The Meaning of Night

by Michael Cox

  The conversation went on pleasantly over tea as we discussed various rarities in the field of voluptuous literature that we were each keen to locate. Mr Tredgold was particularly eager to augment his collection with a copy of The Cabinet of Venus, the partial, anonymous translation put out in 1658 of the celebrated Geneanthropeia of Sinibaldi. I made a mental note of this, believing that I might know where I could lay my hands on a copy, and thinking that its acquisition would ingratiate me even further with my employer.

  At about five o’clock, much later than my usual hour for departing, I rose to take my leave. But before I could say anything, Mr Tredgold had jumped to his feet and had taken me by the hand.

  ‘May I say, Edward – I hope you will not mind if I presume to address you by your first name – that I have been extremely satisfied by your work.’ One of his hands continued to hold mine tightly, whilst the other he placed gently on my shoulder.

  ‘I am glad to hear it, Mr Tredgold, though I do not know in what way I can possibly have rendered satisfaction.’

  ‘You have done what I asked of you, have you not?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you have done it to the best of your ability, diligently, without shirking?’ ‘I believe so.’

  ‘So do I. And if I were to ask you a question concerning any of the documents you have read, do you think you would be able to answer it?’

  ‘Yes – if you would allow me to consult my note-book.’

  ‘You took notes! Capital! But perhaps you found the task a little irksome? No need to answer. Of course you did. A man of your talents should not be confined. I wish to liberate your talents, Edward. Will you allow me to do that?’

  Not knowing how to reply to this curious question, I said nothing, which Mr Tredgold appeared to take as assent.

  ‘Well then, Edward, your probationary days are over. Come to my office tomorrow, at ten. I have a little problem that I wish to discuss with you.’

  So saying, he wished me a pleasant evening, beamed, and retired to his study.

  *[One of the senior members of the Inns of Court. Ed.]

  *[Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), Italian poet. In 1524 he wrote accompanying sonnets to sixteen pornographic drawings by Giulio Romano, pupil of Raphael. Ed.]

  †[John Cleland (1709–89), author of the infamous Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), otherwise known as Fanny Hill. Ed.]

  II

  Madame Mathilde

  The next morning, as requested, I presented myself at Mr Tredgold’s private office. When I left, an hour later, it was as the Senior Partner’s confidential assistant, a post which, as he was at pains to emphasize, would involve undertaking a variety of duties ‘of a discreet and private kind’. These duties, to which only Mr Tredgold and I were privy, I undertook for the next five years, with, I think I may say, some success.

  It may be imagined that a distinguished, and successful, solicitor such as Mr Tredgold often needed to lay his hand on information essential for a case that was not – shall we say – readily obtainable through the usual channels. On such occasions, when it was best that he remain in ignorance of the sources of such information, as well as the means by which it came to him, Mr Tredgold would summon me, and suggest a turn or two round the Temple Gardens. A problem of particular concern for the firm would be set out – theoretically, of course – and discussed (in the abstract).

  ‘I wonder,’ he would say, ‘whether anything might be done about this?’

  Nothing further would be said, and we would make our leisurely return to Paternoster-row, discoursing on nothing in particular.

  No formal instructions were issued, no records of conversations kept. But when something needed doing – of a discreet and private kind – it became my task at Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr to ensure that it was done.

  The first ‘little problem’ that Mr Tredgold placed before me, for theoretical consideration, concerned a Mrs Bonner-Childs, and may be taken as typical of the work that I subsequently undertook.

  This lady had been a patron of an establishment in Regent-street called the Abode of Beauty, run by a certain Sarah Bunce, alias Madame Mathilde.* Here, Madame enticed gullible females dedicated to the pursuit of eternal beauty (a not inconsiderable market, one would suppose) into parting with their – or more often their husbands’ – money, by dispensing ingenious preparations with exotic names (to effect the complete and permanent removal of wrinkles, or to preserve a youthful complexion in perpetuity) at twenty guineas a time. The establishment also offered a room sumptuously fitted out as an Arabian Bath. The unfortunate Mrs Bonner-Childs, having been tempted to partake of this last amenity, had come back to her clothes to find that her diamond ring and earrings had vanished. Upon confronting Madame Mathilde, she was informed by the proprietress that if she made a fuss over the loss, then Madame would inform Mrs Bonner-Childs’s husband – Assistant Secretary at the India Board, no less – that his wife had been using the Bath for immoral assignations.

