by Michael Cox
I hope this letter will find you safe and well, and I pray that God will protect you, and all our brave soldiers. We have all been appalled by Mr Russell’s reports.*
Yours most sincerely,
C. TREDGOLD.
Blithe Lodge
St John’s Wood, London
18th January 1855
DEAR MR TREDGOLD, —
Yr letter arrived only this morning, but I hurry to send you a reply.
I have not seen him since that snowy night in December last. There had been a falling-out between us, I’m afraid, which I greatly regretted. He stood on the front step & wd not come into the house, saying only that he was leaving England for a time and that he had come to beg my forgiveness for being unable to love me as he said I deserved. Then he told me his real name & the truth about his birth – replacing the half-truths (I will not say lies) I had formerly been given. I understand that you have been long aware of who he really is – he spoke of you most affectionately, & with gratitude for how you have tried to help him. It is a most extraordinary story, & I confess that, at first, I was inclined to think it was all fancy, if not something worse; but I soon saw in his eyes that he was at last speaking the truth. I know also about Miss C—, & how she deceived him in order to deprive him of the proof that would have delivered everything he had dreamed of into his hands. He told me that he loved her, & that he loves her still. And this is why he can never love me.
We parted, & I asked if he would come again – as a friend – when he returned. But he only shook his head.
‘You have your kingdom now,’ was all he said. ‘And I have mine.’ Then he turned and went. I watched him walk down the path, out into the night. He did not look back.
When my employer, Mrs Daley, brought in the report from The Times, naming Edward as the suspected killer of Mr Daunt, I thought my heart would break. What a burden he must have carried with him! To do such a terrible, terrible thing, even though clear injury had been done to him! I saw then how far I had been from knowing him, still less of understanding him. It may be wrong of me to say so, but I shall always think of him fondly, though of course I cannot now regard him as I once did. I loved him truly – then; but he was cruel to me, though I believe not intentionally. He betrayed me, which I might have forgiven. But he did not love me as I deserved, which I cannot forgive.
Yours very sincerely,
ISABELLA GALLINI
Calle Espiritu Santo*
25th November 1855
MY DEAR MR TREDGOLD, —
I can easily imagine your emotions when you open this letter. Surprise and consternation, I am sure, will be uppermost; but also, I hope, a degree of guilty pleasure, to hear again – though for the last time – from someone who esteems you more highly than any man alive, and to whom you have been a father in all but name.
I have come here, where no one will ever find me, under a name no one knows, to live out my days in a solitude of my own choosing – in a blackened and shattered landscape of extraordinary otherness, carved by a furious god, and fanned by hot African winds. I deserve no sympathy for what I have done; but you, my dear sir, deserve to know how I came here, and why.
After leaving England, on the night of December 11th last, I travelled first to Copenhagen, & then to Fåborg, on the island of Funen, where I remained for nearly a month. From there I went to Germany, to revisit some of my old haunts in and around Heidelberg, before going, first, to S. Bertrand de Comminges in the Pyrenees, where there was a cathedral that I had long wished to see, & then to the island of Mallorca – my last destination until I sailed here.
I intend to say nothing concerning the reason for my exile – to spare you more pain than I have already caused you. I have not escaped punishment, as some may imagine; I am punished every hour I live for the folly of my life, and what it drove me to do. My enemy and I were mined from the same mortal seam; cast into the same furnace of creation, our images impressed on opposite sides of the same coin, separate, but not distinct, conjoined by some fatal alchemy. I killed him; but in doing so, I killed the best part of myself.
I think much of her – I mean my mother – & of how alike we were, & how we were both destroyed by believing it was in our own hands to punish those who had done wrong to us. For myself, I felt impelled by a relentless and misguided sense of fatality, which I interpreted as justifying whatever actions I chose to take. My exile has given me more wisdom. I have been immolated by my former belief in a greater Destiny, urging me ever onwards; but now I have found respite and comfort in a re-acceptance of a sterner faith: that we are all sinners, and must all come to judgment. And in this also: that we should not strive against what we cannot mend.
Of course I think also of my dear girl, whom I shall always love, as you loved my mother. Cruel, cruel! To betray me so, knowing that I loved her above all others for herself alone. Yet though she has tormented me almost beyond endurance, I cannot withhold my forgiveness from her. She will inherit what should have been mine, as I have heard; but she has lost more than she will ever gain; and, like me, she will be required to answer for what she has done.
I live here with few comforts, but enough for my simple needs. My only companion is a one-eyed cat, of superlative hideousness, who appeared on the very first morning of my arrival, and who has not left me since. I have enough of my old humour left to have christened him Jukes.
