The relatively recent upsurge of Wold-Newtonian research has produced a genuine plethora of new (or at least seemingly new) hypotheses and theories concerning the families whose activities have spawned the mythology of the modern age. While much of this speculation has focused on new families which are connected to the "core" Wold-Newton family only through acquaintance or marriage, other researchers have continued to study the main tree. In the process, they have discovered new members of the family, whose existences seem to have escaped the revelator from Indiana, Philip José Farmer.
Of course, the primary texts of Wold-Newtonian research, Farmer's biographies of John Clayton, eighth Duke of Greystoke, and of Dr. James Clarke Wildman, are hardly inerrant. Indeed, while researching this article, the author discovered a startling error in Addendum 3 of Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (hereafter, TA). According to these pages, Joane Clayton, daughter of the fourth Duke of Greystoke, was born in 1836. Her precise birthdate is not revealed in the text. However, her older brother, the fifth Duke, was born November 8, 1835, while their other surviving sibling, the sixth Duke, was born October 2, 1836. There would not seem to be enough time for Joane Clayton to have been conceived and brought to term in the interval between the two boys. Since she was listed as the third surviving child of the fourth duke, it seems somewhat more likely that she was born later, in 1837 or 1838. The former of those two dates is presumed to be accurate for the purposes of this article.
Farmer was quite willing to re-examine his own hypotheses when errors of plausibility were pointed out. For example, in TA, he hypothesized that the caped and cowled crusader known as the Shadow was one of the multiple personalities developed by Richard Wentworth, the son of Lord John Roxton, and grandson of the aforementioned Joane Clayton. Wentworth's second personality became a similar crimefighter, the Spider, and Farmer claimed that the splintering of his personality had resulted from his horrific experiences in the First World War, when he was the aerial spy known by the codename of G-8. When the improbability of Wentworth being able to maintain the two costumed identities of the Shadow and the Spider during roughly the same period of time was pointed out to him, Farmer reconsidered the concept, and came to a different conclusion. In Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (hereafter, DS) he presented the theory that, while Wentworth had indeed been the Spider, his half-brothers, Allard Kent Rassendyll and Bruce Hagin Rassendyll, had been the Shadow and G-8, respectively.
In his extensive "Chronology of Shadows", pulp scholar Rick Lai put forward yet a third hypothesis concerning the true identity of the Shadow, basing his theory on the idea that the name used by Walter Gibson in authoring the Shadow texts, Kent Allard, had actually been the Shadow's name. Examining Gaston Leroux' Le Fantôme de l'Opera and the career of Arsène Lupin, Mr. Lai concluded that the man who became the Shadow was actually the son of Theophraste Lupin, Arséne's father, and of the woman whom he calls L'Ombre, an associate of Erik, the Phantom of the Opera. He went no further into the Shadow's genealogy than that. Perhaps Mr.Lai's dismissal of the possibility that the Shadow had access to methods of life-extension, in the "Chronology of Shadows", was at most half-hearted, and he feared the consequences of casting further illumination on his subject.
Being of a more suicidal temperament, this author has has conducted such research. If Mr. Lai's speculations concerning Theophraste Lupin are correct, and there does not seem to be any evidence to disprove them, then the Shadow's paternal genealogy has been traced back to Louis Lupin, a coachman present at the Wold-Newton meteor strike, by Jean-Marc Lofficier. [1] However, the maternal genealogy of the subject remains unclear.
Mr. Lai describes the woman who became L'Ombre as a "courageous young female operative of French Intelligence." It seems likely that she was in her early- to mid-twenties, in 1879, when she made the acquaintance of the Opera Ghost. We can therefore place her birthdate within a year or two of 1855.
In 1854, Joane Clayton was roughly seventeen years of age. Farmer describes her as being "as wild and unconventional as her older brother [the fifth Duke of Greystoke] and as passionate as her other brother [the sixth]." (TA, p. 246) It is not beyond the realm of probability that in the summer of that year, she took an extended, year-long trip to explore the city of Paris, famed for generations as a city for lovers. There would have been chaperones, of course, but Joane was an intelligent and willful young woman; she evaded them, and ran off in search of her first love affair. She found it in the person of one Nicholas Syn, the great-grandson of the Reverend Dr. Christopher Syn, sometimes known as the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.
