Life is full of strange encounters. The year is 1846 and a French hunting party has arrived in Morocco in search of adventure. Their principal target is the Barbary lion that roams through the deserts and mountains of Northern Africa and is greatly admired for its size and dark mane. The same cannot be said for the appearance of the Frenchmen who are attired in forage caps, starched shirts, hunting jackets and goatskin trousers and carry knapsacks and shotguns. They are led by a portly, affable gentleman with a wild head of hair who cannot stop talking, mainly about himself. Alexandre Dumas sees no reason to be modest. His novels are selling all over the world and he is making a great deal of money in the process.
As a mark of respect for his literary eminence, the British Consul has promised Dumas the services of an experienced big game hunter to take charge of the expedition. Waiting for him in the stifling heat of the Grand Socco, Tangier's principal marketplace, Dumas is perspiring and clearly agitated. What is keeping the fellow?
Mon Dieu! This cannot be him! Sauntering towards the French party is a tanned, bearded man wearing a loose shirt, a pair of calf-length drawers and a curious kind of overshoe. He is hatless in the hot African sun and his legs are bare.
'Hello,' says this bizarre apparition. 'I'm your guide. The name is George St Leger Grenfell, acting British vice-consul.' 'But do you know anything about lion hunting,' Dumas asks. 'My dear chap, of course I do. Bagged a few big cats in my time.' 'Well, you don't look the part,' Dumas persists. 'Neither do you, if you don't mind me saying.'
France's greatest living author is not prepared to yield to an English eccentric. 'At least we French know better than to go out in the midday sun without some kind of head covering. Why are you dressed like that?' 'I'm doing what the natives do,' Grenfell replies. 'In this country Arabs go barelegged and Negroes bareheaded. It's much more comfortable this way.' 'I can't see any Arabs following your example in this souk. Now why would that be?' 'Because they are not philosophers. I am a disciple of Diogenes.'
For once, a sweating Dumas is silenced as his guide talks enthusiastically about the Greek cynic who, having discarded all his possessions apart from a wooden drinking vessel, threw the bowl away when he saw a peasant boy gulping water from the hollow of his hands. 'The bowl was superfluous, you see. He who travels lightly, travels well.'
Dumas mops his brow and begins to laugh. 'If you hunt like you talk we will get on well together, my friend. Let us share a bottle of wine.'
This is all that history records of their first meeting but they obviously hit it off together. Dumas later called Grenfell one of the most agreeable men he'd ever met and a splendid hunting companion who 'knew the country to a marvel and in all its details.' As a memento of their time together, he gave Grenfell a copy of his latest book, 'The Count of Monte Cristo.' In thanking him, the Englishman allegedly said that he would always keep the book with him as it may come in useful one day.
To appreciate the prescience of this remark we need to fast forward twenty years to another hot and arid place. We are now in the Dry Tortugas, on a military parade ground in Fort Jefferson where a prisoner is trying to grow vegetables in the island's thin coral sand. The gardener is dressed in a worn grey uniform with a conically pointed straw hat perched on his head. He is Colonel George St Leger Grenfell, late of Morgan's Raiders and Jeb Stuart's Cavalry Division, serving a life sentence for trying to release Confederate soldiers from a prisoner-of-war camp in Chicago. He is a man of infinite resource but no fixed purpose who has fought in wars all over the world with the wounds to prove it, not to mention the mental scars derived from being a wanted criminal disowned by his illustrious Cornish family.
In a prison letter, Grenfell claimed to have turned his sword into a shovel and rake and to have made himself lord of the gardening tools. But he didn't seem too happy about it, venting his anger on his garden by roasting the seeds he'd been given to plant and sprinkling sea water on his growing vegetables. Grenfell did a lot of digging but, according to eye witnesses, the garden was never productive. Which makes one wonder what he was up to?
Questions were also asked two years later when Grenfell escaped from his island prison in a small boat. The official military report stated he possessed a 'considerable sum of money' which he had used to bribe a sentinel into aiding his escape. But where had the money come from? Prisoners were kept without cash. The report also concluded that Grenfell had drowned at sea and, in 1869, he was officially declared dead, only for there to be several unconfirmed sightings of him in Cuba and on the American mainland.
History seldom tells a complete story. There are frequent gaps and silences. Gaps that a novelist is entitled to fill by using his imagination. I like to think of Grenfell carrying his copy of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' with him. It tells the story of Edmond Dantés, a wrongly imprisoned merchant sailor, who acquires a fortune and uses it to take revenge on those who had betrayed him. What if fact imitated fiction and Grenfell became a gardener to dig for buried treasure in the prison compound? Is this too far-fetched? No, not really, but you will have to read my novel 'The Man Who Lived Twice' to find out why.