The Meaning of Night Part 27

When she'd gone, he turned to me, and threw his shoulders back, as if he might be preparing to stand his ground against my a.s.sault.

'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 raised yet more perplexing questions; it also robbed me of the means of exposing Phoebus Daunt to Lord Tansor, and to the world, for the thief and fraudster he was.

I returned to London in the deepest gloom. 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 rest.i.tution of my birthright, of that I was certain. But how could that key be discovered? I found 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 say that I have only just been informed 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 very sincerely, LUCIAN M. SLAKE.

This was puzzling; so 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 t.i.tle-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 lamp with shaking hands, I began to read.

DEPOSITION OF P. CARTERET, ESQ.

CONCERNING THE LATE LAURA, LADY TANSOR1.

To whom it may concern.

Friday, 21st October, 1853.

I.

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 G.o.d.

I begin in this fashion because I wish to establish, from the outset, that I intend hereafter to a.s.sume 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 the divisions of 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 in the taxonomy of wrong-doing, and what penalty does it deserve? That it was a crime, I have no doubt; but what to call it? There 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 spilt. 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 three days' time, I am engaged to meet a representative of the firm of Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr, my employer's legal advisers. I am not acquainted with this gentleman, though I am a.s.sured 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. I must state that I have not relied merely on fallible memory in the composition of this account. Throughout my life I have kept a daily journal, scrupulously written up each evening before I retire. These records have been constantly before me, and will be found to corroborate and amplify this necessarily condensed summary of particulars I regard as being, to a greater or lesser extent, pertinent to the case.

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 twenty-fifth Baron Tansor, in August, 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 great-grandfather, 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 Marina 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.1 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 June, 1821, 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 had left us almost dest.i.tute. The house, of course, had to be sold, along with my father's prized collection of Roman coins; and there was no question now of my new wife and I making 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 n.o.ble nephew, in immediately offering me a position as his private secretary, together with accommodation for us all with his step-mother in the Dower House at Evenwood, I do not well know what we should have done. I owe him everything.

At the time I took up my employment, my cousin was married to his first wife, Laura, Lady Tansor, whose people, like my father's family, 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. I am aware of the immediate cause of the rift but do not wish to elaborate on it here. Suffice it to say that it involved a close relative of Lady Tansor's. Beyond, that, I do not feel it is inc.u.mbent on me to say more. What it is important to know is that Lady Tansor had returned from the Continent in late September of the previous year that is, 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 G.o.ddess, 'newly born of th' Oceans fruitfull froth'.2 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,3 the upper storey of which comprised the Muniments Room, containing legal doc.u.ments, accounts, estate and private correspondence, inventories, and such forth relating to the Duport family and stretching back to the time of the first Baron Tansor in the thirteenth century. To this work-room I would come every day to undertake my duties, which soon also began to encompa.s.s general stewardship of the Library then uncatalogued after I evinced an informed interest in the ma.n.u.script books, stored in the Muniments Room, which had been collected by my cousin's 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 stark 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, silently staring out, come rain or shine, and whatever the season, 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 spent days on end, especially during the dreary winter months, shut away in her suite of 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 then 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, I remember, 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.

That, as I recall, was in the spring April, I think of 1822. I remember it 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, wistful smile, to be sure; but it gladdened my heart to see it. And then, as the summer went 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 a.s.sociates, sometimes accompanying his Lordship to Town. And so 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 again 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 into the autumn, 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 the direct line.

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 wished for; 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 ever 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 seventeenth 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,4 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, and did not return. Thenceforth he devoted himself to the nurture of his son, where formerly his wife had been his only care.

Friday, 21st October, 1853 (continued).

II.

Winter 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 pa.s.sed, 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, Henry Hereward. I became aware of the intimacy that existed between them when one day, a little before Christmas, 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 sitting 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 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.

As Christmas drew near, my Lady's spirits began to improve a good deal, and one bright cold day, bundled up in her furs, she left her room 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 West Terrace, walking slowly up and down, arm in arm with Miss Eames. The next morning her son was brought by his nurse to be dandled for a minute or two on his Mamma's knee; and the morning after that, 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 depicting my Lady, with Henry Hereward in her arms, looking out with a curious almost-smile on her long pale face, whilst his Lordship stands, a little stiffly, slightly apart from both wife and child, strongly projecting the air of a man who knows his duty and is determined to do it.