Exactly one hundred years before, Dr. Syn's wife, Imogene Almago, had abandoned him for his apparent friend, Nicholas Tappett. This was the event that directly led Dr. Syn to become the pirate Captain Clegg, and later the Scarecrow. Unbeknownst to Syn, Imogene had been delivered of his son in 1755, although she allowed Tappett to believe that the boy was his son. He was named Bartholomew Tappett, for a beloved older brother of Nicholas Tappett whom the young Christopher Syn had killed in a duel.
Dr. Syn first learned of his son's existence in 1775, when Imogene revealed all on her deathbed. Apparently, Nicholas Tappett had somehow discovered the truth of the boy's parentage and abandoned him while the couple were in North America. Syn sent his Native American associate, Shuhshuhgah, to the New World, in order that he might discover the boy's whereabouts. Unfortunately, Shuhshuhgah never returned from this expedition. Syn subsequently adopted the daughter of Imogene and Nicholas Tappett, also named Imogene, as his own daughter, and after he died in 1794, she married Dennis Cobtree, the son of Dr. Christopher Syn's closest friend and the Squire of Dymchurch-Under-the-Wall. Their first child, a daughter named for Dennis' older sister Charlotte, was born in 1795, some months before the Wold-Newton incident.
It was not until 1812 that the fate of Dr. Syn's son was revealed, when a mysterious stranger who went by the name Bartholomew Clegg came to Dymchurch-Under-the-Wall, along with his son Benedict. [2] Over the next few months, a small wave of vandalism and isolated incidents of violence swept through the village, seemingly focused on Dennis and Imogene Cobtree. The exact particulars of the situation remain unclear; Imogene's diary, our primary source for these events, is largely silent when it comes to the details, save for occasional comments about the "odious Mister Clegg", whom she held responsible for all the family's troubles in this period.
Dennis Cobtree's diary, on the other hand, is utterly reticent in its discussion of the troubles, but becomes quite forthcoming about the manner in which they ultimately came to an end. In a final confrontation, Bartholomew Clegg was revealed to be the son of "Black Nick" Tappett and Imogene. He believed that his father had been coerced into confessing to the crimes of Captain Clegg, which resulted in his execution, due to some influence which the mysterious Dr. Syn had held over him, and had come to Dymchurch-Under-the-Wall to take his vengeance on Syn's family. The truth of the matter -- that he was in fact the son of Dr. Syn, not Black Nick -- was quickly revealed to him, provoking a nearly-fatal apoplexy in the sixty-seven year old man. Bartholomew Clegg lived out the next four years of his life as a broken man, having spent the best years of his life in pursuit of an empty, pointless vengeance.
Benedict Clegg, on the other hand, was extremely pleased to learn of the truth. He had participated in his father's crimes only reluctantly, as his honest nature had been overcome by his sense of filial duty, and he had come to love Charlotte Cobtree, and she to love him. With the end of hostilities between their parents, the two of them were finally married on Valentine's Day, 1813. On that same day, Benedict took up his grand-father's family name, swearing to return the ancient name of Syn to its former standing. [3]
Nicholas Syn, born in 1820, was a younger son of these star-crossed lovers, and the shame of their family. The roguish strain of the Syn family heritage, which had led both his grand-father and great-grand-father to their unfortunate ends, came out in him to an even greater degree. A mystic might argue that it had been a mistake to name him for his maternal grandfather, "Black Nick". We may never know what exactly he was doing in Paris in 1854, but we may be sure that he was up to no good when he met with Joane Clayton for the first time.
We may also be sure that she knew exactly what sort of man he was; and that was exactly what she had been looking for. The love affair was satisfactory to both parties; its consequences were not. Joane became pregnant; Nicholas vanished. All her cunning and wit couldn't have been able to keep her chaperones from noticing her condition for the entire nine months of the pregnancy, so it is quite likely that she blackmailed one of them into helping her to keep it secret by threatening to implicate the chaperone with complicity in her affair, ruining them both.
