The Glass of Time

by Michael Cox

  IN PERPETUAL MEMORY OF MARGUERITE ALICE BLANTYRE 1836–1859

  This memorial was placed here by her loving daughter

  July 1877

  I REMAINED IN Paris for another month, at the end of which time I returned to England, although not immediately to Evenwood.

  I had received a letter from Mrs Ridpath, inviting me to stay with her in Devonshire Street until all the legal matters were settled. This I gratefully, but firmly, declined; for whilst the offer was kindly meant, I regarded Mrs Ridpath as being somehow tainted by her association with my father, whom I had now determined I never wished to see, even if he made an attempt to communicate with me. Mr Wraxall then urged me to reside with him; but this invitation, although a far more congenial one, I also refused.

  I settled myself instead at Mivart’s Hotel, where I was visited almost daily by Mr Wraxall, but where I had the freedom to do exactly as I pleased, when I pleased. I cannot say that I was happy there, still afflicted as I was by grief for Madame and by aching memories of Perseus, and constantly brooding on what the future might bring. Yet when my mind was not beset by troubling, and often irresolvable, thoughts, I experienced a kind of quiet contentment during those strange, undifferentiated weeks, as I explored the seething streets of the city my father had loved, filling my note-book with observations and descriptions, or sat contemplatively beside the great grey river, to wait upon events.

  THE INQUEST INTO Lady Tansor’s death had returned its expected verdict of suicide and, following the evidence presented by Inspector Alfred Gully, of the Detective Department, the world now knew why the 26th Baroness Tansor had ended her life in the Evenbrook.

  The ensuing scandal was immense. The Prime Minister had been immediately notified of her Ladyship’s death, and the reasons that had led to it. Her Majesty was then informed. According to Mr Wraxall (who had it on the very highest authority), she had listened gravely to her First Minister, before expressing relief that, despite having liked Lady Tansor well enough, she had never cultivated her at Court.

  The nation’s public prints produced an ocean of articles and reports – sober, reflective, speculative, prurient, crowing, castigating, or pitying, according to the temper of the organ, or the disposition of the writer. Questions were asked in Parliament, whilst in society friends and enemies alike could talk of nothing else for months.

  No objections being made, Emily Grace Duport, née Carteret, was buried in the Mausoleum at Evenwood. I did not attend the brief ceremony of interment, but received an account of it from Mr Wraxall. The mourners were few, confined – at the request of the brothers – to Perseus, Mr Randolph, and a dozen or so others. Mr Thripp officiated, managing, for once, to maintain a dignified brevity of expression on an occasion of such poignant solemnity that it robbed even the Rector himself of words.

  I SHALL NOT weary my readers with the details of the legal processes, overseen by Mr Wraxall, that followed Emily’s death, and the public revelations concerning Perseus’s birth. The law duly took its ponderous course, my claim to be the rightful successor to the late Lord Tansor was ratified, and the day finally came when I returned to Evenwood, lady’s-maid and paid companion no longer, but as Esperanza Alice Duport, 27th Baroness Tansor.

  Mr Wraxall was standing in the Entrance Court, with all the assembled servants and estate workers, as the carriage came down the Rise, rattled over the bridge, where the waters of the Evenbrook had brought Emily’s body to rest, and drew up before the front door.

  ‘Welcome home, your Ladyship,’ said Mr Wraxall, with a solemn bow.

  ‘Come now, sir,’ I replied, in mock admonishment. ‘I wish to hear no more “your Ladyships” from you. You will address me by my Christian name, if you please. This is my first command, and I shall expect it to be strictly observed.’

  Thus, arm in arm, laughing as we went, and to the applause of the crowd, we entered the great house of Evenwood to take our tea.

  ONE OF MY first acts as mistress of Evenwood was to appoint Mr Montagu Wraxall to the position of librarian and archivist. We have become very close, and spend a great deal of time in each other’s company. I no longer feel alone in the world. Mr Wraxall is always there, always ready with sound advice, always affectionately solicitous or, when the occasion demands, properly critical, and fiercely protective of my interests. He is my father now. I could want for no other.