And so, my dear old Senior Partner, I come at last to what has been occupying me, as a preliminary to asking a final favour of you – if I can trespass on your goodness so far. Since coming here, six months since, I have been writing down all that has happened to me & have accumulated, as a result, a goodly number of large-quarto sheets, purchased for the purpose before I left Mallorca. Yesterday evening, quite late, I laid down my pen at last, and packed all the sheets into a locked wooden box. I now go to meet an English gentleman, a Mr John Lazarus, shipping agent, of Billiter-street, City, who has kindly agreed to deliver the box to you in Canterbury. He knows me by another name, and of course I can count on you not to disabuse him. The key I shall send to you separately.
If you are so minded – as I hope you will be – I would ask you, on receipt, to arrange for the pages to be bound up (I can recommend Mr Riviere, Great Queen-street) & then, if it can be so contrived, for the volume to be placed privily in the Library at Evenwood, where it may be found, or not, at some future date. It is a great deal to ask; but I can ask it of no one else but you.
There is much I would wish to hear about – of people I have known, and how it goes with the world I have left behind; and, most of all, of you, and how you are, and whether your collection prospers, and whether you are quite recovered. I am now a man apart, and can never again put on the life I once knew. But I pray – yes, truly – for your contentment and good health, and great long life, and beg your forgiveness for what I have done.
This, then, is what I have learned, since writing my confession on this final shore:Honour not the malice of thine enemy so much, as to say, thy misery comes from him: Dishonour not the complexion of the times so much, as to say, thy misery comes from them; justifie not the Deity of Fortune so much, as to say, thy misery comes from her; Finde God pleased with thee, and thou hast a hook in the nostrils of every Leviathan.*
I long for sleep, and for soft English rain. But they do not come.
E.G.
*[The following items have been bound in at this point in the manuscript. Ed.]
*[William Howard Russell (1820–1907), The Times’s correspondent in the Crimea. His reports of the conditions suffered by the British Army, and especially by the wounded in the hospital at Scutari, during the winter of 1854–5, scandalized the nation. Ed.]
*[From the small amount of internal evidence, it appears that the narrator may have written this letter from the volcanic island of Lanzarote. Ed.]
*[A passage from Donne’s Sermon XX, on Psalm 38: 3, in Fifty Sermons (1649). Ed.]
Appendix
P. Rainsford Daunt
(1819–54) List of Published Works
Given in order of publication. Place of publication is London in all cases.
Ithaca: A Lyrical Drama (Edward Moxon, 1841)The Maid of Minsk: A Poem in Twenty-Two Cantos (Edward Moxon, 1842)The Tartar-King: A Story in XII Cantos (Edward Moxon, 1843)Agrippa; with Other Poems (David Bogue, 1845)The Cave of Merlin: A Poem (Edward Moxon, 1846)The Pharaoh’s Child: A Romance of Ancient Aegypt (Edward Moxon, 1848)‘Memories of Eton’, Saturday Review (10 October 1848)Montezuma: A Drama (Edward Moxon, 1849)The Conquest of Peru: A Dramatic Romance (Edward Moxon, 1850)Scenes of Early Life (Chapman & Hall, 1852)Penelope: A Tragedy, in Verse (Bell & Daldy, 1853)American Sonnets (Longman, Brown, Green & Longman, 1853)Rosa Mundi; and Other Poems (Edward Moxon, 1854)The Heir: A Romance of the Modern (Edward Moxon, 1854)Epimetheus; with other posthumous poems (2 vols., Edward Moxon, 1854 for 1855)The Art of the Epic (John Murray, 1856)
Acknowledgements
The literary and factual sources on which I have drawn are too numerous, too scattered over the years, and, in many cases, too obvious, to list in full. In particular, accounts of mid-Victorian London abound, and I have freely ransacked them. Thirty years ago, when I first began contemplating this novel, such works needed to be consulted in a major copyright library. Now many of them are freely available on the Web – I direct interested readers, for instance, to the excellent Victorian Dictionary site created and maintained by Lee Jackson (www.victorianlondon.org). Indispensable sources of background detail and ambience have of course included Henry Mayhew, whose London Labour and the London Poor of 1851 no one writing or fictionalizing about this period can afford to neglect, but also the less well-known non-fiction works of George Augustus Sala.
Three real places have contributed to the making of Evenwood, Glyver’s cursed obsession: Drayton House, the private home of the Stopford-Sackville family, and Deene Park, the former home of James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan (of Balaclava fame) – both in my own home county of Northamptonshire; and Burghley House, Stamford. The library of – I mean the books collected by – Lord Tansor’s grandfather has been based unashamedly on that of the 2nd Earl Spencer (1758–1834) at Althorp, another of Northamptonshire’s great houses. Residents of East Northamptonshire will also recognize the names of several local places in those of some of the characters – Tansor (a charming village outside Oundle) and Glapthorn (ditto), Glyver’s principal pseudonym, amongst them. Needless to say, the topography of Evenwood and its environs is pure invention, though Lord Tansor’s seat may be envisaged as lying in the north-east corner of Northamptonshire, in the area known as Rockingham Forest.
And so to the most important sources of advice, support, and inspiration: people.
