The Glass of Time

by Michael Cox

  What has been troubling me now is how my marriage, and the birth of P—, will be seen by those less charitable souls in society when we return. I expect opprobrium in some quarters for the precipitate manner in which I appear to have conducted myself so soon after the death of P.R.D. But why should I worry about such people? I have Duport blood in me, and so do not need to pay any heed to smallminded tittle-tattle.

  Others, I hope, will say, why should an unexpected attachment be resisted, even when it comes so soon after such a loss as I have suffered? Surely that will not be condemned? People will see that Tadeusz and I are happy, for we truly are; and my friends – my true friends – will rejoice when I return to England a mother, bringing with me a fine son to present to his noble relative.

  So, you see, I have now argued myself out of my anxieties – for I admit only to you that I have greatly feared more often in these last days, when everything, or nearly everything, has been achieved, than ever before, that we shall eventually be found out.

  But now I must take the little one out for his walk – under a brilliant sun that I hope is also shining down on Evenwood, the place where I long so much to be once more.

  Ever yr loving,

  E. ZALUSKI

  LETTER 10

  [Postmarked Carlsbad, 11th March 1856]

  MY LORD,—

  We arrived here from Prague late last evening.

  The time, we think, has now come to give out the news of our return. I believe you have in mind to place announcements in The Times and the Illustrated London News, which should suffice. Tongues will do the rest.

  We leave here on Friday. A few days in Paris are proposed, and then home at last.

  How I long to see Evenwood again – and, most of all, to place its beautiful heir in your arms!

  Yrs ever & truly,

  E.

  32

  The Consequences of a Lie

  I

  The Great Secret Revealed

  CALMLY FOLDING the last letter, I sit back in the chair, staring out, through a thickening curtain of rain, at the carriage-road winding down to the grey mass of the great house, planted, like some fantastic palace of legend, in its shallow bowl of misty green.

  I re-read each of the ten letters in turn, making notes on each, to establish the following sequence of events:

  1. The ten letters corroborate what Inspector Gully has gleaned from Conrad: that in January 1855, despite her grief, Miss Emily Carteret had gone to Bohemia, with Lord Tansor’s blessing, with the sole but secret aim of seeking out a husband. Fortune quickly favours her, and, soon after arriving in Carlsbad, she discovers a suitable candidate in the impecunious Colonel Zaluski.

  2. Certain arrangements are made, and Miss Carteret quickly marries her Polish colonel, apparently towards the end of March.

  3. In September 1855, Mrs Zaluski, as she has now become, gives birth to a son, christened Perseus Verney Zaluski.

  4. In April 1856, fifteen months after leaving England, Emily returns in triumph to Evenwood with her husband and son.

  On the face of it, these facts seem innocuous enough; but behind them is hidden a far less innocent truth.

  Time, Mr Wraxall had said, was of the essence in our attempts to unlock the secret that Lady Tansor has gone to such terrible lengths to conceal. As I sit watching the rain-swayed trees in the barrister’s unkempt patch of garden, I finally understand what he had meant.

  Words on paper. Deadly words. But numbers, too, can be deadly – numbers in the form of dates.

  Miss Emily Carteret arrives in Carlsbad on the 2nd of February 1855. She meets Colonel Zaluski on the 9th of February, just a week later. Arrangements – of an unspecified character, although certainly including some financial consideration – are quickly made with him on the 11th and 12th.

  Miss Carteret and Colonel Zaluski are married, in Toeplitz, on the 23rd of March 1855. Their first son, Perseus, is born – inferring the date from the postmark on Letter 8 – on the 15th of September 1855, in Ossegg, to where the couple had moved from Toeplitz six months earlier.

  Colonel and Mrs Zaluski, with their son, return to Carlsbad from Prague on the 10th of March 1856. They leave Carlsbad four days later, eventually arriving back at Evenwood on the 7th of April 1856 – confirmed by the announcement in the Illustrated London News, described by Mr Lazarus in his recollections.

