The Meaning of Night

And so it was that, following the conclusion of a new investigation, Mr William Cracknell, chemist’s assistant, of Bedford-row, Bloomsbury, stepped out of the Debtors’ Door at Newgate, one cold December morning, to keep his appointment with Mr Calcraft, whilst Josiah Pluckrose, swinging the heavy silver-headed stick with which he had smashed his poor wife’s skull, and wearing the boots that had crushed her ribs as she lay dying, sauntered forth that same morning with a view to taking the air on Hampstead-heath. After the trial, I was not in the least inclined to congratulate myself on my triumph, and neither I nor Mr Tredgold felt any satisfaction that our client had gone free. And so Pluckrose had been forgotten.

After Mary had gone, and I was walking about the stable-yard, I could not help recalling the evidence of Mr Henry Whitmore, surgeon and apothecary of Coldbath-square, Clerkenwell, concerning the violence done to the person of Agnes Pluckrose. Overcome by rage, I left the yard in a kind of daze, walking at a furious pace out into the darkness.

Mary’s tale of her sister’s seduction by this brute had moved me more than I would have thought possible. But there was more than Pluckrose to consider; there was Phoebus Daunt – again! He seemed to haunt me at every turn, a jarring, discordant basso continuo to my life. I was completely baffled by the association revealed by Mary. What common interest, I wondered in bewilderment, could possibly unite this murderer and the son of the Rector of Evenwood?

After wandering aimlessly in this morbid state for an hour or more through the Park, I found myself at the foot of a steep track that wound its way up to the Temple of the Winds. Feeling disinclined to go back to the Dower House just yet, I followed the track up the artificial mound on which the Temple was built, eventually reaching a short flight of steps leading up to a terrace. Here I turned for a moment to look back across the Park to the twinkling lights of the great house.

I was about to make my way back down the steps when I noticed that the door of the Temple’s North Portico was open. On an impulse, I decided to look inside.

The building – partly modelled, like the more famous version at Castle Howard, on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in Vicenza – was in the form of a domed cube, with four glazed porticos set at each point of the compass.^* The interior, which, even in the deepening gloom, I could see was decorated in superb scagliola work, smelled of damp and decay, and as I entered I could feel myself treading on fragments of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. In the midst of the space stood a round marble-topped table, and two wrought-iron chairs; a third chair lay on its back some distance away. On the table stood a stub of candle in a pewter holder.

I placed my hat and stick on the table, took out a lucifer^* from my waistcoat pocket, and proceeded to light what remained of the candle, followed by a cigar to cheer my dismal and unsettled mood. The flickering light revealed the quality of the Temple’s internal decoration, though it was plain that the place had been in a state of disrepair for some years. Several of the panes in the glazed door of the North Portico were smashed – fragments of dirty glass still littered the floor – and black dust-filled nets of spiders’ webs, undulating eerily in the dank air, hung all about like discarded grave-clothes.

Leaving the candle on the table, I walked over to the upturned chair and set it back on its feet. As I was doing so, I noticed a small dark form on the floor, just discernible amongst the shadows cast by the candle stub. My curiosity aroused, I kneeled down.

It was a blackbird – the poor creature must have flown in through the open door of the Temple, and dashed itself against a large gilt-framed looking-glass, cracked and mottled, that hung on the wall above where it now lay. Its wings were outstretched, as though frozen in flight. From one staring but sightless eye flowed a jagged stream of viscous black liquid, staining the dusty floor; the other eye was closed in peaceful death.

It somehow affronted me that it lay here, in this gloomy place, in plain sight, away from the warm enshrouding earth. Gently, I picked the bird up by the tip of one wing, with the intention of conveying it solemnly to some suitable resting-place outside the Temple. But the act of lifting it up from the dirty floor revealed something curious.

Beneath it, previously hidden by one of the bird’s outstretched wings, was a small piece of battered brown leather, some three inches square, with a hole punched in one corner. I took my discovery over to the candle, now nearly burned down, and saw then what it was – a label, apparently, bearing a name in faded gold letters: ‘J. Earl.’

I recognized the name, but could not for the moment recall how or where I had heard it. It seemed strangely imperative, however, to bring its significance to mind, and so I stood for a minute or more in some perplexity, racking my brains for a clue as to its associations.

At length, I seemed to hear the voice of Mrs Rowthorn, Mr Carteret’s housekeeper. Something that she had said – a trivial fact that I had half heard, and then forgotten. But nothing is ever really forgotten, and slowly the vaults of memory began to open and yield up their dead.

‘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 …’

This rough square of leather that I now held in my hand had been attached to Mr Carteret’s bag. I was sure of it. From this deduction quickly followed another: the bag itself must surely have been here, in the Temple of the Winds. But that posed a problem. Had Mr Carteret been here also? It seemed impossible. The testimonies of those who had found him made it certain that he had been attacked soon after he entered the Park through the Western Gates. No, he had not come to the Temple, but the bag had certainly been here.

I looked about me, and began to picture what might have happened. A chair had been overturned, and this piece of leather had somehow become separated from the bag. And then – the following day, perhaps – a bird had flown into the Temple and, in its fear and turmoil, had mistaken a dirty reflection of the outside world for the living freedom of the open sky, dashed itself against the looking-glass, and fallen to the ground, just where the piece of leather lay. And there the bird, and the object beneath it, might have stayed, perhaps for weeks or months, perhaps for years, had I not, on a whim, and in a fury at Mary’s story of the murderous villain Pluckrose, taken the path up to the Temple of the Winds.

Of course it had been no whim. I believed then that I was in the Iron Master’s hands, and that he had pulled me hither for the deliberate purpose of finding this thing. But what did it signify? I sat down at the table, dropped my still-smoking cigar on the floor, and buried my head in my hands.

This much I was still absolutely sure of: Mr Carteret had died because of what he had been carrying. I was certain, too, that he had been intending to place the bag’s contents before me at our next meeting, and that he had been attacked by a single assailant who knew their worth and importance.

I began to wonder why the bag had been brought to the Temple after the attack. Had Mr Carteret’s murderer been un homme de main,^* acting on someone else’s orders? Perhaps he had been instructed to bring the bag and its contents here, to the Temple, where it was to be examined by his employer. Somehow, the little leather label had become separated from the bag.

All this seemed perfectly plausible, probable even; but I could go no further. What had been carried in Mr Carteret’s bag, and the identities of both the murderer and his master, were mysteries that – as yet – I had no means of unravelling. Until more light could be shed on them, there was nothing else to do but stumble on through the darkness a little longer.

I placed the leather label in my coat pocket, and turned back towards where the dead bird still lay, intending to carry it outside, and then make my way back to the Dower House. In that instant, the guttering candle on the table finally went out and, in the sudden enveloping blackness, I was aware of another presence. There was a figure in the doorway, a dark form against the clear, star-filled sky.

She did not speak, but walked slowly towards me, a small lantern held in her left hand, until her face was close to mine, so close indeed that I could feel and smell her warm breath.

‘Good-evening, Mr Glapthorn. What on earth brings you here at this time?’

Her voice had a delicious, inviting softness about it that made my blood race with desire, but her inexpressive stare told another story. I tried to strip that gaze of its disconcerting power by looking full into her dark eyes; but I knew that I was done for. It was all over with me. A great iron door had come down, separating me from the life I had lived before. Henceforth, I knew, my heart would be hers to command, for good or ill.

‘I might wonder the same about you, Miss Carteret,’ I replied.

‘Oh, but I often come to the Temple. It was a favourite resort of my father’s. He would sometimes bring his writing-case and work here. And it was here that I last saw him alive. So, you see, I have reason enough. But what are your reasons, I wonder?’

She continued to look at me, standing stock-still in her mourning clothes; but then she smiled – a sad, child-like half-smile – and once again she uncovered, for the merest instant, a touching vulnerability.

‘Would you believe me if I said that I had no reason at all for coming here; that I had no other object in view but to take the air, and that I found myself here quite by chance?’

‘Why should I not believe you? Really, Mr Glapthorn, your conscience seems rather too eager to protest the innocence of your motives. I merely wondered what brought you here. I’m sure I did not mean to suggest that you were not perfectly entitled to prowl around this damp place in the dark if you wished to do so. You have no need to answer to me – or to anyone, I dare say.’

All this was spoken in a sweet, low, confiding tone, quite at odds with her teasing words. I said nothing in reply as she turned and walked back to the door, but picked up my hat and stick, and followed her.

She was standing on the steps leading down to a narrow terrace, below which the ground fell away steeply towards the main carriage-road. Where the track from the Temple joined the road, I could see two lights twinkling in the darkness.

‘You have not come alone, then,’ I said.

‘No, John Brine brought me up in the landau.’

She seemed suddenly disinclined to talk, and took a few more steps down towards the terrace. Then, holding her lamp up close to her face, and with a troubled expression, she turned and said: ‘My father believed that everything we do in this life will be judged in the next. Do you believe that, Mr Glapthorn? Please tell me whether you do.’

I said that I feared Mr Carteret and I would have disagreed on this point, and that I favoured a rather more fatalistic theology.

At this, her face assumed a strange look of concentration.

‘So you do not believe in the parable of the sheep and the goats? That those who do good will see Heaven, and those who do evil will burn in the eternal fire?’

‘That was what I was brought up to believe,’ I replied, ‘but as I have been deficient in perfection from an early age, it has never seemed to me a comfortable philosophy. It is so ridiculously easy, don’t you think, to fall into sin? I prefer to believe that I was predestined for grace. It accords far more closely to my own estimation of myself, and of course it relieves one of the tedious necessity of always having to do good.’

I was smiling as I said the words, for I had meant them – partly – as an attempt at levity. But she had become strangely agitated, and began to walk quickly hither and thither about the terrace, apparently talking to herself in a mumbled undertone, her little lamp swinging by her side, until at last she stopped at the top of the steps that led down to the path, and stood staring out into the darkness.

The sudden change in her manner was dramatic and alarming, and I could see no immediate reason for it. But then I concluded that the grief that she had been holding back had begun at last to assert its natural ascendancy over her spirits, through being in a place that had such strong associations with her recently deceased father. I was about to tell her, as tenderly as I could, that there was no shame in mourning her poor papa; but I had hardly stepped down to the terrace when she looked up at me and, in an anxious voice, said she must return to the Dower House, whereat she began running down the path towards where John Brine was waiting with the landau.

I was determined not to run after her, like some panting Touchstone after his Audrey,^* but instead set off as coolly as I could, though with long urgent strides, following the bobbing lamp down the path. By the time I caught up with her, she was sitting back in the landau, pulling a rug across her lap.

And then, to my astonishment, she held out her hand and bestowed upon me the most delicious smile.

‘If you have quite finished taking the air, Mr Glapthorn, perhaps you would accompany me back to the Dower House. I’m sure you have walked quite far enough tonight. John, will you take us back, please.’

As we drove along, she began to speak reminiscently about her father – how he had taken her to the coronation of the present Queen,^* on the day after her fourteenth birthday, and how, at Lord Tansor’s instigation, Lady Adelaide Paget, one of the train-bearers, had introduced her to the new monarch, then of course not much more than a girl herself. From this recollection she turned to Mr Carteret’s inordinate fondness for anchovies (which she could not abide), his passion for Delftware (numerous fine examples of which I had noted on display in various parts of the Dower House), and the close relationship that he had enjoyed with his mother. How or why these things were connected in her mind, I cannot say; but she continued in this frantic recollective vein, running from one hurried memory of her father’s tastes and character to another in quick succession.

I looked out to see the looming mass of the many-towered house, rearing up against the paler backdrop of the early night sky, and studded here and there with little points of light. My attention was arrested by a fleeting glimpse of the Chapel windows, a subdued flickering glow of ruby-red and azure, illuminated from within by the candles set around Mr Carteret’s coffin. In that moment, the bells of Evenwood began to toll the hour of nine, and I became aware that my companion had fallen silent. When she spoke again, her manner and tone showed clearly that her thoughts had been brought back to the contemplation of her poor father’s fate, and to the trials of the coming days.

‘May I ask, Mr Glapthorn, whether your parents are still living?’

‘My mother is dead,’ I replied. ‘I never knew my father.’

I said the words without thinking, then instantly reflected on the singularity of my situation. For whom did I speak? For the orphaned Edward Glyver, with a dead mother and a father who had died before he was born? Or Edward Glapthorn, whom I had conjured into existence on learning the truth about my birth, and who was the possessor of two fathers and two mothers? Or the future Edward Duport, whose mother was indeed dead, but whose father still lived and breathed, here, in this great house, not a quarter of a mile from where we now were?

‘I am sorry for you, truly,’ she said. ‘Every child needs a father’s guiding presence.’

‘Not every father, perhaps,’ I observed, thinking of the execrable Captain Glyver, ‘can be considered fit for such a task. But I believe, Miss Carteret, from my brief acquaintance with him, that you may count yourself fortunate that yours was exceptional in that regard.’

‘But then some children, perhaps, are unworthy of their parents.’

She had turned her face away, and I saw her raise her hand to her face.

‘Miss Carteret, forgive me, is anything the matter?’

‘Nothing is the matter, I assure you.’ But she continued to look out into the darkness with unseeing eyes, her hand resting against her cheek. I saw that she was suffering, and so I thought I would make another attempt at encouraging her to give expression to her anguish.

‘Will you allow me to observe, Miss Carteret, as someone who has your interests most sincerely at heart, that grief should not be denied. It is—’

But I was unable to finish my clumsy peroration, for she instantly turned an affronted face upon me.

‘Do not presume, sir, to lecture me on grief. I will take no lessons on that subject from any person, least of all from someone who is little more than a stranger to me and mine!’

I attempted to apologize for my forwardness; but she silenced me with another terrible look, followed by some further strong words, which together induced me to sit back, somewhat nonplussed, and to hold my tongue for the remainder of our journey.

In this awkward state, we turned in through the Plantation and drew up at last before the Dower House. As the landau came to a halt, I observed that her face had once again reverted to its accustomed look of passionless abstraction. Without saying a word, or even bestowing the slightest glance in my direction, she slowly removed the rug from her lap and, assisted by John Brine, descended from the vehicle.

‘Thank you, John,’ she said. ‘That will be all for tonight.’ Then she turned her head and looked at me, with infinite sadness in her eyes.

‘I believe that my father was right,’ she said, almost in a whisper. She seemed to be looking straight through me, as if talking to some unseen distant presence. ‘We shall be judged for what we do. And so, there is no hope for me.’

I watched her walk the short distance to the house. She stood for a moment beneath the portico lamp, and I longed for her to turn and retrace her steps; but then I saw Mrs Rowthorn open the front door, and say a few words to her that I could not catch, whereupon she instantly picked up her skirts and ran inside.

^*[‘On the threshold’. Ed.]

^*[The bells of the church opposite Newgate Prison, which tolled to announce impending executions. Ed.]

^†[Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–71), a former watchmaker from Blois who became one of the greatest stage magicians of the nineteenth century. Ed.]

^‡[William Calcraft (1800–79), the most prolific of all English executioners, who carried out over four hundred hangings between 1829 and 1874. Ed.]

^§ [Slang term for hangman. Ed.]

^*[The Temple was finally demolished in 1919, by which time it was virtually a ruin. Ed.]

^*[A friction match. Ed.]

^*[A hired hand. Ed.]

^*[Audrey was the country wench wooed by Touchstone in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Ed.]

^*[On 28 June 1838. Ed.]

26

Gradatim vincimus^*

I accosted John Brine in the stable-yard, as he was unhitching the horses from the landau.

‘Brine, I have found something.’

He said nothing in reply, but looked at me in that dour, threatening way of his.

Reaching into my pocket, I held out the little square of leather that I had discovered in the Temple. He took it from me, and began to examine it by the light over the tack-room door.

‘James Earl,’ he said. ‘Gamekeeper here some years past. May I ask, sir, where you found this?’

‘In the Temple,’ I answered, eyeing him closely. ‘Not a much-frequented place, I think.’

‘Not since the youngster died.’

‘Youngster?’

‘His Lordship’s only boy, Master Henry. He went up there on his pony. He would not be told, that boy, and his Lordship could do nothing but indulge him. It was his birthday, you see, and the pony had been his father’s gift.’

‘And can you tell me what happened?’

He thought for a moment, and then nodded me towards the open door of the tack-room.

‘Perhaps you’d like to wait in there, sir,’ he said as he led the horses away to their stalls. A few minutes later he returned. There was still a distrusting look about him, but he appeared inclined to resume his story.

‘There’d been a hard frost. We’d ridden all over the Park …’

‘Excuse me,’ I interjected, ‘do you mean that you accompanied the boy?’

‘I was only a lad myself, and my old father, who was his Lordship’s groom, was ill that day and said I should go with them instead – the boy and his Lordship – to make sure all was well. But after we came down through the woods, the boy took off on his own. Headstrong, you see, like his mother.

‘Well, we set off after him, of course, but my horse picked up a stone and I couldn’t keep up. He’d taken the path that goes up to the Temple – you’ve seen it yourself, sir: steep, uneven, dangerous, even for an experienced horseman. And, as I say, there’d been a hard frost. His Lordship dismounted, and called the boy back. But that was a mistake, for as he tried to turn the pony round, the beast slipped, and threw the boy off. I never thought to see that man cry, and I ain’t seen it since. But cry he did, most dreadful to behold, and I don’t ever want to hear such a sound again. It fair tore your heart out, with the poor little chap lying there at his feet so pale and still.

‘And so they buried him, Lord Tansor’s only boy, and since that day his Lordship has never set foot in the Temple, and few others go up there.’

‘But someone has been there,’ I said, ‘and recently. Someone who knows a good deal more about the attack on Mr Carteret than we do.’

I did not know how far I could trust the man; but then I thought how he had taken it upon himself to go to London, on Mary Baker’s behalf, to search for news concerning her sister, the doomed Mrs Agnes Pluckrose. That action spoke of a generous and courageous spirit, and, with Mr Carteret dead, there might be a question as to how he would earn his daily bread; and so, having already recognized the need to find a means of informing myself on the doings of Evenwood and its residents, I decided to risk taking Brine into my confidence a little.

‘Brine, I believe you to be an honest man, and a faithful servant to your former master. But you have no master now, and Miss Carteret’s future, I venture to say, is far from certain. My acquaintance with your late master was short, but I know him to have been an excellent gentleman who did not deserve his fate. More than this, his death has thrown the outcome of our business together into jeopardy, and that must be rectified. I cannot say more on this point. But will you now trust me and help me, as you are able, to seek out those responsible for this dreadful act, and in so doing assist me to conclude the matter that brought me here?’

Brine said nothing in reply, but I could see a glint of interest in his eyes at the question.

‘Our arrangement must be on a strictly confidential basis,’ I continued. ‘I’m sure you understand me. And it would involve no risk to yourself. I simply wish to be informed on what happens here, who comes, who goes, what is said amongst the servants concerning the late Mr Carteret, that sort of thing. I shall pay you well for your loyalty and discretion, and shall ensure that it will never be a matter of regret to you that you assisted me in this matter. And so here’s my hand, John Brine. Will you take it?’

He hesitated, as I expected he would, and looked me square in the eye, without speaking, for some seconds. But whatever he saw therein appeared to decide him. He gripped my hand, like the sturdy fellow he was, and shook it hard.

But then he appeared to hold back a little, and I thought at first that he had repented of his decision.

‘What is it, Brine?’

‘Well, sir, I was thinking …’

‘Yes?’

‘My sister Lizzie, sir, who is maid to Miss Carteret. She’s a canny girl, my sister, and a deal smarter than me in knowing what’s what, if you take my meaning. And so I was thinking, sir, if I can put this to you straight, whether you might feel your interests would be even better served if you was to extend the arrangement you have so kindly offered me to her as well. You won’t find better than her for the work. She’s with her mistress privily every day, and comes and goes as she pleases to Miss’s room. Yes, sir, she knows what’s what round here, and she’ll keep it all as tight as you’d ever want. If you’d like to meet her for yourself, sir, she’s but a step or two down the road.’