Joane gave birth in the early months of 1855, and her daughter was taken away to an orphanage immediately after. It is likely that the painful experience was what led to her determination to keep and raise her second child, John Byron Wentworth (aka Lord John Roxton) by herself if she had to do so. Fortunately, she found a compassionate and loving husband in George Wimsey, the fourteenth Duke of Denver, who was willing to adopt her son as his own, after she gave him the traditional "heir and a spare". Her grand-children from this marriage therefore included Richard Wentworth (alias the Spider) and Lord Peter Wimsey.
It has been said that orphans make the best secret agents; desiring the intimate family which many of them never gain, they often come to see the agency which hires them as a necessary, substitute family. This was certainly the case of the young girl given the name Madeline Allard at the orphanage where she was raised. Eventually attracting the attention of the French Secret Service, she was trained as a lethal weapon against the enemies of France, in alleys, in grand halls, in bedrooms, and, ultimately, beneath the Paris Opera House.
Mr. Lai has dealt with the subsequent career of l'Ombre, and with her relationship with Theophraste Lupin, in great detail. One element that he missed, however, was an event that happened at some time between 1881 and 1891. Drawing on her connections in French Intelligence, she managed to determine the identity of the woman who had abandoned her at birth, and travelled to England in order to confront her. While there was no true hatred in her heart for Joane Wimsey, there could be no love, either. She gained the information about her father that she sought, and left. As far as we can tell, they never met again. L'Ombre then travelled to the ancestral home of her family, Dymchurch-Under-the-Wall, in hopes of finding her father or some clue to his whereabouts. But the Syns living there could tell her nothing of her disreputable father, and so she left them in peace as well. It was likely with great irony that she named her son, when he was born, after the area of England from which her father's family sprang: Kent. [4]
Not all modifications of Farmer's original trees are as plausible as Mr. Lai's work, however. In "The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy", Jess Nevins postulates that the wife of American detective Sim Carter, and thus the mother of the even more famous American detective Nick Carter, was one Winifred Ludlow, whom he identifies as the natural daughter of Sir Jesse Clayton, the fourth Duke of Greystoke, and one Eugenia Ludlow. This in itself is not implausible, and it is certainly significant that Farmer makes it clear that while the third Duke of Greystoke was something of a spendthrift, he was "a strict teetotaller and faithful husband" (TA, p.282); as he is contrasting the third Duke's lack of care for his finances with the penny-pinching ways of his son, it quite possible that he intended us to likewise contrast their behavior in other respects. Moreover, considering the breadth of Nick Carter's accomplishments, there can be little doubt that he derives from the same legendary mixture as "Doc Savage", "Tarzan" and "the Shadow".
The implausibility enters the scenario in statements made by Mr. Nevins concerning the children of Nick Carter. Following the murder of his most recent wife, Nick Carter sought to hide his two sons in foster homes where no one would consider looking for the children of a famous detective. Contacting his associate, Phileas Fogg, he placed the younger son in the custody of Phileas' sister, Isis, and her husband Alvin H. Benson, whose murder would later become the first recorded case of amateur detective Philip Vance. This son later grew up to become Richard Henry Benson, the Avenger, founder of Justice Incorporated.
However, an examination of DS reveals that while Isis Fogg was indeed married to a wealthy American named Benson, she was not Phileas Fogg's sister, but rather his niece: the second daughter of his sister, Roxana. Furthermore, the description of Phileas Fogg, an infamous homebody -- with the exception of his famous trip around the world, of course -- as a party-goer in "The Carters of Virginia" does not quite ring true.
When one considers the revelations concerning Nick Carter's other son, however, all becomes clear. The speculation concerning Richard Benson was nothing more than a feint, intended to deceive unfriendly eyes seeking information concerning the other son. One can only follow the late Professor Starr in admiring the "careful, though futile precautions" taken by either Mr. Nevins or his anonymous source to obscure the facts of this matter by making it seem laughably fictitious.