  The success of Madame Mathilde’s establishment – like Kitty Daley’s Academy – depended on the fatal spectre of public scandal doing its work on those unfortunates who succumbed to this and to other similar ruses; but in this case, Mrs Bonner-Childs immediately informed her husband of what had happened, and he, trusting completely in his wife’s innocence in the matter, instantly consulted Mr Christopher Tredgold.

  My employer and I duly took a turn round the Temple Gardens. Mr Bonner-Childs was ready to prosecute if it came to it, but had expressed the hope that Mr Tredgold might be able to suggest a way by which this might be avoided, and his wife’s jewels returned. Either way, the question of the firm’s fee – at whatever level it might be set – was immaterial.

  ‘I wonder whether anything might be done about this?’ mused Mr Tredgold aloud, whereupon we returned to Paternoster-row, conversing as usual about nothing in particular.

  The next day I set about observing the daily round of entrances and exits at the Abode of Beauty. In due course, I saw what I was looking for.

  The late-morning drizzle had slowly thickened into rain. All around, the city thundered and roared. At every level of human existence, from the barest subsistence to luxurious indolence, its inhabitants crossed and re-crossed the clogged and dirty arteries of the great unsleeping beast, each according to his station – trudging through the murk and mud, insulated in curtained carriages, swaying knee to knee in crowded omnibuses, or perched precariously on rumbling high-piled carts – all engrossed by their own private purposes.

  Though it was not yet midday, the light seemed already to be failing, and lamps were burning in the windows of houses and shops. It is a dark world, as I have often heard preachers say, and on that day the metaphor was made flesh.

  I had been standing in Regent-street for some time, and was somewhat aimlessly glancing into the window of Messrs Johnson & Co.,* thinking that perhaps I might make a present to myself of a new hat, when I saw the reflected image of a woman in the glass. She was about thirty years of age and, passing just behind me, had stopped before the Abode to look up at the luridly painted sign above the door. She hesitated, and then proceeded on her way; but she had taken only a few steps when she stopped again, and then returned to the door of the establishment.

  She had an open honest face, and was wearing a fine pair of emerald earrings. I immediately stepped forward to prevent her entering. She looked momentarily shocked, but I swiftly persuaded her to move away from the door. This was my first lesson in boldness, and I learned it well. I also found, to my surprise, that I possessed a natural persuasiveness in such situations and quickly gained the confidence of the lady, who agreed, after we had retired a little way down the street to discuss the matter, to fall in with my plans.

  A few minutes later, she re-entered the establishment and immediately requested a bath, taking off her clothes and jewellery in an adjoining room, as Mrs Bonner-Childs had done. Having observed that Madame Mathilde was the sole person within the
premises at that moment, I had entered behind my accomplice and, waiting a few moments for her to enter the bath chamber, had the satisfaction of surprising Madame in the act of helping herself to the lady’s emerald earrings.

  We exchanged a few words, with the result that Madame appeared to see the error of her ways. She lived exceptionally well from the Abode of Beauty, and could not risk prosecution, which I assured her would now be a simple matter to accomplish.

  ‘A mistake, sir, a simple mistake,’ she said plaintively. ‘I was just on the point of puttin’ them away for safety – like the girl did with the other lady’s, only I wasn’t aware at the time that she’d done so …’

  And so on until, at last, she produced Mrs Bonner-Childs’s jewellery, with much self-pitying hand-wringing, and fervent promises to send the girl packing who had been so thoughtless as to hide away the items without telling anyone.

  Mr Tredgold expressed great satisfaction that the matter had been resolved so quickly and quietly, without recourse to public prosecution, and Mr Bonner-Childs promptly settled a substantial bill from the firm for services rendered, a satisfactory portion of which was remitted to my account at Coutts & Co.