  For my dear lost Perseus, the calamity of his mother’s death, and the circumstances by which he had been dispossessed, were almost unendurable. He immured himself for some months in his London residence, seeing no one, and communicating with the world only through his solicitor. At length he quit England altogether for Italy, where he apparently intended to remain.

  Following his mother’s death, Mr Randolph, as he had undertaken to do, had returned from Wales, alone, to attend the inquest. He was the subject of much admiration for doing so, being obliged to sit through the painful rehearsal of his mother’s iniquities, whilst enduring the stares and knowing looks arising from the now public knowledge of his marriage to Jane Paget, his mother’s former housekeeper.

  With regard to his own position, he made no attempt to challenge my claim to succeed his mother, as he might have done. He had once assured me that he entertained no wish to be master of Evenwood, and I had no reason to doubt him; but I hoped also that he had abstained from legal contention for another reason, and that, after all, he cherished some regard for me – however small – of which his wife would not approve.

  I DO NOT need to be told that I am blessed. I know it, and thank God every day for the enviable position in the world that I now occupy; but I have little contentment. I suffer much from depression of spirit, and am afflicted almost nightly by bad dreams and painful memories; for I am imprisoned still in the life my father made for me. My father – whom I once believed was dead, but who now lives, or so I must presume. My father – the murderer of Phoebus Daunt. My father – who stole my life and made it his own. My father – the ghost within me, the implacable ruler of my existence.

  I sit here most afternoons, in the window-seat on which I once passed so many hours with Emily, reading her dead lover’s poems to her, idly conversing, or looking out over the terrace and the pleasure-gardens to the wooded horizon.

  Sometimes I will pass the time, my back pressed against the ancient glass, blissfully absorbed in a new novel; at others, I contemplate yet again, as I think I always will, the events that have brought me to the state of life I now enjoy.

  I stare constantly into the Glass of Time, that magic mirror in which the shifting shadows of lost days pass back and forth in dumb show before the eye of memory. As for the present, the days come and go in pleasantly uneventful – yes, and often dull – succession.

  Yet I do not complain. I have new friends; I have become a great gardener, and have made many much-needed improvements to the house. I am learning Italian and Spanish, and have emulated Mr Thripp in procuring a terrier of my own – a lovably roguish creature with an infinite capacity for wickedness, Bowser by name, who steals my shoes and is constantly biting holes in my gowns. He has a formidable feline companion, red-haired and noble of aspect, but of a warlike disposition, who keeps him in check and whom I have called ‘Tiger’, after the cat whose acquaintance I had briefly made at the house of Mr Lazarus in Billiter Street.

  I have also fitted out Emily’s old sitting-room with shelves that are already groaning under the weight of the novels and volumes of poetry, in English and French, that are sent to me every month; and a week rarely passes that I do not return to my mother’s journal, which I now possess in its entirety. It pains me more than ever that I was denied by Death from forming that infinitely precious bond between mother and child, for which – I now believe – there is no true substitute.

  My greatest diversion is this house, this wondrous palace of plenty. I have become utterly entranced by its beauty, in a way that I never was before; and when I am obliged to leave it, even on visits to the Avenue d’Uhrich, I dream of its cupola-crowned tow
ers, and especially of the little arcaded courtyard, with its fountain and dovecote, where I had sat and dreamed – so long ago, it seems; and then I yearn to return. I wander through its rooms and corridors constantly, both by day and by night, marvelling, touching, opening; for it is all mine now.

  I shall never tire of this place. Even when I am an old lady, drooling and drivelling, wrapped in shawls, frail and bony, and rheumy of eye, I shall still wander these rooms, still wondering at the boundless, dreamlike splendour of it all. Perhaps my ghost will do the same, willingly turning its back on the heavenly home that faith promises, to haunt instead the earthly paradise of Evenwood through all eternity.

  Sometimes, although I should not, and strive against it with all my might, I miss her – my former mistress. She comes into my thoughts at all times, and in all places, and I feel her presence everywhere, especially when I am taking my walks on the Library Terrace, or sitting here in the window-seat opposite the closet from where I had spied on her and Mr Vyse. I do not regret the final, unexpected consummation of the Great Task – Justice called for nothing less; yet I wish to my soul that it had not fallen on me to bring it about.

  I also sometimes miss the heady days of adventure and intrigue. I would not have them return, of course, for their legacy has been a bitter one; but I confess that my heart beats a little faster as I live over those times once again, when I was Esperanza Gorst, maid and then companion to the 26th Baroness Tansor.

  And so I take my leave of my patient readers. Time, in its unfathomable way, and the unknowable workings of Fate, have done their work. The Great Task has been accomplished; and my Book of Secrets can now be put away, never again – I pray – to be opened by me.

  E.A.D.

  Evenwood, 1879

  38

  Envoi

  Evenwood, December 1884

  I

  Hope Vindicated

  FIVE YEARS have passed since I wrote the words with which – as I then truly believed – I concluded the story of my secret life, that bitter-sweet journey from my childhood home in the Avenue d’Uhrich to the earthly paradise of Evenwood. I must now crave my readers’ indulgence for taking up my pen once more, to recount certain subsequent events, which I believe those who have had the patience to journey with me may wish to know. Whether they will prove to be the end of my story, or constitute the beginnings of a new one, I cannot of course yet say. I undertake only to lay them before you as briefly as I can.

  ON A FINE June morning in the year 1880, I was sitting by the Lake, looking out towards the Temple of the Winds, and thinking of the past as usual, when one of the footmen brought me the terrible news that Randolph had died in a fall whilst climbing the mountain of Crib Goch with his old friend and brother-in-law, Rhys Paget.

  Randolph and I had maintained a detached but friendly relationship, when family affairs had occasionally brought him back to Evenwood; but I had seen nothing of his widow since the death of my former mistress (it is strange that I should still term her so, but it is a habit I easily fall into).

  After her husband’s interment, Mrs Randolph Duport and I had talked alone for a short time on the Library Terrace, where I sometimes sat on fine afternoons, in an old wicker chair of the former Lord Tansor’s, with Bowser by my side.

  It was a strange meeting – both of us now sharing the same surname, both of us having once been servants to the 26th Baroness; but she was no longer the woman whom I had known as Mrs Battersby when I was Esperanza Gorst, lady’s-maid. She seemed much aged, and subdued in temper, although her curiously fixed half-smile remained, in confusing contrast to the grief so evident in her sunken, reddened eyes. We spoke of Randolph’s many amiable qualities: his kindness, his engaging ways, his enthusiasms, his sweet temper and openness of disposition – on all of which points, and many others, we could easily agree. Of more sensitive matters relating to times past, however, nothing was said.

  I had risen to go when she put out her hand to touch my arm, asking as she did so if she could say one more word. She then confessed that Randolph had lost most of the money that had been left to him in his mother’s will in various failed business speculations. I had also disposed certain sums for his use when I had succeeded to the title; but these, too, it seems, had gone.

  ‘Like my father, he was such an innocent in these things,’ she said with a sigh, ‘yet so anxious to prove himself as capable as his brother. But he found himself out of his depth, and placed his trust in those who only schemed to take his money, and give nothing back.’

  She was looking down into her lap, twisting a handkerchief in her long white hands. I saw how hard it was for the once proud ‘Mrs Battersby’ to humble herself in this way, and I pitied her. She had hated me once, as I would have hated her had our circumstances been reversed; but she was now my kinswoman by marriage, and I could not wholly abandon her.

  I therefore said that I would be glad to offer her some assistance, and I have kept my word, although I shall not receive her here again; and whatever I have done has been for the sake of Randolph’s fatherless son, Ernest – a sweet little boy, in whose future prospects I have determined to take a close interest.