I considered the proposition for a moment. Through my employment at Tredgolds, I had acquired long experience of recruiting such as Brine to serve my purposes; but it was often the case that a certain sort of woman proved more adept, and more subtle, at the work than the men.

‘I will see your sister,’ I said at last. ‘Lead on.’

We walked a little way into the village, to a cottage on the corner of the lane that led down to the church.

‘I’ll go in first, sir,’ said Brine at the door, ‘if you don’t mind.’

I nodded and he entered through the low doorway, leaving me in the roadway to walk up and down. At length, the door opened again, and he ushered me inside.

His sister was standing by the blazing hearth, a book in her hand, which she placed on a table as I walked in. I saw that it was a volume of poems by Mrs Hemans,^* and, on looking round the simply furnished room, I noted a set of Miss Austen’s works, a recent novel by Mr Kingsley, and a volume or two by Miss Martineau,† together with a number of other modern works, which indicated that Miss Brine possessed literary tastes far superior to those of most people of her class and occupation.

She appeared to be in her late twenties, and had her brother’s sandy hair and pale freckly skin, but was shorter and slighter, with darting green eyes, and having – as her brother had accurately described her – the unmistakable look of someone who knew what was what. Yes, she was a sharp one all right. I thought she might do very well.

‘Your brother has explained to you the nature of the proposed arrangement, Miss Brine?’

‘He has, sir.’

‘And what do you say to it?’

‘I’m very happy to oblige you, sir.’

‘And do neither of you feel disquiet at what I am asking you to do?’

They looked at each other. Then the sister spoke.

‘If I may speak for my brother, sir, I will say that no such arrangement would have been possible, or considered by us, if our dear master was alive. But now he is gone, God bless his soul, we are somewhat anxious concerning our future prospects here. Who knows but that my mistress will not take it in her head to flit back to France, where she always says she was so happy. If she does, she won’t take me, that’s for sure. She’s told me as much in the past. And maybe she’d stay there, and then what would we do?’

‘Perhaps she might marry and still live here, though,’ I said.

‘She might,’ she replied. ‘But it would suit us, sir, to prepare for the former eventuality. To put a little money by against the day, if it should come, would be a great comfort to us. And we would give good service.’

‘I’m sure you would.’

I plainly saw that Lizzie would be the more useful member of the partnership, and that she would also keep her brother in line.

‘So you do not feel the same loyalty to your mistress as you did to her father?’

She shrugged.

‘You might say that, sir, though I would not,’ Lizzie replied. ‘But it is true that, circumstances having changed so suddenly, we must look to ourselves a little more than we used.’

‘Tell me, Lizzie, do you like your mistress? Is she kind to you?’

The question caused her brother to look at her a little asquint, as if in anticipation of her reply, which did not come immediately.

‘I do not complain,’ she said at last. ‘That would not be my place. I am sure, as my mistress has often told me, that I am slow and clumsy, and that I do not have the delicate manners of the French girl who looked after her in Paris, and who she is always setting up as an example to me. It may be, too, that I am stupid, for of course I would not expect a lady possessed of such accomplishments as Miss Carteret to think much of a poor girl like me.’

She glanced in a deliberate way towards the volume of poetry lying on the table.

I thanked her for her frankness and, after a few more words, took my leave.

Outside the cottage door, the arrangements were concluded with a handshake. And so it was that John Brine, formerly Mr Paul Carteret’s man, together with his sister Lizzie, Miss Carteret’s maid, became my eyes and ears in and around the Dower House at Evenwood.

As John Brine and I walked back, I had one other matter that I particularly wished to set before my new agent.

‘Brine, I wish you’d tell me about Josiah Pluckrose.’

The effect of my words was extraordinary.

‘Pluckrose!’ he roared, his face colouring. ‘What have you to do with that murdering devil? Tell me, or by God I’ll knock you down where you stand, agreement or no!’

Naturally, under normal circumstances, I would not for a moment have tolerated such insolence from a common fellow like John Brine; even as things were, I was within an inch of teaching him a lesson that he would not forget, for I was easily his match in height and weight, and I knew, perhaps better than he, how to conduct myself in such situations. But I drew back; for, after all, what difference of opinion could possibly exist between us regarding Josiah Pluckrose?

‘I have only one aim in view with respect to that gentleman,’ I said, ‘and that is to send him as speedily as possible, with my very best regards, to the deepest pit of hell.’ Whereupon Brine’s face took on a more compliant expression and he began to apologize, in a fumbling embarrassed sort of way, for his outburst; but I stopped him and told him straight away of my conversation with the housemaid Mary Baker, though of course I did not go so far as to divulge my prior acquaintance with friend Pluckrose.

And then he told me, in a quiet, feeling way, which almost endeared me to the fellow, that he had once entertained what he termed a ‘fondness’ for Agnes Baker, which it was left to me to interpret how I would.

‘Well, Brine,’ I said, as we walked under the gate-house arch, ‘I see there is common ground between us on the matter of Josiah Pluckrose. But what I would particularly like to know,’ I continued, feeling the need for another cigar, but having no more about me, ‘is how such a man came to be associated with Mr Phoebus Daunt. I cannot be alone in observing the incompatibility of the relationship. Can you tell me, for instance, how Mr Carteret viewed the matter?’

‘Like any right-thinking gentleman would,’ said Brine, a little evasively. ‘I know, because I heard him telling Miss Emily.’

‘Telling her what, Brine? Speak up, if you please, for there must be no secrets now between us.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but it just don’t seem right, that’s all, speaking of what was said privately.’

I damned the fellow for his scruples. A fine spy he was going to make! I reminded him, rather pointedly, of the terms of our engagement and, after a moment or two, though still somewhat unwillingly, he began to recount the substance of the conversation that he had overheard between Mr Carteret and his daughter.

‘His Lordship had given a dinner for his birthday, and afterwards it fell to me to bring the master and Miss Emily back from the great house in the landau. It’s an old thing that belonged to Mr Carteret’s mother, but it gives good service and—’

‘Brine. The facts, if you please.’

‘To be sure, sir. Well, sir, as I say, I went up to fetch the master and the young miss back in the landau, and I saw straight away that something was up. Black as thunder her face was as I helped her in, and Mr Carteret looking nearly as bad.’

‘Go on.’

‘There was a fair old wind that night – I remember that very well – and we had a rough time of it on our way back, I can tell you, especially coming up from the river, battered and buffeted and I don’t know what. But though the wind was hard in my face, there were times when I could still catch what Master and Miss were saying.’

‘And that’s when Mr Carteret spoke of Pluckrose?’

‘Not by name, though I knew it was him the master was speaking of. He’d driven a carriage up that evening with Mr Phoebus Daunt and another gentleman – it was that same cursed evening that he first spied Agnes. There’d been some trouble in the servants’ hall – Pluckrose had been given his supper there while t’other two gents were upstairs with the quality, and he’d threatened his Lordship’s butler, Mr Cranshaw. I heard all about the rumpus from John Hooper, who saw it all. Well, we got home and I handed her out – Miss Emily, I mean – and blow me, she fair stormed into the house, with her father following, and calling to her to stop. And so I brought the landau round to the yard, and stabled the horses, like tonight, and then went along to the kitchen, for ’twas a rare old night, as I say, and Susan Rowthorn would always have a little something waiting for me, in the way of refreshment, as I might say, on such a night. “Well,” says she when I open the door, “here’s a to-do. Master and Miss are going at it hammer and tongs.” Those were her exact words: hammer and tongs. Now, Miss has a temper – we all knows that. But Susan says she’d never heard the like, doors slamming and I don’t know what.’

‘And what was the cause of the upset, do you suppose?’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose, sir. I had everything pat and in apple-pie order from Susan. She’d heard everything and noted everything, just as it happened, as is her way. I don’t know, sir, as you hadn’t ought to have brought her into your employ rather than me.’

He smiled a stupid smile, and, once again, I silently damned him, and his feeble attempt at humour.

‘Get to it, Brine, and quickly,’ I said impatiently. ‘What did the woman tell you?’

Now, to spare you any more of John Brine’s ramblings, I intend to present my own account of what happened on that fateful evening, when Josiah Pluckrose came to Evenwood in the company of Phoebus Daunt, and Mr Carteret and his daughter fell out with each other for the first time in their lives. It draws directly on the recollections of the Carterets’ housekeeper, Mrs Susan Rowthorn, and of John and Lizzie Brine.

Once returned to the Dower House, having been bumped and blown all the way, Miss Carteret ran inside, with her father calling after her, and went straight up to her room, slamming the door behind her. She had barely had time to ring for her maid, Lizzie Brine, when there was a short knock at the door, and her father entered, still in his greatcoat, and still in an extremely agitated state.

‘Now this will not do, Emily. Really it won’t. You must tell me all, or you and I shall never be friends again. And that’s the long and the short of it.’

‘How can I tell you all when there is nothing to tell?’

She was standing before the window, her travelling cloak over her arm, her hair disarranged from the wind, which continued to howl all around the house. Dismayed and still angered by the turn of events, and feeling that she had been humiliated by her father, she was in no mood for conciliation.

‘Nothing to tell! You can say that? Very well. Here it is. You will have nothing further to do with that man, do you hear? We must of course observe the decencies of social intercourse with our neighbours, but there must be nothing more. I hope I make myself clear.’

‘No, you do not, sir.’ Her anger was now uncontained. ‘May I ask of whom you speak?’

‘Why, Mr Phoebus Daunt, of course, as I said before.’

‘But that is absurd! I have known Mr Phoebus Daunt since I was six years old, and his father is one of your most valued and devoted friends. I know that you do not esteem Phoebus as others do, but I own myself amazed that you should take against him so.’

‘But I saw you, at dinner. He leaned towards you, in a distinctly …’ He paused. ‘In a distinctly intimate manner. Ah! You say nothing. But why should you? That’s your way, I see, to let me think one thing while you are doing another.’

‘He leaned towards me? Is that your accusation?’

‘So you deny, do you, that you have been secretly encouraging his … his attentions?’

He had placed his hands in his pockets, and was rocking back and forth on his heels, as though to say, ‘There! Deny it if you can!’

But deny it she did, and with a kind of cold fury in her voice, though turning her head away as she spoke.

‘I do not know why you treat me so,’ she went on, angrily throwing her cloak on the bed. ‘I have, I hope, been ever attentive to your wishes. I am of age, and you know that I could leave here tomorrow, and marry anyone I pleased.’

‘But not him, not him!’ said Mr Carteret, almost in a moan, passing his hand through his hair as he did so.

‘Why not him, if I so chose?’

‘I beg you again to judge him by the company he keeps.’

She stood for a moment, waiting to see whether her father intended at last to elaborate further on his statement. Just then came another knock at the door. It was Lizzie Brine, who found her mistress and Mr Carteret facing each other in silence.

‘Is anything the matter, Miss?’

She looked at her mistress, then at Mr Carteret. Of course she had heard the door slamming, and the sound of angry voices. Indeed, she had been lingering in the passage for some time before making her presence known. And she was not alone, for the housekeeper, Susan Rowthorn, assiduous as ever in her duties, had already found a pressing reason to climb the stairs as quickly as her short legs would carry her, in order to inspect the room adjacent to Miss Carteret’s, which contained a connecting door, against the key-hole of which Mrs Rowthorn had felt obliged – no doubt for good housekeeping reasons – to place her eye.

‘No, nothing is the matter, Lizzie,’ said Miss Carteret. ‘I shall not need you tonight after all. You may go home. But be here sharp in the morning.’

And so Lizzie bobbed and departed, slowly closing the door behind her. But she did not go home immediately. Instead she tip-toed into the adjacent chamber to join Mrs Rowthorn, who, crouching down by the connecting door, turned and placed a finger on her lips as she entered.

Left alone once more (or so they thought), father and daughter stood awkwardly for a moment or two, saying nothing. It was Miss Carteret who spoke first.

‘Father, as you love me, I must ask you to be plain with me. What company is Mr Phoebus Daunt keeping that appears to be so abhorrent to you? Surely you do not refer to Mr Pettingale?’

‘No, not Mr Pettingale. Though I do not know that gentleman, I have no reason to believe anything ill of him.’

‘Then whom do you mean?’

‘I mean the other … person. A more loathsome, villainous creature I have never seen. And he calls himself an associate of Mr Phoebus Daunt’s! You see! This swaggering brute, this … this Moloch in human form, comes here, to Evenwood, in the company of Mr Daunt. There now: what do you say to that?’

‘What can I say?’ she asked. She was calm now, standing framed by the curtained window in that characteristic pose of hers, hands crossed in front of her, her head tilted slightly back and to one side, her face devoid of all expression. ‘I do not know the person you describe. If he is, indeed, an associate of Mr Phoebus Daunt’s, well then, that is Mr Daunt’s affair, not ours. There may be perfectly good reasons why it is necessary for him, perhaps temporarily, to have dealings with the person you describe. You must see that we are not in a position to judge on this point. As for Mr Daunt himself, I can assure you, on my dear mother’s life, and before Heaven, that I can find no reason – no reason at all – to rebuke myself for any dereliction of the duty that a daughter owes to a father.’

Though she had said nothing very specific, her attitude, and the emphatic tone in which she had delivered the words, appeared to have a composing effect on Mr Carteret, who ceased continually removing his spectacles, and now replaced his handkerchief in his pocket.

‘And am I truly wrong, then, my dear?’ The question was asked quietly, almost plaintively.

‘Wrong, father?’

‘Wrong to think you cherish a secret regard for Mr Phoebus Daunt.’

‘Dearest father …’ Here she reached forward, and took his hand in hers. ‘I feel for him as I have always done. He is our neighbour, and my childhood friend. That is all. And if you force me to be direct, then I will say that I do not like Mr Daunt, though I will always be civil to him, for his father’s sake. If you have mistaken civility for affection, then I am sorry, but I really cannot be blamed.’

She was smiling now, and what father could have resisted such a smile? And so Mr Carteret kissed his daughter, and said that he was a foolish old man to think that she could ever go against him.

Then a thought seemed to strike him.

‘But, my dear,’ he asked anxiously, ‘you will want to get married, I suppose, some not very distant day?’

‘Perhaps I shall,’ she said gently. ‘But not yet, Papa, not yet.’

‘And not to him, my dear.’

‘No, Papa. Not to him.’

He nodded, kissed her again, and wished her good-night. As he turned the corner of the passage that led to his bedchamber, Mrs Rowthorn, with Lizzie Brine in tow, quietly returned to the kitchen.

This, then, is a true and accurate record, or as true and accurate as I am able to make it, of what passed that night between Mr Paul Carteret and his daughter.

But was anything left unsaid? And were there secrets in each heart that neither could tell to the other?

^*[‘We win by degrees’. Ed.]

^*[The poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835), author of Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse (1819), The Forest Sanctuary, and Other Poems (1825), Records of Women, with Other Poems (1828), Songs of the Affections, with Other Poems (1830), and many other works. She also published translations of the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões. Ed.]

^†[Harriet Martineau (1802–76), social reformer and woman of letters. Her works included Letters on Mesmerism (1845), Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), Household Education and her radical History of the Thirty Years’ Peace (both 1849), and her novel Deerbrook (1839). Ed.]

27

Sub rosa^*

After walking back to the stable-yard, I entered the Dower House by the kitchen door. There I came upon Susan Rowthorn deep in conversation with the cook, Mrs Barnes. In my professional work I always like to cultivate servants; and here was just the opportunity that I had been seeking.

‘Will you take some food in your room, sir?’ asked the housekeeper.

‘I’ll take some food, certainly,’ I replied, ‘but I’ll take it here with you, if I may.’

My gallantry having produced its desired effect, I left the two women to their preparations, while I returned to my room to replenish the supply of cigars that I usually keep about my person.

At the foot of the stair-case, I stopped.

Just inside the front door stood a black leather imperial,^† together with three or four smaller bags. Was someone leaving? Or someone visiting? I noted the initials on the lid of the trunk: ‘M-MB’. A visitor, I concluded. Another question for Mrs Rowthorn.

Having re-supplied myself with cigars from my bag, I returned to the kitchen, noticing en route that the drawing-room door, which had been shut when I was examining the trunk, was now open. Naturally I peeped inside, but the room was empty, although my nose, which is sensitive to such things, caught a faint and intriguing scent of lavender lingering on the air.

The meal prepared by Mrs Barnes was a hearty one and, after my excursion to the Temple and the ride back in the landau with Miss Carteret, most welcome. I sat by the fire, allowing Mrs Rowthorn full rein, for an hour or more. What she told me, as I tucked into a chop with two broiled kidneys, lubricated with a generous go of gin-punch, and followed up by a slice of most excellent apple-pie, I have incorporated into the preceding account. One question only remained.

‘I suppose Miss Carteret is engaged with her visitors?’

‘Oh, only one visitor, sir,’ offered Mrs Rowthorn. ‘Miss Buisson.’

‘Ah, yes. A relative, perhaps?’

‘No, sir, a friend. From her Paris days. John Brine has just gone to take her things up to her room. What a shock for her, poor lamb, to get here at last and find us all in such a state.’

I asked whether Miss Buisson had known Mr Carteret well, to which Mrs Rowthorn replied that the young lady had paid many visits to England, and that she had been a particular favourite of her late master’s.

‘I suppose Miss Carteret must have many friends of her own sex in the neighbourhood,’ I ventured.

‘Friends?’ came the answer. ‘Well, yes, you could say so. Miss Langham, and Sir Granville Lorimer’s girl; but, strange to say, no one like Miss Buisson.’

‘How so?’

‘Inseparable, sir. That is the word I should use. Like sisters, they are when together, though of course so unlike in looks and character.’ She shook her head. ‘No. Miss has no other friend like Miss Buisson.’

As I was about to leave, John Brine came down the hall stairs. He coloured slightly on seeing me, but I quickly diverted the womens’ attention by knocking over my third (or was it fourth?) glass of gin-punch. Apologizing for my clumsiness, I made good my escape.

Back in my room, I lit another cigar, kicked off my boots, and lay down on my bed.

I felt sick and uneasy. A surfeit of gin-punch, and too many cigars, no doubt. Though I was exhausted, my mind was unquiet, harassed with commotion, and sleep seemed impossible. Tomorrow I would return to London, no wiser concerning the nature of Mr Carteret’s discovery than when I came to Northamptonshire, but certain that it had brought about his death. And if the Tansor succession was at the heart of the business, then this could mean that I, too, was caught up in the plot that had led to his murder.

I tried to force myself to think of other things – of Bella, and what she would be doing. Tonight, I knew, there was to have been a dinner at Blithe Lodge for one of the most distinguished members of The Academy, the Earl of B—. The best silver would be out, and Mrs D would be resplendent in garnet and pearls, and sporting the remarkable peacock-feathered headdress that she always wore on such occasions, as signifying her supreme position in the body politic of The Academy. I imagined Bella wearing her blue silk dress, her favourite Castellani necklace^* encircling her wonderful neck, a wreath of white artificial rose-buds nestling in her abundant black hair. The company would ask her to play and sing, and of course she would charm every man there. Some would even half believe they were in love with her.

I closed my eyes, but still the sleep that I craved eluded me. I remained in this state for perhaps an hour, half awake, half dozing, until the striking of the gate-house clock roused me. Now fully alert, and as far from sleep as ever, I was considering what to do with myself when my ears caught a strange sound. I thought perhaps it might be the wind, but on looking out of the window again, I could see that the branches of the trees in the Plantation were barely moving. Silence descended once more, but in a few moments it came again – an urgent whimpering, such as I have heard dogs make in their sleep.