  I must also mention, briefly, the later case of Josiah Pluckrose, as being illustrative of the more unpleasant side of the work I undertook for Mr Tredgold, and for other reasons, which will later become clear.

  He was a common sort of man, this Pluckrose; a butcher from a long line of butchers, who had managed to amass a good deal of capital by means that Mr Tredgold described, in a whisper, as ‘dubious’. He had given up the art of butchery at the age of twenty-four, had done a little boxing, had worked as a waterman and as a brush-maker, and had then, miraculously as it seemed, emerged from the mire as a pseudo-gentleman, with a house in Weymouth-street, and more than a few pennies to his name.

  Tall and thick-set, with reptilian eyes and a livid scar across one cheek, Pluckrose had a wife who had previously been in service at some great house or other, and whom he had treated abominably during the short period they had been married. One day in the autumn of 1849, this poor lady was found dead – beaten around the head in a most terrible way – and Pluckrose was arrested for her murder. He had previously engaged Tredgolds on a number of business matters, and so the firm was naturally retained as the instructing solicitors for his defence. ‘An unpleasant necessity,’ Mr Tredgold confided, ‘which, as he has introduced a number of clients to the firm, I do not think I can avoid. He protests his innocence, of course, but still it is all a little distasteful.’ He then asked me if I could possibly see any way round this particular ‘little problem’.

  To be short, I did find a way – and, for the first time since I began such work, it went a little against my conscience. The details need not detain us here; the case came on in January 1850; Pluckrose was duly acquitted of the murder of his wife; and an innocent man later went to the gallows. I am not proud of this, but I discharged my office so well that no one – not even Mr Tredgold – ever suspected the truth. Good riddance to the odious Pluckrose, then.

  Or so I thought.

  With the business of Madame Mathilde, in February 1849, began a life of which I could have had no conception only six months earlier, so alien was it to my former pursuits and interests. I soon discovered that I had a distinct talent for the work that I was called upon to undertake for Mr Tredgold – indeed, I took to it with a degree of proficiency that surprised even my self-assured nature. I gathered information, establishing a network of connexions amongst both high and low in the capital; I uncovered little indiscretions, secured fugitive evidence, watched, followed, warned, cajoled, sometimes threatened. Extortion, embezzlement, crim.con.,* even murder – the nature of the case mattered not. I became adept in seeking out its weak points, and then supplying the means by which the foundations of an action against a client could be fatally undermined. My especial talent, I found, was sniffing out simple human frailty – those little seeds of baseness and self-interest which, when brought to the light and well watered, turn into self-destruction. And so the firm would prosper, and Mr Tredgold’s seraphic beam would grow all the broader.

  London itself became my workshop, my manufactory, my study, to which I devoted all my talents of application and assimilation. I sought to master it intellectually, as I had mastered every subject to which I had turned my mind in the past; to tame and throw a leash round the neck of what I came to picture as the Great Leviathan, the never-sleeping monster in whose expanding coils I now dwelled.

  From the heights to the depths, from brilliant civility and refinement to the sinks of barbarity, from Mayfair and Belgravia to Rosemary-lane and Bluegate-fields, I quickly discerned its lineaments, its many intertwining natures, its myriad distinctions and gradations. I watched the toolers and dippers,* and all the other divisions of the swell mob, do their work in the crowded affluence of the West-end by day, and the rampsmen† at their brutal work as the shadows closed in. I observed, too, with particular attention, the taxonomy of vice: the silken courtesans brazenly hanging on the arms of their lords and gentlemen; the common tails and judies, and every other class of gay‡ female. Each day I added to my store of knowledge; each day, too, I extended my own experience of what this place – unique on God’s earth – could offer a man of passion and imagination.

