The Meaning of Night

by Michael Cox

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Did you form a favourable impression of Evenwood,

  Edward?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  IV

  The Pursuit of Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I did not expect to be rewarded.’

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

  ‘Those are comforting convictions.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Nor wholly good, either.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Most certainly.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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