Cornelius Vance
Retired lawyer and collector
- Age
- 67
- From
- New England
- Lives
- Saltonstall Street Mansions
- Now
- In Arkham
Before Arkham's business
Forty years at the Essex bar, twice widowed, rich from railway bonds. Collects colonial silver and grievances.
Pompous, courageous, sentimental beneath it. Litigates everything, including the weather.
Afraid of
Senility · Dying before he's finished arguing
Believes
There is a document for everything. Find it.
From the journal
Wrote back to my anonymous correspondent tonight. Kept it short.
Met Osgood at Kellerman's Lunch Room. Hapgood has a Revere porringer he swears is genuine. I swear it is not.
An anonymous letter, kindly meant. I read it twice and put it in my breast pocket.
I keep going over the House on Gallows Lane business, looking for the moment we lost it.
What follows I set down for no reader but myself. My eye fell upon a door open that had been left shut. The candle stub was cold and old. Tramps, surely. We failed.
We reached Whateley Residence at 10.00 p.m.; the masonry suggested a contested boundary. There was, I observed, a single lamp burning low. I copied it here, as exactly as I could — The Lit Window: The upstairs window of the burned house on Gallows Lane is lit most nights, a dull amber, though the house has been boarded since 1911 and has no gas. Nothing obviously out of the ordinary. Hearsay, gossip, and the hysterical fancies of uneducated women.