  I have no intention of laying before you my many amorous adventures; such things are tedious at best. But one encounter I must mention. The female in question was of that type known as a dress-lodger.§ It was not long after the affair of Madame Mathilde, and I had returned to Regent-street to look again at the wares of Messrs Johnson & Co. She was about to cross the street when she caught my eye: well dressed, petite, with a dimpled chin and delicate little ears. It was a dull, damp morning, and I was close enough to see tiny jewels of moisture clinging to her ringlets. She was about to join a small group of pedestrians on a swept passage across the street. On reaching the opposite pavement she stopped, and half turned back, fingering an errant lock of hair nervously. It was then that I saw an elderly woman, crossing the roadway a few yards behind her. This, I knew by now, was her watcher, paid by the girl’s bawd to ensure that she did not abscond with the outfits provided for her. Girls such as she were too poor to deck themselves out in the finery required to hook in custom, like the sharp bobtails of the theatre porticos and the Café Royal.

  I began to follow her. She walked with quick steps through the crowds, sure of her way. In Long Acre, I drew level with her. The business was swiftly concluded, her watcher retired to a nearby public-house, whilst the girl and I entered a house on the corner of Endell-street.

  Her name was Dorrie, short for Dorothy. She had become what she was, she said afterwards, to support her widowed mother, who could now find no regular employment of her own. We talked for some time, and I found my heart begin to go out to the girl. At my request, she took me, with her watcher still a few paces behind us, to a cramped and damp chamber in a dreary court hard by. Her mother, I guessed, was only some forty years of age herself, but she was bent and frail, with a harsh wheezing cough. When I saw the evident signs of perpetual struggle and weariness on her face, I was immediately put in mind – though the cases were very different – of my own mother’s constant labours, and the toll that they had taken on her.

  Almost without thought on my part, an arrangement was made. I never regretted it. For several years, until circumstances intervened, Mrs Grainger came two or three times a week to Temple-street, to sweep my room, take my washing away, and empty my slops.

  As she entered of a morning, I would say: ‘Good-morning, Mrs Grainger. How is Dorrie?’

  ‘She is well, sir, thank you. A good girl still.’ And that is all we would ever say.

  Thus I became a kind of benefactor to Dorrie Grainger and her mother. Yet even this unpremeditated act of charity on my part was to become a connective strand in that fatal web of circumstance that was already closing round me.

  *[This lady appears
to have been a precursor of the more famous Rachel Leverson, extortionist and thief, who was prosecuted in 1868 and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for exactly the same activities as Madame Mathilde. Ed.]

  *[Hatters to the Queen. Ed.]

  *[i.e. ‘criminal conversation’ – adultery. Ed.]

  *[Types of pickpockets. Ed.]

  †[Violent street robbers. Ed.]

  ‡[Used in the contemporary sense of ‘immoral’, not in the modern sense. Ed.]

  § [‘A prostitute who was provided with expensive-looking clothes by her keeper. Ed.]

  G REAT L EVIATHAN

  O N W AKING , F EBRUARY , MDCCL*

  O City! Deep and wide!

  Womb of all things!This Sun, this Moon, these stars – I touch and feel them.

  I burn. I freeze.

  These mountains I grind to powder under my hand.

  These torrents I consume, these forests I devour.I live in all things, in light and air, and music unheard.

  O City of blood and bone and flesh!

  Of muscle and sinew, of tooth and eye!Theatre of all vanity, the hell for which I yearn:

  Wild and raging beneath my feet. My life.

  My death.

  *[As with the passage on the Iron Master (p. 102), these lines have been pasted onto the page at this point. The reason for their inclusion here is not immediately obvious, though they were clearly of significance to the author, and we may perhaps further conjecture that they were written under the influence of opium. Ed.]

  III

  Evenwood

  After taking up residence in Temple-street, and commencing my employment at Tredgolds, my photographic ambitions had languished for a while, though I continued to correspond with Mr Talbot. But, once settled, I constructed a little dark-room within a curtained-off space in my sitting-room. Here also I kept my cameras (recently purchased from Horne and Thornethwaite),* along with my lamps, gauze, pans and bowls, trays and soft brushes, fixing and developing solutions, beakers, glasses, quires of paper, syringes and dippers, and all the other necessary paraphernalia of the art. I worked hard to familiarize myself with the necessary chemical and technical processes, and on summer evenings would take my camera down to the river, or to picturesque corners of the nearby Inns of Court, to practise my compositional techniques. In this way, I began to build up my experience and knowledge, as well as amassing a good many examples of my own photographic work.