With the New Year, my Lady began to exhibit worrying signs of a severe nervous affection, slight at first, but then increasing in frequency and intensity. As an instance, at the beginning of February, having read of the death of Mrs Radcliffe,1 she vehemently expressed a sudden wish to be taken to London in order to attend her funeral, though she had enjoyed no personal acquaintance with the celebrated auth.o.r.ess. Her husband sensibly prohibited such a thing, 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 pa.s.sage she had copied out of the edition of Felltham's Resolves I had taken up to her some months before. This was what was 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 encompa.s.s 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.2 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 weeks, 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 at the end of February, 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, standing just inside the door. I saw his Lordship nod to Gabriel 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 fourteenth of March, 1824, at a little after six o'clock in the evening, and was laid to rest in the Mausoleum built by her husband's great-grandfather three days later.

So ended the life of Laura Rose Duport, nee Fairmile, wife of the twenty-fifth Baron Tansor. I now turn to the hidden consequences of that tragic life, and at last to the crime 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.

Sat.u.r.day, 22nd October, 1853.

III.

I now propose to deal with events successive to the death of Laura, Lady Tansor.

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 she had performed. He hoped 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, if 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 at the base of Hamnet's Tower and instructed me, at my earliest convenience, to gather up all his late wife'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 his late wife 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 work-room? 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 I had been happy to provide for her during the time I had been employed at Evenwood, and said 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 a.s.sured her that I could think of no circ.u.mstance 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.

'Then I am content,' she said, giving me a rather wan smile. 'We are both loyal servants, are we not?' And with that, to me, rather curious interrogative, she retired to ready herself for her journey. And that was the last I saw of Miss Julia Eames.

The next morning, after waiting on my cousin as usual, I began searching through my Lady's apartments for letters and other papers to remove to the Muniments Room, as I had been instructed. I collected a good many items from my Lady's green-lacquer desk that stood by the window in her sitting-room, and many more from various table-drawers and cabinets; but of the ebony writing-box I had seen on several occasions, and which I particularly remembered from the time I had brought my Lady the copy of Felltham's Resolves she had asked for, there was no sign. I searched most diligently, going through the contents of every cupboard and drawer two or three times over, and even getting down on my hands and knees to look underneath the great curtained bed; but without success. Somewhat puzzled as to the box's whereabouts, I placed my haul in the portmanteau I had brought with me and returned downstairs to my work-room, from where I ascended the narrow flight of steps to the Muniments Room above.

It went against my nature simply to leave the papers in a disordered state; and so I thought I would sort them roughly according to type, and then make a preliminary general inventory before storing them. This was quickly and easily done, and within an hour I had several separate bundles of receipts, bills, letters, sketch-books, notes and memoranda, correspondence and drafts of letters from her Ladyship, and a number of miscellaneous items, princ.i.p.al amongst which were an autograph alb.u.m, a commonplace-book with red silk wrappers inserted in a gilt steel cover, a note-book containing what appeared to be original poems and prose fragments, and an address book contained within an embossed calf wallet. I could not resist who could? looking over a number of the items as I placed them in their allotted pile, though I acknowledge that I did so a little guiltily, having received a specific instruction from my employer to leave the papers in an uncla.s.sified state.

The autograph alb.u.m afforded an interesting record of friends and distinguished visitors, both to Evenwood and to his Lordship's Town-house, and then I lingered for longer than I should have done over a book of delightful pen-and-ink drawings and pencil sketches made by my Lady over several years. A series of French scenes a record, no doubt, of her Continental escapade was particularly well done, for my Lady had been a skilled draughtswoman, with a keen eye for composition. Most were signed and dated 'LRD, 1819', and one or two carried descriptions: I particularly recall a most striking and romantic sketch, bearing the legend 'Rue du Chapitre, Rennes, evening', of an ancient and imposing half-timbered mansion with extravagantly carved beams, and a canopied entrance half-disclosing an interior courtyard. There were also a number of more finished views of the same location, all of them executed with remarkable feeling and care.

The striking of twelve noon from the Chapel clock roused me from my reveries, and I set about placing the separate bundles, which I had loosely tied together with string, in a small iron-bound chest that lay to hand, to which I affixed an identifying label.

I was on the point of descending to my work-room, in order to begin my day's work on his Lordship's correspondence, when, on putting my portmanteau away, I noticed a single piece of paper that I had omitted to retrieve.

