a country lane running up from Tottenham Court Road, into what is now the Hampstead Road, and so to Hampstead.[37]
Another road ran out by Tyburn, crossing the road to Reading—the present Edgware Road—and going on by Lisson Grove to Kilburn Abbey, passing West End and Sutcup Hill, Hampstead, and thence on to Edgworth. But the most interesting of these roads, and which is distinctly traced in Aggas’s map, ran up from Charing Cross, through St. Martin’s Lane to Broad St. Giles’s, crossing the ‘Waye to Uxbridge’ (Oxford Street), and thence up Tottenham Court Road, which shows how nearly the modern highway follows the lines of the ancient one. It looks very like the present road to Hampstead, except that it appears to stop short at the top of Tottenham Court Road. The difference is in the road itself and its surroundings—running as it did over a track, which, once made, was left to take care of itself; dangerous with heaps of refuse and hollow places that in winter were full of water, and at other times absolute sloughs. Even in Charles II.’s time, when turnpike roads were made by Act of Parliament, the travelling by coach or waggon does not appear to have been much improved. The highways were in places so narrow that a lady traveller in 1764 tells us that, meeting another coach, her conveyance was brought to a standstill till the road was made sufficiently wide at that particular part to allow of the carriages passing each other. In winter and in rainy seasons, owing to the want of a proper knowledge of draining, it was not an unknown grievance for the waters in low-lying places to inundate the carriages; while at the close of such periods travellers frequently found their wheels so deeply embedded in the mud left in these hollows that they had to remain there till additional horses could be had from the nearest farmhouse or village to drag their vehicle out. The private letters, diaries, and memoirs of those bygone years are full of such adventures.
It was not, indeed, till after the first decade of George III.’s time that this state of things began to be seriously remedied, and roads, in our present meaning of the term, laid through the length and breadth of the land. Pretty deep in the present century, except for a few cottages in the fields, there were no habitations between the George Inn, Hampstead Road, and the Load of Hay, on Haverstock Hill. In other ways, the road continued to be pretty much the same as in Colonel Esmond’s time, ‘hedgerows and fields and gardens’ all the way up to Hampstead. About the time of the building of Camden Town, people who loved pure country air began to move further out, and toy villas and rustic residences dotted the Hampstead Road, some of them remaining there with their paled-in gardens and trellised porches and verandas, oddly wedged in between builders’ yards and other commercial premises, till long after I knew the neighbourhood.