Beadle's Pocket Novels No. 239: Rattlepate

# "The Missing Deed: A Legend of Manhattan in Colony Times"

This serialized story by Scott R. Sherwood appeared in Beadle and Adams's Rattlepate (1866). Set in colonial New York several years before the Revolution, the narrative unfolds at The Leopard, a disreputable tavern three miles north of Manhattan. The innkeeper Christern Gumpert and his wife Marian serve food and drink to sailors and occasional travelers. A mysterious man calling himself "the Nabob"—a weathered, polyglot traveler of forty-five—arrives on a stormy night and questions the hosts about Mynheer Vonderspeight of the nearby Red House. The Nabob learns that Vonderspeight, once a poor clerk under Captain Albert Mery, now possesses considerable wealth and property, having acquired the Mery estate through documents after the family's downfall. Young Frank Mery, Mery's disgraced son, allegedly fled the colony after seducing a gentlewoman and killing her brother in a duel. The Nabob listens intently while a young gentleman named Oscar Flemyng writes despondently at a corner table, apparently composing a letter.