  RANDOLPH WAS LAID to rest in the Mausoleum, next to the tomb of his mother. Perseus, of course, had been informed of his brother’s death, and had written a brief note informing me that he would be attending the interment, although he would be leaving immediately afterwards to spend a few days at his London residence before returning to Italy.

  There had been no direct communication between us since his mother’s death. All our correspondence on the many matters arising from my assumption of the Tansor title had been conducted – at his request – through intermediaries, principally Mr Donald Orr.

  As soon as I became Lady Tansor, I had settled a not inconsiderable fund of money on Perseus, to allow him to maintain himself in an appropriate style; but for this act of genuinely disinterested consideration, intended to provide some small measure of compensation for what he had lost, he had condescended to send me only a few curt words of acknowledgement in a letter to Mr Orr. Despite this rebuff, and after much heart-searching, I had subsequently sent him a long account of why I had been sent to Evenwood, which included a digest of the principal events that I have presented in these pages.

  I waited for the expected reply; but none came. The note confirming that he would be returning to England for his brother’s interment was the first communication from him that he had written to me personally, in his own hand. Not wishing to part with something so precious, I placed it in a little velvet bag to keep in my pocket, like a kind of talisman, in the foolish hope that it might signify some change for the better in our relations.

  Although I had not seen him for nearly three years, Perseus had remained a vivid presence in my life. Hardly a day began but I did not think of him on first waking, and wonder what he was doing, and whether he sometimes thought of me; and hardly a day ended but I did not lay my head on my pillow in the certainty that I would soon be dreaming of him, and of what we had once been to each other. To know that I would be seeing him in person once again filled me with joyful expectation.

  The day of the interment arrived. I awoke in the most extraordinarily confused state, grieving for poor Randolph, for whom I had continued to feel great affection, in spite of what had happened between us, but also excitedly anticipating the return of his brother to Evenwood, even though it was only for a day.

  The mourners began to assemble in the Entrance Court for the short carriage ride to the Mausoleum; but there was no sign of Perseus. Eleven o’clock struck – the hour when the ceremony should have begun – and still he did not come. Unable to delay any longer, the party began to move off.

  In the Mausoleum, the memories of which still sometimes trouble my dreams, Randolph’s coffin was committed to its awaiting loculus, and the iron gates were closed and padlocked. Throughout the short ceremony, conducted by Dr Valentine, successor to Mr Thripp, who had passed away the previous autumn, I had stood nervously i
n the candlelit gloom, hoping that, even now, at this late hour, Perseus would walk through the open metal doors and take his place by my side. But after Dr Valentine had intoned the final prayer, and the mourners prepared to return to their carriages, I knew that my hopes had been in vain.

  BY FOUR O’CLOCK that afternoon, the mourning guests, including Mrs Randolph Duport, had departed. For the past hour, I had been engrossed in a recent novel by Mr Thomas Hardy, which my bookseller had sent me some months before, but which I had only lately begun to read. * Laying the book down, I had happened to glance out of the window.

  On the far side of the ha-ha, exactly in the place where I had first seen Captain Willoughby Le Grice, my then unknown friend, one misty morning in 1876, stood a man, staring up at my window. Despite the distance, I recognized him instantly.

  In no time at all, I had run downstairs and across the Library Terrace, halting, heart afire, on the edge of the ha-ha. For what seemed an eternity, we stood looking at each other across the steep-sided grassy ditch under the late-afternoon sun – just such a sun as had dazled me on the Ponte Vecchio years before.

  Nothing was said; yet everything seemed understood.

  THE DEPARTURE OF the steamer that should have brought him from Boulogne to Folkestone had been delayed for several hours. Being unable to make up the lost time, he had only arrived in Easton half an hour since. Leaving his bags at the Duport Arms, he had immediately taken a fly to Evenwood. This I learn after I have greeted him formally in the vestibule.