  The truth of it all lay here, in a puzzling chronological discrepancy. Why had Perseus’s recent majority been celebrated on Christmas Day, when it was clear from the letters that he had been born in September?

  Then I recall the afternoon on which I had taken tea with Sukie and her mother, and of what Mrs Prout had said concerning the strange notion of the then Mrs Zaluski that, on the advice of her foreign doctor, her son must be kept away from people at all times, and closely wrapped up, even in summer. I remember, too, how Mrs Prout had said that Professor Slake, on catching a glimpse of the young heir, had quipped that the boy had been misnamed: ‘He should have been called “Nimrod”,’ Mrs Prout had reported the Professor as saying. Nimrod: the mighty hunter before the Lord, vigorous and strong in body. How had Mrs Prout herself described the infant? ‘The bonniest three-month child, indeed, I ever did see.’ I had paid little heed to her words at the time; but now they seemed full of unconscious significance.

  Time. Dates.

  Now I understand. Now I see it.

  Perseus was not three months old when Colonel and Mrs Zaluski returned to Evenwood in April 1856, to place the future heir in the welcoming arms of proud Lord Tansor. He was a little over six months old. A bonnie three-month child he must indeed have seemed; and little wonder that his mother had been obliged to concoct a story to keep him from view, swaddled in enveloping shawls, away from inquisitive eyes, until he could be safely brought out, and his uncommon size and robustness displayed to general scrutiny without exciting suspicion.

  The contribution to the plot of the unprincipled German lawyer, Herr Drexler, is now also apparent: he must have been paid to prepare the necessary documents, in which he had inserted the fictitious date of 25th December for the heir’s birth. All subsequent public computations of the infant’s age had therefore been based on this falsified birth-date. With a grudging smile, I reflect on the audacity of the choice of natal day – when both the Son of God and the Duport heir had come into the world of men.

  I can draw only one final, momentous conclusion.

  Miss Emily Carteret had been with child when she left England in January 1855 – unmarried, and in mourning for her lately slain fiancé. A husband was required, to act as a father to the baby she was secretly carrying. That husband was Colonel Tadeusz Zaluski. That child was Perseus Duport, the present Duport heir, the author of Merlin and Nimue, who had lately proposed to me on the Ponte Vecchio. The man I loved.

  But who was his true father?

  Who else but the man his mother had called Lord Tansor’s ‘shining hope’ the love of her life; the co-betrayer, with her, of my father?

  Who else, but Phoebus Rainsford Daunt?

  MADAME HAD BEEN utterly, dangerously wrong. I should not have been instructed to marry Perseus in order to reclaim what had been taken from my father. Perseus was not the rightful heir, as he and all the world believed, and he never could be, for his illegitimacy would now bar him from the succession. It was Mr Randolph, the scorned younger son, the fruit of the legitimate union between Lord Tansor’s cousin, Miss Emily Carteret, and Colonel Tadeusz Zaluski, who was the true heir; and it was Mr Randolph whom I must marry.

  How can I describe what I feel when this realization comes sweeping over me, in a sudden torrent of despair? To have my heart’s true desire snatched away from me – so cruelly, without warning, destroying every hope that I have come to cherish for my future as Perseus’s wife – is the most bitter blow imaginable, and I have to force back the tears so that I can continue with my examination of Mr Barley’s black box.

  Of the three remaining documents, two are single sheets of paper, on which the c
lerk had set down brief depositions concerning the visits that Lady Tansor had paid to Mr Vyse in Old Square, together with transcriptions of what he had overheard of their conversations on those occasions.

  The third and last item is another letter, an original, in Emily’s hand, still in its envelope. With the light fading, I raise the letter close to my face, the better to read it.

  Then I start back. What is it?

  The faintest residue of an odour, almost imperceptible, yet unmistakable: the still lingering scent of long-lost years.

  The smell of violets.

  OUT OF MR Barley’s black box I have plucked the very letter that Conrad Kraus had kept hidden for over twenty years, the precious relic that he had preserved of the beautiful lady whom he had accompanied to Bohemia in his youth, and whom he had continued to reverence – perhaps even love – in his poor, pathetic way ever since; the letter with which his vengeful mother had thought to blackmail the object of her weak-brained son’s futile infatuation, but which had led instead to her destruction.