On examination, it proved to be of little importance, simply a receipt, dated the fifteenth of September, 1821, for the construction of a small rosewood box by Mr James Beach, carpenter, Church-hill, Easton. I do not well know why I make mention of it here, other than an earnest desire to present as full and as accurate a statement of events as I can, and that it seemed odd to me that her Ladyship should have commissioned such an apparently valueless object on her own account from a man in the town, when Lord Tansor employed an excellent estate carpenter who could have made it for her in a moment. But there it was; I had no justification for spending any more of his Lordship's time on idle speculation, and had already dallied far too long on the task he had set me. And so I a.s.signed the receipt to the proper bundle in the chest, shut the lid, and proceeded back down to my work-room.

I had no immediate reason of my own to consult Lady Tansor's private papers further, and received no request from my employer to do so all financial and legal doc.u.ments of importance, of course, having already pa.s.sed under his Lordship's eye and hand during the course of his marriage, were now in my custodial possession; consequently, over the course of the next few weeks, the contents of the little iron-bound chest began gradually to recede from my present view until, in time, they disappeared entirely.

I did not have cause to remember the existence of my Lady's private papers for many years. During the intervening period, life, as it always does, brought us our share of fair weather and foul. Lord Tansor's step-mother, Anne Duport, with whom we shared the Dower House, departed this life in 1826. The previous summer, my cousin had married the Hon. Hester Trevalyn, and it was expected his Lordship being then only thirty-nine years of age, and his new wife ten years his junior that, in time, their union would be blessed with offspring that would secure the succession to the next generation.

After his first wife's death, his Lordship had given himself completely to the care and instruction of his son. I have no doubt that he mourned the woman he had once loved; but he did so, if I may so put it, in his own way. People called him unfeeling, particularly when, within a year or so of Lady Tansor's death, he began to set his sights on Miss Trevalyn; but that verdict, I think, arose from the habit of impermeable reticence that characterized his whole demeanour, and a failure on the part of those who criticized him to acknowledge the responsibilities of his position.

For with his son, Henry Hereward, he displayed a fine and natural capacity for spontaneous affection. He adored the child. There is no other word for it. The boy bore a striking resemblance to his mother, with his large dark eyes and flowing black hair, and as he grew up he began to reveal also something of her Ladyship's character. He was heedless, argumentative, forever pulling at his father's sleeve asking to be allowed to do this or that, and then running off in a howling rage when he was denied; and yet I never saw his father angered by these tantrums, for within a moment the boy would be back, afire with some other scheme that was allowed by his father, and off he would go skipping and whooping like a happy savage. He had such an air of abounding, irreprehensible vigour about him an abundant and entirely natural charm that made him the favourite of everyone, even strangers, who met him.

And more than all these natural amiabilities, he was his father's heir. It is impossible to overstate the importance, in the eyes of my cousin, of the boy's status in this regard. No father wished more for his son; no father did more for his son. Imagine, then, the effect on my cousin when, one black day, death came softly knocking and took away, not only his child, but also his only heir.

It was a catastrophe of the greatest possible magnitude, a gargantuan affront, an indignity my cousin could neither withstand nor comprehend: it was all these things, and more. He was a father, and felt like a father; but he was also Baron Tansor, the twenty-fifth of that name. Who now would be the twenty-sixth? It prostrated him utterly. He was lost to all comfort, all consolation; and for some weeks we feared seriously feared for his sanity.

It is hard for me to write of these things, for as Lord Tansor's cousin I had, and have, a place in the collateral succession to the Barony. I state here, most solemnly, that this potentiality never overruled the duty I felt I owed to my cousin: his interest was always my first care. What also makes it difficult for me is that the loss of Henry Hereward came upon my cousin just months after our own dear girl, Jane, had been so cruelly taken from us. Indeed the two sweet babes often played together, and had been doing so on the afternoon our little angel fell from the bridge that carries the road from the South Gates across the river to the great house. Our lives were darkened irredeemably from that day.

But it is of my cousin that I write; and I have dwelt on his grief at the death of his only son for this reason: to demonstrate as clearly as I can the ground upon which the crime I believe was visited upon him had been raised. In the light of what I have said concerning my cousin's monomaniacal desire to secure an heir for his line (I do not say he was actually mad on this point, but the phrase, I maintain, is metaphorically apt), what would be the greatest harm, barring physical a.s.sault or murder, that could be done to such a man as this?

I leave the question unanswered pro tempore, and will now proceed with my deposition. I fear I have rambled somewhat, through trying my best to antic.i.p.ate the questions and objections of an imagined interlocutor. Having put pen to paper, it has surprised me to find how difficult it has been to confine myself to the salient points: so many things push themselves forward in my mind for attention.

Well, then, to be as brief as I can. The death of his only son and heir might have been borne by my cousin, as far as such a thing can be borne by a sentient human soul, if his second marriage had been productive of other heirs; but it had not been, nor perhaps would ever be. As the years have pa.s.sed, his Lordship has therefore been obliged to consider his position afresh; and now, in his sixty-fourth year, he has turned to other methods for securing his desires in respect of a successor. I shall return to this critical point in due course.

Sunday, 23rd October, 1853.

IV.

In the summer of 1830, our little circle received a most welcome addition when the Reverend Achilles Daunt, whom I am now proud to call my friend, was appointed to the living of Evenwood by my cousin. Dr Daunt, accompanied by his second wife and a son from his first marriage, came to us from a northern parish with a high, and most deserved, reputation as a scholar. Evenwood offers many blessings, but I fear that men of real intellectual accomplishment are not many in number hereabouts, and the addition of Dr Daunt to our society was a great thing indeed for me, providing, as it did, a man of discernment and wide knowledge with whom to share and discuss my own historical and palaeographical interests. I had the honour to a.s.sist my friend, in a modest way, in the preparation of his great catalogue of the Duport Library; and it was at his suggestion that I later took upon myself the task of collecting material towards a history of the Duport family, in which enterprise I am grateful to have been encouraged and supported by my cousin.

My friend's only son, Mr Phoebus Daunt, soon became a great favourite of my cousin's, who was instrumental in sending the boy to Eton. It became greatly concerning to me to observe how my cousin began to look upon the Rector's son almost as his own. I watched this conspicuous liking for the boy grow over time into something other than mere partiality. It became a kind of covetousness that fed on itself, blinding my cousin to all other considerations. The boy was strong, healthy, lively, good at his books, and properly grateful for the attentions he received from his father's n.o.ble patron; perhaps it was natural for my cousin to see in him a reflection, pale though it was to a less partial observer, of the lost heir. What did not seem natural to me (I hesitate to express criticism of my n.o.ble employer, but feel under a solemn obligation to state my opinion) was his Lordship's patent desire expressed in countless material benefactions, personally audited by myself in my professional capacity to possess the Rector's son as his own (if I may so put it). He could not, of course, buy him outright, like a horse of good stock, or a new carriage; but he could, and did, appropriate him gradually, binding the boy ever more closely to himself by the strongest of chains: self-interest. What young man, just down from the Varsity, could fail to feel flattered to the highest degree, and be mightily emboldened in his self-regard, at being treated with such extraordinary attention by one of the most powerful peers in the realm? Not this young man, certainly.

The idea of formalizing this relationship, by adopting Phoebus Daunt as his heir, has been in my cousin's head since the young man came down from Cambridge. As time has pa.s.sed, it has gradually become an idee fixe, and, at the time of writing, nothing, it seems, can now persuade his Lordship against pursuing this course of action. It is not for me to question the wisdom or propriety of my cousin's desire to leave the bulk of his property to this gentleman, on the single condition of his changing his name to that of his n.o.ble patron; I will only say that the choice of his heir perhaps does not demonstrate that acuity of judgment his Lordship has usually displayed in his affairs; further, since the disclosure of his decision to the parties concerned, the effect on my friend's son has been pernicious, serving to magnify a number of deficiencies in his character. This little ceremony took place some three months since, at a private dinner at Evenwood to which only Dr and Mrs Daunt, and their son, were invited; and I may say that, when the news was generally known, it was remarked by many in our local society that, while the young man and his step-mother instantly began to put on airs, and behave in an altogether insufferable manner (I regret the candour of my remarks, but do not withdraw them), the Rector maintained a dignified silence on the matter in fact he appeared positively disinclined to speak of it.

I might say a good deal more concerning Mr Phoebus Daunt; but I am conscious that I digress from my immediate purpose.

To return to my history of my cousin's family (and, of course, of my own). I need not weary the reader of this statement by rehearsing in detail the progress of the work, the sources for which are extensive and requiring of careful and patient scrutiny. Year by year I continued to work, slowly but steadily, through the doc.u.ments acc.u.mulated and stored by each successive generation, making notes thereon, and composing drafts.

In January of the present year, I was drafting an account of the perilous Civil War period, during which Randolph Duport, a staunch supporter of the King, was killed at Naseby1 and for a time the family's fortunes stood in dire rdy. I happened to look up, as I often did, at the unfinished portrait of my cousin's first wife that now hung on the wall of my work-room. My secretary's duties were over for the day, and for the next hour or so the history of the family during the Restoration of the Monarchy should have claimed my attention; but I was much wearied by my recent exertions and, as I contemplated the image of the beautiful face in the picture above me, suddenly wished very much I cannot say why to look again at the remnants of the life of Laura Tansor, which I had gathered together after her death. It was most unmethodical, and, I may say, uncharacteristic of me to deviate from a logical course of action, for I had been proceeding with a.s.sembling material for my projected Historia Duportiana on a strictly chronological basis. But I succ.u.mbed to this sudden keen desire and, going upstairs to the Muniments Room, opened the little iron-bound chest in which I r. I looked again at her wonderful sketches and drawings, especially those executed during her time in France, and read for the first time poems and other effusions that immediately brought her back to mind, so pa.s.sionate were they, so full of life and spirit. I then turned my attention to a large bundle of letters and, not wishing to put my time to waste, began to compose some brief notes ther resented with a puzzle. Her Ladyship's correspondence was extensive, dating back to letters written to her by my cousin during their courtship, and including a large number of communications from members of her family and friends from the West Country. Faced with such a large number of items, I usually commence by arranging them by date and sender; but when I had finished ordering them in this way, it was clear that a quant.i.ty of letters were missing, particularly those from a certain Simona More, later Glyver, who appeared to have been an old childhood friend of her Ladyship's. There was a sequence of communications at least one a month, sometimes two or three from this lady, beginning in February, 1816, the year her Ladyship married my cousin and moved from her home in Somerset to Evenwood; but then, in July, 1819, the letters ceased altogether, only resuming their previous frequency in October, 1820. It was manifest, from her letters to Lady Tansor, that Miss More, or rather Mrs Glyver, as she soon became, had enjoyed an exceptionally intimate acquaintance with my cousin's first wife, which made the gap in the correspondence fifteen months all the more singular. Some of the other categories of doc.u.ment bills, receipts, &c. showed similar chronological disruptions. After considering the matter for some little time, and going back to the Dower House to consult my own daily journal on the matter of dates, I concluded that a deliberate attempt had been made to remove, and perhaps destroy, any doc.u.ment, no matter how trivial, that dated from July, 1819, just before her Ladyship left for France, until after she returned husband, at the end of September the following year. I went to make discreet enquiries of my cousin as to whether any of his first wife's papers were still in his possession, but it seemed they were not. I even made another search of her former apartments, and other places where I thought perhaps they might be, but could find n Sunday, 23rd October, 1853 (continued).

V.

I see from my journal that it was on the twenty-fifth of March, 1853, that I received the following communication: Dear Mr Carteret I regret to inform you that my sister, Miss Julia Eames, died on Thursday last, the 21st inst. Her family and many friends thank G.o.d that, though her sufferings have been great, her pa.s.sing was peaceful.

Before the end came, my dear sister had strength enough to request, most insistently, that I write you this note, to be sent after G.o.d had taken her, to tell you that there is something here she was most desirous for you to have, something placed into her keeping that she said must now pa.s.s to you.

I therefore hope that you will favour me with a reply at your earliest convenience, stating a day and a time that will suit you to visit us here, so that I may discharge this last duty to my dear departed sister.

I am, sir, yours very sincerely, J. McBryde (Mrs) My cousin happened to be on the Isle of Wight just at that time, advising the Prince-Consort on some matter connected with Her Majesty's new residence,1 and was not to return for a week more; and so I immediately arranged with Mrs McBryde to call upon her on the following week.

I was received kindly by this lady, who bore a close resemblance to her late sister, at a well-appointed house in Hyde-Park-square, in that new residential district of London known as Tyburnia.2 After the usual introductions and exchanges, during which I commiserated most sincerely with Mrs McBryde for her loss, I was offered tea, which I declined, and then Mrs McBryde walked over to a large cabinet in the corner of the room and proceeded to take out an object.

'This is what my sister wished you to have.'

I had last seen it nearly thirty years ago, standing on a table in my Lady's sitting-room at Evenwood. A large ebony writing-box, bearing the initials 'LRD' in mother-of-pearl on the lid.