I rose and put my boots on. Candle in hand, I opened the door.

The passage outside my room was dark, the house deathly silent. To my right was the main stair-case leading down to the vestibule; ahead, the passage ran almost the length of the house. On my left I made out two doors, leading, I presumed, to rooms that, like mine, overlooked the front lawn; another room opposite – which I later learned was Mr Carteret’s study – clearly gave onto the gardens at the rear. As I proceeded slowly down the passage, I saw that, at the far end, it made a turn to the right, towards the back of the house.

For a few moments I stood listening intently, but there was no sound to be heard, and so I began to retrace my steps a little more rapidly. To prevent the flickering flame from being extinguished, I cupped my hand around the candle, which immediately produced huge shadow-fingers that slid silently across the walls and doors on either side as I passed. Then, as I reached the second of the doors on the front side of the house, I heard it again, like a soft, involuntary moan. Placing the candle-holder on the floor, I kneeled down, my boots creaking slightly. The key-hole had a little brass cover but it was fixed fast; and so I put my ear to the door.

Silence. I waited, hardly daring to draw breath. What was that? A rustling noise, like a silken garment falling to the floor; a moment later, I began to catch what sounded like fragments of a whispered conversation. I strained to hear what was being said, pressing my ear closer to the door, and squinting my eyes in concentration; but I could make nothing out until—

‘Mais il est mort. Mort!’^*

No longer a whisper, but an anguished cry – her cry! Then, tenderly urgent, came the reply from another voice:

‘Sois calme, mon ange! Personne ne sait.’^†

Again the conversation subsided to a whisper on both sides, and only occasionally, when one or the other of the speakers raised their voice a little, was I able to catch more than a word or two.

‘Il ne devrait pas s’être produit…’

‘Qu’a-t-il dit? …’

‘Qu’est-ce que je pourrais faire? … Je ne pourrais pas lui dire la vérité …’

‘Mais que fera-t-il?…’

‘ Il dit qu’il le trouvera …’

‘Mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que c’est que ça’?’^*

In moving my position a little way, to ease the cramp in my leg, I had knocked over the candle-holder, putting out the flame in the process. Instantly, I heard footsteps inside the room hurrying towards the door. There was no time to return to my own room, and so, hastily gathering up the candle-holder, I ran as quickly as I could back down the passage, reaching the point at the far end where it turned sharply towards the rear part of the house just as the door opened.

I could not see them, but I imagined two frightened faces peering out, and anxiously looking up and down the passage. At length, I heard the door being closed, and a few moments later I ventured my head round the angle of the wall to confirm that the coast was clear.

Back in my room, I immediately sat down and wrote out as much of the conversation between Miss Carteret and her friend as I could remember. Like a scholar working on fragments of some ancient text, I sought to fill in the lacunae to make sense of what I had heard, but without success; my incomplete and disconnected transcriptions – set out above – refused to yield up their secrets. Convinced now that I was seeing mystery and conspiracy where there was none, I walked to the window to look out once again on the moonlit garden.

Miss Carteret, Miss Carteret! I was completely, preposterously, bewitched by my beautiful cousin, though I hated myself for the absurdity of it all. It had happened in two days – only two days! It was mere infatuation, I told myself yet again. Forget her. You have Bella, who is everything you could want or need. Why expend precious time on this cold thing, time that ought to be given to the accomplishment of your great enterprise?

But whoever heeds the voice of reason when love whispers, softly persuasive, in the other ear?

I was awoken early by Mrs Rowthorn knocking at my door with a tray of breakfast, as I had requested.

On descending to the vestibule half an hour later, I looked into the dining-room, and then into the two reception rooms at the front of the house; but there was no sign of either Miss Carteret or her friend, Mademoiselle Buisson. A little French clock on the mantel-piece was chiming half past seven as I opened the front door, and stepped out into a cold, dull morning.

I was drawing deeply on my first cigar of the day, in the hope that strong tobacco would have the required stimulative effect on my sluggish faculties, when Brine brought my horse round from the stable-yard. He wished me a safe journey, and I asked whether he had seen Miss Carteret that morning.

‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘Not this morning. She gave orders to my sister that she would be late coming down, and that she was not to be disturbed.’

‘Please give Miss Carteret my compliments.’

‘I will, sir.’

‘You have the address safe that I gave you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I mounted up, and was riding off under the dark echoing arch of the Scottish gate-house when I reined in my mount. Turning the horse, I galloped back into the Park.

Pushing on up the long incline, and through the avenue of oaks at its summit, I pulled up and looked down across the misty river to where Evenwood lay.

It was a day of lead-grey louring cloud, with a cold east wind sighing through the leafless trees; yet even on such a day, my heart was captivated by the beauty of the house – this place of desire and delights. When would the day come that I would enter it as Master, and my feet stand secure within its gates at last?

As I passed the Rectory, I saw Dr and Mrs Daunt, arm in arm, walking up the lane from the church. On seeing me, the Rector stopped and raised his hat in salute, which gesture I returned in kind. His wife, however, immediately disengaged her arm, and walked off alone down the lane.

In another moment I had left Evenwood, and Miss Emily Carteret, behind.

After a cold, damp ride, I turned into the High Street in Stamford at a little before nine o’clock. Returning my nag to the ostler at the George, I then arranged with the hall-porter for my bags to be carried across to the Town Station in time for the next train to Peterborough. The ride had cleared my head, lightened my mood, and sharpened my appetite; and so, having an hour in hand, I cheerily ordered up chops, bacon, and eggs, and a pot of strong coffee, and settled myself in a box by the fire in one of the public rooms to read the daily news-papers until it was time to stroll over to the station.

It wanted ten minutes to the time that the train was due to arrive when, as I was walking into the first-class waiting-room, something that Dr Daunt had said on our walk back from the Library returned to me. He had been speaking of an early ambition of his son’s to follow a career in the law, in emulation of his closest friend at Cambridge. I had given no further thought to the Rector’s words; but now, standing in the waiting-room of the Town Station in Stamford, they returned with a strange force.

Now, I am a great believer in the instinctive powers – the ability to reach at truth without the aid of reason or deliberation. Mine are particularly acute; they have served me well, and I have learned to trust them whenever they have manifested their presence. You never know where they may lead you. Here was a case in point. I cannot say why, but I was instantly seized with the notion that I must find out the name of this companion of Daunt’s at the University. Acting on this impulse, therefore, I immediately changed my plans and, after consulting my Bradshaw,^* resolved upon a diversion to Cambridge.

By now the train for Yarmouth, which I was to take as far as Ely, had arrived. I was on the point of picking up my bag, when one of the tap-room servants from the George came puffing up to me, and thrust a thick envelope, almost a small package, into my hand.

‘What is this?’

‘Beg pardon, sir, hall-porter says this has been directed to you.’

Ah, I thought. The proofs of Dr Daunt’s translation of Iamblichus. They had been forwarded to me, as arranged, by Professor Slake. I had quite forgotten about them. As it was necessary for me to board the train immediately, I had no time to reprimand the stupid red-faced fellow for the hotel’s failure to give me the package earlier; and so I brushed him aside without a word, stuffed the proofs into my greatcoat pocket, and managed to take my seat just as the station-master was blowing his whistle.

To my consternation, the carriage that I had chosen was crowded almost to capacity, and I spent a most uncomfortable two and a quarter hours wedged between a stout and exceedingly truculent lady, a basket containing a spaniel puppy set precariously on her knees, and a fidgeting boy of about thirteen (much interested in the puppy), with my bag lying between my feet on account of the racks being full.

I disembarked, to my great relief, in Ely, and managed to catch a connecting train to Cambridge with seconds to spare. Arriving at my destination at last, I took a cab into the town, and was set down before the gates of St Catharine’s College.

^*[Literally, ‘under the rose’ – i.e. secretly, in secret. Ed.]

^†[A case or trunk adapted for the roof of a coach or carriage. Ed.]

^*[The Italian jeweller Fortunato Pio Castellani (1793–1865), who specialized in making pieces that emulated the work of the ancient Etruscan goldsmiths. Ed.]

^*[‘But he is dead. Dead!’ Ed.]

^†[‘Be calm, my angel! No one knows’. Ed.]

^*[‘It should not have happened…’

‘What did he say? …’

‘What could I do? … I could not tell him the truth …’

‘But what will he do? …’

‘He says that he will find him …’

‘My God, what was that?’ Ed.]

^*[One of the monthly Railway Guides published by George Bradshaw (1801–53), the first volume of which, in what were to become their familiar yellow wrappers, was published in December 1841. Ed.]

28

Spectemur agendo^*

In the year 1846, through the good offices of my former travelling companion, Mr Bryce Furnivall, of the British Museum, I had begun a correspondence with Dr Simeon Shakeshaft, a Fellow of St Catharine’s College, who was an authority on the literature of alchemy, in which I had developed a strong interest while studying at Heidelberg. We had continued to correspond, and Dr Shakeshaft had been instrumental in helping me assemble a small library of alchemical and hermetic texts. This gentleman, like the Rector of Evenwood, was a member of the Roxburghe Club, and I had recalled Dr Daunt mentioning that this mutual acquaintance had known his son during the latter’s time at King’s College.^† Dr Shakeshaft had recently written to me, at my accommodation address, on the subject of Barrett’s Magus,^‡ a curious compendium of occult lore which I had wished to acquire; and so, as we had not yet had occasion to meet face to face, I would have the satisfaction of killing two birds with one stone. Dr Shakeshaft’s set was at the far end of the charming three-sided, red-brick court that forms the principal feature of St Catharine’s. Having ascended a narrow stair-case to the first floor, I was welcomed most cordially into Dr Shakeshaft’s book-lined study. We talked for some time about a number of subjects of common interest, and my host brought out several superb items from his own collection of hermetic writings for my inspection. This was most pleasant, and it was a relief to expend mental energy on topics of such absorbing fascination after the difficult events of the past few days.

It was with some unwillingness, therefore, that I wrenched myself back to my purpose, and introduced the subject of Phoebus Daunt.

‘Did Mr Daunt have a wide circle of acquaintance in his College?’ I asked, as casually as I could.

Dr Shakeshaft pursed his lips in an effort to remember.

‘Hmm. I would not say wide. He was not popular amongst the sporting men, and, as I remember, most of his friends, such as they were, came from other Houses.’

‘Was there any particular friend or companion that you can recall?’ was my next question. This time the response was instantaneous.

‘Indeed there was. A Trinity man. They were very close, always going about together. I entertained them both myself – young Daunt’s father and I, you know, are old friends. But wait a moment.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Yes, now I remember. There was some trouble.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Not involving Daunt. The other gentleman. Young Pettingale.’

I remembered the name from the accounts given to me by John and Lizzie Brine of the dinner given by Lord Tansor, following which Mr Carteret had accused his daughter of secretly encouraging the attentions of Phoebus Daunt. He had been Daunt’s guest on that occasion, and they had been driven to Evenwood by Josiah Pluckrose.

‘May I ask, if you are able to tell me, the nature of the trouble you speak of?’

‘Ah,’ replied Shakeshaft, ‘you’d best talk to Maunder.’

And so I did. Jacob Maunder, DD, of Trinity College, occupied a splendid ground-floor set in Great Court, with a fine view of Nevile’s Fountain. Tall and stooping, with a lazy curling smile and a sardonic eye, he had occupied the position of Senior Proctor in the University for a period that coincided with Phoebus Daunt’s time at King’s College. The duties of a Proctor are of a disciplinary nature, and consequently expose the holders of this office to the more sordid and unpleasant propensities of those in statu pupillari.^* ‘When you perambulate the streets at night,’ as the Provost of King’s, Dr Okes, once memorably remarked to one of their number, ‘you rarely see the constellation Virgo.’ The post also required a stout heart, as the unfortunate Wale had famously discovered when he was pursued by a mob of undergraduates from the Senate House to the gates of his College.^†

I could not imagine Jacob Maunder fleeing in the face of intimidation. He appeared to me fully to deserve his reputation, described to me in brief by Dr Shakeshaft, as a stern and unyielding upholder of University statute and procedure, and a less than merciful judge of the follies of youth. Did he, I asked, handing him a note of recommendation from Shakeshaft, recollect a gentleman by the name of Pettingale?

‘This is a little irregular, Mr …’

‘Glyver.’ I felt no qualms about using the name by which Dr Shakeshaft knew me.

‘Quite. I see here that Dr Shakeshaft speaks very highly of you. Were you up at the University yourself?’

I told him that I had done my studying in Germany, at which he looked up from his perusal of Shakeshaft’s note.

‘Heidelberg? Why, then, you will know Professor Pfannenschmidt, I dare say.’

Of course I knew Johannes Pfannenschmidt, with whom I had spent many a wonderful hour in deep conversation concerning the religious mysteries of the Ancients. This acknowledgement of an acquaintance with the Herr Professor produced a visible mitigation of Dr Maunder’s raptorial demeanour, and appeared to remove any lingering scruples that he had concerning the propriety of answering my enquiry.

‘Pettingale. Yes, I recollect that gentleman. And his friend.’

‘Mr Phoebus Daunt?’

‘The same. My old friend’s son.’

‘Dr Shakeshaft mentioned some trouble concerning Mr Pettingale. It would assist me greatly, in the prosecution of a highly confidential matter, if you were able to inform me, in a little more detail, of its nature and consequences.’

‘Nicely put, Mr Glyver,’ he said. ‘I will not enquire further into your reasons for seeking this information. But insofar as the matter, in its general outline, is one of public record, I am willing to give you some account of the business.

‘I first came across Mr Lewis Pettingale when I apprehended him in a house of ill-fame – a not uncommon occurrence, I am afraid to say, amongst the undergraduate population of this University. Youth can be a little lax in point of moral resolve.’ He smiled. ‘He was disciplined, of course, and put on notice that, if it happened again, he would be rusticated.^* But the affair that Dr Shakeshaft has in mind was altogether more serious, though its conclusion appeared to exonerate Mr Pettingale of any taint of guilt or censure.

‘It began, from my point of view, when I was called upon, in my capacity as Senior Proctor, by a police inspector from London who wished to question Mr Pettingale in connexion with a serious case of forgery. It appears that the young man had gone to a firm of London solicitors – Pentecost & Vizard, as I recall – for assistance in the matter of an outstanding debt. He had taken with him a promissory note for the amount of one hundred pounds, signed by a Mr Leonard Verdant. The solicitors undertook to write to this Mr Verdant forthwith, and demand payment of the sum in question, on pain of legal proceedings immediately being taken out against him. Within twenty-four hours, a messenger had appeared at the solicitors’ office with the outstanding debt in cash, and a request from Mr Verdant for a signed receipt.

‘On being informed that the debt had been paid, Mr Pettingale went again to the solicitors to receive his money, which was paid to him, at his request, with a cheque drawn on the firm’s bankers – also my own, as it so happened, Dimsdale & Co., Cornhill. Well, the cheque was duly presented, and the matter was concluded to the satisfaction of all parties.

‘But then, a week or so later, a clerk in the solicitors’ office noticed that three cheques, to a total of eight hundred pounds, had been drawn on the firm’s account without, it appeared, any record of the transactions having been made. The alarm was duly raised and the police were called in. A few days later, a man by the name of Hensby was apprehended on the premises of the firm’s bank, attempting to present a further forged cheque, this time for seven hundred pounds.

‘Now for the fraud – for fraud it clearly was – to be brought off, two things were required: a specimen of the authorized signature, and a number of blank cheques. It was surmised by the police that the necessary signature might have been obtained from the receipt sent to this Mr Verdant, or even from the cheque paid to Mr Pettingale for the amount owed to him. It was recalled that Mr Pettingale had especially requested a cheque, rather than cash, and the police were also informed by the solicitors that no other cheques had been authorized since this one had been issued. The coincidence was obvious, and so both Mr Verdant and Mr Pettingale fell under suspicion. As far as Mr Pettingale was concerned, he could not deny, of course, that he had sought payment of the original debt from Mr Verdant, but he vehemently denied all knowledge of the subsequent forgeries, and, indeed, there was not a shred of evidence to connect him to them. When asked by the inspector why the money was owed to him, he replied that he had lent the money to this Verdant, whom he said he had met several times at the Newmarket races, for the settlement of a debt.’

‘And was there any reason to doubt his account?’ I asked.

Dr Maunder gave me a somewhat sceptical smile.

‘None that the police, or I, could uncover. Mr Pettingale was required to go with the officers to London, and was called as a witness at the subsequent trial; but he could not be identified by the man Hensby, who claimed that he had been casually employed by a gentleman – not Mr Pettingale – whom he had met in a coffee-house in Change-alley, to run various errands, one of which was to present the forged cheques at Dimsdale & Co. and to bring the proceeds back, at a pre-arranged time, to the coffee-house.’

‘This gentleman: was Hensby able to identify him?’

‘Unfortunately, no. He provided only a rather indistinct description, which rendered identification of this person by the police virtually impossible. As for Mr Verdant, when the police called at his address in the Minories he had vanished, and was of course never seen again. The poor dupe Hensby, for such I deem him to have been, was prosecuted, found guilty, and transported for life. A travesty of justice, of course. The fellow could hardly write his name, let alone demonstrate the skill to carry out what were, by all accounts, most convincing forgeries of the authorized signature.’

He ceased, and looked at me as if in expectation of further questioning.

‘From your most informative account, Dr Maunder, it certainly seems clear that the perpetrator was the mysterious Mr Verdant, perhaps working with others. Mr Pettingale appears to have been a perfectly innocent party in the business.’

‘You might say so,’ he replied, smiling. ‘I questioned Mr Pettingale myself, of course, on behalf of the University authorities, and could only conclude, with the police, that he had played no part in the conspiracy – or, rather, that there was no substantive evidence that he had played any part.’

He smiled again, and I took my cue.

‘May I ask, then, whether you entertained any personal doubts on the matter?’

‘Well now, Mr Glyver, it would not be right, not right at all, you know, to bring my personal feelings into this. As I say, what I have told you is a matter of public record. Beyond that – well, I am sure you understand. It does not signify in the least, of course, that I am by nature of a rather doubting turn of mind. And besides, the affair did not lay too deep a stain on Mr Pettingale’s character. After going down from here, I believe he was called to the Bar by Gray’s-Inn.’

‘And Mr Pettingale’s friend, Mr Phoebus Daunt?’

‘There is no reason at all to believe that he was implicated in the crime in any way. He was certainly not asked to account for himself by the police, or, indeed, by the University. The only connexion I could establish, in the course of questioning Mr Pettingale, was that he had accompanied his friend to Newmarket on several occasions.’

I thought for a moment.

‘Regarding the blank cheques, is it known how they were obtained? Was there, perhaps, an earlier break-in?’

‘You are right,’ said Dr Maunder. ‘There had been a break-in, some days before Mr Pettingale sought legal help on the matter of the outstanding debt. One must presume that the cheques were stolen then. Again, suspicion fell on the mysterious Verdant. But as it proved impossible to find this gentleman, well, there the matter rested. And now, Mr Glyver, if you will excuse me, I have an appointment with the Master.’

I thanked him for his time, we shook hands, and he showed me to the door.

Leaving Trinity College, I took an omnibus from the Market-square back to the station, and had only a few minutes to wait before the next train to London. As we rattled southwards, I felt a curious elation of spirits, as though a door – be it ever so small – had opened an inch or so, and let in a little gleam of precious light on the darkness through which I had been wandering.