  The writer herself had thought the letter destroyed; but when it at last fell into his hands, the man she had foolishly trusted to protect her had immediately seen its worth, just as doomed Mrs Kraus had done.

  Would you know, at last, what it contained, this deadly epistle, written to Lord Tansor from Franzenbad by Miss Emily Carteret, twelve days before her marriage to Colonel Tadeusz Zaluski?

  Here it is, then, as I faithfully transcribed it into my note-book – that constant companion of mine since the day I first began my employment as maid to the 26th Baroness Tansor.

  II

  The Perfumed Letter

  MISS EMILY CARTERET TO THE LATE LORD TANSOR

  11TH MARCH 1855

  Hotel Adler

  Franzenbad

  MY LORD,—

  I had not intended to write to yr Ldship today, for I have no news of substance; but I was in such distress of mind, on rising this morning to a cold grey dawn, that I did not know what else might relieve my pain & despair other than to pick up my pen, on this most terrible anniversary day, & set down my thoughts in a few inadequate words, & send them to the only other person in the world who is able to comprehend how I feel.

  Three months to the day! Three short months – & yet how long, how infinitely long, have been – & continue to be – each week, each day, each hour, each second, without his dear, adored presence in the world! And still the wound of unutterable grief bleeds, day & night, & indeed I believe that it will never be staunched.

  I see him constantly in my dreams, his poor white face lying in the hardly paler snow, his open unseeing eyes staring up at the cold stars, his precious life-blood yet spreading all around; but still – even in death – he was beautiful, was still my adored Phoebus!

  And then I see, clasped in his frozen hand, the paper on which his murderer had copied out those exquisite lines, with which the name of Phoebus Rainsford Daunt will be eternally associated.

  But what is most horrible to bear – & you will think it strange and inexplicable – is the memory of the last cigar he ever smoked, bearing his favorite Ramón Allones brand name, the end still glowing in the freezing gloom, for it had fortuitously fallen from his lips on to the top of a low wall, where the snow lay less thickly. Such a trifling, insignificant thing, and yet I cannot rid my mind of it.

  What cuts me to my very soul is that I knew it would come to this – knew that he would perish at the hands of that obsessed madman Glyver, & that I would be left to grieve until death took me too.

  It was on waking one morning from another of the terrible visions of impending, fatal disaster that were then nightly invading my sleep, and which – I truly believed – nothing could prevent, that I suddenly thought of a course of action, which, if successful, might help those who survived the catastrophe – you & I, my Lord – to bear what must be borne.

  Certain that the maniac Glyver would not rest until he had wreaked mortal vengeance on his rival, for the injuries that he imagined he had suffered at his hands, I went to dear Phoebus on the day following our dinner in Town with Ld & Lady Cotterstock – do you remember? He laughed at my fears, of course, said Glyver had not the power to hurt him – indeed, that the power was all in his own hands. But in this, my dear love – thinking too little of his enemy’s murder-ous & ungovernable determination to prove his false claim to be yr Ldship’s son and heir – was calamitously mistaken. The truth was far otherwise – as you & I now know, to our eternal sorrow.

  Having begged him to take the greatest possible care to protect himself, which he promised to do, I then urged that we must seek to arm ourselves against the worst happening, by devising a way to thwart the impostor, if we could, and deny him his illusion of victory.

  He listened to my plan; said nothing at first; then sought to dissuade me from the course I had proposed. His objections were many – both moral (as you would have expected of him), & practical – and most earnestly expressed.

  Principal amongst them concerned yr Ldship’s position, which of course he was ever most anxious to protect from public opprobrium. I could not then answer for how yr Ldship would view the as yet unforeseeable consequences of what I contemplated, tho’ I hoped & believed, with all my heart, that yr support & sympathy might at last be secured.