The other son was raised in Moore County, North Carolina, by a family with a respectable, lengthy pedigree in the area, dating back to the early nineteenth century when their ancestors, one Cullen Ramsden and his wife Ellie settled there. Sadly, both Nick Carter's son and his wife (a distant cousin of his adoptive family) died shortly after the birth of their son, John, in 1927. He was raised by his aunt, although she was subsequently forced to hand him over to a practitioner of what one might call "black magic" when he was sixteen. Escaping this evil man's clutches, John went on to forge a legend of his own as the man variously called Silver John, or John the Balladeer. [5]
It is unlikely that John ever learned the truth about his father, or that he would ever have been interested in searching his father's biological family, as L'Ombre had been. What made him what he was had nothing to do with where his father or grand-father had come from, and everything to do with what John himself had done with his life. In such a way, he may have blunted the curse which Mr. Nevins hinted lay on the Carter family.
Farmer once wrote that in North America, there are likely fifty million people who can claim descent from the same ancestors as the Clayton family, but that few of them appear interested in claiming that part of their heritage. It may be that there are almost as many people in the entire world, today, who can claim some part of the Wold-Newton heritage, and that an equally small number of them are interested in the heroic legacy of which they share a part. Unlike Farmer, this author is not inclined to consider this a sign of the moral degeneracy of our own time; it makes those who do behave in an appropriate manner shine all the more brightly. The decision to do the right thing, regardless of the difficulty or consequences to oneself, can be made by anyone, whether their genes were infused with radiation more than two centuries gone, and it is a simple truth that one cannot choose one's ancestors.
Footnotes
[1] I admit to a certain amount of uneasiness with regards to M. Lofficier's hypothesis concerning the true identity of Louis Lupin (i.e. that he was actually Louis Bonaparte) founded as it is on the extremely unreliable logic of anagramical reasoning. If it is true, then I submit that it is quite plausible that -- considering the resemblance that Farmer noted between Paul Delagardie and Charles Dupin (the father of the man whom M. Lofficier calls C. Auguste Lupin) -- Honoré Delagardie may have been the father of one or more of the children borne to Pascaline de Filipone, Louis Lupin's wife.
[2] Ironically, given my own irritation with genealogy which goes no further into the feminine side of a family's history than a single generation, I have not been able to determine anything about the mother of Benedict Clegg (later Benedict Syn.) She had died some time before the two men came to Dymchurch-Under-the-Wall, and her name went unrecorded in Benedict's journal. Unusually, Bartholomew didn't keep a journal.
[3] A descendant of Benedict Syn, Dr. Reginald Syn, was married to a Ms. Philea Jane Fogg-Fog, according to Philip José Famer's The Lavalite World. It is likely that Reginald was not descended from Nicholas Syn, but from one of Benedict and Charlotte's other children.
[4] What then of Kent Allard's relationship with the Rassendylls, and their descendant Cordwainer Bird? It would seem that Kent Allard met Bruce Hagin Rassendyll during the First World War -- not surprising, as they were both famous aviators on the Allied side -- and they corresponded for some time therafter. On discovering the family connections between them -- which may have been even stronger if a previously stated hypothesis concerning the Lupins and the Delagardies is correct, as the mother of Bruce Rassendyll was Rhoda Delagardie -- it became only natural for Cordwainer Bird to view Allard as an "uncle" of sorts, just as he did Richard Wentworth. (A colleague, Cheryl L. Huttner, is presently researching the descendants of Bruce Hagin Rassendyll.)
[5] One may note that I have not repeated the family name given to John in Mr. Nevins' article. There are two reasons for this. First, a significant part of John's identity, as chronicled by Manly Wade Wellman, is that he does not use his family name. Secondly, given the care with which Mr. Nevins sought to obscure the truth within his article, it may well be that the name used is only further protective camouflage. I also will not speculate at this time whether John had any children by his wife, Evadare; the subject is still being explored by a number of my colleagues.
Bibliography
Baugh, Matthew. "The Life and Times of of the Rev. Doctor Christopher Syn, Parson, Smuggler and Sometimes Pirate"
_____________. "Occult Detectives"
Brown, Mark. "A Look at the Wimsey Family"
Drake, David. Old Nathan
Farmer, Philip José. Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
______________. "Letter to ERBania, 1985 issue."
______________. Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (Page references are to the 1972 Popular Library paperback edition.)
Lai, Rick. "A Chronology of Shadows, Part One" and "A Chronology of Shadows, Part Two"
Lofficier, Jean-Marc. "The Tangled Web: Genealogies of the French Wold-Newton Families"
Nevins, Jess. "The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy"