The Meaning of Night

by Michael Cox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Your sister?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Killed her? You don’t say so!’

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

  ‘Go on, Mary.’

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

  ‘And how did your sister meet him?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Pluckrose, sir. Josiah Pluckrose.’

  *[‘The written word remains’. Ed.]

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

  25

  In limine*

  Pluckrose.

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

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

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

  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, t
hat 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.