At A. P. Watt: Natasha Fairweather, who has been, and who continues to be, everything an agent should be; Derek Johns; Linda Shaughnessy; Teresa Nicholls; Madeleine Buston; Philippa Donovan; and Rob Kraitt.
At John Murray: my editor, Anya Serota, who has lived in Glyver’s world as intensely as I have, and who has steered the book through to publication with consummate professionalism; Roland Philipps; James Spackman; Nikki Barrow; Sara Marafini; Amanda Jones; Caro Westmore; Ed Faulkner; Maisie Sather; and all the other people at John Murray and in the wider Hachette group, both in the UK and overseas, who have contributed so much.
Both my North American editors – Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton in New York, and Ellen Seligman at McClelland & Stewart in Toronto – have been wonderfully supportive throughout the final stages of writing and publication. Grateful thanks also go to Louise Brockett, Bill Rusin, Erin Sinesky, and Evan Carver at Norton; Doug Pepper and Ruta Liormonas at McClelland & Stewart; and to everyone in both companies – again too numerous to name individually – who has been involved in publishing The Meaning of Night. I would also like to thank my foreign-language publishers for their enthusiastic commitment to making Glyver’s story available to readers in Europe, Japan, and South America, as well as acknowledging the not inconsiderable labours of the individual translators.
Amongst those who so generously responded to my requests for information, I must acknowledge first of all the advice supplied by Clive Cheesman, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, at the College of Arms, on various matters relating to the (fictitious) Tansor Barony, and to the legal intricacies of Baronies by Writ. I cannot thank him enough for the care and courtesy with which he responded to all my enquiries. Any remaining legal or genealogical howlers that may have escaped scrutiny are, of course, most definitely my responsibility, not his.
Michael Meredith, Librarian of Eton College, and Penny Hatfield, the Eton Archivist, supplied help on several details concerning Glyver’s and Daunt’s time at the school, in particular the Ralph Roister Doister incident, although they should in no way be held responsible for the fictional results.
Gordon Biddle helped to establish how Glyver travelled by train from Stamford to London via Cambridge; whilst for advice on the technical aspects of Glyver’s passion for photography I am grateful to Dr Robin Lenman. Further advice on early photography was kindly provided by Peter Marshall.
I tender particular and admiring thanks to Celia Levett, for her miraculously meticulous copy-editing, and to Nick de Somogyi, for his equally rigorous proofreading. Both have saved me from much embarrassment.
I am indebted to David Young, for his enthusiastic and confidence-boosting verdict on a draft of Part 1, and to another old and valued friend, Owen Dudley Edwards, who gallantly undertook to read and comment on a proof copy over the course of a weekend.
To [Achilles] James Daunt, proprietor of Daunt’s Bookshop in London, may I also record my appreciation for not objecting to the fact that I unknowingly appropriated his name for the Rector of Evenwood.
I would like to express here, without elaboration, my gratitude, and that of my family, to a group of people who have – literally – helped give me the chance to finish what has been in my mind for so long: Professor Christer Lindquist, together with Beth McLaughlin, and all the other members of the Gamma Knife team at the Cromwell Hospital, London; Mr Christopher Adams; Dr Adrian Jones; Dr Diana Brown; and Professor John Wass.
Finally, like all authors who depend on those close to them for daily support and understanding, what is undeniably real about this novel is the debt I owe to my family: to my darling wife Dizzy, without whom I would have no reason to write; our daughter Emily (whose name, I must emphasize, is the only link with my main female character); my stepchildren Miranda and Barnaby; my grandchildren, Eleanor, Harry, and Dizzy Junior; and my daughter-in-law Becky; my mother-in-law, Joan Crockett, in whose house large chunks of the novel were written, and the other members of the Crockett clan in Dorset. It is a sadness to us all that my late father-in-law, Gee Crockett, is not here to see the novel published. Last, but never least, my thanks and love go to my wonderful parents, Gordon and Eileen Cox, who have supported me through thick and thin.
Michael Cox
Michael Cox was born in 1948. After graduating from Cambridge, he avoided working for a living by becoming a singer-songwriter. In 1989, he joined Oxford University Press as a senior commissioning editor. His highly praised biography of the ghost-story writer M.R. James was followed by a critical edition of James’s stories and several successful Oxford anthologies of supernatural and detective fiction. Michael Cox’s first novel, The Meaning of Night, was published to wide critical acclaim and shortlisted for the 2007 Costa First Novel Award. His second novel, The Glass of Time, is a sequel to his debut and has garnered rave reviews worldwide since its publication in 2008. Cox was nominated for Waterstone’s Newcomer of the Year award at the 2006 Galaxy British Book Awards. He lives in rural Northamptonshire with his wife, Dizzy.
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Cox
Cloth edition published 2006
Trade paperback edition published 2007
Emblem edition published 2009
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cox, Michael, 1948-
The meaning of night / Michael Cox.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-385-0
I. Title.
PR6103.O975M42 2009 823.92 C2008-907502-1
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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