The Meaning of Night

The village lies, in quiet seclusion, close to a slow-moving tributary of the River Nene, the Even, commonly called the Evenbrook by the local inhabitants, which winds through the Park to join the main river a few miles to the east. A church and adjoining Rectory, a noble Dower House of the late seventeenth century, clusters of picturesque cottages, some outlying farms, and then the great house itself: similar compositions can be found all over England; but Evenwood is like no other place on earth.

The always-sighing reed-beds and the overarching willows, the pale stone houses with their roofs of thatch or Collyweston stone,^* the undulating Park with its lake and ancient trees, and in the midst, the faery splendour of Lord Tansor’s residence, are sources of deep and abiding solace for those weary of the quotidian world. The whole place seems to be somehow beyond time, shut in and protected from the meanness of existence by the meandering river, and the gently wooded slopes on either side, which, on a fine day, dissolve into long soft swathes of grey-green.

If you consult Verekker’s dull but dependable Guide to the County of Northamptonshire (a copy of the augmented 1812 edition is now before me as I write),^† you will read of Lord Tansor’s seat being ‘pleasantly situated in a well-wooded Park of many acres, planted with noble stands of oak, ash, and elm, and watered by the Even, or Evenbrook. The house, or manor, is built of brick and freestone. The accretions of centuries have bestowed upon the house a pleasing irregularity of form, at once imposing and romantic.’ You will also learn from Verekker the bare architectural facts concerning the house: the licence to crenellate granted in 1330; the Elizabethan extensions to the fortified mediaeval dwelling; the Jacobean refinements; the remodelling by Talman early in the last century; and the improvements lately effected in the Classical style by Henry Holland, who also worked on another of the county’s great houses, Althorp.

What you will not find in Verekker, or in any other guide, is an anatomy of Evenwood’s power to bewitch both soul and sense. Possibly, it is beyond human art to convey the sense of something lost, but eternally present, that such places inspire. In every light, and in every season, it possesses a transcendent beauty; but in summer it is very paradise. Approach it if you can – as I first did – from the south, on a mid-summer afternoon. On entering the Park, you ascend the incline that I have mentioned, at the summit of which you will certainly pause, as I did, to catch your first sight of the great house. To your left, over the low boundary wall, light dances on the river curving gently westwards; and then you glimpse the church – its delicate spire on such a day set against a cloudless sky of deepening blue – facing the ivy-covered Rectory on the far side of a little field of graves.

Proceed a little further. The carriage-drive descends towards the river, crosses it by a fine balustraded bridge, then turns to the right, levelling out to give a fuller view of the house, and the swaying haze of trees behind; then it divides, to sweep either side of a perfect oval of lawn, with a fine Classical group – Poseidon with Tritons – at its centre, before passing through a pair of massive iron gates into an enclosed and gravelled entrance court.

Always your eye is drawn upwards, to a riot of gables and fluted chimneys, and, dominating all, six soaring towers topped with arched, intricately leaded cupolas. Behind the formality of Holland’s frontage, the remains of earlier ages ramble in picturesque confusion: cobbled alleys between high walls, a vaulted cloister opening onto gardens. Tudor brick mingles with smooth ashlar; oriels and battlements oppose Classical columns and pediments. And, in the midst, a sequestered mediaeval courtyard filled with urns and statuary, heavy in summer with the scent of lavender and lilies, and echoing always to the sound of birds and trickling water.

Evenwood. I had wandered its corridors and great rooms in dreams, collected representations of it, greedily hoarded every published account of its history and character, no matter how trite and inconsequential, from William Camden to the pamphlet published in 1825 by Dr Daunt’s predecessor as Rector. For years it had been, not a built thing of stone and timber and glass, which could be touched and gazed upon under the light of sun and moon, but a misty dream-place of unattainable perfection, like the great Pavilion of the Caliphat described so perfectly by Mr Tennyson.^*

Now it was spread out before me. No dream, it stood planted deep in the earth that my own feet were treading, washed by the rain of centuries, warmed and illuminated by countless dawns, raised and shaped by dead generations of mortal men.

I was overwhelmed, almost choked by tears, at the first sight of the place that I had seen only with the interior eye. And then – it was almost like the sensation of physical pain – I became certain that I had seen it before; not in books and paintings, not in fancy, but with my own eyes. I said to myself: I have been here. I have breathed this air, heard these sounds of wind through the trees, and the music of distant waters. In an instant I was a child again, dreaming of a great building, half palace, half fortress, with soaring spires and towers reaching to the sky. But how could these things be? The name of this place held dim childhood associations, but no recollection of ever having been brought here. Whence came, then, this certainty of re-acquaintance?

In a kind of daze, confused by the confluence of the real and the unreal, I walked a little further, and the perspective began to shift. Shadows and angles emerged to soften or delineate; definitions hardened, elevations extended and attenuated. A dog barked, and I saw rooks wheeling and cawing about the towers and chimneys, and white doves fluttering. Between high enclosing walls was a fishpond, dark and still, overlooked by two little pavilions of pale stone. As I drew nearer still, details of ordinary human activity began to emerge: planted things, a broom leaning against a wall, window-curtains moving in the warm breeze, smoke drifting up from a chimney stack, a water pail set down in a gateway.

We know, from the account of his life published in the Saturday Review, that Evenwood burst upon young Phoebus Daunt like Paul’s vision. It seemed – they were his words – ‘almost as if I had not lived before’.

I do not blame the boy Phoebus for feeling thus on encountering the beauty of Evenwood for the first time. No one with eyes to see, or a heart to feel, could be unmoved by the place. I, too, felt as he did when I first caught sight of its cupolas and battlements, rising up through the summer haze; and with greater familiarity came greater attachment, until, even in memory, Evenwood assumed such a power to enthral that it sometimes made me sick with a desire to spend my life within its bounds, and to possess it utterly.

If Phoebus Daunt truly experienced such an epiphany on his first coming upon Evenwood, then I freely absolve him. Remove it from the tally, with my blessing. But if he believed the words that he wrote in his public recollections, that Evenwood was ‘an Eden made for me alone’, he was culpably wrong.

It had been made for me.

My travelling chest, containing my camera, tripod, and other necessary equipment, had been placed on a trolley in a narrow yard leading off the entrance court. The footman who assisted me in the task, one John Hooper, was a pleasant, amenable fellow, and we chatted easily as he helped pull the trolley to the first location. In due course, I would have occasion to apply to him, discreetly, for information concerning certain matters connected with Evenwood, which he was happy to supply.

I had brought with me a dozen dark slides containing negatives prepared according to the process recently introduced by Monsieur Blanquart-Evrard.^* For three hours I worked away, and was satisfied that Lord Tansor would be well pleased with the results.

I had just finished taking several views of the Orangery, and was stepping through a little gate set in an ancient fragment of flint wall, when I was brought up short by the sound of someone laughing. Before me was a broad sweep of close-cut grass on which four figures, two ladies, and two gentlemen, were engaged in a game of croquet.

I would not have been aware of his presence had he not laughed; but as soon as I heard that distinctive note, and the concluding snort, I knew it was him.

He seemed to have grown taller, and was broader in the shoulder than I remembered; and now he had a dark beard, which, with the silk handkerchief that he had tied round his head, gave him a distinctly piratical air. There he was, in the flesh: P. Rainsford Daunt, the celebrated poet, whose latest volume, The Conquest of Peru, had just been published, to great acclaim.

I stood spellbound. To see him here, leaning on his mallet, and to hear his voice paying gallant compliments to his partner, a strikingly tall young lady with dark hair, seemed to twist the knife into the wound that had been festering within in me for so long. I considered for a moment whether I should make myself known to him; but then, looking down at my dusty boots, I noticed that I had a tear in the knee of my trousers where I had kneeled down on the gravel of the entrance court to adjust my tripod. Altogether I made a rather sorry sight, with my dirty hands and high colour, for it had been warm work, pulling the trolley from one location to the next. Daunt, by contrast, stood elegantly at his ease on the new-mown lawn, waistcoat shimmering in the sunlight, unaware of his former friend concealed in the shadow of a large laurel bush.

I confess that I could not help feeling envious of him, which gave the knife yet another little turn. He looked so assured, so settled in comfort. If I had known then the full extent of his good fortune, I might have been tempted into some rash deed. But, in my ignorance, I simply stood observing him, thinking of when we had last spoken together in School Yard, and wondering whether he still remembered what I had whispered to him. I doubted it. He looked like a man who slept well. It seemed almost a pity to disturb his peaceful slumbers; but one day my words would come back to him.

And then he would remember.

I remained out of sight behind the laurel bush for a quarter of an hour or more, until Daunt and his companions picked up their mallets, and returned to a small shaded terrace, where tea had been laid out for them. He strolled back with the tall young lady, whilst the other two followed behind, chatting and laughing.

It was now a little before five o’clock, and so I returned to the entrance court. I was beginning to pack up my things when Mr Tredgold appeared on the steps.

‘Edward, there you are. I trust you have had a productive afternoon? Very good. My business with his Lordship is concluded, but there is one more thing you might do before we leave.’

‘Certainly. What is it?’

He gave a little cough.

‘I have persuaded his Lordship that it would be a great thing, for his posterity, to have a photographic likeness of himself made. I urged him to consider what it would mean for his descendants to have an unmediated image of him as he really is, at this very time. I said it would be as if he lived again in their eyes. I hope it will not be too much trouble for you? His Lordship is waiting for us on the Library Terrace.’

The Library Terrace was on the west side of the house; Daunt and his friends were taking tea on the south. I quickly weighed up the risks of our meeting each other, and decided that they were small. Besides, the opportunity to study the man whom I believed to be my father was irresistible; and if Daunt did appear, I was confident that my recently acquired moustachios would prevent discovery.

‘Not in the least,’ I replied, as calmly as I could. ‘I have two negatives left, and will be very glad to oblige his Lordship. If you will allow me a moment to gather up my things …’

When we arrived at the terrace, Lord Tansor was pacing up and down, the silver ferrule of his stick clattering on the stones, the sunlight glinting off his immaculate silk hat.

‘Your Lordship,’ said Mr Tredgold, advancing towards him. ‘This is Mr Glapthorn.’

‘Glapthorn. How d’ye do. You have all your instruments, cameras, and what not, I see. A travelling chest? Everything to hand, what? Very good. That’s the way. Now then, let’s get on.’

I began to set up my tripod as Lord Tansor continued to walk up and down, conversing with Mr Tredgold. But I found that I could not take my eyes off him.

Now in his fifty-ninth year, he was a smaller man than I had expected, but with a straight back and strong shoulders. I became immediately fascinated by his little mannerisms: the left hand placed behind him as he walked; the way he tilted his head back when he spoke; the gruff, staccato phrases, and the barking interrogatives with which his speech was punctuated; the impatient tic in his left eye when Mr Tredgold directed some observation to him, as if his toleration were about to expire at any second.

Above all, my attention was held by the complete absence of either humour or vulnerability in the heavy-lidded, close-set eyes, and especially in the small, almost lipless mouth. I noticed the curious fact that one rarely saw Lord Tansor’s teeth. His mouth appeared to be permanently fixed shut, even when he spoke, which naturally conveyed the impression that here was a man in whom disapproval and suspicion of his fellow human beings was instinctive and irreversible. Everything about him was tight, ordered, contained. There was so much concentrated potency and will in the way that he looked you up and down, and in the stance of purposeful readiness that he habitually adopted – shoulders pulled sharply back, feet slightly apart – that you quickly forgot the shortness of his stature. I have met many impressive men, but few have impressed me with the completeness of their self-possession, born of the long exercise of personal and political authority, as he did. I have strong arms and a strong body, and am a giant compared to him; but as he approached to ask whether all was ready, I could hardly look him in the eye.

Yet I believed he was my father! Could it be true? Or had I been deluding myself? Say that he was my father, standing next to me in the bright June sunshine, and seeing only a stranger busying himself with his camera and tripod. Would the day ever come when I would turn and face him as my true self?

The sun had moved westwards, and was now illuminating the far end of the terrace, beyond which was a raised pavement, with a half-glazed door set in the return. We stepped down to a gravel path, and Lord Tansor – grasping his stick firmly in his right hand, and holding his left arm straight to his side – positioned himself a foot or two in front of this pavement, with the door behind his left shoulder. Through the lens of my camera, each individual detail of his appearance increased in clarity and definition: his square-toed boots, brightly polished as always; the surmounting gaiters, grey like his trousers and waistcoat; his black four-button coat and black stock; his gleaming hat. He stood straight and still, tight-lipped, white side-whiskers trimmed to perfection, small black eyes gazing out over bright pleasure-grounds and sunlit parkland, and beyond to the distant prospect of farms and pasture, rivers and lakes, woods and quiet hamlets. Lord of all he surveyed. The 25th Baron Tansor.

My hands were shaking as I completed the exposure, but at last it was done. I was about to begin preparations to expose the last negative, but his Lordship informed me that he did not wish to detain me any longer. In a moment he had thanked me brusquely for my time, and was gone.

Mr Tredgold and I passed the night in Peterborough, returning to London the next morning. We left Evenwood without catching further sight of Phoebus Daunt; but I could not rid myself of the fixed image that I now had of him: standing in the sun, laughing, gay and self-assured, without a care in the world.

We had both been too tired the previous evening to discuss the events of the day, and during the homeward journey, on the following morning, my employer seemed no more inclined to talk. He had settled himself into his seat immediately on boarding the train, and had taken out the latest number of David Copperfield,^* with the deliberate air of someone who does not wish to be disturbed. But as we were approaching the London terminus, he looked up from his reading and regarded me inquisitively.

‘Did you form a favourable impression of Evenwood,

Edward?’

‘Yes, extremely favourable. It is, as you said, a most ravishing place.’

‘Ravishing. Yes. It is the word I always use to describe it. It transports one, does it not, almost forcibly, carrying one rapturously away, to another and better world. What it would be to live there! One would never wish to leave.’

‘I suppose you have been there frequently,’ I said, ‘in the course of business.’

‘Yes, on many occasions, though not so often now as formerly, when the first Lady Tansor was alive.’

‘You knew Lady Tansor?’ I heard myself asking the question somewhat eagerly.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Tredgold, looking out of the carriage window as we entered under the canopy of the terminus. ‘I knew her well. And now, here we are. Home again.’

^*[Opticians, ‘chemical and philosophical instrument makers’, and also a leading supplier of photographic equipment, at 121 and 123 Newgate Street. Ed.]

^*[The famous stone roofing slates of northern Northamptonshire. Ed.]

^†[Conrad Verekker (1770–1836). The first edition of his guide was published in 1809. Ed.]

^*[In ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’, first published in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). Ed.]

^*[Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (1802–72), a cloth-maker from Lille. He developed an improved version of the calotype process that allowed paper negatives to be prepared in advance and developed hours or even days after exposure. The negatives also had greater sensitivity to light, and thus had shorter exposure times. In 1850 Blanquart-Evrard introduced the albumen paper print process, which became the primary print medium until gelatine paper became available in the 1890s. Ed.]

^*[Dickens’s novel was published in monthly parts from May 1849 to November 1850, and in book form in November 1850. Mr Tredgold would therefore have taken out the second number, for June. Ed.]

IV

The Pursuit of Truth

I did not see Mr Tredgold again for several weeks. He left London the next day to visit his brother in Canterbury, and I was just then embarked on investigating a case of fraud, which obliged me to be out of the office a good deal. It was not until a month after we returned from Evenwood that I received an invitation to spend a Sunday with the Senior Partner.

We quickly resumed our old bibliological ways; but it appeared to me that there was not that unalloyed surrender by my employer to our shared enthusiasm for book-lore as before. He beamed; he polished his eye-glass; he brushed his feathery hair away from his face; and his hospitality was as warm as ever. But there was a change in him, detectable and troubling.

The negatives exposed at Evenwood had been developed, fixed, and printed, and all the views, with the exception of the portrait of Lord Tansor, had been mounted, at my own expense, in an elegant album, embossed with the Duport arms. The portrait, which I had mounted separately in a morocco case, would have been a fine piece of work, had it not been spoiled by the face of an inquisitive servant, whom I had failed to notice, peeping through the glazed door just behind where Lord Tansor had been standing. But Mr Tredgold complimented me on the work, and said that he would arrange for the album and the portrait to be sent to Evenwood.

‘His Lordship will be happy to remunerate you,’ he said, ‘if you would care to let him have a note of your charges.’

‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘I shall not hear of it. If his Lordship is satisfied with the results, then I am well rewarded.’

‘You have a generous nature, Edward,’ said Mr Tredgold, closing the album. ‘To have worked so hard, and then to refuse reward.’

‘I did not expect to be rewarded.’

‘No, I’m sure you did not. It is my belief, however, that good deeds will always be rewarded, in this life or the next. This accords with another belief of mine, that what has been taken from us will one day be restored by a loving providence.’

‘Those are comforting convictions.’

‘I find them so. To believe otherwise, that goodness will receive no recompense in some better place, and that loss – real loss – is irreversible, would be the death of all hope for me.’

I had never before heard Mr Tredgold speak in so serious and reflective a manner. Nothing more was said for a moment or two, as he sat contemplating the portrait of Lord Tansor.

‘You know, Edward,’ he said at last, ‘it seems to me that there is a kind of correspondence between these convictions of mine and the photographic process. Here you have captured and fixed a living person, permanently imprisoning light and form, and all the outward individualities of that person. Perhaps the lineaments of our souls, and of our moral characters, are similarly imprinted on the mind of God, for His eternal contemplation.’

‘Then woe to all sinners,’ I said, smiling.

‘But none of us is wholly bad, Edward.’

‘Nor wholly good, either.’

‘No,’ he said slowly, still looking down at Lord Tansor’s portrait, ‘nor wholly good.’ Then, more brightly: ‘But what an age we live in – to have the power to seize the evanescent moment, and fix it on paper for all to see! It is quite extraordinary. Where will it all lead? And yet how one wishes that some earlier age had made these wonderful discoveries. Imagine looking upon the face of Cleopatra, or gazing into the eyes – the very eyes – of Shakespeare! To see things as they were, long ago, which we can now only dream of – that would be wonderful indeed, would it not? And not only to look upon the dead of ages past, but also upon those we have recently lost, whom we yearn to see in their living forms again, as those who come after us will now be able to see Lord Tansor when he is no more. Our friends who died before this great miracle was discovered can never now be rendered permanently visible to our eyes, in the full flower of their lives, as his Lordship has been rendered, here in this photographic portrait. They must live only in our imperfect and inconstant memories. Do you not find that affecting?’

He looked at me and, for a moment, I thought his eyes were moist with tears. But then he jumped up, and went over to his cabinet to retrieve some item that he wished to show me. We talked for another half-hour, when Mr Tredgold said that he had a slight headache, and begged me to excuse him.

As I was leaving, he asked me whether I had many friends in London.

‘I can claim one good friend,’ I replied, ‘which I find sufficient for my needs. And then of course I have you, Mr Tredgold.’

‘Do you think of me as a friend, then?’

‘Most certainly.’

‘Then, speaking as a friend, I hope you will always come to me, if you are in any difficulty. My door is always open to you, Edward. Always. You will not forget that, will you?’

Touched by his tone of genuine solicitation, I said that I would remember his words, and thanked him for his kindness.

‘No need to thank me, Edward,’ he said, beaming broadly.

‘You are an extraordinary young man. I consider it a duty – a most pleasant duty – to offer you every assistance, whenever you may feel it needful. And, besides, as I told you when we first met, the ordinary I can leave to others; the extraordinary I like to keep for myself.’

So my life proceeded for the the next three years. On Mondays and Tuesdays I would be engaged on my work as Mr Tredgold’s confidential assistant – sometimes in the office, but more frequently following some investigatory trail that might take me to every corner of London, and occasionally beyond. On Wednesdays, I took the pupils sent to me for instruction by Sir Ephraim Gadd, whilst on Thursdays and Fridays I resumed my duties at Tredgolds. I took my lunch at Dolly’s, and my dinner at the London Restaurant, day in, day out.^*

My free time, except for occasional Sunday visits to the Senior Partner’s private residence, was devoted to a renewed study of my mother’s papers. To facilitate the work, I had begun to acquaint myself with shorthand, using Mr Pitman’s system,^† which I used to make notes on each item or document. These were then indexed and arranged in a specially constructed set of small compartmentalized drawers, somewhat like an apothecary’s chest. But in all the mass of paper through which I had wandered, like some primaeval discoverer on an unknown ocean, I could still find nothing to supplement or advance my original discovery. Time and Death had also done their work: Laura Tansor was no more, and could not now be cross-examined; and her companion, whom I had called Mother, had followed her into eternal silence. My work at Tredgolds, however, had made me wiser in the art of detection, and I now commenced on several new lines of enquiry.

Gradually, through surviving receipts and other documents, I began to trace my mother’s movements during the summer of 1819, visiting several inns and hotels where she had stayed, and seeking out anyone in those places who might have remembered her. I met with no success until I was directed to an elderly man in Folkestone, who had been the Captain of the packet that had taken my mother and her friend to Boulogne, in August 1819. He distinctly remembered the two ladies – one, small of stature and of rather nervous appearance; the other, tall and dark, who ‘bore herself like a queen’, as he said, and who had paid him a substantial consideration so that she and her companion could spend the crossing undisturbed in his cabin.

I then travelled to the West Country, to make enquiries concerning Lady Tansor’s family, the Fairmiles, of Langton Court, a handsome house of Elizabeth’s reign situated a few miles from where my mother was born. In due course, I discovered a voluble old lady, Miss Sykes by name, who was able to tell me something concerning the former Laura Fairmile. Of particular interest to me was what she had to say about Miss Fairmile’s aunt on her mother’s side. This lady, Miss Harriet Gilman, had married the ci-devant Marquis de Québriac, who had resided in England, visibly impecunious, since the days of the Terror. After the Amiens Peace had been struck,^* the couple returned to the Marquis’s ancestral château, which stood a few miles outside the city of Rennes. But the gentleman died soon after, and the château was placed in the hands of his creditors, leaving his widow to decamp to a small house in the city, in the Rue du Chapitre, belonging to her late husband’s family. It was to this house that Lady Tansor and her companion later came.

At last the references in my mother’s journals to ‘Mme de Q’ were satisfactorily explained, and so in September 1850, on the basis of this new intelligence, I travelled to France, having obtained permission from Mr Tredgold to take a short holiday.

The house in the Rue du Chapitre was boarded up, but I found an old priest at the Church of St-Sauveur who was able to tell me that Madame de Québriac had died some twenty years since. He also recalled the time when Madame’s niece, accompanied by a friend, had resided with her for several months, and that a baby had been born, though he could not recall to which lady, or whether it had been a boy or a girl. The priest directed me to a Dr Pascal, who also lived in the Rue du Chapitre; but he, too, proved to be an old man, with few useful memories, and these added little to what the priest had already told me. The doctor did, however, inform me of an ancient retainer of Madame de Québriac’s who was still living, he thought, just outside the city. I arrived at the place in high hopes, only to learn that the old man had died a few weeks earlier.

Interesting though they were, however, such little discoveries as I was able to make whilst in France served only to show me how far I was from my goal. All my efforts had increased my store of plausible inferences, hypotheses, and suggestive possibilities; but I was no closer to uncovering the independent proof that I required, which would confirm, beyond disputation, that I was Lord Tansor’s lost heir, the son for whom he longed.

As for Phoebus Daunt, my endeavours to gather information on him, with the aim of conceiving some effective means of revenge, had been somewhat more successful, and were spurred on by the recent sight of him at Evenwood. Years had passed sinced my enforced departure from Eton, but my anger at his perfidy was undiminished. He had prospered; he had made his mark on the world, as I had once hoped to do; but my prospects had been blighted because of him. Perhaps I might have been a great figure at the University by now, with even greater distinctions in view. But all that had gone, stolen from me by his treachery.

Since making the acquaintance of Dr T—, during my earlier visit to Millhead, I had been regularly regaled with lengthy epistles from that brazenly indiscreet gentleman on the history of Dr Daunt and his family during their time in Lancashire. The information thus obtained was of only slight significance, though it served to show me how much influence the second Mrs Daunt had wielded, and perhaps wielded still, over her step-son.

Then, one day in Piccadilly, I happened to encounter an old schoolfellow, who, over an expensive dinner at Grillon’s,^* which I could ill afford, was happy to supply me with some tittle-tattle concerning our mutual acquaintance. According to my informant, Daunt had lately enjoyed a little dalliance with a French ballet-dancer, and was rumoured to have proposed to Miss Eloise Dinever, the banking heiress, but had supposedly been refused. He dined at his Club, the Athenaeum, of an evening when in London, kept a box at Her Majesty’s,^† and could be seen riding out in Rotten-row^‡ on most Saturdays, between five and seven, during the Season. He had a good house, in Mecklenburgh -square, and was generally a figure in fashionable, as well as literary, society.

‘But where does he get his money from?’ I asked in surprise, knowing well the cost of maintaining such a life in London, and strongly suspecting that the writing of poetic epics would hardly keep him in dinners, let alone a box at the Opera.

‘Bit of a mystery,’ said my informant, lowering his voice. ‘But there’s plenty of it.’

Now, a mystery was exactly what I was looking for; it spoke to me of something concealed from public gaze that Daunt might not wish to be known – a secret which, once unlocked, could perhaps be used against him. It might prove to be nothing at all; but, where money is in the case, my experience always inclines me to adopt a sceptical view of things. Yet even with all the means at my disposal, having by now begun to accumulate quite a little army of agents and scouts about the capital, I failed to locate the source of Daunt’s evident wealth.

Time went on, but no new information on Daunt came to light, and I had made no further progress in my search for the evidence that would prove my true identity. Weeks came and went; months passed, and slowly I began to sink into an enfeebling gloom that I could not shake off. This was a black time indeed. I was perpetually on edge, eaten up by frustrated rage. To ease my spirits, I passed long oblivious hours in Bluegate-fields, under the deft ministrations of Chi Ki, my customary opium-master. And then, night after night, I would wander the streets, taking my accustomed way from the Westend via London-bridge, along Thames-street, past the Tower, and so onto St Katharine’s-dock, and the fearful lanes and courts around and about the Ratcliffe-highway, in order to observe the underside of London in all its horror. It was on such excursions, pushing my way through dirty crowds of Lascars and Jews, Malays and Swedes, and every form of our British human scum, that I became truly acquainted with the character of our great metropolis, and learned to trust my ability to frequent its most deadly quarters with impunity.

Whilst I languished thus in my dull sublunary life, pulled hither and thither by my demons, the rise of Daunt’s literary star had been ceaseless. The world, I concluded, had gone quite mad. I could hardly open a news-paper or a magazine without coming across some piece of eulogistic clap-trap extolling the genius of P. Rainsford Daunt. The volumes had flowed thick and fast from his prodigal pen, an unstoppable torrent of drivel in rhyming couplets and blank verse. In 1846 had come that ever-memorable monstrosity, The Cave of Merlin, in which the poet out-Southey-ed Southey at his most execrable, but which the British Critic unaccountably considered to be ‘sublime in conception’, averring that ‘Mr Phoebus Daunt is without equal, a master of the poetic epic, the Virgil of the nineteenth century’. This production was followed, in tedious succession, by The Pharaoh’s Child in 1848, then Montezuma in 1849, and, the following year, by The Conquest of Peru. With every publication, more inflated estimates of the poet’s oeuvre would greet me as I idly perused Blackwood’s or Fraser’s, whilst paragraphs would rise up before my affronted eyes in The Times, informing his eager and adoring public that Mr Phoebus Daunt, ‘the celebrated poet’, was presently in town, and then proceeding to enumerate his doings in tedious detail. In this way, I learned that he had been to Gore House to sit to the pencil of the Count d’Orsay,^* who also later modelled in plaster a fetching bust of the young genius. Naturally, his inclusion with other notables at the ceremonial opening of the Great Exhibition^† had excited no little interest amongst a certain impressionable section of society. I recall opening the Illustrated London News over breakfast in the spring of 1851 and being greeted by a preposterous engraving of the poet – dressed in dark paletôt, light trousers strapped under the instep, embroidered waistcoat, and stove-pipe hat – together with his noble patron, Lord Tansor, standing proudly with the Queen and the Prince Consort, beside the gilded cage containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond.^‡

With the rest of the world, I had also attended the Exhibition, drawn there by a desire to view the latest photographic advances. Accompanying me had been Rebecca Harrigan, Mr Tredgold’s housekeeper, with whom I had struck up a kind of friendship. On more than one occasion, I had caught her looking at me in an interested way. She had a fine little figure, and was pretty enough; but, as I quickly discovered, after engaging her in a little conversation, she also possessed a sharp mind, and a pleasingly audacious spirit. I soon began to take quite a fancy to her.

One evening, in St Paul’s Church-yard, I encountered her sheltering under the portico of the Cathedral from a shower of rain. We chatted inconsequentially until the rain began to ease, and then I asked her whether she might care to take some dinner with me. ‘If your husband wouldn’t mind,’ I added, believing that she and Mr Tredgold’s manservant, Albert, were man and wife.

‘Oh, ’e ain’t my ’usband,’ she said, looking at me as cool as you like.

‘Not your husband?’

‘Not ’im.’

‘Then …’

‘I’ll tell you what Mr Glapthorn,’ she butted in, giving me a quite delightfully sly smile, ‘you take me to dinner, and I’ll come clean.’

She was respectably and soberly dressed in blue taffeta, with a matching stole and bonnet, an ensemble which, with her delicate little reticule, made her look like a vicar’s daughter. So, after walking a little way, I hailed a hansom in Fleet-street and took her off to Limmer’s,^* where I asked the waiter to find a table for myself and my sister.

Over the course of the evening, Rebecca recounted something of her history. Her real name was Dickson. Orphaned at the age of nine, she had been obliged to fend for herself on the unforgiving streets of Bermondsey. But – like me – she was resourceful and had quickly found a protector, a noted cracksman,^† for whom, as she said, she ‘thieved like a good ’un’ in return for food and a roof over her head. In due course, she graduated to whoring; but then, through the good offices of one of her customers, she succeeded in gaining a place in service, as a maid in the house of a Director of the East India Company. It was there that she had met Albert Harrigan, a servant in the same establishment. She and this Harrigan soon formed an attachment, even though her paramour (whose real name was Albert Parker) had an abandoned wife and child somewhere in Yorkshire. All went along nicely until their employer lost all his money in a failed railway speculation, and committed suicide. His legal adviser had been none other than Mr Christopher Tredgold, who happened just then to be in need of a manservant for his private residence. Harrigan was duly taken on, to be joined after a few weeks by his supposed wife. But their relationship had quickly soured, and now only convenience kept them together.

She told me all this – peppering her account with several anecdotes of questionable propriety – with all the gusto of a tavern raconteur; but as soon as the waiter arrived with each course, the wily little slut instantly assumed an expression of the most perfect demureness, smiling sweetly and turning the conversation, without once dropping her aitches, to some topic of unimpeachable dullness.

In the weeks following, Rebecca and I found occasion to promote our friendship, in ways that I am sure I do not need to describe. If Harrigan guessed how things lay between us, then it did not appear to trouble him. As for Rebecca, her good humour and healthy natural appetites, together with that optimistic artfulness that comes from having successfully made the most of a very bad lot, soon began to have a beneficial effect on me; and, as she had no wish to put a rope round my neck and lead me to the altar, we got on very well, meeting when the inclination took us, and pursuing our own interests whenever we wished.

This, then, was my life, from 1849 to 1853. And so things would perhaps have continued, but for two events.

The first occurred in March, of the latter year. I found myself in St John’s Wood, on Mr Tredgold’s business, and had just turned into a pleasant tree-lined street when the name on the gate-piers of a large white-painted villa, half hidden behind a screen of shrubs, brought me up short. Blithe Lodge – where the beauteous Isabella Gallini had lived for the past four years – stood before me. I have already written of how I renewed my acquaintance with Bella and how, under the auspices of Mrs Kitty Daley, she became my mistress. Until the great events of the autumn of that same year broke upon me, I discovered that I was able to remain faithful to Bella, saving a few minor and quite meaningless indiscretions, which I confess here for honesty’s sake. Rebecca, however, I did give up. She received the news with little emotion.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that don’t matter. I’ve still got Albert, such as ’e is. An’ I reckon we’ll stay friends, you an’ me. You’re a chancer, Edward Glapthorn, for all you’re a gennelmun, and so am I. An’ that makes us equals in a way, don’t it? Friends an’ equals. So, gimme a kiss, and let’s ’ear no more about it.’

The second event was of a very different character, and of far more moment.

It was the morning of the 12th of October 1853 – a date indelibly impressed on my memory. I was just leaving my room at Tredgolds, and was on the point of descending to the clerks’ room, when I saw Jukes leap up from his desk at the sound of the front bell. I could not see who the visitor was, but in a moment Jukes was hurrying up the stairs towards me.

‘Lord Tansor himself,’ he whispered excitedly as he passed.

I leaned back against the wall and gazed down.

He was sitting bolt upright, both hands clasping his cane before him. The office, before his arrival, had been quietly going about its business, with just the usual rustle of papers and scraping of pens, and the occasional sound of subdued conversation between the clerks breaking the silence. But in his presence, the atmosphere seemed suddenly charged, somehow put on alert, and a blanket of strained silence instantly descended. All conversation ceased; the clerks moved about the room with concentrated deliberation, opening their drawers with the utmost care, or silently closing doors behind them. I watched this phenomenon closely, and observed that several of the clerks would look up from their work from time to time, and direct apprehensive glances over towards the seated figure, as if, sitting there tapping his foot impatiently as he waited for Jukes to return, he was about to weigh the feather of truth in the scales of justice against their sinful hearts.

In a few moments, Jukes hurried past me again, heading back down the stairs to where the visitor sat. I stepped back into my room as his Lordship followed the clerk to the door of Mr Tredgold’s private office. As Lord Tansor entered, I heard the Senior Partner’s effusive welcome.

Jukes closed the office door and began to make his way back to his position.

‘Lord Tansor,’ he said again, seeing me as he came past my door. He stopped, and leaned his head towards me in a confidential manner. ‘There are firms,’ he said, ‘that would give a great deal – a very great deal – to have such a client. But the SP keeps him tight with us. Oh yes, he’s Tredgolds’ as long as the SP is with us. A great man. One of the first men in the kingdom, you know, though who has heard of him? And he’s ours.’

He delivered this little speech in a rapid whisper, looking back and forth to the door of Mr Tredgold’s office as he did so. Then he nodded quickly, and scampered back down the stairs, scratching his head with one hand, and clicking his fingers with the other.

I walked back to my desk, leaving my door slightly ajar. At length, I heard the Senior Partner’s door open, and the muffled sound of conversation as the two men passed along the passage to the head of the stairs.

‘I’m obliged, Tredgold.’

‘Not at all, your Lordship,’ I heard Mr Tredgold reply. ‘Your instructions in this matter are much appreciated, and shall be acted upon without delay.’

I sprang from my desk and went out into the passage.

‘Oh, pardon me,’ I said to the Senior Partner. ‘I did not realize.’

Mr Tredgold beamed at me. Lord Tansor’s face was expressionless at first, but then he began to regard me more closely.

‘You seem familiar to me,’ he barked.

‘This is Mr Edward Glapthorn,’ prompted Mr Tredgold. ‘The photographer.’

‘Ah, the photographer. Very good. Excellent work, Glapthorn. Excellent.’ Then he turned to the Senior Partner, nodded his goodbye, and immediately descended the stairs with short rapid steps. In the next moment he was gone.

‘I notice it is a fine day outside, Edward,’ said Mr Tredgold, smiling radiantly. ‘Perhaps you might like to join me for a little stroll in the Temple Gardens?’

^*[Dolly’s Chop-House, Queen’s Head Passage, Paternoster Row. The London Restaurant was in Chancery Lane. Ed.]

^†[Isaac Pitman’s Stenographic Sound-Hand was first published in 1837. Ed.]

^*[The Peace of Amiens, 27 March 1802, between France and its allies, on the one hand, and Great Britain, on the other. It is generally seen as marking the end of the French Revolutionary Wars. Ed.]

^*[A hotel in Albemarle Street. Ed.]

^†[i.e. owned an opera-box at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket. Ed.]

^‡[A roadway for saddle-horses on the south side of Hyde Park, crowded during the Season with the most fashionable riders. Ed.]

^*[Count Alfred Guillaume Gabriel d’Orsay (1801–52), wit, dandy, and artist, who was a prominent member of Lady Blessington’s social and artistic circle at Gore House. Ed.]

^†[In May 1851. Ed.]

^‡[One of the many attractions of the Great Exhibition. The cage had been made by Messrs Chubb. Ed.]

^*[A respectable first-class hotel in Conduit Street. Ed.]

^†[A burglar; safe-breaker. Ed.]

V

In the Temple Gardens

Once away from the office, and having entered the Temple Gardens, Mr Tredgold began to outline, in his usual circuitous and abstract way, a ‘little problem’ with which he had been presented.

‘Tell me, Edward,’ he began, ‘how extensive is your genealogical knowledge?’

‘I have some slight acquaintance with the subject,’ I replied.

‘I find, my dear Edward, that you have some slight acquaintance with most subjects.’

He beamed, took out his red silk handkerchief, and proceeded to polish his eye-glass as we walked.

‘Baronies by Writ, for instance. What can you tell me about them?’

‘I believe that such dignities are so called because they describe the old practice of summoning men of distinction to sit in the King’s Parliament by the issuing of a writ.’^*

‘Correct!’ exclaimed Mr Tredgold. ‘Now, by several statements of law laid down since Stuart times, these Baronies are held to be heritable by heirs general – that is to say, through females as well as males. The present Lord Tansor’s peerage is just such a Barony. Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘it would be interesting to you, from an antiquarian point of view, to have a brief account of Lord Tansor’s noble line?’

I said that nothing would give me greater pleasure, and begged him to proceed.

‘Very well – pray stop me if any of this is familiar to you. In the reign of Henry III, Lord Maldwin Duport was a person of power and influence. Of Breton extraction, an ancestor having come over with the Conqueror, he was memorably described in one of the chronicles as “a man of iyrn and blud”. A dangerous and belligerent man, we may perhaps assume, but one whose services were much in demand in those uncertain and violent times. He was a great landowner, already a baron by tenure, holding lands in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Warwickshire, and Northamptonshire, in addition to other properties in the North and the West Country.

‘In December 1264, Maldwin was summoned to attend the rebel Parliament called by Simon de Montfort in the King’s name – Henry himself, along with his son, Prince Edward, being then under lock and key following the Battle of Lewes. Maldwin was subsequently summoned to Parliament in 1283, 1290, and 1295, and his successors continued to be called into the next century and beyond. In the course of time, their constant presence in Parliament was interpreted as constituting a peerage dignity deriving from the 1264 Parliament, thus giving the Barony senior precedence, along with those of Despencer and de Ros, in the English peerage.

‘The Lord Maldwin’s principal estate, or caput, was the castle of Tansor, in Northamptonshire – a few miles to the south of the present Lord Tansor’s seat of Evenwood – and so he was summoned to Parliament as Malduino Portuensi de Tansor. Of course the family has suffered many vicissitudes of fortune – especially during the Commonwealth; but the Duports have generally married judiciously, and by the time of George, the 22nd Baron, at the beginning of the last century, they had risen to that position of eminence and influence that they continue to enjoy.

‘This position, however, is now under threat – at least, that is how the present Lord Tansor interprets matters. The absence of an heir – I mean of a lineal heir, whether male or female – has caused him great concern; and it is this lack, and the consequences that may flow from it, that he feels may signal a decline in the family’s fortunes. His fear is that the title and property could pass to a branch of the family in which, to put things in his own terms, the qualities that have been so conspicuously demonstrated by successive generations of his ancestors are lacking. His Lordship has certainly been singularly unlucky. As you may know, the only son from his first marriage died when still a child, and his present union has so far been without issue.’

Mr Tredgold had taken out his handkerchief; but, rather than cleaning his eye-glass, he was using it instead to mop his forehead. I noticed that he had coloured a little, and so asked whether he would prefer to move out of the sun, which, though low in the sky, was unusually intense for the time of year.

‘By no means,’ he replied. ‘I like to feel the light of heaven on my face. Now then, where was I? Yes. In a word, then, it appears that there is, at present, ahem, no male heir of the direct line, which raises the distinct possibility that the title will pass to a member of one of the collateral branches of the family, an outcome to which his Lordship is deeply opposed.’

‘There are legitimate collateral claimants, then?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Tredgold. ‘His cousin and secretary, Mr Paul Carteret,^* and, in due course, Mr Carteret’s daughter. But, as I say, his Lordship’s aversion to collateral succession is – well, entrenched and immovable. It is perhaps irrational, because the Barony has reverted to collateral relatives on a number of occasions in its history, but there it is. Come, I am a little tired of walking. Let us sit.’

Taking my arm, Mr Tredgold drew me to a bench in the corner of the Gardens.

‘There may yet, of course, be time for a satisfactory outcome to Lord Tansor’s predicament in the normal course of events, as it were. His physician considers it possible that her Ladyship might still be capable of conceiving an heir. I believe these things have been known. But his Lordship is not prepared to put his trust in Nature, and, after considering the matter carefully for several years, has finally come to a decision. He has wisely rejected divorce, against which I strongly advised, there being no grounds other than the lack of an heir, and it would go hard on his Lordship’s standing and reputation to behave like some Eastern potentate, and take such a step. He understands this, and so has taken an alternative course.’

Pausing once again, he looked up at the radiant blue of the sky through the branches of the tree under which we were seated, and shielded his eyes with his hand against the sun.

‘An alternative course?’

‘Indeed. A somewhat unusual one. The adoption of an heir of his own choosing.’

I cannot describe what I felt on hearing these words. An heir of his own choosing? But I was Lord Tansor’s heir! Struggling hard to maintain some appearance of composure, I began to experience the most peculiar sensation, as if I were falling through great darkness into infinite space.

‘Are you well, Edward? You look a little pale.’

‘Perfectly well, thank you,’ I replied. ‘Please go on.’

But I was far from being perfectly well. I thought my heart would burst from my chest, so assailed was I by panic at this entirely unexpected turn of events. Then I began to see that this was not the end of all my hopes; whatever such a course might mean in practice, I would still be able to claim my rightful place in the succession, if I could discover corroborative proof of my identity. All was not lost. Not just yet.

‘The firm,’ Mr Tredgold was saying, ‘has been charged with the task of modifying the provisions of Lord Tansor’s will, by the addition of a codicil. The baronial title, of course, is a separate matter; it must go whither the law dictates, to the next heir in line of succession, whether direct or collateral; which of course means that Mr Paul Carteret, through his Duport mother, may, as things presently stand, become the 26th Baron Tansor. I hope I am not being too abstruse?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Good. I wish you to be aware of the situation, as it pertains to his Lordship’s present intentions. You do understand, don’t you, Edward?’

It was such a curious question that I did not well know how to answer, but simply nodded mutely.

‘Good again. The title, then, is not in Lord Tansor’s gift. But what his Lordship possesses materially – including Evenwood, the greatest and noblest of all his possessions – is his to bestow, subject to certain legal procedures, on whomsoever he wishes – as is, in a specific sense, the Duport name. He has therefore taken a decision of great consequence. He has separated the baronial dignity, conferred by the writ that summoned Lord Maldwin Duport to Parliament in 1264, from the material interests that the family has subsequently garnered to itself, resolving that the future title-holder will inherit little but the dignity. His Lordship desires that all the entailed property that he himself inherited, as well as those possessions specifically bequeathed to him by his father, should be left to his nominated heir.’

‘And has Lord Tansor made his nomination?’

‘He has.’

Mr Tredgold paused. His china-blue eyes met mine.

‘It is to be Mr Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, the poet. You may have seen the reviews of his new volume.^* It has, I believe, been very well received.’

A terrible helplessness began to grip me, such as those must feel who see their doom approaching, but are powerless to resist it. This moment I shall always count as one of the most significant of my life; for now I became absolutely convinced that I had been driven forwards, and was still being driven, by a fatality from which I could never escape. In his recollections of how we had first met, in School Yard at Eton, Daunt had likened me to some messenger of Fate, as if he knew, as I now did, that our destinies were inextricably entwined. Had the consequences of his youthful treachery been merely the precursor of this greater loss, of which he had been made the agent? This terrible possibility was like a knife of ice to my heart. But, once again, I was saved from despair by the thought that neither of us could know the end towards which we were being impelled. Who was fated to receive the final prize? The true heir, or the false? Until that question could be answered beyond all doubt, I must continue to hope and believe that I would come at last into the life that I had been born to live. Yet I remained mesmerized by the bitter humour of it all, and could not suppress a mirthless smile.

‘Is something amusing you, Edward?’ asked Mr Tredgold.

‘By no means,’ I replied, quickly assuming an expression of concern, which, indeed, I did not need to manufacture.

‘As I was saying, Lord Tansor intends, by breaking the entail, that Mr Daunt will succeed to the possession of Evenwood, and of all the other property that his Lordship inherited from his father, on condition of Mr Daunt’s assuming the Duport name and arms on his Lordship’s death.’

‘And is it in Lord Tansor’s power to do all this?’

‘Assuredly. The property he inherited from his father is his to dispose of as he wishes. It will be be necessary for his Lordship to sign a deed of recovery for the entailed property, and to enrol it in Chancery, before he can bequeath this portion of his inheritance to Mr Daunt; but this is a relatively straightforward procedure, and is, indeed, already in hand.’^*

The air had taken on a slight chill as the mid-afternoon sun began to wane.

We had been nearly an hour in the Gardens – an hour that had changed my life for ever.

‘Mr Phoebus Daunt’s prospects are rosy indeed,’ I said, as carelessly as I could, though I was burning inside. ‘A most fortunate young man. Already a distinguished poet, and with expectations before too long of succeeding to Lord Tansor’s wealth and possessions, and to Evenwood itself.’

‘Expectations, yes,’ said Mr Tredgold, ‘though one might perhaps wish to qualify them. Pro tempore, and until the codicil is executed, Mr Daunt remains the prospective heir of his Lordship’s property. But Lord Tansor is fit and robust, his present union may yet be productive of a child; and of course the birth of an heir of the blood, unlikely though that is, would change everything, and would then bring about a revocation of the proposed provisions. Besides, who knows what the future may hold? Nothing is certain.’

For a moment or two we sat looking at each other in awkward silence. Then he stood up and smiled.

‘But you are right, of course. As things presently stand, you may say that Mr Phoebus Daunt is certainly a most fortunate young man. He has already received ample demonstrations of Lord Tansor’s regard for him, and soon he is to be formally anointed, if I may so put it, as his Lordship’s legal heir. When the day comes, Mr Phoebus Daunt, or should I say Mr Phoebus Duport, though he will not be the 26th Baron Tansor, will be a very powerful man indeed.’

We left the Gardens, and began to make our way back to Paternoster-row.

‘Forgive me, Mr Tredgold,’ I said, after we had walked some way in silence, ‘I am unclear as to what part in the proceedings that you have outlined you expect me to play. This is a legal matter, but I am no lawyer. The case is far removed from the Abode of Beauty.’

Mr Tredgold smiled at the reference to my first success for the firm.

‘Indeed it is,’ he said, taking my arm. ‘Well, Edward, here it is. There is what I may call an additional element, of which Lord Tansor is as yet unaware, and which must remain strictly confidential for the time being. I have received a communication – a private communication – from his Lordship’s secretary, Mr Paul Carteret. The circumstances whereby he has come to be employed by his relative are interesting, but need not concern us now. It appears that Mr Carteret – whom I have known and liked for many years – has been troubled for some time by a little discovery that he has made. He has not seen fit to vouchsafe its full nature to me, but his letter appears to suggest that it has a direct and fundamental bearing on the matters that we have just been discussing. In short, Mr Carteret seems to raise the possibility, if my inference is correct, that, unknown to his Lordship, a legitimate and direct heir of the blood exists. This, then, is the little problem that I would like your assistance in resolving. And now, I think I should like some tea. Will you join me?’

The clock on Le Grice’s mantel-piece struck three o’clock.

He had said nothing after I had finished telling him of my conversation with Mr Tredgold in the Temple Gardens. Behind him, in the shadows, towered a portrait of his father, Brigadier-General Sir Hastings Le Grice, of the 22nd Foot, who famously distinguished himself with Napier at the Battle of Meeanee.^* Stretched out below, his long legs resting on the brass fender, the general’s son sat gazing at the ceiling, ruminatively twirling the end of his moustache.

‘This is a tangled tale, G,’ he said at last, grasping a poker and leaning forward to stir the dying embers of the fire, ‘so let me see if I’ve got things straight. Old Tansor has taken it into his head to leave everything to Daunt, except his title, which isn’t his to give. You believe you’re Tansor’s heir, but can’t prove it. Now this chap Carteret has come along with a little secret to impart, which may, or may not, have a bearing on the case. So far, so good. But, look here: it’s all very well, you know, to make Daunt pay for what he did to you at school. It’s a long time to bear a grudge, but that’s your business, and I can’t say I mightn’t have felt the same myself. But, hang it, G, you can’t blame Daunt if old Tansor has taken a fancy to him. It’s rum that it should be Daunt, I’ll grant; dashed bad luck actually, but …’

‘Luck?’ I cried. ‘Not luck, not chance, not coincidence! Can’t you see? There’s a fatality at work here, between him and me. It had to be Daunt! It could have been no one else. And there’s worse to come. Much worse.’

‘Well, then,’ said Le Grice, calmly, ‘you’d better push on, as quickly as you can, and tell me the rest. The regiment leaves in three weeks, and if I’m to perish valiantly for Queen and Country, then I must know that all’s well with you before I go. So, speed on, Great King, and let’s hear all about Carteret and his mysterious discovery.’

He refilled his glass and leaned back in his chair once more, whilst I, taking my cue, lit another cigar, and began to tell him of Mr Carteret’s letter, in which, though I did not yet know it, the seeds of an even greater betrayal had been sown.

^*[Baronies by Writ are, in fact, a legal fiction. As a result of decisions made in the House of Lords and elsewhere, between the early seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, a doctrine – now considered indefensible – grew up that, where a man had been directly summoned to attend one of a specific list of medieval parliaments, and there was evidence that he had done so, and that he was not the eldest son of a peer or another person also summoned to such a parliament, then he could be taken as thereby honoured with a Barony, in the modern sense of a peerage. It was further construed (as Mr Tredgold rightly says) that such titles were heritable by heirs general of the first baron, though no medieval writ deals with the matter of succession, for the simple reason that they were not then conceived as creating an hereditary title of honour. However, by the mid-nineteenth century the legal doctrine of heritable Baronies by Writ held full sway. Ed.]

^*[The younger son of Sophia Mary Carteret, née Duport (1765–1836), Lord Tansor’s aunt. Ed.]

^*[Penelope: A Tragedy, in Verse (Bell & Daldy, 1853). Ed.]

^*[This process would have ‘barred’, or rendered ineffective, the entailed property – i.e. the oldest part of the Tansor inheritance, which included Evenwood and the other principal estates that had been settled ‘in tail general’ on all heirs inheriting the title of Baron Tansor. As entailed property, it could not in the normal way be disposed of by any one possessor as absolute owner; but by breaking the entail, Lord Tansor would be free to bequeath this property to his nominated heir. Ed.]

^*[The Battle of Meeanee (or Miani), a few miles north of Hyderabad in present-day Pakistan, was fought on 17 February 1843, during the Sind War of that year. A British force of under three thousand men, commanded by Sir Charles Napier (1782–1853), defeated the emirs of Sind, whose army numbered over twenty thousand. Sind was subsequently annexed by Britain. Ed.]

PART THE THIRD

Into the Shadow

October 1853

I will take heed both of a speedy friend, and a slow enemy.

Owen Felltham, Resolves (1623), iii,

‘A Friend and Enemy, When Most Dangerous’

19

Fide, sed cui vide^*

Back in my rooms, after the discussion with Mr Tredgold in the Temple Gardens, I considered the new prospect that now lay before me.

My position had appeared fatally threatened by the revelation that Lord Tansor had determined to make Daunt his heir; but now Mr Tredgold seemed to offer the startling possibility of a resolution in my favour, if his inference concerning Mr Carteret’s discovery was correct. Did Lord Tansor’s secretary indeed possess the proof that I needed?

This is the letter that Mr Tredgold had received, and which he had given to me when we parted with the words, ‘Read this, Edward, and tell me what you think should be done.’

The Dower House, Evenwood Park

Evenwood, Northamptonshire

Wednesday, 5th October 1853MY DEAR TREDGOLD, —I write to you in a strictly private & confidential capacity, in the full knowledge that your own rectitude & respect for my position here will ensure that no word or hint of this communication will be given to any third party, especially to my employer. We have had many occasions to correspond over the years in a professional capacity, and it has been my pleasure also to welcome you to Evenwood as a much esteemed guest – and friend. I therefore hope and believe that the sincerity of my regard for you will be more than sufficient to bind you to this undertaking.What I wish to say to you, most urgently, cannot be set down in writing but must be conveyed to you in person, for it goes to the heart of the present matter. I am aware – acutely aware – that my position is a delicate one, since my own interests are involved. But you will know that I speak God’s truth when I say that I have always had the sincerest desire to serve my employer to the best of my ability, regardless of my personal interests.I have been troubled for some little time by a matter that has presented itself to me, quite unexpectedly, in the course of my work here, relating to the question that is of most concern to my employer, and which he is now seeking to resolve by the means of which we are both aware. The consequences are momentous for his Lordship, and have their origins in the actions of a certain person, now deceased, for whom you and I once cherished an exceptional regard. But I cannot say more in writing.I am unable to come up to town for some weeks, and so you would oblige me greatly if you could suggest some arrangement for us to meet in the country in private. I would not wish to anticipate any plan you may have, beyond saying that I usually find myself in Stamford of a Tuesday morning, & that I also find the tap-room of the George Hotel a convenient place to take some refreshment at around midday.I cannot impress upon you enough the need for absolute discretion.Please direct reply via Post-office, Peterborough.I have the honour to be,Yours very sincerely,P. CARTERET

The next morning, Mr Tredgold and I laid our plans. Feeling that he could not risk undertaking such a clandestine meeting himself, my employer suggested that I might go to meet Mr Carteret in his stead. To this I readily agreed, and so he replied immediately, requesting Mr Carteret’s permission to send a trusted agent. Two days later a letter came back. The secretary was unwilling to sanction such an arrangement, saying that he would speak only to Mr Tredgold in person. But a further exchange of letters produced a softening in his attitude, and it was agreed that I, as Mr Tredgold’s surrogate, should travel to Stamford to meet Mr Carteret the following Tuesday, the 25th of October, though I decided I would go a day earlier and settle myself in the George Hotel in readiness.

The day prior to my departure happening to be a Sunday, Mr Tredgold invited me to spend the afternoon with him in his private residence.

‘I think perhaps we should forgo our usual bibliological entertainment,’ he said after we had taken our lunch and were sitting before the fire in his sitting-room, ‘and speak a little about the matter of Mr Carteret – if you do not mind?’

‘Of course. I am entirely at your disposal.’

‘As you always are, Edward,’ he beamed. ‘Well, then, no doubt you find Mr Carteret’s letter puzzling enough – as I do also – with respect to the matter he wishes to disclose. It may be that Mr Carteret exaggerates the importance of what he has discovered; but I suspect, knowing him to be a gentleman of careful judgment, that he would not have written to me in this way unless it was of the greatest possible moment. Whether Mr Carteret will choose to reveal the matter to you in person, I cannot say. Whatever happens, I hope you will be kind enough to keep me closely informed. I’m sure I do not need to impress on you the necessity for absolute discretion.’

‘I understand completely.’

‘That is one of your most valuable qualities, Edward,’ said Mr Tredgold. ‘You instinctively understand what is required in any given situation. Is there anything else I can tell you?’

‘Mr Carteret, you have said, is Lord Tansor’s cousin.’

‘That is correct. He is the younger son of his Lordship’s late aunt. His father, Mr Paul Carteret Senior, fell into pecuniary difficulties, leaving his two sons with no alternative but to earn a living. Mr Lawrence Carteret, now deceased, entered the diplomatic service; Mr Paul Carteret Junior was offered employment by his noble relative.’

‘A generous gesture,’ I observed.

‘Generous? Yes, you may say that, although the offer was perhaps made more out of duty towards Mrs Sophia Carteret, his Lordship’s aunt.’

‘You also mentioned, I think, during our talk in the Gardens, that Mr Carteret will inherit the Tansor title.’

‘He will – assuming of course that his Lordship’s position regarding an heir of his own remains as it is at present.’

Mr Tredgold took out his red handkerchief and began to polish his eye-glass.

‘You should be aware,’ he continued, ‘that Lord Tansor’s resolve to bequeath the major portion of his property to Mr Phoebus Daunt has been strengthened by a history of ill-feeling between the two branches of the family. A financial disagreement between Lord Tansor’s father and Mr Paul Carteret Senior has, alas, coloured his Lordship’s relationship with his cousin. The Carteret line, in his opinion, is also tainted by mental impairment.’

He lowered his voice, and leaned towards me.

‘Mr Carteret Senior’s mother died insane, though there is not the slightest indication that his son has inherited the malady. Indeed, Mr Carteret Junior is one of the sanest men I know; and his daughter, too, is decidedly free of any imputation of mental feebleness, being a fiercely intelligent and capable young woman – and a beautiful one, too. Lord Tansor, however, is prey to an acute sensitivity on this subject, deriving, I believe, from the fact that his Lordship’s elder brother, Vortigern Duport, died of an epileptic seizure. More tea?’

We sipped silently, Mr Tredgold appearing to take keen interest in an area of the ceiling just above my head.

‘Do you wish me to say something about Mr Phoebus Daunt?’ he suddenly asked.

‘Mr Daunt?’

‘Yes. To better understand the circumstances that have led to the present situation.’

‘By all means.’

Whereupon Mr Tredgold began to give me a full and detailed account of how Dr Daunt and his family had come to Evenwood, as a result of his second wife’s connexion with Lord Tansor, and of how the Rector’s son had been taken into his Lordship’s favour through his step-mother’s influence. Much of what he told me has been incorporated into an earlier section of this narrative.

‘It cannot be denied,’ Mr Tredgold was saying, ‘that the young man is highly gifted. His literary genius is well known, and Lord Tansor takes pleasure in it as far as it goes. But he has also displayed a rather extraordinary talent for business, which is much more to his Lordship’s taste. I think it is certain that this has played no little part in Lord Tansor’s wish to see him succeed to his property, in preference to Mr Carteret and his successors.’

Now, this was a completely new, and unexpected, view of my enemy, of which I was eager to hear more. According to Mr Tredgold, Daunt had been given two hundred pounds by Lord Tansor on his twenty-first birthday. Not six months later, the young man had requested an interview with his patron, at which he confessed, with a solemn face, that he had committed the whole sum to a railway speculation recommended to him by an old College acquaintance.

Lord Tansor was not pleased. He had expected better. A foolhardy railway speculation! Why, better that the boy had lost it all on the tables at Crockford’s^* – after all, a few salutary sacrifices to the goddess of chance were to be expected of gilded youth (not that he had ever been so irresponsible). But this straight-faced confession was merely in the nature of a calculated lever de rideau;^† for, seeing Lord Tansor’s face darken with disapproval, Daunt, no doubt grinning in self-satisfaction, then proudly announced that the speculation had been sound, and that it had paid out a handsome profit, which he had now realized; his original investment, it seemed, had all but doubled.

Lord Tansor, though gratified to hear this, was nonetheless inclined to think that the lad had been prodigiously lucky. Imagine his surprise, therefore, when, at a further interview some months later, he learned that the profit from the first venture had been invested in a second, with similar satisfactory results. He began to think that the boy might have a nose for these things – he had known such people; and, in the course of time, after further demonstrations of Daunt’s financial instincts, he decided to place some of his own money into the young man’s hands. No doubt he awaited the outcome with not a little anxiety.

But he was not disappointed. His investment was returned to him within three months, together with a substantial profit. There was, as Mr Tredgold had suggested, no better way for Daunt to have recommended himself to Lord Tansor. Reading the many laudatory reviews of his work was one thing; but this new talent was of a different order altogether. It impressed Lord Tansor, the consummate man of affairs, as no number of blank-verse epics could have done. Gradually, and with due diligence, his Lordship began to delegate little matters of business to Daunt, until, by the time of which I now write, his protégé had his fingers in a number of exceedingly large Duport pies.

I made the observation that Mr Phoebus Daunt must now be a man of some means.

‘It would appear so,’ Mr Tredgold replied guardedly. ‘However, he has received nothing from Lord Tansor, as far as I know, other than the two hundred pounds that I have mentioned; nor, I think, has Dr Daunt contributed to his son’s upkeep. Whatever he has made of that principal sum, by way of speculation and investment, must have supported him in the life that he presently leads.’

I thought to myself that he must be a genius indeed, to make such a sum go so far.

‘Mr Phoebus Daunt is away from Evenwood at present,’ said Mr Tredgold, brushing a speck from his lapel. ‘He is in the West Country, inspecting a property recently acquired by Lord Tansor. But there will be other opportunities, I am sure, for you to make his acquaintance. And so, Edward, I think I have said all I intended to say, and now I wish you bon voyage. I shall await your report, whether written or in person, with the greatest interest.’

We shook hands, and I turned to go; but as I did so, I felt Mr Tredgold’s hand on my shoulder.

‘Take care, Edward,’ he said quietly.

I had expected to see his usual beaming smile. But it was not there. That evening I went to Blithe Lodge. Bella was in captivating mood, and I was utterly charmed by her, as we sat by the fire in Kitty Daley’s private sitting-room, talking of this and that, and laughing at tid-bits of Academy gossip.

‘You are such a dear,’ I said, feeling a sudden uprush of affection for her as she sat in the firelight, gazing dreamily into the flames.

‘Am I?’ she asked, smiling. Then she leaned forward, cupping my face between her long fingers so that I felt the gentle impress of her rings on my skin, and kissing me tenderly.

‘An absolute, utter, and complete dear.’

‘You are quite sentimental tonight,’ she said, stroking my hair. ‘It is very pleasant. I hope you don’t have a guilty conscience.’ ‘Why should I have a guilty conscience?’

‘You ask me that!’ she laughed. ‘Every man who comes here has one, whether they admit it or not. Why shouldn’t you?’

‘That is rather hard, when all I wished to do was to pay you a compliment.’

‘Men are such martyrs,’ she said, giving my nose a mischievous little tweak. Then she sat down at my feet, placed her head on my lap, and gazed into the fire once again. Outside, the rain began to lash against the front windows of the house.

‘Isn’t it delicious,’ she said, looking up, ‘to hear the rain and the wind, while we are so snug and safe?’ Then, resting her head on my lap once again, she whispered: ‘Will I always be dear to you, Mr Edward Glapthorn?’

I bent down and kissed her perfumed hair.

‘Always.’

The following afternoon, the 24th of October 1853, a year to the very day before my chance meeting with Lucas Trendle, I took an express train northwards to Stamford, arriving at the George Hotel just before dark.

I awoke the next morning to find that the day had broken grey, wet, and cold. As it was market day, the town was full of local farmers and labourers; and by noon, the hotel was overflowing with a noisy bustling herd of muddy-booted, red-cheeked gentlemen, all eager to partake of the establishment’s amenities.

In the tap-room, thick clouds of pungent pipe smoke mingled with the appetizing aromas of roast meats and strong ale. The press of burly country bodies, and waiters rushing hither and thither, made it impossible at first to make out whether anyone there appeared to be waiting for me. After a few moments, however, a space in the mêlée cleared temporarily and I saw a man, seated on a settle in front of the window that looked out onto the long cobbled yard round which the hotel was built. He was occupied in reading a news-paper, from the perusal of which he occasionally looked about him with a slightly anxious air. I knew immediately that it was Mr Paul Carteret.

In appearance, he was a series of rounds. A round face, from which sprouted a closely clipped black-and-silver beard, like a well-kept lawn; large round eyes behind round spectacles; round ears, a perfectly round button nose above a cherubic round mouth, all set upon a small round body – not corpulent, simply round. You instantly saw a natural disposition towards goodness, his roundness seeming appropriately indicative of a corresponding completeness of character: that enviable, unaffected integration of feeling and temperament in which there is excess neither of preening self-regard nor impatience with the failings of others.

‘Have I the honour of addressing Mr Paul Carteret?’

He looked up from his paper and smiled.

‘Mr Edward Glapthorn, I think. Yes. Mr Glapthorn it is, I am sure. I am very pleased to meet you, sir.’

He rose from his seat, though his lack of height still caused him to look up at me as he did so, and held out his hand, with which he gripped mine with remarkable firmness. He then called over a waiter, and we commenced on some pleasant preliminaries before, at last, he looked hard at me and said:

‘It is rather close in here, Mr Glapthorn. Shall we walk?’

We left the din and smoke of the tap-room and proceeded over the Town Bridge and up towards the soaring spire of St Mary’s Church, which looked back from atop its little hill towards the River Welland. Mr Carteret set a brisk pace, turning round every now and again as if he expected to see someone following close behind. We had not gone far when it began to rain hard again. He clapped me on the shoulder, and hurried me up the remaining part of the hill.

‘Here,’ he said.

Quickly ascending a short but steep flight of steps, we ran through a cramped little graveyard into the porch of the church, to take shelter from the rapidly intensifying downpour.

Seating himself on one of the rough stone benches hewn out of the inside walls on either side, he signalled to me to take my place opposite. The floor of the porch was still muddied over following a recent interment – the newly filled grave was just within my view beyond the porch opening – and our shelter was lit by two Gothic windows; but they were unglazed and the rain, blown in by strong gusts of wind, soon began to pound against the back of my coat. Mr Carteret, however, seemed not to notice the discomfort, and sat smiling at me, his round hands gripping his parted knees, and looking as settled and comfortable as if he had been sitting before a blazing fire.

‘May I ask, Mr Glapthorn,’ he began, leaning forward a little across the wet and muddy flagstones, ‘how my letter was received in Paternoster-row?’

‘Mr Tredgold was, of course, concerned by its implications.’

He did not reply immediately, and I noticed for the first time a look of weariness in his large round eyes, which regarded me intently from behind his thick round spectacles.

‘You come here, Mr Glapthorn, as I understand, with the full authority and confidence of Mr Christopher Tredgold, whom I have had the pleasure of knowing these many years past. I am perfectly happy, as a consequence, to put my complete trust in Mr Tredgold’s choice of a surrogate.’

I said that I appreciated his sentiments, and assured him that I had been charged with no other task than to listen, note, and report back to my principal. He nodded approvingly, but said nothing; and so we sat in silence for some moments.

‘Your letter mentioned a discovery,’ I ventured at last.

‘A discovery? Yes, certainly.’

‘I am at your service, sir, should you wish to inform me further concerning its nature.’ I took out my note-book and a pencil, and regarded him expectantly.

‘Very well,’ he said; whereupon he leaned back a little and began to tell me something of his history.

‘I was first employed,’ he said, ‘by my cousin, Lord Tansor, as his confidential private secretary over thirty years ago. My dear and much-lamented mother was alive then, but my father had recently died. A good man, but I fear an irresponsible one, like his father before him. He left us with debt and discredit, the consequences of foolish and reckless investments in concerns about which he knew nothing.

‘After my father’s death, Lord Tansor was kind enough to allow my late wife and me, together with my mother, to take up residence with his step-mother in the Dower House at Evenwood, which he refurbished at his own expense. He also offered me employment as his secretary.

‘For my cousin’s treatment of me, when my brother and I were left almost destitute, I shall always feel the deepest gratitude. While I live as his employee, I intend to serve him as well as I can, with no other end in view than to earn my salary to the best of my ability.

‘Mr Tredgold will, I’m sure, have told you that Lord Tansor has no heir. His only son, Henry Hereward, died when still quite a boy, not long after his seventh birthday. The shock to my cousin was beyond words, for he loved the child to excess. The loss of his son was terrible enough; the loss of his only direct heir compounded his grief dreadfully.

‘The continuation of his line has been the dominant – I may say the animating – principle of my cousin’s life. Nothing else matters to him. He had received much from his father, who had received much from his father before him; and Lord Tansor intended that his son should receive much from him, in a cycle of giving and receiving, the maintenance of which he held to be a trust and duty of the highest order.

‘But when that cycle was broken – when the golden chain was snapped, so to speak – the effect on him was almost catastrophic, and for several weeks after the death of Henry Hereward he locked himself away, refusing to see anyone, hardly eating, and coming out only at night to wander the rooms and corridors of Evenwood like some tormented spirit.

‘Gradually, he recovered himself. His dear son was gone, but time, he realized, was still on his side and could yet furnish him with an heir, for he was only then in his thirty-ninth year.

‘This, I’m sure, will all be familiar to you, Mr Glapthorn, but you must hear it all again from me for this reason. I do not look upon his Lordship as most people do, who see him as cold and aloof, concerned only with his own affairs. I know he has a heart, a feeling heart, a generous heart even, though it has only been revealed in extremis. It is there, nonetheless.’

I let him talk on, and still the rain came down.

By and by he said: ‘It does not improve, and we are getting a little wet here. Let us walk in.’ So we stood up and moved towards the great black studded door of the church, only to find it was shut fast.

‘Oh well,’ he sighed, ‘we must stay where we are.’

‘A metaphor of Fate, perhaps,’ said I.

He smiled as he took his seat again, this time tucking himself tightly into the corner of the porch away from the window, beneath an already blackening memorial tablet erected to Thomas Stevenson and his wife Margaret, deceased three months apart (also their daughter Margaret, ob. 1827, aet. 17).

‘I knew Tom Stevenson,’ he said, observing me looking up at the memorial. ‘His poor daughter drowned, down by the bridge there.’

He was silent for a moment.

‘I shared Lord Tansor’s sorrow, you see, for our first-born child had been taken from us the year before poor Henry Hereward. Drowned, if you will believe it, like Tom Stevenson’s girl, but in the Evenbrook, which runs through Evenwood Park. She was walking along the top of the carriage-road bridge, in the way that children love to do. Her nursemaid had turned back to retrieve something she had dropped. All over in a moment. Six years old. Just six.’ He sighed, and leaned his round head back against the cold stone. ‘The ever-flowing stream that took her has gone to its own unknown ends. But the heart’s lacerations, Mr Glapthorn: they remain.’

He gave another deep sigh, and then continued.

‘The death of a child, Mr Glapthorn, is the saddest thing. Tom Stevenson was mercifully spared knowledge of his poor daughter’s fate – he predeceased her, as you see from the dates. But it was not given to Lord Tansor to be so spared, nor to me. We both suffered the keenest pangs of grief and loss. Prince or pauper, all of us must endure such trials alone. In this, Lord Tansor was – is – no different to you or I, or to any other human soul. He occupies a privileged station in life, but there are burdens, too, mighty ones. But I expect you are not persuaded. Perhaps you perceive the servility of the old retainer in me?’

I said that I was very far from possessing the natural temperament of the sans culotte,^* and that I was quite happy for Lord Tansor to enjoy what had been given to him by a kind Fate.

‘Well, we can agree on that,’ said Mr Carteret, smiling. ‘These are democratic and progressive times, I know – my daughter constantly tells me so.’ He sighed. ‘Lord Tansor does not see it – I mean the inevitability of it all, that it will all end one day, which is perhaps not too far distant. He believes in a perpetual, self-sustaining order. It is not hubris, you know, but a kind of tragic innocence.’

And then he apologized for inflicting what he called his usual homily on me, and went on to speak of the present Lady Tansor, and of his Lordship’s increasing desperation, over the years following his marriage to her, that no heir had been forthcoming.

After a while, he fell silent and sat, hands on knees, regarding me as if in anticipation of my making some remark.

‘Mr Carteret, forgive me.’

‘Yes, Mr Glapthorn?’

‘I am here to listen, not to question you. But will you allow me to ask this one thing, concerning Mr Phoebus Daunt? He has been mentioned to me, by Mr Tredgold, as a person who enjoys Lord Tansor’s particular favour. Are you at liberty to say now, or when we next meet, whether this gentleman’s position, in respect to his Lordship, is in any way germane to the concerns that you voiced in your letter?’

‘Well, that is a very lawyerly way of putting it, Mr Glapthorn. If you mean, has Mr Phoebus Daunt become the object of Lord Tansor’s ambitions to secure an heir, then I can of course answer immediately in the affirmative. I am sure, in fact, that Mr Tredgold must have told you as much. Do I blame my cousin for the action he wishes to take with respect to Mr Daunt? No. Do I feel slighted by it? No. Lord Tansor’s possessions are his to dispose of as he wishes. Even if I should succeed to the title, it would be an empty dignity, a name only; and I truly do not desire it – full or empty. However, the matter that I wished to place before Mr Tredgold, and which I am now to place before you, does not concern Mr Daunt directly, though indirectly it certainly bears – rather critically – on his future prospects. But if I am to say more, then I think perhaps it will be best to do so at our next meeting. I see the rain eases a little. Shall we go back?’

I waited in the doorway of the tap-room while Mr Carteret retrieved a battered leather bag from the hall-porter and spent some few minutes in conversation with him. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed him hand over a small package, and then speak a few more words to the man. He rejoined me, and we walked out together into the stable-yard, where he girded his little round body in a capacious riding-coat, slapped a battered old hat on his head, and secured the bag tightly across his chest. ‘Will you reach home before dark?’ I asked.

‘If I press on now. And I have the comfortable prospect of tea, and the welcome of my dear daughter, to light my way.’

We shook hands, and I waited in the yard while he mounted a stocky black horse.

‘Come to tea tomorrow,’ he said. ‘About four o’clock. Dower House, Evenwood. Just by the Park gates. South side.’

He was about to pass through the archway at the far end of the cobbled yard when he turned, and shouted back: ‘Bring your bags and stay the night.’

After dinner, I retired to my room to write a brief account for Mr Tredgold of my first meeting with Mr Carteret, which I sent down to the desk to be despatched by the early post the next morning. Then, overcome with tiredness, and feeling no need of my usual opiate cordial, I went to bed, and quickly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

After some time, I was conscious of being gradually drawn back into wakefulness by an insistent tapping against my window. I rose from my bed to investigate, just as the nearby bell of St Martin’s Church chimed one o’clock.

It was nothing more than a loose tendril of ivy moving in the wind; but then I happened to glance down into the stable-yard.

Under the archway at the far end was what appeared to be a single red eye. Slowly, the darkness around it began to coalesce into a darker shape, enabling me to discern the figure of a man, half lit by the light of the street lamp on the other side of the archway. He was smoking – I could now make out the glow of his cigar expanding and contracting as he drew in and released the smoke. He remained motionless for some minutes; then he suddenly turned, and disappeared into the shadows of the archway.

I thought nothing of this at the time. A late dinner guest on his way home, perhaps, or one of the hotel staff. I shuffled back to bed, and fell fast asleep once more.

Early the next afternoon, I set off on one of the hotel’s horses to Evenwood, reaching the village just before three o’clock.

In the main street of the village, I pulled up my horse to look about me. There was St Michael and All Angels, with its soaring spire, a little beyond which stood the creeper-covered Rectory, home of the Reverend Achilles Daunt and his family. A great stillness had descended, broken only by the faint sound of a breeze passing through the trees that lined both sides of the lane that led down to the church. I moved off, following the line of the Park wall until I reached the towered gate-house – put up in the gloomy Scottish style by Lord Tansor in 1817, in a temporary fit of enthusiasm after reading Scott’s Waverley. Once in the Park, the main carriage-drive began its gradual ascent, for the great house is hidden from here, a pleasure cunningly deferred by ‘Capability’ Brown when he remodelled the Park; but a building could be glimpsed to the left, through an area of thickly planted trees.

A spur from the main driveway passed through the Plantation and brought me to a gravelled space. From here, it bisected an area of well-tended lawn, and led up to the main entrance of the Dower House – a fine three-storeyed building of creamy Barnack stone, built in the second year of King William and Queen Mary,^* as proclaimed by the incised numbers on the semi-circular pediment above the shallow portico. It struck me as looking like a beautiful doll’s house for some giant’s child, perfect both in its simple proportions and in the well-mannered taste of its construction. A flight of half a dozen or so steps led up to the pillared portico. I dismounted, ascended the steps, and knocked at the tall unglazed double doors; but no one came to my knock. Then I heard the sound of a woman crying, somewhere at the back of the house.

I tethered my mount, and followed the sound through a gate and down a short flight of steps into a walled garden, lying now in the shadows of late afternoon, then towards an open door in the rear of the residence.

A young serving girl was sitting on a chair by the door being comforted by an older lady in cap and apron.

‘There, there, Mary,’ the older lady was saying, stroking the girl’s hair and attempting to brush away her tears with the hem of her apron. ‘Try to be strong, my dear, for Missie’s sake.’

She looked up and saw me.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I have been knocking at the front door.’

‘Oh, sir, there is no one here – Samuel and John are up at the great house with his Lordship. We are all at sixes and sevens, you see. Oh sir, such a terrible thing …’

She continued in this, to me, incomprehensible way for some moments until I interrupted her.

‘Madam, perhaps there is some misunderstanding. I am here by appointment to see Mr Paul Carteret.’

‘No, no, sir,’ she said, as Mary began to wail with renewed force, ‘Mr Carteret is dead. Killed on his road back here from Stamford last evening, and we are all at sixes and sevens.’

^*[‘Trust, but be careful in whom’. Ed.]

^*[The celebrated gambling house in St James’s. Ed.]

^†[A curtain-raiser. Ed.]

^*[A member of the working classes during the French Revolution, who wore trousers as opposed to the knee-breeches of the aristocracy. Ed.]

^*[i.e. 1690. Ed.]

20

Vae victis!^*

I pride myself on my coolness under duress – a necessary quality for my work at Tredgolds. But I simply could not disguise my shock, my complete shock, at this news.

‘Dead?’ I cried, almost frantically. ‘Dead? What are you saying? It cannot be.’

‘But it is true, sir,’ said the lady, ‘only too true. And what will Miss Emily do now?’

Leaving Mary to her tears, the lady, who introduced herself as Mrs Rowthorn, the Carterets’ housekeeper, escorted me through the kitchen and up a short flight of stairs, from which we emerged at the rear of the vestibule.

As was my custom, I quickly sought to fix the details of my new surroundings in my mind. A floor of black-and-white tiles; two windows flanking the front door, which was secured by two bolts, top and bottom, and a sturdy central mortice. Pale-green walls with fine stucco work, equally fine plasterwork on the ceiling, and a plain white marble fireplace. A stair-case with an elegant wrought-iron handrail leading to the first floor. Four doors leading off, two at the front, two at the rear; a further door leading back into the garden.

Out of one of the front rooms, a young woman now emerged.

She was tall, unusually so for her sex, nearly indeed my own height, and was dressed in a black gown with a matching cap that was almost indistinguishable from her jet hair.

As I looked upon her extraordinary face, I thought that I had not known what human beauty was until that moment. The beauty that I thought I had known, even Bella’s, now seemed delusive and figmental, a half-realized dream of beauty, moulded by invention and desire. But now beauty stood in plain sight, real and unmediated, like starlight, or sunrise over a snow-covered land.

She stood, in the diminishing afternoon light, with her hands folded in front of her, regarding me calmly. I had expected a homely, round person, like Mr Carteret; a welcoming domestic angel. She wore spectacles, like her father, but the resemblance went no further; and, far from detracting from the uncommon loveliness of her face, they seemed only to heighten it – a phenomenon that I have often observed.

She possessed the exaggerated prettiness of a doll, but somehow elevated and made noble. Her heavy-lidded eyes – almond-shaped, and coal-black, like her hair – were exceptionally large, and dominated her face, which was as pale as a November moon. Her nose was perhaps a little long, her upper lip perhaps a little short; and the mole on her left cheek might have been considered by some to be a blemish. But hers was not a perfection of individual features; her beauty seemed greater by far than the sum of its parts, as music played transcends the written notes.

I desired Miss Emily Carteret from that very first moment, as I had desired no other woman. Her soul seemed to beckon to mine, and I had no choice but to follow where she led. Yet, if my true identity could be proved, we were cousins, with Duport blood in common. The thought was thrilling, and seemed to make my desire for her all the keener.

My reveries were interrupted by Mrs Rowthorn.

‘Oh, Miss,’ she said, with evident agitation, ‘here’s a gentleman been knocking to see your poor father.’

‘Thank you, Susan,’ replied Miss Carteret calmly. ‘Please bring some tea into the drawing-room – and tell Mary that she may go home if she wishes.’

Mrs Rowthorn dropped a slight curtsey and hurried back down the stairs to the kitchen.

‘Mr Glapthorn, I think. Won’t you come in?’

Her voice was warm and low, laced with a caressing but distant musical quality that somehow put me in mind of a viola played in an empty room.

I followed her into the apartment from which she had just emerged. The blinds had been drawn, and lamps had been lit. She stood with her back to the window, while motioning me with a slow wave of her hand to take a seat on a small upholstered chair in front of her.

‘Miss Carteret,’ I began, looking up at her, ‘I hardly know what to say. This is the most appalling news. If I can—’

She interrupted the little speech of condolence that I had planned to give. ‘Thank you, Mr Glapthorn, but I neither desire nor need your support at this time – for that, I think, is what you were about to offer me. My uncle, Lord Tansor, has put everything necessary in hand.’

‘Miss Carteret,’ I said, ‘you know my name, and I infer that you also know that I had arranged to see your father here today on a confidential matter.’

I paused, but she said nothing in response, and so I continued.

‘I came here with the authority of Mr Christopher Tredgold, of Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr, whose name, I also infer, is not unfamiliar to you.’

Still she stood, silently attentive.

‘I undertook to keep Mr Tredgold fully informed of my time here, and that undertaking I must of course honour. May I ask – are you able to tell me – how this dreadful thing happened?’

She did not answer for a moment but instead turned away, looking at the blank surface of the window-blind. Then, with her back still towards me, she began to recount, in a level, matter-of-fact tone, how her father’s horse – the little black horse that I had seen him mount in the yard of the George – had been found trotting riderless through the Park at about six o’clock the previous evening, on the track that led down from Molesey Woods. A search party had been sent out. They soon found him, just inside the line of trees, close to where the road entered the Park from the Odstock Road. He was alive but unconscious, fearfully beaten about the face and head, and had been taken on a cart back to the great house, where his body still lay. Lord Tansor had immediately been informed, and had sent to Peterborough for his own local physician; but before the medical gentleman arrived, Mr Carteret had died.

‘They believe he had been followed from Stamford,’ she said, now turning away from the window, and fixing her gaze on me.

It appeared that there had been a number of such attacks over the past few months, carried out by a gang of four or five ruffians, whose ploy was to follow farmers and others who appeared likely to be returning home from market with money in their bags. A farmer from Bulwick had been badly assaulted only the week before, though until now there had been no fatalities. The attacks had caused outrage in the vicinity, and had been the subject of furious calls for action to be taken in the pages of the Stamford Mercury.

She stood looking down at me, as I sat awkwardly, like some scolded schoolboy, in my little chair.

She had the most extraordinary, unblinking stare that I have ever seen. Her dark, fathomless eyes revealed nothing of herself, seeming instead like perfect mechanical devices. They immediately put me in mind of the lenses of my cameras: hard, penetrative, all-seeing; impassively absorbing, capturing and registering every detail and nuance of any object that came into view, but giving nothing back. The discomfort of that gaze, its disconcerting combination of impenetrability and knowingness, affected me intensely, producing a kind of paralysis of will. I felt that she knew me instantly for what I was, and for who I was, in all my disguises. It appeared to me that those eyes had taken in all the degradations of my life, and recorded all my doings committed beneath the light of heaven, or the cloak of night; that they saw, too, what I was capable of, and what, with time and opportunity, I would do. I suddenly felt unaccountably afraid of her; for I knew then that I would have no choice but to love her, with nothing given back.

At that moment we were interrupted by Mrs Rowthorn, bringing in a tray of tea. For the first time since our interview began, Miss Carteret moved away from the window, and took a seat opposite me. She poured out the beverage, which we drank in silence.

‘Miss Carteret,’ I said at length, ‘this is difficult for me to ask, but it will, as I say, be necessary for me to give Mr Tredgold as full a report as possible of the recent terrible events. I shall therefore need to inform myself, as far as I can, of the precise circumstances of your father’s death. It is possible, indeed probable, that I was the last person to see him alive, other than his attackers, and that likelihood in itself involves me in the tragedy. But I would also beg you to think of me as your friend – and your father’s also – for though I only met him for the first time yesterday, I had already grown to like and respect him.’

She put down her cup.

‘You are a stranger to me, Mr Glapthorn,’ she replied. ‘All I know of you is that you are Mr Tredgold’s representative, that my father left here yesterday to meet you in Stamford, and that you were likely to be returning here today to continue your discussions. My father instructed that a room should be prepared for you, and you are of course welcome to stay for as long as you require, in order to compose your report to Mr Tredgold. I am sure, once that is done, that you will wish to return to London as soon as possible. Mrs Rowthorn will show you to your room.’ At which she rose and rang for the housekeeper.

‘Good-bye, Mr Glapthorn. You must ask Mrs Rowthorn if there is anything you require.’

‘Miss Carteret, I cannot express my sorrow—’

‘It is not for you to be sorry at what has happened,’ she interrupted. ‘You are kind, but I do not need your sympathy. It does not help me. Nothing can help me.’

Mrs Rowthorn soon appeared at the door (I knew enough of housekeepers to suppose that the speed of her arrival signified that she had been eavesdropping on our conversation). I made a slight bow to Miss Carteret, and followed the housekeeper back out into the vestibule.

Minutes later, I was being shown into a small but welcoming room on the second storey of the house. Raising the blind of one of the two windows, I saw that the room looked out across the front lawn and its screen of trees towards the South Gates. I then lay on the bed, closed my eyes, and tried to think.

But my head was full of Miss Carteret, and whenever I attempted to direct my thoughts towards the business of her father’s letter to Mr Tredgold, I could see only her great black eyes under their hooded lids. I tried to think of Bella instead, but found that I could not. At last, I took out paper, pen, and ink, lit a cigar, and began to compose a report to my employer on the circumstances of Mr Carteret’s death, as they had been told to me.

Dusk had fallen by the time I had completed my task and taken some supper, which Mrs Rowthorn brought up on a tray. I had just opened the window, feeling the need to take a draught of the cold evening air, when the silence was broken by the sound of a piano-forte.

The delicate melody and its ravishing harmonies, the affecting shifts from the major to the minor mode, and from pianissimo to forte, took hold of my heart, and wrung it dry. Such pathos, such grief-laden beauty, I had never experienced in my life. I did not immediately recognize the piece – though I know now that it was by the late Monsieur Chopin – but I guessed the player. How could it be anyone else but her? It seemed clear that she was playing for her father, articulating through her instrument, and the composer’s perfect arrangement of tones and rhythm, the agony she could not, or would not, reveal to a stranger.

I listened, spellbound, imagining her long fingers moving over the keys, her eyes washed with tears, her head bowed in the desolation of her grief. But as suddenly as it had begun, the playing stopped, and there came the sound of the lid of the instrument being banged shut. I returned to the window, and looked down into the garden to see her walking quickly across the lawn. Just before reaching the Plantation, she stopped, looked back towards the house, and then moved a little closer towards the trees. Then I saw him, a darker form, emerge from the shadows, and enfold her in his arms.

They remained in a silent embrace for some minutes before she suddenly drew back, and began to speak to him in evident animation, shaking her head violently, and twisting around from time to time to look back at the house. Gone was the reserve and cold restraint that I had witnessed earlier; instead I saw a woman gripped by irresistible emotion. She made to leave, but the man caught her by the arm and pulled her back towards him. They continued to converse, their heads close together, for some minutes; then she broke away once more and appeared to remonstrate with him, pointing from time to time into the shadows behind him. At last she turned and ran back to the house, leaving the man standing with empty outstretched arms for a moment or two. I watched her disappear under the portico, and heard the sound of the front door closing. When I looked back towards the Plantation, the man had gone.

So she had a lover. It could not of course be Daunt, for Mr Tredgold had told me before I left that he was in the West Country, on Lord Tansor’s business; he had also mentioned, in passing, that Daunt’s former amorous designs on Miss Carteret had been firmly discouraged by the young lady, in deference to her papa’s thorough dislike and disapproval of his neighbour’s son, and that they now maintained a civil but unencumbered friendship. But she was beautiful, and unattached, and must have many admirers amongst the county’s bachelors. Doubtless I had witnessed an assignation with some local buck. But the more I considered the dumb-show that had been played out before me, the more puzzling it seemed. One might expect a man who comes a-courting to step up to the front door, and announce himself boldly, not skulk in the shadows; nor did it seem to me that this had been a lovers’ tiff, but something of far greater moment. There was, it appeared, far more to beautiful Miss Carteret than met the eye.

There was a knock at the door, and the housekeeper came in to remove my tray.

‘Mrs Rowthorn,’ I asked, as she was about to leave, ‘these attacks that have taken place recently: how many have there been?’

‘Well, sir, let me see. Mr Burton, who has a farm of Lord Cotterstock’s over at Bulwick – he was the last, poor man. And then there was Squire Emsley’s man, and I believe there was another gentleman from Fotheringhay, but I can’t recall. The poor master would be the third or fourth, I think.’

‘And were they all carrying money?’

‘I believe so – except for the master.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, sir, that the others had all been about their business in Stamford, it being market day when they were attacked. Mr Burton had near fifty pounds taken. But the master keeps his money at the bank in Peterborough, though I don’t know how much he had about him in the normal way of things.’

‘Why, then, did he go to Stamford yesterday?’

‘To meet you, sir, and to go to the bank.’

‘The bank? To withdraw money, perhaps?’

‘Oh no, sir,’ she replied. ‘I believe it was to bring back some papers they’d been holding safe for him. Before he left here, he came to ask me where he could find something big enough to put them in, and I found him an old leather bag of Mr Earl’s – who used to be his Lordship’s gamekeeper – that has been hanging on the back of the pantry door these two years …’

I remembered the item distinctly, and how Mr Carteret had strapped it tightly over his riding-coat in the stable-yard of the hotel.

‘And where is the bag now?’ I asked.

She paused for a moment.

‘Now there’s a thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t seem to recall seeing it when they … excuse me, sir, I do beg your pardon …’

She put the tray down to fumble for her handkerchief, and I apologized for my thoughtlessness. When she had composed herself, and after a few consolatory words, she picked up the tray again, and wished me good-night.

I was certain now that Mr Carteret had not been tracked and set upon by this supposed gang for the money that they believed he might be carrying. This was no crime of opportunity. Mr Carteret had been attacked for a clear and specific purpose; and had I been a betting man, I would have put money on its involving the contents of the missing bag. But it puzzled me to surmise what Mr Carteret had been carrying, if not money, and what could have been so valuable that cold-blooded, brutal murder was no bar to obtaining it.

This quiet place, standing in elegant seclusion within the walls of Evenwood Park, had suddenly become a place of conspiracy and violent death. Slowly, but insistently, a conviction began to form in me of some link between the death of Mr Carteret and the letter that he had written to Mr Tredgold. By and by, I concluded that such a conviction was groundless. Yet Mr Tredgold had told me to take care. I began to wonder whether his words had been anything more than a conventional farewell.

I sat up for another hour or more, turning matters over in my mind, contending with vague fears and unfounded suspicions, until I could stand no more and blew out my candle. Then I lay, open-eyed, in the darkness, listening to the call of an owl in the Plantation, and watching shadows cast by the trees playing on the white-washed ceiling. How long I lay there, I do not know; but at last I sank into a fitful sleep, pulled down into dreams that were haunted by the face of Miss Emily Carteret.

^*[‘Woe to the conquered!’. A phrase from Livy. Ed.]

21

Requiescat^*

Rising early, I made my way down through the silent house to find the front door locked and bolted, making it necessary to take the back stairs down to the kitchen. There I encountered the servant girl, Mary Baker, at work at a great stone sink. She turned on hearing my footsteps and curtseyed.

‘Oh, sir, is anything the matter? Did you ring?’

‘No, no, Mary,’ I replied. ‘I am going for a walk, but the front door is locked.’

She looked up at a clock hanging above the range. It told just a little before half past five.

‘The master would always come down himself with the keys, at six sharp,’ she said. ‘Every morning, without fail.’

‘I suppose Miss Carteret has the keys now,’ I said.

‘I can’t say, sir. I was that upset yesterday evening that Mrs Rowthorn said I might go home, which I did, though I made sure I was here early this morning.’

‘And do you live in the village, Mary?’

‘All my life, sir.’

‘I imagine this has been a terrible shock. So senseless and unexpected.’

‘Oh sir, the poor dear master … such a good man, so good to us all.’ Whereupon her voice began to falter, and I saw that tears were not far off.

‘You must be strong, Mary,’ I said, ‘for your mistress’s sake.’

‘Yes, sir, I shall try. Thank you, sir.’

As I was about to leave, a thought struck me.

‘Tell me, Mary, if it does not upset you too much, who found Mr Carteret?’

‘John Brine, sir.’

‘And who is John Brine?’

She described him as Mr Carteret’s man, by which I understood her to mean his general factotum.

‘And how many other servants are there here, besides John Brine?’

‘Well, Mrs Rowthorn, of course, and myself. I mostly help Mrs Barnes, the cook, and do the cleaning, though Mr Tidy’s girl comes in three times a week to help me with that. Then, besides John Brine, there’s his sister Lizzie – Miss Emily’s maid – and Sam Edwards, the gardener.’

She turned from the sink, and began rubbing her hands on her apron. It appeared that John Brine had been on some errand to the great house when Mr Carteret’s horse was first seen trotting riderless through the Park. Brine, together with two of Lord Tansor’s grooms, Robert Tindall and William Hunt, had immediately set off to look for Mr Carteret, the two grooms taking the main road to the gates that stood on the southern side of the Park, Brine following the smaller track that led through a swathe of woods to the western gateway on the Odstock Road.

‘So Mr Carteret was found by John Brine alone, then?’ I asked.

‘I believe so, sir. He rode back straight away to find the others, and then they all went there together.’

‘And where can I find John Brine?’

Mary directed me to a yard leading off the garden, one side of which consisted of a range containing two or three stables and a tack-room. Here I found a stocky young man of about thirty, with light sandy hair and beard. He looked up from his work as I entered, but said nothing.

‘John Brine?’

‘I am,’ he replied, in a suspicious tone, drawing himself up and straightening his back.

‘Then I would like to ask you a few questions concerning the attack on Mr Carteret. I am—’

‘I know your name, Mr Glapthorn,’ he said. ‘We were told to expect you. But I don’t know why you feel it is appropriate to question me. I’ve told everything I know to Lord Tansor, and I don’t think, beggin’ your pardon, sir, that his Lordship would consider it proper that I repeat myself to a stranger. I hope you understand my position, sir. If you’ll excuse me.’

At which he returned to his work. But I would not be brushed off so easily by such as he.

‘Just a minute, Brine. You should know that I am remaining here for a day or so with the express permission of Miss Carteret. It is incumbent upon me, in my professional capacity, for reasons I need not trouble you with, to inform myself as fully as possible with all the circumstances surrounding this terrible event. You will oblige me greatly, Mr Brine, if you could see your way to giving me your account, in your own words, of how you found Mr Carteret. I would not wish to rely on hearsay or rumour, which might distort or contradict the truth that I know I shall hear from your own lips.’

He looked at me for a moment, trying no doubt to gauge the sincerity of my little speech. Then he appeared to relax his stance somewhat, nodded to me to take a seat on an old wheel-backed chair that stood by the door, and began to tell me his story.

In outline, it confirmed what I had already heard from Mary. He had been at the great house when one of the gardener’s boys had run into the stable-yard to say that Mr Carteret’s black mare was trotting through the Park, but that there was no sign of its rider. With darkness now coming on, Brine and the two grooms had at once mounted up and ridden out, the grooms heading towards the South Gates, Brine veering west towards the woods.

Brine had found him lying face down amongst the trees, a little way off the track, not far from the Western Gates.

‘Had he fallen where he was attacked, do you think?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Brine, ‘I don’t think so. The track bends sharply at that point, just before the gates. I believe they were waiting for him on the far side of the bend, just within the trees. He wouldn’t have seen them until it was too late. After he’d fallen, I suppose they’d sent the horse off and then dragged him into the trees – you could see the flattened grass. He was still breathing when I found him, but I couldn’t rouse him.’

‘And his bag?’

‘Bag?’

‘The bag he had across his chest.’ ‘There was no bag.’

I then asked him where they had taken Mr Carteret. ‘William Hunt rode back to the great house and they brought up a cart. We took him back on that.’ ‘To the great house, not here?’

‘Yes. Lord Tansor insisted. He said he should be kept as quiet as possible until Dr Vyse could be brought from Peterborough. Robert Tindall was sent straight away.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Around eight o’clock.’

‘But Mr Carteret died before the doctor arrived?’

‘At about half past nine, or thereabouts. Miss Carteret was with him, and Lord and Lady Tansor.’

I held out my hand, which he took after a little hesitation. I was determined to get the fellow on my side, though he seemed somewhat dull-witted and morose.

‘Thank you, Brine. I am grateful to you. Oh, Brine,’ I said, as I was about to leave, ‘where is Mr Carteret now?’

‘In the Chapel at the great house. Lord Tansor thought it would be best.’

I nodded. ‘Indeed. Yes. Thank you, Brine. Oh, by the way, could you arrange for this to get to Peterborough, in time for the midday railway mail?’ I handed him the second account that I had written for Mr Tredgold, describing the reported circumstances of the fatal attack on Mr Carteret.

‘You will need some money,’ I added, taking out some coins. ‘This should suffice.’

He made no reply, but merely nodded as he took the proffered money.

I retraced my steps to the garden, and then walked across the lawn to the gate-house. As I stepped out onto the roadway, I noticed something dark lying on the ground and stooped down to examine it more closely. It was the remains of a half-smoked cigar, sufficient for me – by now a seasoned connoisseur – to recognize one of the premier Havana brands, Ramón Allones no less. Miss Carteret’s lover was a man of discernment. I threw the stump on the ground, and proceeded on my way.

A little before gaining the point at the summit of the long incline from where the great house could be seen, I stopped and turned to look back. Below and behind me were the turrets of the gate-house; to the right, the Plantation, with a glimpse of the Dower House beyond. Further to the right was the boundary wall, on the other side of which could be seen the roof of the Rectory and the spire of St Michael’s and All Angels. The irresistible swell and spread of pure fresh morning light was breaking along the distant line of the river; to the west the great arc of woodland that clothed the higher ground towards Molesey and Easton stood in silent half-shadow.

I turned and resumed my trudge up the remainder of the long slope. The road here begins to swing through a gentle curve, flanked on either side by a short avenue of oaks, and then levels out before descending to cross an arched bridge across the Evenbrook, which can be seen making its sinuous way eastwards through the Park. I emerged from the trees and stopped.

The house was spread out below, its magical splendour even more dizzyingly captivating in the misty October light than I remembered it from my first visit in high summer. I proceeded down the slope, across the bridge, and at last found myself standing in the inner courtyard. Before me were the main doors to the house, on each side of which two elegant Doric columns supported a pediment carrying the Tansor arms and an inscription: ‘What thing so Fair but Time will not Pare. Anno 1560’. A little further off, to left and right, abutting into the forecourt, two of the many cupola-topped towers for which Evenwood is celebrated soared into the brightening air; a little way beyond the southernmost of these was a small archway, through which I could discern a cobbled courtyard.

I did not stop to consider what I would say or do if I encountered anyone. I had laid no plans, had no alibi or excuse prepared. Without thinking, I found myself walking through the archway and into the courtyard beyond, heedless of the possible consequences. I was simply intoxicated by the grave beauty of the building, which seemed to drive away all calculated and rational thought.

I had entered one of the oldest parts of the house. Three sides of the court consisted of open-arched cloisters, unchanged since the Middle Ages; the fourth, forming the outer wall at this point and containing the Chapel, was a closed-in range, altered in the last century, with four rectangular windows of painted glass, two on each side of an ogee-arched door standing at the top of a little semicircular flight of steps. Surmounting the roof of this range was a magnificent clock of brightly coloured wood within an intricate Gothic housing, the gilded panels of which were now catching the first gleams of the early morning sun.

As I ascended the steps, the bell of this instrument tolled the half-hour. I looked at my pocket-watch: half-past six. The household would already be about its business, but still I paid no heed to the prospect of being discovered while creeping uninvited about the building. I pushed open the door and entered.

The interior of the Chapel, wainscoted in dark wood and paved in white marble, was cool and silent. I noted, with approval, the pretty little three-manual pipe-organ of the last century, which I knew from my researches had been made by Snetzler.^* On either side of a central aisle, three or four rows of ornately carved chairs stood facing a simple railed-off altar, above which hung a painting of the Sacrifice of Isaac. Before the altar, placed on trestles and lit by four tall candles in massive golden holders, stood the open coffin of Mr Paul Carteret.

The upper part of his body had been covered by a white cloth. I gently pulled it back and looked down at the man I had last seen trotting out of the George Hotel in Stamford, anticipating a good tea and the company of his daughter.

Death had not been kind to him. His jaw had been temporarily bound; but the rest of his poor round face showed all too clearly the violence that had been meted out to him. The left eye was closed and undamaged, but the right had gone completely, reduced to a horrifying mess of bone and pulp, along with much of that side of the face. I had seen such injuries before, on many dangerous midnights in London, and knew with cold certainty that whoever had visited this violence upon him had done so with truly murderous intent, having, I guessed, something of overwhelming moment to lose if their victim survived the attack. I was now sure that Mr Carteret had been doomed from the moment he took horse from Stamford: he had been carrying his own death warrant in the bag he had strapped round him, and which had now disappeared.

Though I went to church dutifully throughout my childhood, I had retained little of what is generally called religion, except for a visceral conviction that our lives are controlled by some universal mechanism that is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that was what others call God. Perhaps not. At any rate, it was not reducible to forms and rituals, and required only stoical assent and resignation, since I considered mediation or intervention to be useless. Yet, after pulling the cloth back over Mr Carteret’s face, I found myself bowing my head nonetheless – not in prayer, for I had no listening deity to whom to pray, but in common human sympathy.

It was as I stood in this apparent attitude of reverential supplication that I heard the door to the Chapel open.

A tall, white-bearded figure in clerical garb stood framed in the doorway. He had removed his hat, revealing two wings of white hair swept back on either side of a broad highway of pink flesh. It could be no other than the Reverend Achilles Brabazon Daunt, Rector of Evenwood.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I heard him say, in deep plangent tones. ‘I had not expected to find anyone here at this hour.’

He did not leave, however, but closed the door behind him, and walked down the aisle towards me.

‘I do not think I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance.’

There was no help for it now, so I told him my name and the simple truth: that I had come up to meet Mr Carteret on a matter of business; that he had invited me to stay on for a day or so; and that it had only been on my arrival at the Dower House, the previous day, that I had learned the terrible news.

We exchanged the usual pieties, dwelled a little on the iniquity of men, and discussed the likelihood of the attackers being apprehended.

‘This must not stand,’ he said, shaking his head slowly, ‘indeed, it must not. These wretches will certainly be discovered, I have no doubt on that score. Such a crime cannot stay hidden. God sees all – and so do men’s neighbours, I have found. Lord Tansor is placing an advertisement in the Mercury, offering a substantial reward for any information that leads to a successful prosecution. That, I think, may loosen a few tongues. Such atrocities are common, I believe, in London, but not here; no, not here.’

‘It is in the power of every hand to destroy us,’ I said.

A smile broke across his broad face.

‘Sir Thomas Browne!’ he cried, with evident delight. ‘“And we are beholding unto everyone we meet he doth not kill us.” There is always something in good Sir Thomas – a kind of sortes Homericae.^* I often use him thus. Open him anywhere, and wisdom pours from his page.’

We stood in silent contemplation of the coffin for a moment or two. Then he turned to me again.

‘Will you join me in a prayer, Mr Glapthorn?’ he asked.

Mirabile dictu! Behold me now, kneeling beside the coffin of Mr Paul Carteret, with the Reverend Achilles Daunt, the father of my enemy, at my right hand, intoning a prayer for the peace of the poor victim’s soul, and swift retribution to be visited on the heads of his murderers – to which last sentiment I was only too happy to add my ‘Amen’.

We rose and went out once more into the courtyard.

‘Shall we walk back together?’ he asked, and so we set off.

‘You are not a complete stranger to me, Dr Daunt,’ I said, as we were descending the Chapel steps. ‘I have had occasion to consult your great catalogue,^* and am delighted, on that score alone, to have made your acquaintance.’

‘You have an interest in such things, then?’ he asked with a sudden eagerness.

And so I began to reel him in, just as I had done with Mr Tredgold. It was the bibliophilic temperament, you see; its possessors constitute a kind of freemasonry, ever disposed to treat those blessed with a similar passion for books as if they were blood brothers. It did not take me long to demonstrate my familiarity both with the study of books in general, and with the character of the Duport Collection in particular. By the time we had begun to ascend the slope back towards the South Gates, we were in deep discussion on whether the 1472 Macrobius (Venice: N. Jenson), or the 1772 folio of Cripo’s Conjuracion de Catalina (Madrid: J. Ibarra), with its rare signed binding by Richard Wier, was the most perfect example of the typographer’s art in the collection.

He spoke at length, too, of Mr Carteret, whom Dr Daunt had known since first coming to Evenwood as Rector. After Lord Tansor had volunteered his secretary’s services as the Rector’s assistant in the preparation of the great catalogue, their acquaintance had deepened into friendship. Mr Carteret had been especially helpful with regard to the manuscript holdings, which, though not extensive in comparison with the printed books, contained several important items.

‘He was not a trained scholar,’ said Dr Daunt, ‘but he was extremely well informed on the manuscripts acquired by his Lordship’s grandfather, and had already prepared some commendably accurate descriptions and summaries, which spared me a great deal of labour.’

By now we had reached the point at which the path to the Dower House led off the main carriage-road.

‘Perhaps, Mr Glapthorn, if you have no duties that you need to attend to, you might wish to take some tea at the Rectory this afternoon? My own collection is modest, but there are one or two items that I think will interest you. I would invite you for a spot of breakfast now, but I have to call on my neighbour, Dr Stark, at Blatherwycke, and then go on to Peterborough. But I shall be back in good time for tea. Shall we say three o’clock?’

^*[‘May he rest [in peace]’. Ed.]

^*[John Snetzler (1710–85), the German-born organ builder to George III. Ed.]

^*[A form of divination that consisted of taking the first passage from Homer, or, later, Virgil, that the eye fell upon as an indication of future events. The Bible was also so used. Ed.]

^*[Bibliotheca Duportiana. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Library Established by William Perceval Duport, 23rd Baron Tansor, by the Reverend A.B. Daunt, MA (Cantab). With an Annotated Hand-list of Manuscripts in the Duport Collection by P.A.B. Carteret (privately printed, 4 vols, 1841). Ed.]

22

Locus delicti^*

After leaving Dr Daunt, I was admitted to the Dower House by Mrs Rowthorn. As I was ambling towards the stair-case, I noticed that one of the doors leading off the vestibule was ajar.

Now, I cannot resist a half-opened door – just as I am unable to stop myself from peeping into a lighted and uncurtained window as I pass it on a dark night. The desired privacy proclaimed by a deliberately closed door I can respect; but not if it is half open. That, for me, is an invitation that I will always accept. This one was especially tempting, for I knew that it must lead into the room in which Miss Carteret had been playing the piano-forte the previous evening.

I continued on my way, but waited on the first-floor landing for a moment or two until I was sure that the housekeeper had returned to the lower regions of the house, then quickly descended the stairs again, and entered the room.

The atmosphere was close, heavy, and silent. The instrument I had heard – a fine Broadwood six-octave grand – stood before the far window. On it, opened, as if ready to be played, was a piece of music: an Étude by Chopin. I turned over the pages, but it was not the piece that I had heard the night before. I looked about me. The pale blinds had been drawn down, and through them the morning sun cast a muted silver light about the room. My eye picked out three or four dark-velvet ottomans and matching chairs, with coloured cushions of Berlin-work scattered upon them; the walls, hung with a rich red self-patterned wall-paper, were covered with a profusion of portraits, prints, and silhouettes. A number of round tables, covered in chenille cloths and laden with a variety of japanned and papier-mâché boxes, pottery ornaments, and bronze figurines, were placed here and there amongst the chairs and ottomans, whilst above the fireplace, to the right of the door, hung an umbrageous seventeenth-century depiction of Evenwood.

The comfortable but unremarkable character of the room left me feeling a little cheated until I noticed, lying under the piano-forte, two or three half-torn sheets of music, which appeared to have been violently ripped out of a larger compilation. I walked over to the instrument, and bent down to pick up the remnants.

‘Do you play, Mr Glapthorn?’

Miss Emily Carteret stood in the doorway, looking at me as I was picking up the ripped sheets to place them on the piano-stool.

‘Not as well as you, I fear,’ I said, truthfully, though the note sounded false, a pathetic attempt at gallantry. But my words had an effect on her nonetheless, for she began to look at me with a strange concentration of expression, as if she were waiting for me to confess some mean action.

‘You heard me playing last evening, I suppose. I hope I did not disturb you.’

‘Not in the least. I found it extremely affecting. A most satisfying accompaniment to the close contemplation of a twilit garden.’

I meant her to know that I had not only heard her playing, but had also witnessed the rendezvous with her lover in the Plantation; but she simply remarked, in a flat, vacant tone, that I did not give the impression of possessing a contemplative disposition.

I immediately regretted the cynical tone that I had adopted, for I saw now that her face was drawn, with dark rings around the eyes that betokened long hours of sleeplessness. Her manner had less of the frigidity of our first encounter, although I remained wary of the way that her eyes slowly but constantly scrutinized my person with judicial intensity, like a prosecuting counsel cross-examining a hostile witness. But the burden of her grief was now apparent. She was human, after all; and what could have prepared her for this, the senseless slaughter of her father? It was not in her nature to speak her misery – I saw that clearly; but the o’er-fraught heart^* must somehow find expression, or it will break.

She picked up the torn pieces of music that I had placed on the piano-stool.

‘A favourite piece of my father’s,’ she said, though offering no explanation as to why the sheets had been spoiled in this way. ‘Are you an admirer of Chopin, Mr Glapthorn?’

‘In general, I prefer the music of earlier times – the elder Bach, for instance; but I attended Monsieur Chopin’s concert at Lord Falmouth’s …’

‘July ’forty-eight,’ she broke in. ‘But I was there, too!’

At this, I recounted how I had found myself in London in the summer of that year, soon after taking up residence in Camberwell, and had happened to see an advertisement for the recital. The coincidence of our both being present that evening to hear the maestro play produced a distinct change in her. Her look softened somewhat, and as we talked about our separate recollections of the evening, a faint smile would occasionally moderate the severity of her expression.

‘Miss Carteret,’ I said softly, as I was taking my leave, ‘I hope you will not think it presumptuous of me if I beg you – once more – to see me as a friend, for I truly wish to be so. You have told me that you neither want nor need my sympathy, but I fear I must presume to give it to you, whether you will or no. Please will you let me?’

She said nothing, but at least she did not rebuff me, as formerly; and so, emboldened, I pressed on.

‘I have despatched my report to Mr Tredgold, and so shall return to Stamford this evening, and take train to London tomorrow. But, if I may, I hope you will allow me to return for your father’s funeral. I shall not, of course, presume on your hospitality …’

‘Of course you may return, Mr Glapthorn,’ she interrupted, ‘and I shall not hear of your staying anywhere tonight but here. You will forgive me, I hope, for being so cold with you before. It is my nature, I fear, to let very few people into my confidence. To my disadvantage, I have nothing of my father’s outgoing nature.’

I thanked her for her generosity, and then we spoke a little further of the arrangements that had been put in hand. The inquest was to take place on the following Monday in Easton, the nearest town to Evenwood, under Mr Rickman Godlee, coroner for the district; the interment, at St Michael’s and All Angels, would be tomorrow week.

‘By the way, Mr Glapthorn,’ she said, ‘I am required to speak with some police-officers from Peterborough this afternoon. I have already indicated to the authorities that you would be happy to put yourself at their disposal. I trust that you do not object?’

I replied that, naturally, as the representative of Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr, and perhaps as the last person to have seen her father alive, I would do everything possible to assist those responsible for identifying Mr Carteret’s assailants.

She expressed her gratitude, and informed me that the officers would be arriving at two o’clock, if that would be convenient for me. As this would still give me an hour before I was due at the Rectory, I said that I would return at the appointed time and turned to go.

‘I hope, Miss Carteret,’ I said at the door, ‘that you have friends hereabouts, and that you will not be too much alone in the coming days?’

‘Friends? Of course. But I do not mind being alone. I grew up more or less on my own – after my poor sister died. Solitude holds no terrors for me, I can assure you.’

‘And you are fortunate to have good neighbours, too, I think?’

‘You are referring to Dr and Mrs Daunt, perhaps?’

I briefly recounted my meeting with the Rector, and my decidedly favourable impressions of that gentleman.

‘Dr Daunt is certainly a good neighbour,’ she said. ‘I could wish for no better.’

‘And Mr Phoebus Daunt must be a welcome addition to any society,’ I continued, as disingenuously as I could, for I was determined that my liking for Miss Carteret would not deflect me from learning as much as I could about my enemy.

‘Are you acquainted with Mr Phoebus Daunt?’

Her mouth perceptibly tightened, and I noticed that she passed her hand over her forehead as she spoke, though her eyes held me fast in their gaze.

‘His literary reputation precedes him,’ I replied. ‘Who has not read and admired Ithaca?’

‘Do you mock my distinguished neighbour, Mr Glapthorn?’

I sought, but could not quite find, something in her face that would confirm that her literary estimation of P. Rainsford Daunt coincided with my own.

‘Not at all. It is a very great thing to be a poet, and to be able to write so much poetry at a time is surely enviable.’ ‘Now I know that you are being unkind.’

She looked me straight in the eye, and then she laughed – a clear spontaneous laugh, which instantly produced a similar response in me. The action briefly transformed her face into something even more wonderful, and for a moment or two she stood swaying from side to side in a most charming, child-like manner. Then she sought to check herself, looking away slightly, and affecting to tidy up some flower petals that had fallen from a display on a nearby table-top.

‘I must tell you, Mr Glapthorn, what perhaps you already know, that I grew up with Mr Daunt, and that it is very cruel of you to deride the literary efforts of my childhood companion.’

‘Oh, I do not deride them, Miss Carteret,’ I replied. ‘I do not pay them any heed at all.’

By now she appeared to have collected herself, and turned from the table to hold out her hand.

‘Well, Mr Glapthorn,’ she said, ‘perhaps we shall be friends after all. I do not know how you have made me laugh at such a time as this, but I am glad you have done so, though I must caution you not to underestimate Mr Daunt. He is exceptional in many ways – and not a little like you.’

‘Like me? How so?’

‘For one thing, he is determined to make his mark on the world – as, I believe, from our brief acquaintance, that you are also. For another, I think he would make a dangerous enemy – as you would.’

‘Well, then,’ I replied, ‘I must be sure to keep my opinions concerning his literary productions to myself. It would never do to antagonize so dangerous a man.’

I could not help delivering these words in a swaggering manner, which I immediately regretted when I saw the smile fade from Miss Carteret’s face.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have warned you. I know him well, as well as anyone, I think, and I say again that he is not a man to be crossed. But perhaps you already know the gentleman as well as his works?’

Of course I lied, and said that I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting him in person, but that I hoped to rectify this as soon as possible.

She moved towards the window to raise up the blind. ‘It is such a beautiful morning,’ she said. ‘Shall we take a turn round the garden?’

And so round we went, several times, at first in silence but then, in answer to my questions, she began to speak of her childhood at Evenwood, and of how she had once become lost in the great house, and thought she would never be found again; then, at my gentle prompting, she told me something of the terrible day that her sister died, which she recalled even now in all its heart-breaking detail, though she had only been four years old when they brought the bedraggled little body back to the Dower House. She fell silent again, the painful memory of that loss no doubt compounding the grief that she felt at the brutal slaying of her father. So, to change the subject, I asked her about her time abroad, and how she had liked Paris, and because she said that she adored the French language, I suggested that we should converse in that tongue, which we proceeded to do until, somewhat overawed by her fluency, I stumbled over a word, and she laughed at my embarrassment.

‘I see you are not used to being laughed at, Mr Glapthorn,’ she said. ‘I suspect few people get the better of you, and when they do, you take it hard. Is it not so?’

I admitted that she was right in general, but that, with regard to my spoken French, I humbly deferred to her superior proficiency, and – which was true – was happy to be laughed at. At length, after we had taken several turns of the garden, we sat down to rest on a little stone bench, where we remained, saying nothing, for some minutes.

The autumn sun was warm on our faces, and when I turned to speak to her I saw that her eyes were closed. How exquisitely beautiful she was! She had left her spectacles in the house, and her pale skin, framed and intensified by the stark black of her hair, was bathed in the clear October light, bestowing on it a strangely numinous, unearthly quality. She sat perfectly still, her head tilted upwards, her lips slightly parted. It was the most enchanting composition, and I wished so much to have my camera to capture the fleeting moment, and fix it for ever. Then she opened her eyes, and looked straight at me.

‘Your business with my father,’ she said. ‘Are you at liberty to say what it concerned?’

‘I’m afraid that must remain confidential.’

‘Do you not trust me?’ she asked.

There was a hard look in her eye that matched her tone of voice. I struggled to find a suitable answer, but could only prevaricate.

‘Miss Carteret, it is not a question of trust between you and me, but between my employer and myself.’

She thought for a moment and then stood up, blocking out the sun.

‘Well, then,’ she declared, ‘there is nothing more to be said. I had begun to hope that we might perhaps become friends, but without trust —’

‘I assure you, Miss Carteret,’ I began, but she held up her hand to stop me from speaking further.

‘No assurances, Mr Glapthorn,’ she said, with terrible emphasis. ‘I do not care for assurances. They are given all too lightly, I find.’

And then she turned, and began walking back towards the house, leaving me to follow her. Just as I caught up with her, a tall thin gentleman with a lugubrious expression, and wearing trousers that appeared to belong to a much shorter person, appeared on the path that led from the gate-house through the Plantation. He bowed obsequiously on seeing Miss Carteret. At once her demeanour changed.

‘Mr Gutteridge,’ she whispered, keeping her eyes on the visitor. ‘The undertaker. I’m afraid we must continue our conversation another time. Good-morning, Mr Glapthorn.’

And with that she left me.

For the next hour or so, I passed the time by making an exploration of the Park, and considering, as I walked, my last conversation with Miss Carteret.

I naturally regretted having discomposed her during this time of mourning; but her late father had bound Mr Tredgold to strict confidentiality, and I, as Mr Tredgold’s agent, was subject to the same obligation. Yet I was forced to acknowledge that duty was even now under threat from desire, and I did not know whether I would have the strength to refuse her again. Like a half-conscious somnambulist, I felt I was stumbling towards – I knew not what; and, compounding this sudden wilful folly, all my once-sincere intentions towards Bella were being driven from my mind, so blinded was I by Miss Carteret’s beauty, and so deaf to the quiet urgings of conscience.

I had taken a branch of the main carriage-road that led towards the Temple of the Winds, the Grecian folly built by Lord Tansor’s great-grandfather in 1726. From here, I made my way up through the woods that formed the western boundary of the Park, and then descended again, through silent ranks of oak and ash and fluttering showers of leaves, to emerge before the West Front of the great house.

The sight of its walls and towers wrenched me back to the task in hand. If I achieved my purpose, then this wondrous place would be mine by right of succession. I could not allow what might be only a temporary infatuation to lure me from the path on which my feet had been set. What though Miss Carteret was beautiful? Bella was beautiful, and kind, and clever, and as affectionate a companion as any man could wish for. I knew nothing of Miss Emily Carteret, except that she was proud and self-possessed, and that her heart might already belong to another. But Bella I knew to be open-hearted, and warm, and devoted to me alone. What had I to do with cold Miss Carteret? I concluded that I had suffered from some temporary perturbation of the emotional faculties, brought about by the terrible death of Mr Carteret. After standing for some time contemplating my situation, I began to believe that I had reasoned myself out of my silly fancy, as a fool in love will sometimes do. And so I set off back to the Dower House, certain that when I next saw Miss Carteret, the spell she had cast would have been broken by brisk walking and fresh October air.

Inspector George Gully, accompanied by a constable, was waiting for me in the drawing-room. I settled myself in an arm-chair and took out a cigar.

The interrogation, though lengthy, was not of the subtlest, and the Inspector seemed satisfied with the perfectly truthful account – truthful, that is, as far as it went – that I gave him of my meeting with Mr Carteret in Stamford.

‘You have been most obliging, Mr Glapthorn,’ he said at last, closing his note-book. ‘I do not think, you being a stranger hereabouts, that we shall need to trouble you further. But if we do have occasion to speak to you again—’

‘Of course.’ I handed him a card carrying the address of Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr.

‘Just the ticket, sir. Thank you. As I said, merely a precaution. We won’t be intruding on you further, I’m sure. We’ll be on to these rogues soon enough, you mark my words.’

‘You believe them to be local, then?’

‘Not a doubt of it,’ replied the Inspector. ‘Not the first such outrage in this vicinity of late, I regret to say, though the first fatality. But we already have our suspicions … I shall say no more.’

He gave me a look that seemed to say, ‘You see what we are made of here in the Shires!’

‘Well, Inspector,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘I shall report to my principal that, in my opinion, the investigation could not be in better hands. And if there is anything further I can do to assist your enquiries, please do not hesitate to inform me. And now, if you will excuse me.’

This oaf would never discover who killed Mr Paul Carteret. His death was bound up with a far greater mystery, which was beyond the ability of Inspector George Gully and his minions to unravel.

^*[‘The scene of the crime’. Ed.]

^*[The phrase is from Macbeth, IV. iii.210. Ed.]

23

Materfamilias^*

Half an hour later, at a little before three o’clock, I presented myself as arranged at the Rectory, where Dr Daunt received me in his study. We passed a pleasant hour or so, perusing his extensive collection of biblical and theological texts. This is not a field in which I have any great expertise, and I was content to let the Rector pick out volumes of particular rarity or importance, and expatiate on them at some length, occasionally contributing a comment or two of my own, where I could. Then a first edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Ponder, 1678) caught my eye.

‘Ah, Bunyan!’ I cried, seizing on the volume. ‘I read him often as a child.’

‘Did you, though?’ said Dr Daunt, with evident approval. ‘I applaud your young taste, Mr Glapthorn. I never could get my son to like the book, though I would read it to him when he was a boy. I fear that allegory held no appeal for him.’ He sighed. ‘But he was an imaginative child – and I suppose he is imaginative still, though now it is in what I may call a professional capacity.’

‘I think Mr Carteret mentioned to me that your son was born in the North?’

Dr Daunt seemed disposed to talk, and I was eager to let him. ‘Yes, indeed. I had taken a living in Lancashire on my marriage – my first marriage, I mean. I am sorry to say that my dear wife – my first wife, you understand – was taken from us soon after Phoebus was born.’

He sighed again and turned away, and I saw him glance up at a small portrait in oils that hung in an alcove between the bookshelves. It showed a slight, fragile figure in a pale mauve gown and a neat cap, with misty blue eyes and clusters of airy curls at her neck. It was plain enough that his love for his first wife was still strong. Clearing his throat and brushing down his beard, he was about to speak again when the door opened, and a tall figure in rustling black silk swept into the room.

‘Oh! Forgive me, Achilles, I was not aware that we had a visitor.’

‘My dear,’ said Dr Daunt, with the air of someone who has been caught in a guilty act, ‘may I introduce Mr Edward Glapthorn?’

She gazed at me imperiously, and held out her hand. I think that she was expecting me to kiss it humbly, like a queen’s; but instead I touched the ends of her outstretched fingers in the briefest of gestures, and bowed stiffly.

‘I am honoured to meet you, Mrs Daunt,’ I said, and withdrew a few steps.

Well, she was a deuced handsome woman, I will say that. I could easily see how her good looks, together with a spirited and capable character, would have made it – let us not say easy, but perhaps less difficult for Dr Daunt, in his grief at the loss of his first wife, and entombed alive as he had been in Millhead, to succumb to her charms. She had brought life and hope to that dismal place, and I supposed he had been glad of it. But he had never loved her; that was plain.

‘Mr Glapthorn,’ the Rector ventured, ‘is staying at the Dower House.’

‘Indeed,’ came the frosty reply. ‘Are you a friend of the Carterets, Mr Glapthorn?’

‘I came up from London to see Mr Carteret on a matter of business,’ I replied, intending to dispense as little information concerning my visit as possible. She had seated herself next to her husband, placing her hand protectively over his, whilst we spoke about the shocking events of recent days, and how the placid community of Evenwood had been riven by what had happened to their well-liked neighbour.

‘Mr Paul Carteret was my second cousin,’ intoned Mrs Daunt, ‘and so, naturally, this terrible crime affects me particularly closely—’

‘Not, perhaps, as closely as his daughter,’

I interjected. She shot me a look that was intended no doubt to crush my impudence.

‘One must of course suppose that Miss Emily Carteret feels the loss of her father deeply, especially under such dreadful circumstances. Do you know Miss Carteret?’

‘We have only recently met.’

She smiled and nodded, as if to signify her complete comprehension of the matter.

‘And do you work in some professional capacity, Mr Glapthorn?’

‘I am a private scholar.’

‘A private scholar? How interesting. And is that a line of business?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You said just now that you had come to see Mr Carteret on a matter of business.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘In a manner of speaking. I see.’

Dr Daunt, looking a little uncomfortable, then broke in.

‘Mr Glapthorn has been so kind as to compliment me on my bibliographic labours, my dear. It is always pleasant for us poor scholars to receive the approval of a discriminating intellect.’

He was looking at me, in anticipation, I supposed, of some pertinent remark or other; but before I could say anything, Mrs Daunt had spoken again.

‘My husband’s catalogue has been widely approved, by some of the most eminent authorities,’ she said, intimating no doubt that my own praise of Dr Daunt’s labours was poor enough by comparison. ‘And have you published anything in the bibliographical line yourself, Mr Glapthorn?’

Of course I had to admit that I had not.

‘My husband’s son is also a published author,’ she continued. ‘He is, as you may know, a poet of some distinction. He has always had a remarkable gift for literary expression, has he not, Achilles?’

The Rector smiled helplessly.

‘Of course, his genius was immediately discerned by Lord Tansor, who has been like a second father to Phoebus. Achilles, I’m sure Mr Glapthorn would be interested to see Phoebus’s new volume. The reviews have been most gratifying, you know,’ she said, watching her husband as he walked over to his desk to pick up the latest production from the pen of P. Rainsford Daunt – Penelope: A Tragedy, in Verse.

I dutifully flicked through the volume, stopping occasionally to read a line or two, and nodding as if in sage appreciation of the beauties contained therein. It was, of course, stuffed full of his usual hectic and overblown versifying.

‘Remarkable,’ I said, ‘quite remarkable. Your son has several such volumes to his credit, I believe?’

‘Indeed he has,’ replied Mrs Daunt. ‘And they have all been extremely well received. Achilles, fetch Mr Glapthorn that copy of the New Monthly …’

‘Pray don’t trouble yourself, Dr Daunt,’ I said hastily. ‘I believe that I have read the article in question. What a thing, though, to have a poet in the family! Of course, his celebrity precedes him, and I confess that I was hoping to have the pleasure of meeting your son while I was in Northamptonshire.’

‘I’m afraid he is away. Phoebus enjoys the particular confidence of my noble relative,’ said Mrs Daunt. ‘His Lordship, having been a little unwell of late, has asked Phoebus to undertake a business engagement on his behalf.’

‘It will be a great shock for your son when he learns of the attack on Mr Carteret,’ I said.

‘It will most certainly prostrate him,’ replied Mrs Daunt, with solemn emphasis. ‘His is a most feeling and compassionate nature, and of course he has known Mr Carteret, and his daughter, since he was a little boy.’

After a moment or two’s silence, I turned to the Rector.

‘I suppose, Dr Daunt, that your son’s rise in the world now precludes him from following in your footsteps?’

It was a mischievous question, I own, but it was intended for his wife, not for him; and indeed, before he had time to speak, Mrs Daunt was already answering it.

‘Our lot here is an extremely fortunate one. We are not rich, but we live in the hand of a most loving and generous master.’

‘You allude to God, perhaps?’

‘I allude, Mr Glapthorn, to the beneficence bestowed on us by Lord Tansor. If Phoebus had no other prospects, then I am sure the Church would be a most suitable channel for his talents. But of course he has great prospects, very great prospects, both as an author and …’ She hesitated for a moment. I looked at her, eyebrows raised in expectation. But before she could resume, there was a knock at the door and a maid entered with a tray of tea things.

This fortuitous diversion allowed Mrs Daunt quickly to change the subject, and, as she poured out and passed around the tea, she began to ask me a number of questions about myself – had I lived in London all my life? Was I a Cambridge man, like her step-son? Was this my first visit to Evenwood? How long had I known Mr Carteret? Was I a member of the Roxburghe Club, like her husband, and had I known the late Mr Dibdin,^* whom they had often had the honour of entertaining at Evenwood? I answered all her questions politely, but as briefly as I could. Of course she perceived my evasion, and countered by throwing out still more questions. So we continued in our dance – Dr Daunt sitting all the while in silence. Then she asked me whether I had inspected the great house. I told her that I had visited the Chapel briefly that morning, to pay my respects to Mr Carteret, but that I hoped to enjoy a fuller acquaintance with Lord Tansor’s residence in the very near future.

‘But you must at least see the Library before you go,’ cried Dr Daunt suddenly.

‘I’m afraid I must return to London tomorrow.’

‘But we could go now, if that would be convenient.’

Nothing could have been more to my liking, and so I eagerly assented to the proposal. We quickly finished our tea, and Mrs Daunt rose to leave.

‘Good-bye, Mr Glapthorn. I do hope we shall have the pleasure of seeing you again soon. Perhaps when you next visit Evenwood, Fate will look more kindly on us and allow us to introduce you to my step-son.’

I said that that would be a pleasure which, I hoped, would not be long deferred.

She had drawn herself up to her full height and I found myself gazing into her grey eyes. How old was she now? Fifty-three or fifty-four?^* I could not remember. Whatever her age, she still had about her a fascinating look of practised coquetry. I began to see how she had managed matters with Lord Tansor in respect of her step-son: her undeniable beauty and charm, in concert with her commanding personality, had no doubt been deployed to the full on his behalf. As she looked at me with those winning eyes – it was but for the most fleeting of moments – I felt sure that she had divined that, in some way that she could not yet comprehend, I was a threat to her prosperous condition, and to that of her precious Phoebus. In short, she disliked and distrusted me, as I did her.

Left to ourselves once more, Dr Daunt and I reverted to an earlier discussion concerning the Neoplatonic philosophy, with particular reference to Taylor the Platonist’s^† translations of Plotinus and Proclus. The Rector was discoursing on Taylor’s paraphrastic rendering of Porphyry’s De antro nympharum,^‡ which led us on to other equally engaging topics concerning the theologies of the ancient world, a subject in which each of us professed both interest and expertise.

‘Mr Glapthorn,’ said Dr Daunt at length. ‘I wonder whether I might ask a favour of you?’

‘By all means,’ I returned. ‘Name it.’

‘It is just this. Though I am an admirer of Mr Taylor in general, his philological and linguistic skills do not always match his enthusiastic advocacy of these important subjects. His translation of Iamblichus is a case in point. I have therefore presumed to prepare a new rendering of the De mysteriis,^* the first part of which is to be published in the Classical Journal.^† The piece is now in proof and is being looked over by my friend, Professor Lucian Slake, of Barnack. Perhaps you are familiar with Professor Slake’s work on Euhemerus?^‡ The Professor’s knowledge of Iamblichus is sound, but not so complete, I think, as yours. The favour that I would wish very much to ask of you, therefore, is this: would you do me the greatest kindness by agreeing to cast your eye also over the proofs, before the piece goes to press?’

Now this, I thought, was an opportunity to establish a closer relationship with Dr Daunt, which, in turn, might eventually open up an advantageous position with respect to his son. I therefore told him that I would be pleased and honoured to review the work; and so it was settled that Dr Daunt would immediately send word to Professor Slake, asking him to direct the proofs to me at the George Hotel before my departure for London.

‘And now,’ he said brightly, ‘let us be off.’

The collection of books assembled by William Duport, the 23rd Baron Tansor, soon after the Revolution in France, bore comparison with the libraries established by the 2nd Earl Spencer at Althorp, and by the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe. The 23rd Baron had inherited some three thousand volumes, assembled haphazardly by his forebears over the centuries. Shortly after succeeding to the title, he added to this stock by acquiring the entire library of a Hungarian nobleman – around five thousand items, and particularly notable for containing many hundreds of the first printed editions of the Greek and Roman Classics, as well as many outstanding examples of the de luxe printers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Baskerville and Foulis. He then set about augmenting his collection by methodical – and occasionally unconventional – means, travelling widely in order to seek out early editions of those Classical authors that had eluded Count Laczkó, and gathering along the way a large number of early Bibles, fifteeners,^* and – a particular interest of his – examples of Early English literature. By the time of his death, in 1799, the collection had grown to over forty thousand volumes.

The original library at Evenwood had been housed in a dark and rather damp chamber of the Elizabethan period, on the north side of the building, which was soon overflowing with his Lordship’s acquisitions. And so in, 1792, as I have previously described, Lord Tansor wisely determined to refurbish the large ballroom on the West Front, with its famous ceiling by Verrio, into a place fit to hold his rapidly growing collection. The work took but twelve months to complete, at enormous expense, and in the summer of 1793 the books amassed to that date were transferred to their present home, where they were soon joined by many thousands more.

I saw this wonderful room for the first time, in the company of the Reverend Achilles Daunt, on the afternoon of the 27th of October 1853. We had walked through the Park from the Rectory, with the declining sun in our eyes, talking of Mr Carteret.

Away from his wife, Dr Daunt was an altogether different man – voluble, energetic, and enthusiastically companionable. In her presence he had seemed somehow lessened, and unwilling to set his own strong character against hers. Now, in the open air, as we strode together down the hill towards the river, he appeared renewed. We spoke of various matters relating to the Bibliotheca Duportiana, and I congratulated him again on his great achievement – it was, in my view, a work that would keep its compiler’s name alive amongst scholars of the printed book for generations to come.

‘The labour, of course, was very great,’ he said, ‘for the books had not been properly catalogued before, and were in some disorder. There was, to be sure, Dr Burstall’s hand-list of the seventeenth-century English books, which he drew up in – when was it, now? Eighteen ten, or thereabouts. Burstall,^* as you perhaps know from his little book on Plantin, was a most careful scholar, and I was able to use many of his descriptions virtually verbatim. Yes, he saved me a good deal of work, though his hand-list also brought to light a little mystery.’

‘Mystery?’

‘I allude to the disappearance of the editio princeps of that minor but most noble work, Felltham’s Resolves.^† The book, listed unequivocally in Burstall’s list, simply could not be found. I searched high and low for it. The collection contained later editions, of course, but not the first. It was impossible that Dr Burstall had included it in his list in error, and I was sure it had not been sold. I expended many hours, looking through the records of disposals, which have been most meticulously maintained over the years. The curious thing was that when I mentioned this to Mr Carteret, he distinctly remembered seeing this edition of the work – indeed, he knew that it had been read by Lord Tansor’s first wife, some time before her unfortunate death. It is hard to believe that it was stolen; a wonderful little book, of course, but not especially valuable. Mr Carteret searched her Ladyship’s apartments most assiduously, in case it had not been returned to the Library; but it was nowhere to be found. It has not been found to this day.’

‘Speaking of Mr Carteret,’ I said, as we approached the great iron gates of the Front Court, ‘I suppose that Lord Tansor will be obliged to find another secretary.’

‘Yes, I think that will certainly be necessary. His Lordship’s affairs are many and various, and Mr Carteret was a most conscientious and industrious gentleman. It will not be easy to replace him – he was no mere amanuensis. It may fairly be said that he performed the work of several men, for besides dealing with Lord Tansor’s business and estate correspondence, which is extensive, he was also the de facto keeper of the Muniments Room, librarian, and accomptant. There is an agent for the farms and woods, of course – Captain Tallis; but Mr Carteret was, in all other respects, the steward of Evenwood – although he was not always treated by his Lordship with that gratitude owed to a good and faithful servant.’

‘And you tell me that he was a good scholar besides?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ replied Dr Daunt. ‘I believe he missed his true calling there, excellent though his other abilities were. Mr Carteret’s hand-list of the manuscript collection exhibits a knowledgeable and discerning intellect. With very little amendment, I was able to incorporate it in its entirety as an appendix to my catalogue. Alas, it will be his only monument, though a noble one. If only he had lived to complete his great work. That would have been a monument indeed.’

‘His great work?’ I asked.