Of Mr Lewis Pettingale’s guilt in the clever conspiracy described to me by Dr Maunder, I had not the least doubt; but it was clear that he had not worked alone. This Leonard Verdant, now: he had been a co-conspirator I was sure, a conclusion indicated, I thought, by his possession of a most unlikely name, concealing – whom? I had my suspicions, but they could not yet be tested. And then there was Mr Phoebus Daunt. Ah, Phoebus, the radiant one, unsullied and incorrupt! There he stood, as ever, whistling innocently in the shadows. Was he as guilty as his friend Pettingale and the elusive Mr Verdant? If so, what other iniquities did he have to his credit? At last, I began to sense that I was gaining ground on my enemy; that I had been given something that might, perhaps, give me the means I needed to destroy him.

Yet with regard to more pressing matters, all this was of scant comfort. I was returning to London with no more knowledge of why Mr Carteret had written his letter to Mr Tredgold than when I had started out; and the expectations that I had cherished that the secretary might be in possession of information to support my cause had also been shattered by his death. The only certainty I had brought back was that what Mr Carteret knew concerning the Tansor succession had led, directly or indirectly, to this catastrophe. As for me, what a change had been wrought in the matter of a few days! I had left London believing that I might be falling in love with Bella. I returned the helpless slave of another, in whose presence I constantly burned to be, and for love of whom I must turn my back on the certainty of happiness.

Do not ask me why I loved Miss Carteret. How can such an instantaneous passion be explained? She seemed beautiful to my eyes, certainly, more beautiful than anyone I had known in my life. Though I knew little of her character and disposition, she seemed to possess a discerning, well-stocked mind, and I knew from direct experience that she could claim musical ability well above the common. These accomplishments – and no doubt others of which I was yet unaware – were worthy of admiration and respect, of course; but I did not love her for them. I loved her because – because I loved her; because I could not help succumbing to this irresistible contagion of the heart. I loved her because choice was denied me by some greater force. I loved her because it was my fate to do so.

^*[‘Let us be judged by our actions’. Ed.]

^†[King’s is the neighbouring College to St Catharine’s. Ed.]

^‡[The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett, born between 1770 and 1780, is a seminal work on the subject of magic and occult philosophy. The Preface states that it was written ‘chiefly for the information of those who are curious and indefatigable in their enquiries into occult knowledge; we have, at a vast labour and expense, both of time and charges, collected whatsoever can be deemed curious and rare, in regard to the subject of our speculations in Natural Magic – the Cabala – Celestial and Ceremonial Magic – Alchymy – and Magnetism’. Ed.]

^*[‘Under guardianship or scholastic discipline’; i.e. undergraduates. Ed.]

^†[Alexander Wale of St John’s College, then Senior Proctor. The incident took place in April 1829. Ed.]

^*[i.e. sent down from the university for a specified time. Ed.]

PART THE FOURTH

The Breaking of the Seal

October–November 1853

Nothing wraps a man in such a mist of errors, as his

own curiosity in searching things beyond him.

Owen Felltham, Resolves (1623), xxvii,

‘Of Curiosity in Knowledge’

29

Suspicio^*

That night, I took my supper at Quinn’s – oysters, a lobster, some dried sprats on the side, followed by a bottle of the peerless Clos Vougeot from the Hotel de Paris. It was still early, and the Haymarket had not yet put on its midnight face. Through the window I contemplated the usual metropolitan bustle, the familiar panorama of unremarkable people doing unremarkable things, which you may see out of any window in London at eight o’clock on a Friday evening. But in a few hours’ time, after the crowds had poured out of the Theatre, taken their supper at Dubourg’s or the Café de l’Europe, and made their laughing way home to warmth and comfort, this broad and glittering thoroughfare of shops, restaurants, and cigar-divans would take on a very different aspect, transformed then into a heaving, swollen river of the damned. What is your pleasure, sir? You may find it here, or hereabouts, with little trouble, at any hour of the night after St Martin’s Church has tolled the final stroke of twelve. Liquor in which to drown; tobacco and song; boys or girls, or both – the choice is yours. Ah! How often have I thrown myself into that continually replenished stream!

Evenwood! Had I dreamed thee? Here, lying at my ease once more on the scaly back of Great Leviathan, feeling the monster’s deep, slow breath beneath me, its rumbling pulsing heart beating in time with my own, the things that I had so recently seen and heard and touched now seemed as real in imagination, and as unreal in fact, as the palace of Schahriar.^* And had I truly breathed the same air as Miss Emily Carteret, when I had stood so close to her that I could see the rise and fall of her breast, so close that I only had to stretch out my fingers to caress that pale flesh?

I loved her. That was the plain and simple truth. It had come upon me suddenly on swift wings, pitiless as death: inescapable, and undeniable. I felt no joy at my new condition, for how can the conquered slave be joyful? I loved her, without hope that she would ever return my love. I loved her, and it was bitter to me that I must break my dearest Bella’s heart. For there is no mistress like Love. And what cares she for those who suffer when their dearest one betrays them for love of another? Love only smiles a conqueror’s smile, to see her kingdom advanced.

A second bottle of the Clos Vougeot was perhaps a mistake, and at a little after ten o’clock I walked out into the street, somewhat unsteadily, with a light head and a heavy heart. It had begun to rain and, assailed by melancholy thoughts, and feeling a great need for company, I headed off to Leadenhall-street, in the hope of finding Le Grice taking his usual Friday supper at the Ship and Turtle. He had been there, as I had expected, but I had missed him by a matter of minutes, and no one could tell me where he had gone. Cursing, I found myself back in the street again. Normally, in such a mood of restless melancholy, I would have taken myself northwards, to Blithe Lodge; but I was too much of a coward to face Bella just yet. I would need a little time, to regain some composure, and to learn dissimulation.

Down to Trafalgar-square through the dirt and murk I wandered, and then eastwards along the Strand – aimlessly, as I thought; but before long I had passed St Stephen, Walbrook, and had begun to walk at a more purposeful pace.

Welcome, welcome! I had been gone too long, the opium-master said.

And so, bowing low, he led me through the kitchen, dark and vaporous, to a truckle-bed set against a greasy, dripping wall in the far room, where, curling myself up, I laid my head on a filthy bolster whilst the master, with many soothing words, plied me speedily with my means of transportation.

In Bluegate-fields I had a dream. And in my dream I lay on a cold mountain, with only the stars above me; but I could not move, for I was held down fast with heavy chains, about my legs and feet, around my chest and arms, and in a great loop around my neck. And I cried out for ease – from the bitter cold and from the pressing, suffocative weight of the chains – but no help came, and no voice returned my call, until at last I seemed to faint away.

A sleep within a sleep. A dream within a dream. I awake – from what? And my heart leaps, for now I stand in sunshine, warm and vivifying, in a secluded courtyard, where water plays and birds sing. ‘Is she here?’ I ask. ‘She is,’ comes the reply. And so I turn and see her, standing by the fountain, and smiling so sweetly that I think my heart will burst. In black mourning no more, but in a comely robe of dazzling white samite, with her dark hair flowing free, she holds out her hand to me: ‘Will you come?’

She leads me through an arched door into a deserted candlelit ballroom; faint echoes of a strange music reach us from some unimaginable distance. She turns to me. ‘Have you met Mr Verdant?’ And then a sudden wind extinguishes all the lights, and I hear water lapping at my feet.

‘I do apologize,’ I hear her saying from somewhere in the darkness. ‘But I have forgotten your name.’ She laughs. ‘A liar needs a good memory.’ And then she is gone, and I am left alone on a drear and lonely shore. I look out to see a heaving black ocean, with a pale-yellow light suffusing the horizon. In the distance, something is bobbing on the waves. I strain my eyes; and then, with a fearful pang, I see what it is.

A blackbird, stiff and dead, its wings outstretched, drifting into eternity.

The carriage-clock that stood on the mantel-piece struck half past five. It was now Sunday morning, and I had spent a second profitless night seeking oblivion in the company of my demons, returning home feeling sick and tired, and falling asleep in my chair in my coat and boots.

When I awoke, the room was cold, and had a strangely desolate air about it, though it was full of familiar things: my mother’s work-table, covered in papers as usual; next to it, the cabinet with its little drawers, overflowing with the notes I had made on the documents and journals she left behind; the curtained-off area at one end containing cameras and other photographic necessaries; the faded Turkey rug; the rows of books, each one a well-remembered old friend; the tripod-table on which I kept my travelling copy of Donne’s sermons; the portrait of my mother, which used to hang over the fireplace in the best parlour at Sandchurch; and, on the mantel-piece, next to the clock, the rosewood box that had once held ‘Miss Lamb’s’ two hundred sovereigns.

I sat staring into the empty hearth, exhausted in body, and troubled in spirit. What was happening to me? I had no happiness, no contentment, only restiveness and agitation. I was adrift on an ocean of mystery, like the blackbird in my dream – powerless, frozen. What dark creatures inhabited the unseen deeps beneath me? What landfall awaited me? Or was this my fate, to be forever pushed and pulled, now this way, now that, by the winds and currents of circumstance, without respite? The goal that I had once had constantly before me – simple and supreme – of proving my claim to be the lawfully begotten son of Lord Tansor, seemed to have become dismembered and dispersed, like a great imperial galleon full of treasure dashed to pieces on a rocky shore.

There was a piece of paper lying on the tripod-table beside me, a stub of pencil with it. Seizing both, I began to compose a hasty memorandum to myself, outlining the problems confronting me that were now demanding resolution.

I read over what I had written, three, four, five times, in mounting despair. These disjoined and yet, it seemed, intertwined and co-essential conundrums swirled and chattered and roared around my head like Satan’s legions, refusing utterly to coagulate into a single reasoned conclusion, until I could stand it no more.

As I stood up to throw off my great-coat, something fell out of the pocket, and landed on the hearth-rug. Looking down, I saw that it was the package containing the proofs of Dr Daunt’s translation of Iamblichus, handed to me by the servant from the George as I was about to take train from Stamford. It was impossible to bend my mind to such work at present, and so I threw the package on my work-table, intending to open it when my mind was clearer.

I dozed for an hour or so. When I awoke, the idea of a chop and some hot coffee suddenly thrust itself forward for my consideration. I examined the proposal and found it excellent in every way. It was still early, but I knew of a place.

I stood up, rather shakily reaching for my great-coat, which was lying on the floor. Whoa there!

And then the floor-boards seemed to fall away beneath me and I was tumbling through the air, spinning round and round, descending ever deeper into a great yawning, roaring void.

I came round to find Mrs Grainger dabbing my face with a wet napkin.

‘Lord, sir,’ she said, ‘I thought you was dead. Can you stand, sir? There now, a little more. I ’ave you, sir, don’t you worry. Dorrie ’ere’ll help. Look sharp, dear. Take Mr Glapthorn’s arm. Gentle does it. That’s it. All’s well now.’

I had never heard her say so many words to me. Sitting back in my chair, with the wet napkin tied round my forehead, I was also surprised to see her daughter standing by her side. Then, to my complete astonishment, I learned that it was Monday morning, and that I had slept the clock round.

After I had recovered a little, I thanked them both, and asked the girl how she was.

‘I am well, thank you, sir.’

‘As you see, Mr Glapthorn,’ said her mother, smiling weakly, ‘she goes on very well. A good girl still, sir.’

Dorrie herself said nothing, but seemed, indeed, in fine fettle, with a bright expression on her face, dressed in a neat little outfit that showed off her figure extremely well, and altogether looking winsome and contented.

I said I was glad to hear, and to see for myself, that Dorrie appeared to be prospering, and felt not a little satisfaction that I had done some good by the simple expedient of employing her mother, and sending a little money to Dorrie every now and again.

‘Prospering?’ exclaimed Mrs Grainger, with a sly look at her daughter. ‘Why, you may say so, sir. Go on, Dorrie, spill it.’

I looked quizzically at the girl, who blushed slightly before speaking.

‘We have come to tell you, sir, that I am to be married, and to thank you for all you have done for us.’

She bobbed sweetly, giving me such a fond and modest look as she did so, that it fair made my heart melt.

‘And who is your husband to be, Dorrie?’ I asked.

‘If you please, sir, his name is Martlemass, Geoffrey Martlemass.’

‘A most excellent name. Mrs Geoffrey Martlemass. So far, so good. And what sort of a man is Mr Martlemass?’

‘A good and kind man, sir,’ she replied, unable to hold back a smile.

‘Better yet. And what does good and kind Mr Geoffrey Martlemass do?’

‘He is a clerk, sir, to Mr Gillory Piggott, of Gray’s-Inn.’

‘A legal gentleman! Mr Martlemass holds a pretty full hand, I see. Well, I congratulate you, Dorrie, on your good fortune in finding good, kind Mr Martlemass. But you must tell him that I shall expect no nonsense from him, and that if he does not love you as you deserve, he shall have me to answer to.’

A little more good-humoured raillery on my part followed, after which Dorrie ran off to fetch in some breakfast, Mrs Grainger set to with mop and bucket, and I repaired to my bedchamber to wash my face and change my linen.

With breakfast over, and my chin shaved, I felt revived and ready for the day. Dorrie was off to meet her beau at Gray’s-Inn, and that piece of information immediately settled the matter of what I would do with myself for the next few hours.

‘If you will allow me, Dorrie,’ I said gallantly, ‘I’ll escort you.’

I offered her my arm, an act that appeared to amaze Mrs Grainger greatly, and off we went.

It was a clear bright morning, though there was a stiff breeze off the river. As we walked, Dorrie spoke a little more of Mr Geoffrey Martlemass, whom I began to conceive as a dependable sort of fellow, if a little serious in his outlook, an impression confirmed when we encountered a small man of notably anxious mien, distinguished by a pair of magnificently bushy mutton-chops,^* standing by the entrance to Field-court.

‘Dorothy, my love,’ he cried, in an anguished tone, on seeing us. ‘You are past your time. Whatever has happened?’

Dorrie, releasing her arm from mine and taking his, laughed and chided him gently that it was only a minute or two beyond the hour appointed, and that he must not worry so about her.

‘Worry? But naturally I worry,’ he said, apparently distraught that he could ever be thought too solicitous for the welfare of one so precious. We were introduced, and Mr Martlemass, Dorrie’s senior by some years, removed his hat (revealing an almost perfectly bald pate except for two little tufts of hair above each ear) and made a low bow, before grasping my hand and shaking it so vigorously that Dorrie had to tell him to stop.

‘You, sir,’ he said, with great solemnity, replacing his hat and throwing back his shoulders, ‘have the appearance of a man, and yet I know you to be a saint. You amaze me, sir. I thought the age of miracles had passed; but here you are, a living, breathing saint, walking the streets of London.’

In this wise, Mr Martlemass began to heap praises upon my head for, as he put it, ‘rescuing Dorothy and her estimable parent from certain death or worse’. I did not enquire of him what he conceived could be worse than death; but the warmth of his gratitude for the little I had done to remove Dorrie from the life in which I had first found her was most apparent, and rather affecting. I then learned that he was a member of a small philanthropical society that took an especial interest in the rescue and rehabilitation of fallen females, as well as being a churchwarden at St Bride’s,^† where he had first encountered Dorrie. Normally I cannot abide a treacly do-gooder, but there was a simple sincerity about Mr Martlemass that I could not help but admire.

I let the little man rattle on, which he seemed determined to do, but at last proclaimed that I must leave them, and so made to go.

‘Oh, Mr Martlemass,’ I said, turning back as though struck by an afterthought. ‘I believe an old College friend of mine has chambers in Gray’s-Inn. We have lost touch, and I would so like to see him again. I wonder whether you know him by any chance – Mr Lewis Pettingale?’

‘Mr Pettingale? You don’t say so! Why, certainly I know the gentleman. He has the set above my employer, Mr Gillory Piggott, QC. Mr Piggott is in Court today,’ he added, lowering his voice somewhat, ‘which is why I have been allowed to take an hour or so for an early fish ordinary at the Three Tuns^* with my intended. Mr Piggott is a most considerate employer.’

He directed me to a black-painted door in a range of red-brick houses on the far side of the court. I thanked him, and said that I would try to call on Mr Pettingale the next day, as I had some urgent business to attend to in another part of town.

We parted, and I walked off towards Gray’s-Inn-lane, dirty and dismal even on such a bright day. Stopping at a book-stall, I began idly turning over the mouldering tomes there displayed (ever hopeful, like all bibliophiles, of unearthing some great rarity). After five or ten minutes, I returned to Field-court.

The court was deserted, the love-birds had flown; and so through the black door I went, and up the stairs.

^*[‘Suspicion’. Ed.]

^*[The Sultan to whom Scheherazade tells her stories in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Ed.]

^*[Side-whiskers, narrow at the ears, broad and rounded at the lower jaw. Ed.]

^†[In Fleet Street. Designed by Wren and completed in 1703. Ed.]

^*[The Three Tuns Tavern was in Billingsgate. Its celebrated fish ‘ordinaries’ – i.e. fixed-price meals – were served at one and four o’clock; the charge was 1s. 6d., including butcher’s meat and cheese. Ed.]

30

Noscitur e sociis^*

In my work as private agent for Mr Tredgold, I had learned to follow my nose. It has rarely let me down. There was a distinct smell about Mr Lewis Pettingale, though I knew nothing about him, only that he appeared to be a close associate of Daunt’s. But this was enough for me to give up an hour or two of my time, with the object of making his acquaintance, and to see what might come of it. I had my opening planned. It might be instructive, I thought, to discuss the subject of forged cheques.

On the first floor, a painted name-plate greeted me: ‘Mr L. J. Pettingale’. I put my ear to the door. Someone within coughs. An inner door closes. I knock softly – it would not do simply to walk in – but no one answers. So I enter.

It is a large, well-appointed chamber, with oak panel-work, a stone fireplace, and a plaster ceiling of the Stuart period. To my left as I enter are two tall windows that give out onto the court below. A fire blazes pleasantly in the dog-grate^† on the hearth, on either side of which two comfortable chairs are set. Above the fireplace hangs a painting of a bay horse, a terrier at its feet, standing in a park landscape. In the corner of the room, to my right, is another door, closed, through which I can hear the sound of someone attempting, in a thin tenor voice, a version of the aria Il mio tesoro,^* to the accompaniment of water splashing.

I decide to leave the singer to his ablutions, settle myself in one of the chairs, feet on the fender, and light up a cigar. I have almost finished smoking it when the door in the corner opens and a tall, thin man emerges, wearing an ornately fashioned brocade dressing-robe, Persian slippers, and a tasselled skull-cap made of red velvet, from beneath which a few meagre strands of straw-coloured hair descend almost to his shoulders. He is about my own age, but looks prematurely aged. His skin is sallow and papery, and from where I am sitting I am not sure that he possesses eyebrows.

‘Good morning,’ I say, smiling broadly, and throwing my cigar butt into the fire.

He stands for a moment, disbelief on his skull-like face. ‘Who the devil are you?’

His voice, like everything else about him, is thin, with a reedy, querulous tremor about it.

‘Grafton, Edward Grafton. Pleased to meet you. Cigar? No? Oh well, bad habit, I’m sure.’

He is taken aback for a moment by my coolness, and then asks haughtily whether he knows me.

‘Well, now, there’s a question,’ I reply. ‘Are you of a philosophical turn? For we might spend a good few hours considering the nature of knowledge. It is a large subject. We might begin with Aquinas, who said that, for any knower, knowledge is after the fashion of his own nature; or, as St Augustine put it …’

But Mr Pettingale seems disinclined to enter into a discussion on this interesting question. He angrily stamps a slippered foot, threatens to call for assistance if I do not leave at once, and grows quite red – almost replicating the colour of his skull-cap – with the exertion of it all. I tell him to calm himself; that I have merely come to seek a professional opinion; and that I knocked at the door but could not make myself heard. Somewhat calmer, he asks whether I am in the profession myself – an instructing solicitor, perhaps? Alas, no, I tell him; my interest is personal, though it is a matter of law on which I wish to consult him. I invite him, with a broad smile, to sit down, which he does, a little reluctantly, looking pleasingly foolish in his dandyish get-up. As he takes his seat, I vacate my own chair and stand with my back to one of the tall windows, through which soft sunshine is now pouring.