  At length, he saw that I was right. With what courage he conceded that the lunatic might succeed, despite taking every precaution, in doing him mortal harm. But he did not flinch from the dread prospect, nor would he fly from it. He was a man, indeed!

  And so, as you now know, from that day forth, until the last fateful evening, we became man & wife in all but name and legal form. Then, with mingled joy and grief, I discovered that I was with child! His child! – the son or daughter of yr Ldship’s chosen heir, in whom, even if my fears proved groundless, my darling boy would live, and be for ever remembered.

  The worst had happened. The madman had succeeded in the exercise of his brutal will, just as I had foreseen. And yet a kind Fate had quickly granted (beyond, I can now confess, my most sanguine expectations) the means of salvation.

  I am conscious that I ought not to be so frank in writing to yr Ldship. You will say – rightly – that I have been dangerously injudicious, having already laid some of these things before yr Ldship, and when I promised circumspection, as far as was possible, in our correspondence. But I find I cannot help myself. I must give vent to the tumult within me – & it is to yr Ldship that I instinctively turn. Besides, once received through our trusted intermediary, you will, I know, destroy this, as we agreed, & as I feel sure that you have destroyed my other letters.

  It is the day, I think, the accursed 11th day of every month, that raises up this tumult within me. I cannot describe the dread I feel as each one approaches – & then the sense of desolation when waking on the day itself, as I did this very morning. It overcomes me utterly, driving away all other thoughts & sensations. Yet it is also a day of sacred observance, on which I must for ever, each succeeding month, & especially on the one day, worship the memory of him who will always rule my heart, & who has made it impossible for me to love any other man.

  Mrs Kraus has just arrived to dress me, & so I must conclude, & once more find strength – for his sweet sake, & yours, my dear sir – to bring our enterprise to a successful conclusion.

  I shall now send Conrad, who is standing sullenly by the door regarding me as I write, in that peculiar abstracted way of his, to ensure that this goes by the first mail coach.

  Until my next, when I trust I shall be more myself, I am, my Lord, yr loving & grateful daughter, by adoption & affection,

  E. CARTERET

  III

  The Portrait

  ‘WELL, MY DEAR,’ said Mr Wraxall, as I came back into the sitting-room, carrying Mr Barley’s black box. ‘Is all clear to you now?’

  ‘Where is Mr Barley?’ I asked, seeing the vacated chair.

  ‘He was obliged to return to London this evening,’ returned Mr Wraxall. ‘Mrs Wapshott’s son has just taken
him to Easton in the trap. Well? Do you see it now?’

  He regarded me expectantly.

  ‘I see it.’

  I sat down; he drew his chair close to mine, and we began a conversation that lasted for nearly an hour, until darkness began to fall, and Mrs Wapshott appeared at the door to light the lamps. So we continued to talk, until we could talk no more.

  For a while we sat saying nothing, listening to the ominous rolling of distant thunder. Then we heard the sound of the trap returning from Easton.

  ‘When will she be—’

  Mr Wraxall held up his hand, to prevent my saying more.

  ‘Enough now, my dear,’ he said, quietly. ‘All that is in Gully’s hands, but I do not think it will be long. Now then, let me call John, to take you back to the house.’

  DINNER WAS OVER by the time I returned. In the Drawing-Room, as I entered, I could see that Emily, sitting broodingly alone by the fire, was angry.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, testily.

  There was no reason to deceive her; indeed, I felt seized by a kind of taunting boldness, knowing what I now knew, as I answered.

  ‘To North Lodge.’

  She could not prevent a faint flush of apprehension from colouring her sallow cheeks, but as usual quickly contrived an air of unconcern.

  ‘And how goes the brilliant Mr Montagu Wraxall?’ she asked, in an affectedly sarcastic tone. ‘Surely his business here must soon be finished? Lancing has found a new tenant for North Lodge, and it is now rather inconvenient to us for Mr Wraxall to be here any longer than is absolutely necessary. We have been more than generous in allowing him to remain there for so long, with the freedom to come and go as he pleases, as if the place were really his.’