‘His history of the Duport family, from the days of the 1st Baron. A mighty undertaking, on which he had been engaged for nigh on twenty-five years. In the course of his duties, he naturally had access to the family papers stored in the Muniments Room – a collection of voluminous extent, stretching back some five hundred years – and it was on the examination of these that his history was to be based. I fear it is unlikely now that anyone else will be found with the requisite talents and capacity for industry to finish what he had started, which I deem a great loss to the world, for the story is a rich and fascinating one. Well now, here we are at last.’

^*[‘The mother of a household’. Ed.]

^*[The Roxburghe Club was founded in 1812, at the height of the bibliomania craze, by the bibliophile and bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847). Ed.]

^*[Mrs Daunt was born in April 1797, so she was 56 when the narrator first encountered her in October 1853. Ed.]

^†[Thomas Taylor, ‘the English pagan’ (1758–1835), who devoted himself to translating and expounding the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and the Pythagoreans. He was an important influence on William Blake and on the Romantic poets (Shelley in particular), and much later on W. B. Yeats. Ed.]

^‡[‘Concerning the Cave of the Nymphs’, an allegorizing interpretation of the Cave of the Nymphs on the island of Ithaca, described by Homer in the Odyssey, Book XIII. Ed.]

^*[Taylor’s translation of Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, which dealt with such matters as theurgy and divination, was published in 1821. Iamblichus (c.AD 245-c.325), born in Syria, was a Neoplatonist philosopher. Ed.]

^†[Despite extensive searching, I cannot find that Dr Daunt’s translation and commentary were ever published in the Classical Journal, even though they apparently reached proof stage. Ed.]

^‡[A native of Messene, perhaps active as late as 280 BC. He wrote an influential fantasy travel novel, the Hiera anagraph, known mainly through fragments in the work of Diodorus Siculus; it was also quoted by the Christian apologist Lactantius. Ed.]

^*[i.e. what are now termed ‘incunabula’ (from the Latin ‘things in the cradle’), meaning books produced in the infancy of printing in the late fifteenth century. Ed.]

^*[John Burstall (1774–1840)was a close contemporary of the celebrated bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1818 he published Plantin of Antwerp, a pioneering study of Christophe Plantin (1514–89), the French-born bookbinder and printer. Ed.]

^†[Owen Felltham or Feltham (1602?–68), essayist and poet. The first edition, or century, of his famous collection of moral essays and maxims was published c. 1623. It proved extremely popular and went through twelve editions by 1709. Ed.]

24

Littera scripta manet^*

We were standing before the great West Front, with its prospect of carefully tended pleasure-gardens, and the distant mass of Molesey Woods. A paved terrace, balustraded and lined with great urns – that same terrace where I had made the photographic portrait of Lord Tansor – stretched the length of this western range.

As we entered the Library, the late-afternoon sun, streaming through the line of tall arched windows, transformed the interior of the great room into a dazzling confection of white and gold. Above us, Verrio’s ceiling was a misty swirl of colour; around us, rising from floor to ceiling on three sides of the huge space, was a glorious vista of white-painted book-cases, arranged in tall colonnaded bays. My eyes gorged on the sight that lay before me: row upon row of books of every type – folios, quartos, octavos, duodecimos, eighteenmos – exhibiting every facet of the printer’s and binder’s art.

Taking a pair of white cotton gloves from his pocket, and drawing them carefully over his hands, Dr Daunt walked over to one of the bays, and reached up to remove a thick folio.

‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, gently laying the volume down on an elaborately carved giltwood table.

It was a perfect copy of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, translated and printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1483: a volume of superlative rarity and importance. Dr Daunt procured another pair of cotton gloves from the drawer of the table, and offered them to me. My hands were shaking slightly as I opened the massive folio, and gazed in awe at the noble black-letter printing.

‘The Golden Legend,’ said the Rector, in hushed tones. ‘The most widely read book in late mediaeval Christendom after the Bible.’

Reverently, I turned over the huge leaves, lingering for some moments on an arresting woodcut of the Saints in Glory, before my eye was caught by a passage in the ‘Lyf of Adam’:

A place of desire and delights. No better description of Evenwood could be found. And this paradise would one day be mine, when all was accomplished at last. I would breathe its air, wander its rooms and corridors, and take my ease in its courtyards and gardens. But greater than all these delights would be the possession of this wondrous library for my own use and pleasure. What more could my bibliophile’s soul ask for? Here were marvels without end, treasures beyond knowing. You have seen the worst of me in these confessions. Here, then, let me throw into the opposite side of the balance, what I truly believe is the best of me: my devotion to the mental life, to those truly divine faculties of intellect and imagination which, when exercised to the utmost, can make gods of us all.

‘This’, said Dr Daunt, laying his hand on the great folio that had so entranced my soul, ‘was the first volume for which I wrote a description. I remember it as if it were yesterday. August 1830. The 29th day-a day of furious wind and rain, as I recall, and so dark, if you will believe it for that time of the year, that you could hardly see beyond the terrace. We had the lamps burning in here all day long. The book was not in its proper place – you will observe that the bays in this section of the Library are arranged in alphabetical order by author – and I thought at first to remove it to where it belonged, and make my acquaintance with it at some later date; but then, on a whim, I decided to deal with it then and there. And so it has retained a special place in my heart.’

He was smiling to himself as he stroked his long beard and gazed fondly at the open folio. I felt a great closeness to the dear old fellow in that moment, and caught myself wishing that I had had such a man as my father.

He returned the book to its place, and then took down another: Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliae, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1516. As he left me to pore over this, he strode over to another bay and brought back the first printing of Walter Hylton’s great mystical treatise, the Scala Perfectionis, the Ladder of Perfection, printed, again by de Worde, in 1494, and the first book to which he put his name. I had hardly begun to examine it when he hurried back with yet another treasure – Pynson’s reprint of the Ars Moriendi. Then off he went again, returning this time with St Jerome’s Vitas Patrum, Caxton’s translation, completed on the last day of his life, and exquisitely printed in folio by de Worde in 1496.

And so it went on, until darkness began to fall, and a servant appeared to bring us lights. At length, while the Rector was replacing a particularly fine copy of Barclay’s Sallust, I began to make my own perambulation of the room.

In a recess between two of the arched windows that gave onto the terrace, I stopped to look into a little glass-topped display case, containing a curious piece of vellum, dirty and browned, a few inches wide and two or three inches from top to bottom, placed on a piece of blue velvet. It had plainly been folded up for a long period of time but had now been opened out for display, held down at each corner by round brass weights, each of which had been stamped with the Duport coat of arms.

It was crammed with tiny writing, elegantly executed, and peppered with many little flourishes and curlicues, contractions, and abbreviations. A magnifying-glass lay on top of the cabinet, and with this I slowly began to make out the opening words: ‘HENRICUS Dei gratia Rex Angliae Dominus Hyberniae et Dux Aquitaniae dilecto et fideli suo Malduino Portuensi de Tansor militi salutem.’^*

As I mouthed the words to myself, I realized that it was the original writ, sent out by Simon de Montfort in the name of King Henry III, summoning Sir Maldwin Duport to attend Parliament in 1264 – a document of exceptional rarity, and probably unique of its kind. How it had survived seemed little short of miraculous.

I was momentarily transfixed, both by the rarity of the document, and by what it signified. Knowing now that I was descended from Sir Maldwin Duport, what qualities of character, I wondered, had I inherited from this man of iron and blood? Courage, I hoped, and a bold, enduring will; a spirit not easily cowed; resolve above the common; and the strength to contend until all opposition failed. For I, too, had been summoned, like my ancestor – not by the will of some earthly monarch, but called by Fate to reclaim my birthright. And who can deny what the Iron Master has ordained?

I laid down the magnifying-glass, and continued my inspection of the Library. At the far end was a half-open door, which, as my readers will already know, I am unable to resist. And so I put my head round it.

The chamber beyond was small, and appeared to be windowless, although on closer examination I made out, high up, a row of curious glazed apertures, triangular in shape, that admitted just enough light for me to be able to discern its general character and contents. Picking up one of the lighted candles left earlier by the servant, I entered.

From its shape, I realized that this must be the ground floor of the squat octagonal tower, of Gothic design, that I had noticed abutting the south end of the terrace. Standing against one of the angled walls was a bureau overflowing with papers; the rest of the room was fitted out with shelves and cupboards, the former stacked with labelled bundles of documents that reminded me irresistibly of those on my mother’s work-table at Sandchurch. Tucked away in the far corner was a little arched door, behind which, I surmised, must be a staircase leading to an upper floor.

But what had instantly caught my attention on entering the chamber was a portrait that hung above the bureau. I raised the candle to observe it more closely.

It showed a lady, full length, in a flowing black dress of Spanish style. Her dark hair, crowned with a cap of black lace rather like a mantilla, was drawn back from her face, and fell about her bare shoulders in two long ringlets. A band of black velvet encircled her lovely throat. She was looking away, as if something had caught her attention; the long fingers of her left hand rested on a large silver brooch attached to the bodice of her dress, whilst her right hand, in which she held a fan, dangled languorously by her side. The artist had depicted her leaning against a piece of ancient stonework, beyond which a bright moon could be seen peeping out from behind an angry mass of dark clouds.

It was altogether an arresting composition. But her face! She had the most strikingly large eyes, with intense black pupils, and pencil-thin black eyebrows; striking, too, was her long but slender retroussé nose, and her delicately moulded mouth. The effect of her physical loveliness, combined with the expression of wilfulness in repose, which the artist had so skilfully caught, was utterly enchanting.

I held the candle closer, and discerned an inscription: ‘R.S.B. fecit. 1819.’ I knew then, without a doubt, that this was Lord Tansor’s first wife – my beautiful, wayward mother. I tried to reconcile this surpassing beauty with the memories that I still had of sad, faded Miss Lamb, but could not. The artist had painted her in her prime, at the pinnacle of her beauty and pride – in the very moment before she took the fateful step that was to change her life, and mine, for ever.

There was a noise behind me. Dr Daunt was standing in the doorway, a book in his gloved hands.

‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘I thought you would like to see this.’

He handed me a copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the first edition of 1646.

I smiled, thanked him, and began to examine the book, another constant companion of mine, but my mind was elsewhere.

‘So you have found your way into Mr Carteret’s sanctum. It seems strange to be here and not see him sitting in his customary place.’ He gestured towards the bureau. ‘But I see you have also found my Lady. Of course I did not know her – she died before we came to Evenwood; but people still remember and speak of her. She was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. The portrait is unfinished, as you will have noticed, which is why it hangs here. Goodness me, is that the time?’

The clock in the Library had struck the hour of six.

‘I’m afraid I must return to the Rectory. My wife will be expecting me. Well, then, Mr Glapthorn, I hope the afternoon has not been too unpleasant for you?’

We parted at the head of the path that led through a gate in the Park wall, past the Dower House, to the Rectory.

The Rector paused for a moment, looking towards the lights of the Dower House.

‘That poor girl,’ he said.

‘Miss Carteret?’

‘She is alone in the world now, the fate above all others that her poor father feared. But she has a strong spirit, and has been brought up well.’

‘Perhaps she may marry,’ I said.

‘Marry? Perhaps she may, though I wonder who would have her. My son had some hopes once in that direction, and my wife – I mean my wife and I, of course – would not have been against the match. But she would not have him; and I fear also that her father was not fond of him. Mr Carteret was not a rich man, you know, and his daughter will now be dependent on Lord Tansor’s generosity. And then she has such decided opinions on matters that really ought not to concern a young lady. I suppose that comes from her time abroad. I myself have never left these shores, and hope I never have to do so. My son, though, has expressed a wish to go to America, of all places. Well, we shall see. And now, Mr Glapthorn, I must bid you a very good evening, and hope we may have the pleasure of seeing each other again very soon.’

As he made to leave, my eyes strayed towards the baronial towers of the South Gates, and something that I had been half conscious of all day suddenly rose to the surface.

‘Dr Daunt, if you don’t mind my asking, why do you suppose Mr Carteret rode home through the woods? Surely the quicker route from Easton to the Dower House is through the village.’

‘Well, yes, now you come to mention it, that would indeed have been the quickest way,’ he replied. ‘The only reason to come into the Park through the Western Gates from the Odstock Road would be if there were a need for Mr Carteret to go up to the great house, which is much closer to that entrance than to this.’

‘And was there such a need, do you know?’

‘I cannot say. Perhaps he had some business with Lord Tansor before he returned home. And so, Mr Glapthorn, I’ll wish you another good-evening.’

With that, we shook hands and I stood watching him as he walked off towards the gate in the wall. As he passed through, he turned and waved. And then he was gone.

I took the path that led into the stable-yard. There I encountered Mary Baker, the kitchen-maid, lantern in hand.

‘Good-evening, Mary,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re feeling a little better than when last I saw you.’

‘Oh, yes, thank you, sir, you’re very kind. I’m sorry you had to see me like that. It took me hard, that’s the truth. The master had been so kind to me – so kind to us all. Such a dear man, as I’m sure you know. And then it brought to mind, in such a terrible way, what happened to my poor sister.’

‘Your sister?’

‘My only sister, sir – Agnes Baker as was. A little older than me, and a mother to me, too, after our own mother died when we were still little. She worked in the kitchen up at the great house, under Mrs Bamford, until that brute came and took her away.’

She hesitated, as if in the grip of some strong emotion.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m sure you don’t wish to hear all this. I’ll say good-evening, sir.’

She turned to go, but I called out to her to stop. Something was stirring in a dark, unvisited corner of my memory.

‘Mary, don’t go, please. Sit down a moment, and tell me about your sister.’

With a little more gentle persuasion, she agreed to postpone the task that she had been engaged upon, and we sat down in the fading light on a roughly made bench constructed around the thick, gnarled trunk of an old apple-tree.

‘You mentioned a brute, Mary. What did you mean?’

‘I meant that murdering villain who took my sister away, and killed her.’

‘Killed her? You don’t say so!’

‘I should say I do! Killed her, in cold blood. Married her, then killed her. As soon as I saw him, I knew he was a bad ’un, but Agnes wouldn’t hear of it. It was the only time we ever argued. But I was right. He was a bad ’un, for all he charmed her.’

‘Go on, Mary.’

‘Well, sir, he called himself a gentleman – dressed like one, I’ll grant you. Even spoke a bit like one. But he weren’t no gentleman. Not him. Why, he weren’t hardly more than a servant when he first came to Evenwood.’

‘And how did your sister meet him?’

‘He’d come up from London, with Mr Daunt.’

‘Mr Daunt?’ I said, incredulously. ‘The Rector?’

‘Oh no, sir, Mr Phoebus Daunt, his son. He’d come up with Mr Phoebus and another gent, for a great dinner, on the occasion of his Lordship’s birthday. I was by the gates when they went past. But he wasn’t invited to the dinner, just Mr Phoebus and the other gentleman. He seemed like he was a serving-man, or some such, for he was driving the carriage that they all came in, and yet he dressed so well, and thought so much of himself, and seemed to be on easy terms with the other two gentlemen. Anyways, that’s when he met Agnes, that evening, in the yard by the ice-house. Oh, he was a sly one. He wheedled and cooed, and she, poor fool, took it all in, and thought he was such a great man, taking notice of such as she. But he was no better than her – no, he was a lot worse. We were decent folk, well brought up. But he’d come from nothing, and made his money, Lord knows how. Why Mr Phoebus took up with him, who could say? He came back a week later, but not with Mr Phoebus, nor to see him neither. And then – what do you think? Agnes comes down the next day and says, “Well, congratulate me, Mary, for I’m to be married, and here’s the proof,” and she holds out her hand to show me the ring he’d given her. After a week! There was nothing anyone could say. She just shut her ears and shook her head. And off she went, poor lamb. And, if you’ll believe me, sir, that was the last I saw of her. My poor dear sister, who’d been my closest and dearest friend in the whole world.’

‘What happened then, Mary?’ I asked, feeling increasingly certain that I knew where her story was leading.

‘Well, sir, I had a letter from her a month later to say he’d been as good as his word and had married her, and that she was set up in fine style in London. And so of course my mind was eased a little, though I still couldn’t see how this was to end in anything but trouble for her, being tied to such as he. I waited and waited, longing to hear from her again, but no letter came. Six months passed, sir, six whole months, and I was going quite mad with worry – you ask Mrs Rowthorn if I weren’t. So John Brine, to set my troubled mind at rest, says he would go down to London and find her and send word back. Oh, sir, how I trembled when his letter came – and weren’t I right to tremble! I couldn’t open it, so I gave it to Mrs Rowthorn and she read it to me.

‘It was the worst news that there could be: my poor sister had been murdered by that brute – savagely beaten, so bad, they said, that you could hardly recognize her darling face. But he had been taken, and would stand trial, and so I took some comfort that he would be hanged for his evil deed, though that was too good for him. But even that comfort was denied me, for some villainous lawyer got the jury to find another man guilty. They said that this other man had been her lover! My Agnes! She’d never do such a thing, never. So her husband was set free to murder again, and the other man was hanged – though Lord knows he was as innocent as my poor dear sister.’

She ceased, tears beginning to well up in her pretty brown eyes. I laid my hand on hers, to offer some comfort before asking my final question.

‘What was the name of your sister’s husband, Mary?’

‘Pluckrose, sir. Josiah Pluckrose.’

^*[‘The written word remains’. Ed.]

^*[‘HENRY by the grace of God King of England Lord of Ireland Duke of Aquitaine to his well-beloved liegeman Maldwin Duport of Tansor, knight, Greeting.’ The writ, which is of great historical interest, is now in the Northampton Record Office. The Latin text was printed in full in Northamptonshire History, vol. xiv (July 1974), with a translation and commentary by Professor J. F. Burton. Ed.]

25

In limine^*

Pluckrose.

I remembered the cynical smile of contempt he had given the jury when he was acquitted of the murder of his wife, Mary Baker’s sister, Agnes. ‘You fools,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘You know I did it, but we’ve been too clever for you.’ And he had me to thank – me! – for escaping the noose.

He was a beast of a man, tall and heavy, though quick on his feet, with shoulders even broader than Le Grice’s, and huge hands – one of which, the right, was lacking an index finger, amputated accidentally during his butchering career. Now, I am afraid of no man; but there was something about Josiah Pluckrose that I did not care to confront: an intimation in those narrow eyes of a raw, unbridled capacity for purposeless and terrible violence, rendered all the more unsettling by the suavity of his dress and manner. If you met him casually in the street, by his appearance you would almost think him a gentleman – almost. He had long ago scrubbed the gore of Smithfield from his fingers, but the butcher was in him still.

Everything about him proclaimed Josiah Pluckrose to be guilty of the remorseless murder of his poor wife following some trivial domestic disagreement; and yet, because of me, he had cheated the bells of St Sepulchre’s,^* and lived to murder again. After his acquittal, he had returned to his house in Weymouth-street, in defiance of his neighbours and opinion generally, as if nothing had happened. Of course, Mr Tredgold had never expressed any wish to know how the trick had been done. I had seen the excellent M. Robert-Houdin^† perform in Paris, and had witnessed for myself the effect of the art of illusion, when practised by a master, on those who wish to believe in the impossible. I could not use mirrors, or the power of electricity, to produce the impression of guilt that would condemn an innocent man, and deny Calcraft,^‡ or some other nubbing cove,^§ the pleasure of stretching Pluckrose’s miserable neck. Nevertheless, I had other well-tried means at my disposal, just as productive of complete persuasion in my audience: documents, apparently in his own hand, setting forth the unfortunate dupe’s guilty association with Mrs Agnes Pluckrose, née Baker; and witnesses – some ready to swear to the furious temper of the man, and the fact of his being in the house on the fateful afternoon, and others to affirm the presence of Pluckrose in a public-house in Shadwell at the time of the murder. Having done their work, the witnesses – carefully chosen, exhaustively coached, and extremely well paid – had then sunk back into the deeps of London.