‘Here it is, Mr Pettingale,’ I say. ‘I put a case to you. Some years ago, two rascals masquerading as gentlemen swindle a firm of solicitors out of a considerable amount of money – let us say, for the sake of argument, fifteen hundred pounds. The thing is done cleverly – one almost admires the cleverness – and the two scallywags come out the other end without a stain on their characters, but considerably richer than when they started. There is a third rascal, but we shall come to him in a moment. More than this, they so contrive matters that, when all is done, an innocent man is sent to the other side of the world, to toil his life out, on their behalf, in the wilderness of Van Diemen’s Land.^* Now, the question on which I wish to seek your professional opinion is this: knowing, as I believe I do, the identity of two of the three persons I have described, how may I best lay a charge against them, so that they can be brought at last to justice?’

The effect of my speech is most gratifying. His mouth falls open; he reddens even more, and begins to sweat.

‘You say nothing, Mr Pettingale? A lawyer with nothing to say! A most uncommon sight. But by your uncomfortable demeanour, I see you have perceived that I have been playing a little game with you. Well then; let us be more direct, shall we? What is done is done. Your secret is safe with me – for the time being, at least. I have no argument with you, Mr Pettingale. My real interest lies in your friend, the distinguished author. You know to whom I allude?’

He nods dumbly.

‘I wish to know a little more about your association with this gentleman. I will not trouble you with my reasons.’

‘Blackmail, I suppose,’ says Pettingale mournfully, taking off his cap and using it to wipe his perspiring brow. ‘Though how you come to know all about it is beyond me.’

‘Blackmail? Why yes, you have it, Mr Pettingale. A palpable hit! You are a sharp one, I see. So: the floor is yours. Be quick, be bold, hold nothing back. I would particularly wish that you do not hold anything back. Let us be completely frank with one another. And, for good measure, you may throw in a few words concerning the third rascal. Again, I’m sure you know to whom I am referring?’

Once more he nods, but does not speak. I wait; but still he says nothing. He bites his lip, and his knuckles turn white with gripping the arms of the chair so hard. I begin to get a little impatient, and tell him so.

‘I cannot,’ he says at last, with a kind of faltering moan. ‘They – they will—’

As he is speaking, I see him give a sudden darting glance towards the door, and in a flash he is on his feet. But I am ready for him. I throw him back into his chair and stand over him. I ask again for him to begin his recitation, but still he will not sing out. For the third and last time, I tell him to speak, taking out one of my pocket-pistols, and laying it with exaggerated deliberation on the table. He blanches, but shakes his head. I try another means of encouragement, and voilà!

The prospect of having your fingers broken one by one appears to be a mighty incentive to do as you are told; and in no time at all he capitulates. Here, then, though a little more persuading was required as we went along, is what Mr Lewis Pettingale, of Gray’s-Inn, told me on that October afternoon.

He had been introduced to Phoebus Daunt at the Varsity by a mutual friend, a Kingsman^* by the name of Bennett. They had hit it off straight away, and quickly cemented their friendship by discovering a shared, though largely untested, enthusiasm for the turf. Off they would go to Newmarket, whenever occasion offered, where they got in with a rather dangerous set of men up from London. These flash coves knew what they were about, and they welcomed Daunt and Pettingale with open arms. Bets were placed by the pair and, in short order, money was lost. No matter; their new friends were more than willing to advance them a little credit; and then a little more. At last, with the touching optimism of youth, our heroes determined on a rather risky course: they would hazard all that they had – or, rather, all that they had been advanced – on a single race. If their choice came in, all would be well.

But it did not come in, and all was not well. However, their benefactors took a statesman-like view of the situation. If the gents would co-operate in a scheme that this company of obliging family men^* had in view, then they would be pleased to consider the debt paid. There might even be a little something in it for them. If not … The offer was quickly taken up, and one of the gang, an impressive party with a prominent set of Newgate knockers,^† was deputed to assist the noviciates in the prosecution of a little well-planned fraud.

The two young scholars took to the business with a certain aptitude for what was required, particularly on the part of the Rector’s son. I need not repeat what was told to me by Dr Maunder, about how the fraud was accomplished; I will only say that Pettingale revealed that the shadowy person who had employed the dupe, Hensby, had been Daunt, and that it was Daunt also who, after demonstrating to the gang a remarkable facility to replicate signatures, had actually carried out the forgeries.

‘And who was Mr Verdant?’ I asked. ‘He was part of the dodge, wasn’t he?’

‘Certainly,’ said Pettingale. ‘A leading light in the little fraternity we got mixed up with at Newmarket. He was the one appointed to shepherd us through the business. Couldn’t have done it without him. Burglary was his trade. None better than Verdant. He broke into the solicitor’s office and got us the blank cheques.’

‘Verdant, now,’ I said. ‘Uncommon name, that.’

‘Pseudonymous,’ Pettingale came back. ‘Not his own, though few people knew his real one.’

‘But you did, I think?’

‘Oh, yes. His mother knew him as Pluckrose. Josiah Pluckrose.’

I said nothing on hearing Pluckrose’s name, but inwardly exulted that the suspicions that I had been harbouring as to the identity of Mr Verdant had been proved correct. The origin of his pseudonym was nothing more than this. At Doncaster, in the year ’38, he had put twenty stolen guineas on a rank outsider called Princess Verdant, who rewarded his faith in her by coming in at extremely favourable odds, though her victory may have been assisted by the fact – barely worth mentioning – that she was a four-year-old entered in a race for three-year-olds.^* No matter. Thereafter, he was known as ‘Mr Verdant’ to his friends and associates amongst the capital’s criminal fraternities.

After the dodge on the solicitors had been successfully brought off, Pluckrose fell out with his former colleagues over the division of the spoils and quit the gang in high dudgeon, vowing to be revenged on them all. And revenged he was. Not one of his confederates – five in number – lived to see the year out: one was found in the river at Wapping with his throat cut; another was bludgeoned to death as he left the Albion Tavern one evening;^† the three that remained simply disappeared from the face of the earth, and were never seen again. Pettingale could not conclusively say that Pluckrose had done for them all himself; but that he had signed their death warrants, as it were, seemed certain.

‘The last to go was Isaac Gabb, the youngest member of the gang – elder brother kept the public-house down in Rotherhithe where the gang used to meet. Rather a decent fellow, young Gabb, despite his roguery. The brother took it hard, and takes it hard still, as I hear. He’d have come down on Pluckrose if he could, not a doubt of it, but he knew him only as Verdant, you see, and as such he’d disappeared, like Master Isaac, without a trace, and was never heard of again. Verdant was dead. Long live Pluckrose.’

Then Pettingale’s story turned to the subject in which I was most interested. After making a little money from the original fraud, Phoebus Daunt developed a taste for criminality, and began to look upon himself as quite a captain of the swell mob. Having no clear idea of what he would do in the world when he had taken his degree, though he might babble to Lord Tansor about the prospect of a Fellowship, and feeling that a man of his genius needed a certain minimum amount of capital with which to establish a position in society, which he could not at that moment lay his hands on, he conceived the practical, though by no means original, notion of taking what he needed from other people. To assist him in the enterprise, he enlisted his friend and fellow fraudster Pettingale, for his legal brain, and their erstwhile companion-in-arms Josiah Pluckrose, alias Verdant, for his brawn, as well as his demonstrable skills with the jemmy and the other tools of the ken-cracker’s art.^*

I own that I could not have been more astonished if Pettingale had told me that Phoebus Daunt was none other than Spring-Heeled Jack himself.^† But he had even more to tell.

The extraordinary head for business, which Lord Tansor believed that he had discovered in his favourite, was in reality nothing else but a low talent for devising schemes to relieve the gullible of their money. I might have regarded this as harmless enough, for a man must live, and there are a million deserving fools in the world ready and willing to be fleeced; but when he practised his deceits on my father, who was not in the least gullible, only properly trusting of someone to whom he had shown an uncommon degree of preference, and from whom he had a right to expect loyalty and deference – then the case was very much altered. And it was all to ingratiate himself still further with his Lordship, with the object – duly attained – of insinuating himself ever more closely into the latter’s affairs.

The ‘speculations’, to which he had freely confessed to Lord Tansor, were nothing but gimcrackery; the ‘profits’ that he returned to his protector were only the proceeds of various swindles and chicaneries. Some were epic in conception: imaginary gold-mines in Peru; a projected tunnel under the Swiss Alps; proposed railway lines that were never built. Others were more modest, or were merely confidence tricks performed on the unwary.

False documents of all kinds, concocted with superlative skill and aplomb by Daunt, were their principal weapons: inventively convincing references and recommendations ascribed to men of known character and reputation; fictitious statements of assets from distinguished banking-houses and accomptants; counterfeit certificates of ownership; dexterously produced maps of non-existent tracts of land; grandiose plans for buildings that would never be built. Daunt, with help from the young lawyer Pettingale, began to attain a certain mastery of the spurious, whilst Pluckrose was retained to encourage the faint-hearted amongst those they preyed upon, and to discourage those inclined to squeal about their losses to the authorities. They chose their victims with infinite care, adopted clever disguises and aliases, hired premises, employed dupes like the unfortunate Hensby, and conducted themselves always with gravity and sobriety; and then, when all was done, they evaporated into thin air, leaving not a wrack behind.

Now I had the measure of Phoebus Rainsford Daunt indeed, and what a joy it was to have the truth revealed at last! The insolent and preening scribbler was also a deep-dyed sharp: a practised chizzler, no better than the macers on the Highway.^* Mr Pettingale continued to sing out nicely. His colour had returned to its customary pastiness, and perspiration no longer stood out on his forehead. Indeed, he seemed, to my eye, to be warming to his task, and I began to sense that all was not as it once had been between the lawyer and his literary friend.

‘We don’t see each other as much as we did,’ he said at last, looking meditatively into the fire. ‘All very well, you know, when we were younger. Difficult to explain – excites the mind greatly, this sort of work. And brings home the bacon. But it started to go against the grain a bit – some of the chaps we took were quite decent sorts of fellows, wives and families, etcetera, and we left them with nothing. Anyway, I told Daunt we couldn’t go on for ever. Sooner or later we’d slip up. Didn’t fancy following Hensby on the boat^* – or worse. Came to a head when that unutterable blackguard Pluckrose did for his wife. Never understood why Daunt brought him in – and told him so. Capable of anything, Pluckrose. We knew that, of course. Bit of a flare-up, I’m afraid. Words said, and all that. Gulling a flat^† one thing. Topping your wife quite another. Very bad business. Worst of it was that Pluckrose got off by some piece of trickery and some other cove paid his account in full and swung for what he’d done. Clever work, that, never seen better. Sir Ephraim Gadd, briefed by Tredgolds. Anyway, truth is, I thought it was time we threw over Pluckrose once and for all and went steady. Thought Daunt would agree – in the public eye, toast of the literary world, and all that. He said I might do as I pleased, but he had only just got started, and that a new tack he was on would set him up for life.’

‘New tack?’

‘Apropos his uncle, as he called him. Lord Tansor. Powerful gent. Know the name, do you? Lost his own son, I believe, and thought he’d have Daunt instead. Very rum, but there it is. Old boy bit of a tartar, but rich as Croesus, and Daunt was comfortably situated, for he stood in a fair way to step into the old man’s shoes in the course of time. But he couldn’t wait. Thought he’d take a little bit here and there in advance. Ready cash first, slyly done, for he had Uncle Tansor’s trust, you see. Then a little judicious forging of the old boy’s signature – second nature to Daunt. Rather a genius in that way. Amazing to observe. Give him a minute and he’d produce you the signature of the Queen herself, and good enough to fool the Prince-Consort. Old boy as sharp as they come, but Daunt knew how to play him. Reeled him in nice as you like. Didn’t suspect a thing. A dangerous game though – I told him so, but nothing would move him. Old boy’s secretary got on the scent, keen old cove called Carteret. When Mr Secretary became suspicious of him, Daunt started on his new tack. We’d been working a sweet little turn, our first for some months, but Daunt went cold on it. Everything put in jeopardy. More words, I fear. Much said in anger. Not pleasant. He said he had something better.’

‘And what was it?’

‘Only this: the old boy has a very grand house in the country – been there myself. Said house in the country packed to the rafters with portable booty.’

‘Booty?’

‘Prints, porcelain, glassware, books – Daunt knew a bit about books. All cleverly and quietly done, of course, and everything now laid up safely in a repository – in case the old boy didn’t come across, he said, or against some unseen occurrence. Worth a king’s ransom.’

‘And where is this repository?’

‘Ah, if only I could tell you. He cut me out. Dissolved the partnership. Haven’t seen him these twelve months.’

I had him now, had him tight in the palm of my hand! After all these years, I had been given the means to bring him down. His box at the Opera, his house in Mecklenburgh-square, his horses, and his dinners – all paid for by the proceeds of crime! I was almost delirious with joy at the prospect of my triumph. Why, I could now destroy him at a moment’s notice; and, in the ensuing scandal, would Lord Tansor rush to his heir’s defence? I think not.

‘You’d speak out against him, of course,’ I said to Pettingale.

‘Speak out? What do you mean?’

‘Publicly declare what you have just told me.’

‘Now hang on a moment.’ Pettingale made to get up out of his chair, but I pushed him back.

‘Something wrong, Mr Pettingale?’

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I can’t, you know. Implicate myself, and all that. And my life wouldn’t be worth a sniff.’

‘Don’t take on so,’ I said soothingly. ‘I might only need you to testify privately to Lord Tansor. No repercussions. Just a quiet conversation with his Lordship. You could do that all right, couldn’t you?’

He thought for a moment. To aid reflection, I picked up my pistol from the table.

At length, looking whiter and pastier than ever, he said that he supposed he could, if matters were so arranged that his identity was concealed from Lord Tansor.

‘We’ll need some evidence,’ I said. ‘Something unequivocal, in writing. Could you lay your hands on such a thing?’

He nodded, and bowed his head.

‘Bravo, Pettingale,’ I said with a smile, patting him on the shoulders. ‘But remember this: if you tell your former associates of our conversation, or if you subsequently take it into your head to be unco-operative, you may be assured of paying a very high price. I hope we understand each other?’

He did not reply, so I repeated my question. He looked up at me, with such a weary and resigned look.

‘Yes, Mr Grafton,’ he said, closing his eyes and giving a great sigh. ‘I understand you perfectly.’

^*[‘He is known by his companions’. Ed.]

^†[A free-standing, raised fire-basket of wrought iron, usually on ornamental legs and having a decorated back-plate. Ed.]

^*[From Mozart’s Don Giovanni, sung by Don Ottavio, Donna Anna’s fiancé. Convinced that Don Giovanni has killed Anna’s father, Don Ottavio swears to avenge her and to return ‘as the messenger of punishment and death’. Ed.]

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

^*[i.e. a member of King’s College. Ed.]

^*[A slang term for the criminal classes. Ed.]

^†[Heavily greased side-whiskers, which swept back to, or over, the ears. Ed.]

^*[A common method of rigging races, along with pulling favourites and doping. As Baron Alderson noted in his summing up of a case brought before the Court of Exchequer after the 1844 Derby, ‘if gentlemen will condescend to race with blackguards they must expect to be cheated’. Ed.]

^†[At 153 Aldersgate Street. Ed.]

^*[Ken-cracker: slang term for house-breaker. Ed.]

^†[A terrifying cloaked figure that began to terrorize London in 1837. His usual modus operandi was to pounce on unsuspecting passers-by, often women, and rip at their clothes with claw-like hands. He was sometimes said to breathe fire, had eyes that burned like hot coals, and was capable of leaping great heights over walls and fences. Whether Jack was real or imagined is still debated, though the attacks were widely reported in the press. Ed.]

^*[Sharp: someone constantly ready to deceive you; chizzler: slang term from chizzle, to cheat; macers: thieves or sharps (‘Flash Dictionary’, in Sinks of London Laid Open, 1848). By ‘the Highway’ the author means the Ratcliffe Highway, which ran from East Smithfield to Shadwell High Street. It was described by Watts Phillips in The Wild Tribes of London (1855) as ‘the head-quarters of unbridled vice and drunken violence – of all that is dirty, disorderly, and debased’. Ed.]

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

^†[Slang term for a gullible victim. Ed.]

31

Flamma fumo est proxima^*

I left Field-court in the highest of spirits. At last I had the means to destroy Daunt’s reputation, as he had once destroyed mine. It was exhilarating to feel my power over my enemy, and to know that he was even now going about his business in ignorance of the Damoclean sword hanging over him. But still there was the question of when to draw on Pettingale’s testimony, and on the evidence that he claimed he could provide concerning Daunt’s criminal activities. To do so before I could prove to Lord Tansor that I was his son would be an incomplete revenge. How infinitely more tormenting it would be for Daunt if, at the very moment of his destruction, I could stand revealed as the true heir!

My thoughts now returned to Mr Carteret’s murder, and to the question of his ‘discovery’. He had said to me, during our meeting in Stamford, that the matter that he had wished to lay before Mr Tredgold had a critical bearing on Daunt’s prospects. I was now absolutely certain that Mr Carteret had been in possession of information relating to the Tansor succession that would have helped me establish my identity; it might even have provided the unassailable proof that I had been seeking. It therefore followed that what was of the utmost value to me had also been of value to someone else.

Suspicions and hypotheses filled my head, but I could come to no clear conclusion. Back in my rooms, I wrote a long memorandum to Mr Tredgold in which I attempted to marshal under various heads all the various matters relating to recent events. Then I walked briskly to Paternoster-row, and knocked on the Senior Partner’s door.

There was no reply. I knocked again. Then Rebecca appeared, coming down the internal stairs that led to Mr Tredgold’s private apartments.

‘’E’s not there,’ she said. ‘’E left for Canterbury yesterday, to see ’is brother.’

‘When will he be back?’ I asked.

‘Thursday,’ she said.

Three days. I simply could not wait.

When I sat down at my desk I found an envelope containing a black-edged card, with the following communication printed in black-letter type:

I duly sat down to write a formal note of acceptance to Mr Gutteridge, and a personal note to Miss Carteret, which I called for one of the clerks to take to the Post-office.

This business done, I determined at once to go down to Canterbury, to see my employer. I therefore instantly dashed off a note to Bella, whom I had been engaged to meet that evening, and consulted my Bradshaw.

I arrived in Canterbury at last to find myself standing before a tall, rather forbidding three-storey residence close by the Westgate. Marden House stood a little back from the road, separated from it by a narrow paved area and a low brick wall topped with railings.

I was admitted, and then shown into a downstairs room. A few moments later, Dr Jonathan Tredgold entered.

He was shorter and a little heavier than his brother, with the same feathery hair, though darker and in somewhat shorter supply. He held my card in his hand.

‘Mr Edward Glapthorn, I believe?’

I gave a slight bow.

‘I beg you to excuse this intrusion, Dr Tredgold,’ I began, ‘but I hoped it might be possible to speak with your brother.’

He pulled his shoulders back, and looked at me as if I had said something insulting.

‘My brother has been taken ill,’ he said. ‘Seriously ill.’

He saw the shock that his words had produced, and gestured to me to sit down.

‘This is sad news, Dr Tredgold,’ I began. ‘Very sad. Is he—’

‘A paralytic seizure, I am afraid. Completely unexpected.’

Dr Tredgold could not give me a categorical assurance, as things then stood, that his brother’s paralysis would pass quickly, or that, even if it did abate, there would not be severe and permanent debilitation of his powers.

‘I believe that my brother has spoken of you,’ he said after a short space of silence. Then he suddenly slapped his knee and cried, ‘I have it! You were amanuensis, secretary, or what not, to the son of the authoress.’

I struggled to conceal the effect of this wholly unexpected and astonishing reference to my foster-mother, but evidently without success.

‘You are surprised at my powers of recall, no doubt. But I only have to be told something once, you see, and it can be brought to mind in perpetuity. My dear brother calls it a phenomenon. It was a matter of much amusement between us – a little game we would play whenever he came here. Christopher would always try to catch me out, but he never would, you know. He mentioned to me, some years ago now, I believe, that you had such a connexion with Mrs Glyver, who I believe was a client of the firm’s and whose works of fiction he and I – and our sister – used greatly to admire; and of course I have never forgotten it. It is a gift I have; and, in addition to the harmless amusement that it affords my brother and me whenever we meet, it has had some practical use in my medical career.’

His words were delivered with a succession of deep sighs. It was apparent that a close bond united the two brothers, and I divined also that the doctor’s expert knowledge made him less sanguine, with regard to the Senior Partner’s prognosis, than he might have been without it.

‘Dr Tredgold,’ I ventured, ‘I have come to regard your brother as more than an employer. Since I first came into his service, he has become, I might almost say, a kind of father to me; and his generosity towards me has been out of all proportion to my deserts. We have also shared many interests – of a specialist character. In short, he is a person I esteem highly, and it pains me greatly to hear this terrible news. I wonder, would it be at all presumptuous if—’

‘You would like to see him?’ Dr Tredgold broke in, anticipating my request. ‘And then, perhaps, we might take a little supper together.’

I accompanied Dr Tredgold upstairs, to a bedchamber at the rear of the house. A nurse was sitting by the bed, whilst in a chair by the window sat a lady in black, reading. She looked up as we entered.

‘Mr Edward Glapthorn, may I present my sister, Miss Rowena Tredgold. Mr Glapthorn is come from the office, my dear, on his own account, to ask after Christopher.’

I judged her to be some fifty years of age, and, with her prematurely silvered hair and blue eyes, she bore a most remarkable resemblance to her afflicted brother, who lay on the bed, deathly still, eyes closed, his mouth drawn down unnaturally to one side.

The introductions over, she returned to her book, though out of the tail of my eye I caught her looking at me intently as I stood, with Dr Tredgold, by the bedside.

The sight of my employer in such distress of body and mind was most painful to me. Dr Tredgold whispered that the paralysis had affected his brother’s left side, that his vision was seriously impaired, and that it was presently almost impossible for him to speak. I asked him again whether there was a chance of recuperation.

‘He may recover. I have known it before. The swelling in the brain is still in the acute phase. We must watch him closely for any deterioration. If he begins to wake soon, then we may hope that, in time, he may regain motivity, and perhaps also some operative residue of his communicative faculties.’

‘Was there any immediate cause?’ I enquired. ‘Some extreme excitation of feeling, or other catastrophe, that might have precipitated the attack?’

‘Nothing discernible,’ he replied. ‘He arrived here last night in the best of spirits. When he did not come down at his usual hour this morning, my sister said I should go up to see whether all was well. He was in the grip of the seizure when I found him.’

I took supper with Dr Tredgold and his sister in a cold, high-ceilinged room, sparsely furnished except for a monstrous faux-Elizabethan buffet that took up nearly a whole wall. Miss Tredgold said little during the meal, which was as sparse as the furniture; but I felt her eye upon me more than once. Her look was one of strained concentration, as though she was attempting, unsuccessfully, to recall something from the depths of memory.

Suddenly, there was a loud knocking at the front door, and a moment or two later a servant came in to announce that Dr Tredgold was wanted urgently at the house of a neighbour who had been taken ill. I used the opportunity to take my leave of the doctor and his sister. Though they pressed me to stay the night, I preferred instead to take a room at the Royal Fountain Hotel. I wished to be alone with my thoughts; for now I had lost my only ally, the one person who could help me find a way through the labyrinth of supposition and speculation surrounding the death of Mr Carteret.

I secured my accommodation with little trouble. Having a headache, I took a few drops of laudanum,^* and closed my eyes. But my sleep was troubled by a strange and disturbing dream.

In it, I appear to be standing in a darkened place of great size. At first I am alone, but then, as if a light is slowly being let in from some unseen source, I discern the figure of Mr Tredgold. He is sitting in a chair with a book in his hands, slowly turning over the pages, and lingering every now and again on some point of interest. He looks up and sees me. His mouth is drawn down to one side, and he appears to be mouthing words and sentences, but no sound comes out. He beckons me over, and points to the book. I look down to see what he wishes to show me. It is a portrait of a lady in black. I look closer. It is the painting of Lady Tansor, which I had seen hanging in Mr Carteret’s work-room at Evenwood. Then more light floods in, and behind Mr Tredgold I make out a figure on a black-draped dais, sitting behind a tall desk and writing in a great ledger. This person, too, is dressed in black, and seems to be wearing a grey full-bottomed wig, like a judge; but then I see that it is in fact Miss Rowena Tredgold, with her hair let loose around her shoulders. She stops writing and addresses me.

‘Prisoner at the bar. You will give the court your name.’

I open my mouth to speak, but cannot. I am as dumb as Mr Tredgold. She asks me for my name again, but still I am unable to speak. Somewhere a bell tolls.

‘Very well,’ she says, ‘since you will not tell the court who you are, the verdict of the court is that you shall be taken hence to a place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. Do you have anything to say?’

I fill my lungs with air, and try to scream out a protest at the top of my voice. But there is only silence.

Back in Temple-street the following day, I remained indoors, beset by a vacillating and porous state of mind in which nothing could be fixed or retained; and so, with the afternoon drawing to a close, I thought I would go down to the Temple Steps, and take my skiff out on the river for half an hour.

Later that evening, Bella received me at Blithe Lodge with her customary warmth, and with many demonstrations of amity.

It was our first meeting since I had made the acquaintance of Miss Carteret, and I was never more conscious of being ‘a thing of sin and guilt’.^* I sat a little way off and watched Bella as she sat by the fire in Kitty Daley’s drawing-room with some of The Academy’s junior nymphs. Whores, every one of them, of course, but a sweeter, kinder, and livelier bunch of girls you could not wish to meet; and Bella was the sweetest and kindest of them all. She looked so fresh and alive, discoursing easily and amusingly to the little sorority gathered all around her of Lord R—’s insistence, during a recent encounter with one of the absent nymphs, that she must dress herself up like the Queen, complete with a diadem of paste diamonds, and a pale blue sash across her bust, whilst he whispered warm encouragements into her ear, in a German accent, as they went to it.

Laughter filled the room; champagne was brought in; cigarettes were lit; Miss Nancy Blake tripped to the piano-forte to extemporize, con brio, a spirited little waltz, whilst Miss Lilian Purkiss (a flame-haired Amazon) and Miss Tibby Taylor (petite, grey-eyed, and lusciously agile) cantered round and round, in and out of the furniture, giggling as they repeatedly bumped into chairs and tables. Bella, clapping her hands in time to the waltz, looked across to me from time to time, and smiled. For though, as usual, she was at the centre of the gaiety, I knew that she never forgot me; in company, she would always seek me out, or would let me know, by a loving look or by gently pressing my arm as she passed, that I was the true and only occupier of her thoughts. Even when I left that evening, she would continue to think fondly of me, and to muse on what we had done together, and what we would do when I next returned to Blithe Lodge.

But what could I offer her in return? Only neglect, inattention, and betrayal. I was a damned fool, I knew, and did not deserve the tender regard of such an excellent creature. But it was my fate, it seemed, wilfully to cast this treasure from me. She was vividly and gloriously present to my senses at that moment, there in Kitty Daley’s drawing-room. I knew that I would give her but little thought when I once again saw the face of Miss Emily Carteret, whom I loved as I could never love Bella. But I could not bear to give Bella up – not yet. The plain fact was that my affection for her had not yet been quite snuffed out, or negated, by what I felt for Miss Carteret. It remained bright and true, though overshadowed by a greater and stranger force. As I looked at her, it was brought home to me that my heart would be broken, too, if I were to turn away from her then, and for nothing gained.

After the rest of the company had departed, she came over and sat next to me, placing a jewelled hand on mine and looking smilingly into my eyes.

‘You have been quiet tonight, Eddie. Has anything happened?’ ‘No,’ I told her, running my finger-nail gently down her cheek, and then placing her hand to my lips. ‘Nothing has happened.’

^*[‘Flame follows smoke’ – i.e. there is no smoke without fire (Pliny). Ed.]

^*[A mixture of opium and alcohol. Legal restrictions on the use of opium did not come into force until 1868 and at this period laudanum was widely prescribed, and widely abused. Initially a drug for the poor, laudanum became a favoured means of pain relief for the middle classes; celebrated literary users included Coleridge, De Quincey, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The novelist Wilkie Collins became virtually dependent on it and confessed that much of The Moonstone (1868) had been written under its influence. ‘Who is the man who invented laudanum?’ asks Lydia Gwilt in Collins’s Armadale (1866). ‘I thank him from the bottom of my heart.’ Ed.]

^*[Milton, Comus, in a passage describing Chastity: ‘A thousand liveried angels lackey her, / Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.’ Ed.]

32

Non omnis moriar^*

It is Thursday, the 3rd of November 1853. I have arrived back at the Town Station in Peterborough and took a coach to the Duport Arms in Easton. The town, which lies some four miles south-west of the great house belonging to the family from which this establishment takes it name, is, as far as I am aware, distinguished for nothing in particular, except for its antiquity (there has been a settlement here since the time of the Vikings), its quaint cobbled market-square, and the picturesqueness of its slate-roofed houses of mellowed limestone, many of which look out across the valley, from atop the gently sloping ridge upon which the town is built, to the village of Evenwood and the wooded boundaries of the great Park.

After I had settled myself in my room – a long low-beamed apartment overlooking the square – I opened my bag and took out a small black note-book, a remnant of my student days in Germany. Tearing out some notes that I had made on Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis,^† I wrote on the new first page the words: JOURNAL OF EDWARD DUPORT, NOVEMBER MDCCCLIII. I pondered this title for some time, and decided that it looked very well. But the sensation of forming the letters of my true name for the first time had engendered a frisson that was both exhilarating and productive of a strange feeling of unease – as though, in some way that I could not comprehend, I had no right to possess what I knew to be rightfully mine.

I had decided, before leaving for Northamptonshire, that I would begin recording, in brief, the daily course of my life, partly in emulation of my foster-mother’s habit, but with the additional purpose of providing myself, and perhaps posterity, with an accurate digest of events as I embarked on what I had become convinced would be a critical phase of my great project. Enough of irresolution and fluctuation. Not only had I forgotten who I was, and what I was capable of; I had also forgotten my destiny. But now I seemed to hear the Iron Master’s hammer once more, like gathering thunder, rolling ever closer – the blows raining down faster and harder to fashion the unbreakable links, sparks flying up to the cold sky, the great chain tightening around me as I was dragged ever closer, and now more swiftly than ever, to meet the fate that he had reserved for me. For it is the afternoon of my life, and night approaches.

So I began to write in my new journal, and it is from this source that I have mainly drawn for the remainder of my confession.

Ten o’clock. The square was deserted. A thin rain had been falling for the past hour but was now pattering harder against my window, beneath which a creaking board carrying the ancient arms of my family – with the painted motto ‘FORTITUDINE VINCIMUS’ – swayed back and forth in the wind.

I took dinner in one of the public rooms, with only a sullen, lank-haired waiter for company. Self: ‘Quiet tonight.’

Waiter: ‘Just you, sir, and Mr Green, up from London like yourself.’

Self: ‘Regular?’

Waiter: ‘Sir?’

Self: ‘Mr Green: a regular here, perhaps?’ Waiter: ‘Occasional. Another glass, sir?’

Back in my room I lay down on my bed, and took out an octavo volume of Donne’s Devotions, which I had brought with me for its inclusion of the incomparable ‘Deaths Duell’ – Donne’s last sermon. The book was an old companion of mine, which I had purchased during my long sojourn on the Continent.^* I contemplated the reproduction of the striking frontispiece to the 1634 edition, showing an effigy of the author in a niche wrapped in his winding sheet, and then mused for a moment on my youthful signature on the fly-leaf: ‘Edward Charles Glyver’. Edward Glyver was gone; Edward Duport was to come. But in the here and now, Edward Glapthorn fell asleep over John Donne’s great rolling periods, and woke up with a start to hear the church clock striking midnight.

I went over to the window. The square was lit by one gas-lamp on the far side. It was still raining hard. I noted a late wanderer in a long cloak and a slouch hat. My breath clouded the window-pane; when I wiped the glass clean with my sleeve, the wanderer had gone.

I laid my head back on the pillow and slept for an hour or more, but on a sudden I was clear awake. Something had roused me. I lit my candle – twenty minutes past one o’clock by my repeater.^† There was no sound, except the rain against the window, and the creaking of the inn sign. Was that the sign swinging on its hinges? Or a footfall on the shrunken boards outside my door?

I sat up. There, again – and again! Not the sign swaying in the wind; but another sound. I reached for my pistol as the door handle slowly and silently turned.

But the door was locked and, just as slowly and silently, the handle was turned back. The floor-boards creaked once more, and then all was silence.

Pistol in hand, I carefully opened the door and looked out into the corridor; but there was no one to be seen. There were rooms on either side of mine, Numbers 1 and 3. Stairs led down to the tap-room, with another flight up to the next floor, on which were situated two more rooms. I had no way of knowing whether my unwelcome visitor was still on the premises, perhaps in one of these rooms; but I did not think he would return. I tip-toed to the first of the adjacent chambers: the door was unlocked, the room unoccupied. But the other door, at the head of the stairs, I found was shut fast.

I lay awake for another hour, pistol at the ready. But, as I expected, I was not disturbed again. I concluded at last that I was being foolish, that it was only a fellow guest – Mr Green, perhaps – mistaking my room for his.

And so I gave myself up to sleep.

I awoke to weak sunshine, but, looking outside, saw that the square was still wet from the night’s rain, and that there was a threatening look to the eastern sky. Going downstairs, I asked the waiter from the previous evening whether my fellow guest, Mr Green, had come down yet. The waiter, still sullen, could not say; so I took my breakfast alone.

After concluding my meal, I returned to my room to prepare myself. I had to take the greatest care to avoid being recognized by Phoebus Daunt, whom I presumed would certainly be present at the interment. I examined myself closely in the mirror. We had not seen each other, face to face, for seventeen years, not since our last meeting in School Yard in the autumn of 1836. Would he trace the lineaments of his old school-fellow in the face that now looked into the glass? I did not think so. My hair was longer and thicker, and, with the assistance of dye, blacker than formerly; altogether, I felt confident that the changes brought about by the passage of time, together with the luxuriant moustachios and side-whiskers that I had since acquired, and a pair of green-glass spectacles, would shield me from discovery. I donned my great-coat, procured an umbrella from the sullen waiter, who seemed to be the only servant in the whole establishment, and set off.

A pleasant walk along a steep tree-shaded road, the banks on each side smothered with glistening ivy, led me out of the town down to Odstock Mill. At the bottom of the hill, I took the way that veered eastwards towards Evenwood village. It wanted a quarter of an hour to eleven o’clock.

In the village, there were already people walking down the lane leading to the church – villagers, I perceived on getting a little closer, amongst whom I recognized Lizzie Brine, walking with another woman. She did not see me, for I was already taking care to intrude myself as little as possible on the scene, having determined not to present myself at the Dower House with the other invited mourners, but to stand back from the proceedings, and observe them from a distance.

I therefore waited until the little crowd had turned under the lych-gate and into the church-yard, and then positioned myself a little way off, behind the trunk of a large sycamore-tree. From here, I had a good view, both of the church and of the gravelled track that branched off to the Dower House. I was also shielded from the view of anyone else coming down the lane that led back to the village. To my left was St Michael and All Angels, a noble building, largely of the thirteenth century, dominated by its celebrated spire – tall and needle-pointed, resting on a slender tower, and crocketed up the angles. As I was gazing up at the golden cross placed on its tip, it began to rain. Before long, it had become a regular torrent, requiring me to open up my borrowed umbrella.

As the clock struck eleven, I heard the sound of footsteps on gravel, and looked out from my place of concealment to see the vanguard of the funeral procession coming down the narrow track from the Dower House ahead of the coaches – a large squadron of pallbearers, feathermen,^* pages, followed by bearded mutes carrying wands, all solemnly be-gowned, and all looking more melancholy than even their duties demanded on account of the heavy rain now soaking their hired finery.

A few moments later, the glass-sided hearse appeared, with its canopy of black ostrich feathers, and decorations of gilded skulls and cherubs, the coffin inside covered over with a dark-purple cloth. Following close behind was the main armada of six or seven funeral coaches. Then I saw Dr Daunt emerge from the porch of the church with his curate, Mr Tidy, at his side. As the first coach passed my vantage point, I noticed that one of the blinds was up, enabling me to catch a clear view of Lord Tansor. He sat, grim-faced, his mouth set tight shut. Then he was gone, but not before I had caught the briefest of glimpses of a tall bearded figure sitting at his right hand. I could not mistake the profile of my enemy.

The remaining coaches, all with their blinds closed, splashed past. Before the lych-gate was an open area, where the vehicles pulled up to discharge their occupants. Attendants rushed forward with umbrellas to shepherd the mourners towards the shelter of the church porch; after the latter had entered the building, the pall-bearers removed the coffin from the hearse and carried it through the rain down the tree-lined path to the church. Lord Tansor, straight-backed, his eyes fixed ahead of him, and looking the very image of proud authority, waved away the offer of an umbrella, and marched off purposefully through the downpour; but Daunt, a few steps behind his Lordship, haughtily signalled to the same servant to perform the service for him that his noble patron had refused.

Miss Carteret had been in the second coach, with Mrs Daunt and two other ladies, one of whom was unknown to me; the other, however, I thought must be her French visitor, Mademoiselle Buisson. She was slight of build and of middling height, but except for an impression of pale hair tucked up under her bonnet, her features were obscured by her veil. As Miss Carteret descended from the coach, she took her friend’s arm and pulled her close; thus entwined, they made their way to the church, with John Brine following behind, holding a large umbrella over them.

Though Miss Carteret, too, was veiled, the poise and grace of her tall figure could not be disguised. Her back was towards me, but in my mind I could picture her face, as I had first seen it, in the light of a late October afternoon. I watched her, arm in arm with her companion, as she walked towards the church, thinking again of how, in a moment, I had seen in those commanding eyes everything that I had ever desired, and everything that I had ever feared. It was clear that she was suffering – I saw it in her bowed head, and the way she leaned on Mademoiselle Buisson for support; and I suffered for her, and longed to comfort her for the loss of the father she had loved.

When all the company had entered the church, and the organ had begun to play a solemn voluntary, I left my place beneath the dripping branches of the sycamore-tree. Inside the porch, I halted. The choir had begun to sing Purcell’s divine ‘In the midst of life we are in death’,^* with its anguished dissonances. The bitter-sweet sound, reverberating through the vaulted spaces of the church, tore at my heart in the most extraordinary way, and I felt angry tears welling up as I thought of the man whose blameless and useful life had been so violently cut down. Then came the resonant voice of Dr Daunt intoning the words of St John: ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’^†

I remained in the porch as the congregation began to say together the words of Psalm 90, ‘Domine, refugium’, in which the Psalmist complains of the frailty and brevity of our life on earth, and of the suffering that is inseparable from our sinful nature; then, as the mourners came to the verses in which Moses speaks of God setting our misdeeds before Him, and our secret sins in the light of His countenance, I picked up my umbrella, turned away, and walked back out into the church-yard.

In due course came the sound of the church door being opened. The committal of Mr Carteret’s body was soon to commence. I moved away, tucking myself in the recess of the west door, beneath the bell-tower, from where I was able to observe the mourning party and the various attendants, along with a number of villagers, and the household servants from the Dower House, follow the pall-bearers through the rain to where the pile of earth marked the last resting-place of Paul Stephen Carteret. Lord Tansor followed directly behind the coffin, oblivious, it seemed, to the unremitting rain; a few paces back, Phoebus Daunt, now with umbrella in hand, solemnly matched him step for step, like a soldier on parade. One by one, the company began to assemble themselves about the grave.

It was a most melancholy spectacle: the ladies in their bombazine and crape huddled together under umbrellas; the gentlemen, for the most part, standing unsheltered in the rain or beneath the yew-trees that grew about the church-yard, the black bands on their tall hats fluttering in the wind; the ranks of mutes and other mercenaries supplied by Mr Gutteridge – some a little the worse for liquor – forlornly holding up their batons and soaking plumes; and the simple wooden coffin being borne towards the terrible gaping gash in the wet earth, preceded by the imposing figure of Dr Daunt. Everything contributed to a bitter sense of the futility of the mortal condition. All was black, black, black, like the smoke-black angry sky above.

I found I could not take my eyes off the coffin, and saw again in imagination what pitiless brutality had done to the round and once genial face of Mr Carteret. And now he was to be consigned to a muddy hole in the ground. I never was so despairing and comfortless, to see what he had come to, and to what we all must come. I found that I could not help but think of the deceased secretary as resembling Donne’s private and retired man, who in life ‘thought himselfe his owne for ever, and never came forth’, but who, in death, had to suffer the indignity of his dust being ‘published’ – such an apt and terrible image – and ‘mingled with the dust of every high way, and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond’. It was, as the preacher averred, ‘the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider’.^* I did consider it. And it was indeed so.

Miss Carteret had emerged from the church with Mademoiselle Buisson again by her side, and both ladies now stood next to Dr Daunt as he began to deliver the final part of the Order for the Burial of the Dead.

‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death …’

And so, with the rain beginning to lessen, they buried Paul Carteret at last, to the mournful tolling of a single church bell. Requiescat in pace, was all I could think. In small groups, the mourners – led by Lord Tansor, with Daunt close by his side – dispersed to their coaches, the mutes and the feathermen tramped off, and Dr Daunt returned to his church. Only Miss Carteret lingered by the grave, whilst Mademoiselle Buisson, with John Brine in attendance, began to walk back to her carriage. She turned her head as she reached the lych-gate, to see whether her friend were following; but Miss Carteret remained for some minutes at her station, looking down at the coffin. She appeared to show no external sign of grief – no tears, at least; but as she brushed aside the black silk ribbons of her bonnet, which a sudden breeze had blown across her face, I clearly saw that her hands were trembling. Then she nodded to the sexton and his assistant to do their work, and began to walk slowly back towards the church.

I stood alone, watching her tall figure until it reached the open ground beyond the lych-gate, where her companion was waiting for her. As she reached the door of the carriage, Mademoiselle Buisson took out a white handkerchief, gently wiped her friend’s face, and kissed her on the cheek.

I waited until Miss Carteret’s carriage had splashed its way up the lane towards the Dower House before leaving the church-yard to begin my walk back to Easton. I wished so much to see her again, to hear her voice, and to look once more into those extraordinary eyes; but, expecting that Daunt would be amongst the company gathered at the Dower House, I felt unsure of my ability to maintain my assumed identity in his presence. Yet as I reached the outskirts of the town, the desire to feed on her beauty once more overcame my misgivings. I turned on my heels and retraced my steps back to Evenwood.

As I reached the lane leading down to the Rectory, it occurred to me that I might leave a note for Dr Daunt, as a matter of courtesy, apologizing for not having read his proofs. When I knocked at the door, the girl informed me that the Rector and Mrs Daunt, as well as Mr Phoebus Daunt, were still at the Dower House, and so I requested pen and paper and was left alone in Dr Daunt’s study to write my note. When I had finished, and was about to leave, I noticed three or four thick leather-bound note-books lying on the desk, each with a label carrying the words DAILY JOURNAL. It was wrong of me, I admit it, but I could not help myself from opening one of the volumes and reading it. In a moment, I had taken out my pocket-book and had begun frantically scribbling in shorthand; for the pages contained entries relating to the Rector’s Millhead years. I expected the girl to return at any moment, but she did not; and so I continued in my task for as long as I decently could, before slipping out unseen. I had discovered nothing of great significance, except the satisfaction of knowing a little more concerning the upbringing and character of my enemy; but that, to me, had justified my actions.

Ten minutes later, I was standing within the Plantation, looking out across the lawn towards the Dower House.

Through the drawing-room window, the figure of Lord Tansor could be easily picked out, talking with Dr Daunt; behind him, I could see Mrs Daunt, with her step-son by her side. To gain a closer view of the proceedings, I moved stealthily through the dripping trees, taking up my station amongst a planting of shrubs close to one of the windows. The blind had been half drawn, but by crouching down I was able to see into the room.

Miss Carteret was standing by the fire, alone. Elsewhere, her guests – a dozen or so in all – had arranged themselves into quietly conversing groups. A young lady broke away from one of these and walked over to join her. She had blonde hair, of a most unusual paleness, which, with the unconsciously familiar way she took Miss Carteret’s hand in hers, confirmed to me that she must be Mademoiselle Buisson.

They said nothing, but remained, hands clasped, for some moments until they saw Phoebus Daunt approach, at which they disengaged and stood side by side to greet him. He gave a little bow, in acknowledgement of which Miss Carteret inclined her head slightly, and spoke a few words. Her face remained expressionless, and she merely dipped her head again in response to whatever he had said. Bowing once more to Miss Carteret, and then to Mademoiselle Buisson, he took his leave. A few moments later, I saw him emerge through the front door, and make his way back down the path to the Rectory.

All through this brief scene my heart had been pounding as I strained to see how Daunt would be received by Miss Carteret; but when it quickly became obvious that there was not the slightest spark of intimacy between them, I began to breathe more easily – the more so when, as Daunt had turned to go, I had seen Mademoiselle Buisson lean towards Miss Carteret and whisper something in her ear. This had produced an involuntary little smile, which she immediately sought to hide by placing her hand over her mouth. From the rather mischievous look on Mademoiselle Buisson’s face, I made a guess that the remark had been in some way uncomplimentary to Daunt, and I was most satisfied to see how Miss Carteret had responded to her friend’s comment, even at such a time.

Now that my enemy had gone, I thought that I might after all present myself to Miss Carteret, as I had been invited to do. Then I considered that I was wet, and a little dishevelled, and that my bag was at the Duport Arms; but yet I was expected, and she would think it strange if I did not come. I dithered and dawdled for several minutes until, at last, I got the better of my misgivings. I was on the point of quitting my place of concealment when the front door opened. Lord and Lady Tansor appeared, followed by Miss Carteret and her friend, and Dr and Mrs Daunt. The party proceeded down the steps and into two waiting carriages, which then moved away through the Plantation and into the Park.

Feeling tired and dejected, and with no reason now to remain, I once more made my way back through the rain to Easton.

In the tap-room of the Duport Arms, my friend the sullen waiter was throwing fresh sawdust on the floor.

‘Has Mr Green left?’ I asked.

‘Two hours since,’ he said, without looking up from his work.

‘Are there any more guests tonight?’

‘None.’

The Peterborough coach was about to arrive, and so, dispensing with another solitary dinner, I sent the man upstairs for my bags whilst I fortified myself with a gin-and-water and a cigar. In ten minutes I had boarded the coach and was just settling myself inside, thankful that I was the sole occupant, when John Brine’s face, red from exertion, appeared at the window.

‘Mr Glapthorn, sir, I am glad to have caught you. Lizzie said I should tell you.’ He paused for breath, and I heard the driver ask him whether he intended to get in.

‘One minute, driver,’ I shouted. Then, to Brine: ‘Tell me what?’

‘Miss Carteret and her friend are to leave for London next week. Lizzie said you’d wish to know.’

‘And where will Miss Carteret be staying?’

‘At the house of her aunt, Mrs Manners, in Wilton-crescent. Lizzie is to attend her.’

‘Good work, Brine. Tell Lizzie to send word of Miss Carteret’s movements to the address I gave you.’ I leaned my head towards him and lowered my voice. ‘I have reason to think that Miss Carteret may be in some danger, as a result of the attack on her father, and wish to keep a close eye on her, for her own protection.’

He gave a nod, as if to signify his complete comprehension of the matter, and I handed him a shilling so that he could refresh himself before returning to Evenwood. As the coach moved off, I drew the tattered silk curtain against the rain, and closed my eyes.

^*[‘Not all of me will die’: Horace, Odes, III.xxx. 6. Ed.]

^†[Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d; or, The Artificiall Changeling (1650), a history of bodily adornments and mutilations, by the physician John Bulwer (fl. 1648–54). Ed.]

^*[This was probably the edition of Devotions published in octavo by William Pickering in 1840, which also included (as well as the reproduced frontispiece mentioned by Glyver and the famous ‘Deaths Duell’ sermon, preached before King Charles I, February 1631) Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. Ed.]

^†A repeating pocket watch. Ed.]

^*[Hired men carrying plumes of black feathers. Ed.]

^*[From the Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, performed in March 1695. The music was performed again at Purcell’s own funeral in November 1695. Ed.]

^†[John 11: 25–6. From the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer. Ed.]

^*[From Donne’s last sermon, the aforementioned ‘Deaths Duell’ (see p. 372). Ed.]

33

Periculum in mora^*

‘Do you remember’ the last time we went to the Cremorne Gardens,’^† I asked Le Grice.

It was now past three o’clock, and the fire had died quite down. I had been recounting the events subsequent to the violent death of Mr Paul Carteret.

Le Grice looked up and thought for a moment.

‘Cremorne?’ he said at last. ‘Of course. We took the threepenny steamer. When would it have been?’

‘November last year,’ I said. ‘A few days after I’d returned from Mr Carteret’s funeral. We played bowls.’

‘We did, and then we watched the Naval Fête. Yes, and I recall a little set-to as we were leaving. But what has this to do with anything?’

‘Well, I shall tell you,’ I said, ‘while you throw another log on the fire and refill my glass.’

The night of Wednesday, the 9th of November 1853, remained clear in my mind. We had amused ourselves most satisfactorily for an hour or two. As eleven o’clock approached, and the lamp-lit arbours began to fill up with carmined whores and their tipsy swells, I had been game to continue our jollities elsewhere; but, unusually, Le Grice had expressed a strong wish to be in his bed. And so, at a few minutes before twelve, we had made our way out of the Gardens.

By the pay-box, at the King’s-road entrance, we had come upon an altercation. A group of four or five women – whores every one, as I quickly judged – and a couple of fancy roughs were disputing in a rather bellicose fashion with a small man sporting a prominent pair of mutton-chop whiskers. As we approached nearer, one of the roughs grabbed the man by the collar and threw him to the ground. By the light of the large illuminated star above the pay-box, I immediately recognized the anxious face of Mr Geoffrey Martlemass, fiancé of Dorrie Grainger.

Our arrival had heated up the proceedings somewhat, but the roughs were quickly persuaded, by a brief demonstration of our combined force and determination, to leg it, while the whores swayed away into the darkness, shouting and jeering as they went.

‘It’s Mr Glapthorn, isn’t it?’ asked the little man, as I helped him to his feet. ‘What an extraordinary coincidence!’

Much against the advice of his inamorata, the philanthropic Mr Martlemass had been on a mission that night to bring the light of Christ to the whores of Cremorne – a task that would have taxed St Paul himself. He was rather crestfallen at his failure, but seemed manfully inclined to dust himself off and attempt the task again. It was only after a good deal of persuasion that he consented to let the uncaring objects of his crusade abide in darkness for a little while longer, and accepted our advice to return home.

‘We took a hansom,’ said Le Grice, ‘and you dropped me off in Piccadilly. What happened then?’

After Le Grice had been deposited safely at the Piccadilly entrance to Albany, Mr Martlemass and I continued our way eastwards. ‘The night has been a failure,’ he said, shaking his head mournfully, as we passed through Temple Bar, ‘but I am glad, at any rate, that our paths have crossed again. I wished to ask after your poor friend.’

I could not think to whom he was referring, whereupon, seeing my puzzlement, he enlarged upon his statement.

‘Your friend Mr Pettingale. Of Gray’s-Inn?’

‘Ah, yes. Pettingale. Of course.’

‘Are the injuries extensive?’

I had no idea what the little man was talking about; but my interest had of course been roused by the mention of Pettingale’s name, and so I decided to feign comprehension of the matter.

‘Extensive? Oh, moderately so, I believe.’

‘All the members of the Society have expressed condemnation and concern – an attack upon a member in his chambers is an occurrence that is believed to be without precedent – and naturally my employer, Mr Gillory Piggott, as a near neighbour of Mr Pettingale’s, feels the outrage particularly keenly.’

‘Quite.’

A little subtle probing on my part soon elicited enough information for me to grasp the story in outline.

A few days after my interview with him, Mr Lewis Pettingale had returned to his chambers one evening at about eight o’clock. His neighbour, Mr Gillory Piggott, happening to come into Field-court half an hour later, noticed a large man leaving the stair-case leading to Mr Pettingale’s set. The next morning, as usual, a waiter from the coffee-house near Gray’s-Inn-gate ascended those same stairs carrying Mr Pettingale’s breakfast, but, on knocking at the lawyer’s door, received no answer.

The door was found to be unlocked. On further investigation by the waiter, the body of Mr Pettingale was discovered slumped across the corner of the hearth. He had been beaten, with some violence, about the face and head, but was still alive. A doctor had been called, and that afternoon the injured lawyer had been taken away in a coach to his house in Richmond, there to be attended by his own physician.

We had now reached the corner of Chancery-lane, and Mr Martlemass, insisting that he would not allow me to be taken out of my way, descended from the cab and, after shaking my hand with his customary vigour, marched briskly off towards his lodgings in Red Lion-square.

During the last leg of the journey to Temple-street, I mused on what the attack on Pettingale might signify; but, as so often of late, I felt as if I were groping blindfold in the dark. I could not say for certain that there was a connexion with the lawyer’s former associate, Phoebus Daunt, though instinct strongly urged me to that conclusion. Perhaps Pettingale’s criminal past had simply caught up with him. A trip to Richmond, I decided, might be both pleasant and instructive.

The following morning I rose early, and with small difficulty arrived in Richmond at a little after ten o’clock. I took a late breakfast at the Star and Garter, by the Park gates, where I began to enquire of the waiters whether they knew of a Mr Lewis Pettingale. At my third attempt, I was given the information I sought.

The house was on the Green, in Maids of Honour Row, a pretty terrace of three-storey brick houses.^* It stood at the end of the row, fronted by a well-tended garden. I entered through a wrought-iron gate and proceeded down the path to the front door, which was opened to my knock by a whey-faced girl of about twenty.

‘Will you give your master this? I shall wait.’

I handed her a note, but she looked at me blankly and thrust the note back at me.

‘Mr Pettingale is here, is he not, recovering from his injuries?’

‘No, sir,’ she said, looking at me with staring eyes, as if I had come to murder her.

‘Now then, what’s this?’

The question was asked by a grim-looking man with a patch over one eye and a white spade beard.

‘Is Mr Pettingale at home?’ I asked again, in some irritation.

‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ said the man, assuming a protective position in front of the girl.

‘Well then, where may I find him?’ was my next question.

At this the girl began to play somewhat nervously with her pinafore, while casting anxious looks at the man.

‘Phyllis,’ he said, ‘go inside.’

When she had gone, he turned to me, and threw his shoulders back, as if he might be preparing to stand his ground against my assault.

‘Mr Pettingale,’ he said at last, ‘has left the country, which, if you were a true friend to him, you would already know.’

‘I am not a friend of Mr Pettingale’s,’ I replied, ‘but neither do I wish him any harm. I have only recently made his acquaintance, and so of course do not expect to be taken into his confidence. He has gone to the Continent, perhaps?’

‘No, sir,’ said the man, relaxing his stance a little. ‘To Australia.’

Pettingale’s flight, and the reason for the assault on him, raised yet more perplexing questions; he had also robbed me of the means of exposing Phoebus Daunt to Lord Tansor, and to the world, for the thief and fraudster that he was.

I returned gloomily to London. Every way I turned, my progress was blocked by unanswered questions, untested presumptions, and unsubstantiated suspicions. The murder of Mr Carteret held the key to the restitution of my birthright, of that I was certain. But how could that key be discovered? I found that I had not the least idea what to do next. Only one man could bring forth into the full light of understanding the weighty truth that so evidently lay behind Mr Carteret’s letter to Mr Tredgold: the author himself; and the dead cannot speak.

On reaching Temple-street, in this depressed and frustrated state of mind, I took to my bed and immediately fell into a sound slumber, from which I was awoken by a loud knocking at the door.

When I answered the knock, I saw, to my surprise, one of the office boys from Tredgolds on the landing, holding out a brown-paper parcel.

‘Please, sir, this has come for you, to the office. There is a letter as well.’

I perused the letter first, with some curiosity. It was a short note of apology from Dr Daunt’s friend, Professor Lucian Slake, of Barnack:DEAR SIR, —I am sorry to inform you that I have only just been told by the people at the George Hotel that the package I sent for your attention was mislaid, and has only now come to light. I have written a very strong letter of complaint to the manager, for the inconvenience this has caused to all concerned. But as Dr Daunt took the precaution of giving me the address of your employer, I now send you the proofs of his partial translation of Iamblichus, as he requested. It is, in my opinion, a fine piece of work, a most necessary corrective to Taylor’s rendering; but you will know better than I.I am, sir, yours most respectfully,

LUCIN M. SLAKE

This was puzzling. I immediately tore open the package, which did indeed contain the proofs of Dr Daunt’s translation. What, then, was in the other package, the one that had been thrust into my hand by the serving-man from the George Hotel as I was preparing to take the train to Peterborough?

It still lay on my work-table, hidden under several old copies of The Times, and was addressed to ‘E. Glapthorn, Esq., George Hotel’. I then noticed, for the first time, that it was marked ‘Confidential’.

Inside were some thirty or forty sheets of unlined paper, folded like the leaves of a small quarto book, the first leaf being in the form of a title-page laid out in neatly formed capitals. Each of the remaining leaves was covered to the edges with small, close-packed writing – but in a different hand from the one that had inscribed the wrapper.

Intrigued, I put a match to the fire, pulled my chair a little closer to the hearth, and turned up the lamp. Holding the pages close to the light with shaking hands, I began to read.^*

^*[‘There is danger in delay’ (Livy, Ab urbe condita). Ed.]

^†[Celebrated pleasure gardens near Battersea Bridge. Regular entertainments included fireworks, dancing, concerts, and balloon ascents. It was open from three in the afternoon until midnight. After its respectable patrons had departed, it became an infamous haunt of prostitutes. It finally became so great an annoyance to its neighbours that in 1877 it was forced to close. Ed.]

^*[Built in 1724 for the Maids of Honour of George II’s wife, Caroline of Anspach. Ed.]

^*[The author’s narrative temporarily concludes on this page of the manuscript. The following account, transcribed in the author’s hand, has been bound in at this point. Ed.]

DEPOSITION OF

P. CARTERET, ESQ.

Concerning the Late

Laura, Lady Tansor

I

Friday, 21st October 1853

To whom it may concern.

I, Paul Stephen Carteret, of the Dower House, Evenwood, in the County of Northamptonshire, being of sound mind and in full possession of my faculties, do hereby solemnly swear that the following deposition is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God.

I begin in this fashion because I wish to establish, from the outset, that I intend hereafter to assume the character and responsibilities of a witness to certain events, though I do not stand in any dock to deliver my evidence. Nevertheless, I beg most earnestly to be regarded as such a person by whomsoever may read this, taking my place – though in imagination only – before the bar of Blind Justice, with due solemnity, and delivering myself, as fully and as accurately as I can, of my testimony.

Crimes, like sin itself, are various both in form and in the severity of their effects; consequently, various are the punishments meted out to those who perpetrate them. But the crime I must herein expose – where does it stand amongst the divisions of wrong-doing, and what penalty does it deserve? That it was a crime, I have no doubt; but what to call it? Here lies my first difficulty.

I must leave it to sager minds than mine to deliver judgment on this point. But of this I am confident: the matter of which I shall speak was an active and considered act of moral harm against another person. And what does that signify, if not a crime? No material possessions were taken, and no blood spilled. And yet I say that it was theft – of a kind; and that it was murder – of a kind. In short, that it was a crime – of a kind.

There is a further difficulty: the perpetrator is dead, whilst the victim is ignorant of the outrage that has been visited upon him. Yet I persist in calling this a crime, and my conscience will not let me rest until I have set down the facts of the case, as far as they are known to me. I cannot yet see how it will all end; for though I know something, I do not know all. I write this, therefore, as a necessary preliminary to some future process whose outcome I cannot as yet foresee, and in which I myself may, or may not, play a part. For I believe that dangerous consequences have been set in motion by what I have uncovered, which cannot now be averted.

In four days’ time, I am engaged to meet a representative of the firm of Tredgold, Tredgold and Orr, my employer’s legal advisers. I am not acquainted with this gentleman, though I am assured he has the full trust of Mr Christopher Tredgold, whom I have known and respected, as a business correspondent and friend, these twenty-five years and more. I have undertaken to reveal in person to Mr Tredgold’s agent a matter that has given me the greatest possible concern, since making certain discoveries in the course of my work.

To set things in their proper light, I must first say something about myself and my situation.

I began my present employment, as secretary to my cousin, the 25th Baron Tansor, in February 1821. I had come down from Oxford three years earlier with little notion of what I would do in life, and for a time, I fear, idled most irresponsibly at home.

We lived then – my father and mother and I, my elder brother having by then secured a diplomatic position abroad – in a good deal of comfort, just across the river from Evenwood, at Ashby St John, in a fine old house that had been purchased by my paternal greatgrandfather, the founder of the family’s prosperity. But, as the younger son, I could not remain in a state of dependency on my father indefinitely; and, besides, I wished to marry – wished very much to marry – the eldest daughter of one of our neighbours, Miss Mariana Hunt-Graham. And so I resolved at last, after a little travelling, to follow my elder brother Lawrence into the Foreign Service, having at my disposal, besides a respectable degree and the good offices of my brother, a powerful recommendation from my cousin, Lord Tansor, to the then Foreign Secretary.^* On the strength of this resolve, my father – albeit reluctantly – agreed to my proposing to Miss Hunt-Graham, and to providing us with a small allowance until I had established myself in my new career. She accepted me, and we were married in December 1820, on a day that I shall always regard as one of the happiest of my life.

But, within a month of my marriage, my father was taken ill and died; and with his death came ruin. Unknown to us all, even to my mother, the former Sophia Duport, he had committed all his capital to ruinous speculations, had borrowed most injudiciously, and, as a consequence, left us almost destitute. The house, of course, had to be sold, along with my father’s prized collection of Roman coins; and there was no question now that my new wife and I could make a new life for ourselves in London. My poor mother suffered greatly with the shame of it all, and if it had not been for the generosity of her noble nephew, in immediately offering me a position as his private secretary, together with accommodation for us all with his stepmother in the Dower House at Evenwood, I do not well know what we should have done. I owe him everything.

At the time that I took up my employment, my cousin was married to his first wife, Laura, Lady Tansor, whose people, like my father’s, were from the West Country. There had recently been a rift between Lord and Lady Tansor, apparently now healed, during which her Ladyship had left her husband to spend over a year in France. She had returned from the Continent in late September 1820, a changed woman.

I cannot think of her Ladyship without affection. It is impossible. I acknowledge that her character was flawed, in many ways; but when I first knew her, in the early years of her marriage to my cousin, she seemed to my impressionable mind to be like Spenser’s Cyprian goddess, ‘newly borne of th’ Oceans fruitfull froth’.^* I was already in love with Miss Hunt-Graham, and had eyes for no one else; but I was flesh and blood, and no young man so composed could fail to admire Lady Tansor. She was all beauty, all grace, all spirit; lively, amusing, accomplished in so many ways; a soul, as I may say, so fully alive that it made those around her seem like dumb automata. The contrast with my cousin, her husband, could not have been greater, for he was by nature grave and reserved, and in every way the opposite of his vivacious wife; yet, for a time, they had seemed curiously suited to each other; each, as it were, neutralizing the excesses of the other’s temperament.

I had almost daily opportunity to observe my cousin and his wife after the latter’s return from France. I had been given a work-room adjoining the Library at Evenwood, on the ground floor of what is called Hamnet’s Tower,^† the upper storey of which comprised the Muniments Room, containing legal documents, accounts, estate and private correspondence, inventories, and so forth, relating to the Duport family, and dating to the time of the 1st Baron Tansor in the thirteenth century. To this work-room I would come every day to undertake my duties, which soon also began to encompass general stewardship of the Library – then uncatalogued – after I evinced an informed interest in the manuscript books, stored in the Muniments Room, which had been collected by our grandfather.

My first duty of the morning would be to call upon my cousin at eight o’clock to receive his instructions for the day. He would usually be taking breakfast with his wife in what was known as the Yellow Parlour, sitting at a small table set in a bow-window, looking out upon a secluded walled garden on the south side of the house. Lady Tansor had been back in England, and seemingly reconciled with her husband, for nearly a year when I began my employment at Evenwood. A portrait of her, begun before the rift of which I have just spoken, hung unfinished on one of the walls of this modest apartment, and provided a salutary daily reminder of the strange transformation of her physical appearance that had taken place since the artist had first begun to paint her – from the dazzling, captivating beauty of former times, with proud flashing eyes and abundant raven hair, to the gaunt and slightly stooped figure, her hair now prematurely flecked with grey, who sat opposite her husband each morning, come rain or shine, and whatever the season, silently staring out over his shoulder into the garden, whilst he, with his back to the window, read The Times and drank his coffee. Such a change! And so sad to see! As I entered the room each morning, she barely noticed my presence, and would take no part in my conversations with her husband. Sometimes she would rise absently from the table, letting her napkin drop to the floor, and, without a word, would drift from the room like some poor ghost.

She would spend days on end, especially during the dreary winter weeks, shut away in her rooms above the Library, and generally saw no one, except her maid and her companion, Miss Eames, and of course her husband at meal-times. But, as time went by, she would sometimes, and on a sudden, take it into her head to go up to town, or to some other place, regardless of the weather and the state of the roads. Once, for instance, she insisted, with something of her old force, that she absolutely must go to see an old friend, and so off she went to the South Coast in the midst of a most ferocious downpour, accompanied only by Miss Eames, to the considerable disapproval of my cousin, and the consternation of those of us who loved her and fretted after her well-being. This, I see from my journal, was towards the close of the year 1821.

I remember the incident particularly because, after she returned from the coast, she appeared to have regained a little of her former spirit, almost as if a weight had been lifted from her. Little by little, she began to show her husband small considerations, and as I came into the Yellow Parlour of a morning I would sometimes even catch her smiling at some trifling pleasantry of Lord Tansor’s – a slight, pained smile, to be sure; but it gladdened my heart to see it. Then, as the spring came on, she began to busy herself a little – planning a new area of garden, replacing the window-curtains in her private sitting-room, arranging a weekend party for some of her husband’s political associates, sometimes accompanying his Lordship to town. And so a kind of contentment returned to my cousin’s marriage, though things were not – nor ever would be – as they had been formerly, and my Lady’s eyes never regained the radiant energy captured so well in the unfinished portrait that hung by the breakfast-table in the Yellow Parlour.

This partial restoration of happiness between my cousin and his wife, muted and delicate though it was, continued, culminating in an announcement, made to the general delight of their many friends, that her Ladyship was with child. Lord Tansor’s joy at the news was plain for all to see, for it had been the cause of much distress and anxiety for my cousin that his union with Lady Tansor had, so far, denied him the thing he desired above all others: an heir of his own body.

The change in him was quite remarkable. I even remember hearing him whistle, something I had never heard him do before, as he was coming down the stairs one morning, a little later than usual, to take his breakfast. He became wonderfully solicitous towards his wife, showing her every attention she could have desired; so absorbed in her welfare did he become that he would often send me away of a morning, saying that he could not put his mind to business at such a time, or reprimanding me sharply for intruding when, as he said, I could see that her Ladyship was tired, or that her Ladyship needed his company that morning, or strongly conveying by word or look some other mark of his determination to do nothing else that day but devote himself to my Lady’s service.

The object of his concern, however, received these unwonted demonstrations of partiality with little outward show of satisfaction; indeed, she appeared to regard them with an increasing irritation that seemed likely to throw into disarray the state of peace and equilibrium that had latterly been established between them. This did not in the least deflect her husband from his purpose, but it produced an uncomfortable atmosphere in which my cousin doggedly, and with unusual patience, sought even more ways of expressing his care for his wife’s condition, whilst she became peevish and captious, brushing off his well-meant enquiries with a brusqueness that I fear he did not deserve. Once, when I was about to knock at the door of the Yellow Parlour as usual one morning, I heard her telling him sharply that she did not want to be molly-coddled so by him, that she neither desired it nor deserved it. I reflected afterwards on her words, concluding that some residual action of guilt for having abandoned her husband was responsible, in concert with the natural anxieties of impending motherhood, for her peppery behaviour.

So things went on until the 17th of November, in the year ’22, when, at a little after three o’clock in the afternoon, my Lady gave birth to a son. The boy, who would be christened Henry Hereward, was a hale and hearty creature from the first; but his mother, grievously weakened by the exertion of bringing him into the world, sank into a deep decline that lasted several days. She lay, hardly breathing, lingering between life and death, in the great curtained bed, fashioned to a fantastic design by du Cerceau,^* that had been brought to Evenwood by Lady Constantia Silk on her marriage to Lord Tansor’s father. Gradually, she began to revive, take a little food, and sit up. A week to the day after the birth of her son, her husband, accompanied by the wet-nurse, brought the child to her for the first time; but she would not look at it. Propped up in the heavy-curtained bed, she closed her eyes and said only that she wished to sleep. My cousin remonstrated gently that she ought to make the acquaintance of their fine son and heir; but, with her eyes still shut, she told him, in a barely audible whisper, that she had no wish to see him.

‘I have done my duty,’ was all she would say when pressed by her husband to open her eyes just a little and look upon her son’s face for the first time. She would not even consent to attend the boy’s christening, which had been held off until she should have recovered sufficiently.

So Lord Tansor left her alone, and did not return. Thenceforth, he devoted himself to the nurture of his son, where formerly his wife had been his only care.

II

Friday, 21st October 1853 (continued)

The winter of 1822 came on, damp and raw. Her Ladyship left her bed, but refused to dress, sitting instead wrapped up in a shawl in an arm-chair before the fire, which burned night and day, and sometimes falling asleep there until her maid came in to draw back the window-curtains in the morning. The weeks passed, but still she would not see her son or quit her apartments. Her reply, when urged by friends to rouse herself and take up the duties of motherhood, was always the same: ‘I have done my duty. The debt is paid. There is no need to do more.’

One by one, she cut herself off from all visitors, even my late dear wife, of whom she had been particularly fond. Only her companion, Miss Julia Eames, was permitted to stay with her in the gloomy panelled chamber in which she spent most of her days. My cousin did not quite approve of Miss Eames, and had often questioned the necessity of her remaining in his house when his wife enjoyed such a wide acquaintance, both in the country and in town. But my Lady, alas, as was often the case, would not accede to his wishes, and it became a regular source of friction between them that she angrily refused to give up her companion.

It was to Miss Eames, and to her alone, that my Lady turned for comfort and companionship in the weeks and months following the birth of her son. I became particularly aware of the intimacy that existed between them when, one day, in the late spring of 1823, my Lady sent word that she wished me to bring up a copy of Felltham’s Resolves from the Library. It pleased me a great deal to receive the request, thinking it betokened the beginning of a return to her former habits; for my Lady, though she had been a great one for dresses and jewels and other fripperies, had always been an earnest and discriminating reader – unlike my cousin, whose literary tastes were somewhat rudimentary and who, in this as in so many other aspects of my Lady’s character and inclinations, found his wife’s fondness for poetry and philosophy incomprehensible.

When I took the volume she had requested up to my Lady’s sitting-room, I discovered her in close conversation with Miss Eames, heads together, talking with quiet intensity, their chairs drawn round a small work-table on which, open to view, was an ebony writing-box containing a considerable number of letters and other papers. On seeing me enter, Lady Tansor slowly closed the box and sat back in her chair, whilst Miss Eames stood up and walked towards me, holding her hand out to receive the book that I had brought, though it seemed to me that her action had also been intended to prevent me from drawing too close to the writing-box and its contents.

The incident may seem trifling, but it was to gain in significance retrospectively, as I shall shortly record.

And so to continue my deposition, and to conclude it as quickly as I may.

Still my Lady could not be persuaded to give up her self-imposed exile from society, and she absolutely refused to quit her apartment under any circumstance. But then, as the summer days began to shorten, her spirits gradually revived, and one bright cold day, at the beginning of October 1823, bundled up in her furs, she finally left her rooms, for the first time since the birth of her son – I observed her myself from the window of the Muniments Room taking the air on the Library Terrace, walking slowly up and down, arm in arm with Miss Eames. The next morning, Master Henry was brought by his nurse to be dandled for a minute or two on his mamma’s knee; the following morning, she began to take her breakfast again with her husband in the Yellow Parlour.

My cousin treated her return to domestic life with cold civility; for her part, she regarded him with utter indifference, though she ate her meals with him and sat with him of an evening, neither of them speaking the whole time, until each retired without a word of good-night to their own bedchambers at opposite ends of the house. She showed not much more interest in her son, though she raised no objection when my cousin brought up Sir Thomas Lawrence to paint the family portrait that now adorns the vestibule at Evenwood.

But then my Lady began to exhibit worrying signs of a severe nervous affection, slight at first, but increasing in frequency and intensity. In November 1823, as I noted in my journal, she repeatedly expressed a strong and intemperate desire to go and see the old friend she had previously visited on the south coast. Her husband sensibly prohibited such a thing; but her Ladyship contrived a means of leaving Evenwood when Lord Tansor was required to be in town on business. On her return, angry words were spoken; whereupon she locked herself in her room for two days and refused to come out, even when begged to do so by Miss Eames, until at last my cousin was obliged to order that the door be broken down. When his Lordship entered the apartment, to satisfy himself that she had not harmed herself in any way, she thrust a piece of paper into his hand, on which was a passage she had copied out of the edition of Felltham’s Resolves that I had taken up to her some months before. This was what she had written:When thou shalt see the body put on death’s sad and ashy countenance, in the dead age of night, when silent darkness does encompass the dim light of thy glimmering taper, and thou hearest a solemn bell tolled, to tell the world of it; which now, as it were, with this sound, is struck into a dumb attention: tell me if thou canst then find a thought of thine devoting thee to pleasure, and the fugitive toys of life.^*

She had once been the brightest ornament of society, beautiful and carefree. Now her thoughts were all centred on the anguished contemplation of her inevitable demise. It pains me, even now, to speak of these last months, during which Lady Tansor became ever more unpredictable and distracted. My cousin had given instructions that, henceforth, his wife must never be left alone, and had arranged for a woman from the village, Mrs Marian Brine, to sleep in a truckle-bed next to my Lady’s own bed, whilst during the day, even when Miss Eames was with her, a servant was required to sit outside the door of her apartments, the keys of which had been confiscated to prevent her from incarcerating herself again.

But these safeguards proved insufficient, and one night, dressed only in her shift, when a late frost had rendered the earth iron-hard, she slipped out of the house and was found wandering the next morning on the path near the Grecian Temple that stands on the western edge of the Park, dirty and dishevelled and wailing in the most terrible fashion, her poor bare feet cut to pieces from walking through brambles and thorns.

They covered her, and she was brought back in the arms of Gabriel Brine, then his Lordship’s groom, and husband of the woman who had been set to watch over her at night. Brine himself told me how she had continued to babble and moan as he had carried her, crying out over and over again, ‘He is lost to me, my son, my son’; but when he attempted to comfort her by telling her that all was well, and that Master Henry was safe in his cradle, she became maddened, and began to shriek and kick and writhe, cursing him in the most dreadful manner until, coming into the Front Court at last and seeing her husband standing beneath the light of the portico lamp, anxiously awaiting her return, she quietened herself, closed her eyes, and sank back, her strength exhausted, into Brine’s arms.

Lord Tansor stood for a moment, silently contemplating the destruction of his once beautiful wife. I, too, was there, just inside the door. I saw his Lordship nod to Brine, who proceeded to carry his pathetic burden upstairs, where she was laid in Lady Constantia’s great carved bed, from which she was to rise never more.

She died peacefully on the 8th of February 1824, at a little after six o’clock in the evening, and was laid to rest three days later in the Mausoleum built by her husband’s great-grandfather.

So ended the life of Laura Rose Duport, née Fairmile, wife of the 25th Baron Tansor. I now turn to the hidden consequences of that tragic life, and – at last – to the crime that I believe was committed against the closest interests of my cousin, for which I hope – constantly and most fervently – that the soul of the perpetrator has been forgiven by the grace of Him into whose hands we all must fall.

III

Saturday, 22nd October 1853

Immediately after the interment of his wife, Lord Tansor called for Miss Eames, her Ladyship’s former companion, and requested her to leave Evenwood at her earliest convenience. To what she was owed by way of remuneration, he added a generous additional payment, thanking her coldly for the services that she had rendered to his late wife. He hoped that she would have no cause to complain that she had been treated badly by him, to which she replied that he need have no fear on that score, and that she was properly grateful for the consideration she had received in his house.

He did not stop to ask, either Miss Eames or himself, whether she had a home to go to. As it happens, she did not; her father, a widower, had died soon after her Ladyship had absconded to France, and her other sisters were all married. One of these, however, lived in London, and to her, by means of a telegraphic message sent from Easton, Miss Eames now applied for temporary sanctuary.

Leaving Miss Eames to arrange her few possessions for departure, his Lordship then came to my work-room and instructed me to gather up all Lady Tansor’s private papers, and place them in the Muniments Room. Did he wish to peruse them himself after they had been collected? He did not. Did he wish me to examine or order them in any way? He did not. Were there any further instructions concerning her Ladyship’s papers? There were not. Only one more thing was required: the unfinished painting of her Ladyship was to be removed from the Yellow Parlour and placed ‘in a less conspicuous position’. Did his Lordship have a specific location in mind? He did not. Would there be any objection to my hanging it here, in my workroom? None whatsoever.

An hour or so later, there was another knock at my door. It was Miss Eames, come to bid me farewell. She spoke most kindly of the little services that I had been happy to provide for her during the time I had been employed at Evenwood, and said that she would always think of me as a friend. Then she said something that struck me as very odd:

‘You will always think well of me, won’t you, Mr Carteret? I would not like it – I could not bear it – if you did not.’

I assured her that I could think of no circumstance that would alter my very high opinion of her, for, indeed, I regarded her as a very sensible and dependable soul, in whom resided a great deal – a very great deal – of natural goodness and sympathy; I told her as much, and also that no one could have served her late mistress better, or more faithfully. That alone would always command my admiration, the prosecution of one’s duty to an employer or benefactor being, to my mind, a cardinal virtue.