The Meaning of Night

by Michael Cox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  32

  Non omnis moriar*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Self: ‘Regular?’

  Waiter: ‘Sir?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And so I gave myself up to sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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