The God of the Labyrinth

by Colin Wilson

  And so we know how the apparently impossible came about, and Lady Charlotte Ingestre yielded her maidenhood to a man who was determined to reject it. Esmond’s letters to Laclos seldom enter into so much physical detail; both men were more interested in discussing the psychological peculiarities of women. At twenty-four, Esmond was not experienced enough to divine that there was a distinctly masochistic element about Charlotte Ingestre; she wanted to be mastered and taken by a man who ordered her to lie down and open her legs. She became Esmond’s mistress, and followed him around in much the same manner that Lady Caroline Lamb later followed Lord Byron. It is equally indicative of her yielding temperament that, having become his mistress, she ceased to talk about marriage; again, her masochism revelled in her anomalous position.

  What happened next must be summarised briefly. Gossip about Esmond and his daughter may have reached the ears of the Earl of Flaxstead; he told her one day that he had selected a husband for her—a respectable Scottish baronet who spent his days hunting on his moors. She said she wanted to marry Esmond; her father told her to forget any such ambition; Esmond was a nobody, the son of an Irish landowner without enough money to maintain a London house. There were scenes and hysteria; she was taken back to the family home at Weston upon Trent, where she fell ill for a few weeks. Mary Ingestre wrote to Sophia, asking her to advise Esmond to return to Ireland, because while he was in London, her father was determined to keep Charlotte away from it. Esmond went. Oddly enough, Mary became hostile to her sister after this crisis; perhaps she resented the ease with which this gentle, sweet-tempered girl had captured Esmond, who would have been altogether better suited by Lady Mary.

  And what was the scandal about Lady Mary that the Misses Donelly had mentioned to me? It was that Mary preferred Esmond to Horace Glenney, whom she married in August 1773. This was largely Glenney’s own fault. Having installed his wife in the west wing of Golspie House, and invited Charlotte to come and stay, he lost no time in asking Esmond. Esmond accepted promptly, and his relations with Charlotte resumed immediately; she spent every night in his room, returning to her own at dawn.

  The sequel is also described in a letter to Laclos, in which Esmond criticises an episode from Prévost’s Memoirs and Adven­tures of a Man of Quality describing how a virtuous lady got her maid to sleep with her lover, so she could preserve her chastity. Esmond says this is absurd, unless the lover was drunk.

  Some years ago, a friend and I were drinking port in front of the fire, long after his wife and her sister had retired for the night. We fell to discussing the different temperaments of the two women, and he remarked that he believed he would have been happier if he had married the sister. We discussed the way in which their temperaments were reflected in their lovemaking, and soon discovered that the sisters had one thing in common: if asleep, they would allow themselves to be made love to without fully awaking. This suggested to us the idea that we might try what would happen if I were to get into bed with his wife, and he with her sister, my mistress. The idea seemed to us amusing, and we tried it. I went along to his room, which was in darkness, and very cold; I undressed and slipped into bed. He had told me that if he desired to take her, he gently pulled her on to her back by her shoulder, pulled open her thighs by laying his hand upon her knee, and then mounted her with­out further caresses. This I did. Her back was turned to me; when I was warm, I took hold of her shoulder and turned her over. She gave a low moan of protest, but lay still. I raised her night gown, which was of silk, caressed between her thighs for a moment, then moved on to her. She was soft and warm, and I scarcely moved, afraid to wake her, enjoying the contrast of her with her sister. Then she moved her buttocks slightly and raised her belly; this undid me, and I gushed inside her. When I withdrew, she turned over again, and seemed to sleep peacefully. Half an hour later, I did the same again, but this time determined to get the most of the pleasure, and so moved up and down on her. This time she responded, moving with me, until we achieved our ecstasy together. We said nothing, and she slept again. An hour later I woke and felt her hand on me, caressing my priapus with skilful fingered delicacy; we came together quickly, and went at it for a long time. When it was over, she whispered: ‘I wonder if Charlotte is enjoying her change as much as I am?’ They were the first words either had spoken. Before dawn, I went back to my own bed, and the next day learned that Charlotte had also detected my friend after their first coming-together, although she had been asleep while he possessed her.

  What Esmond does not mention in this letter is that as a result of their night together, Mary began to treat Esmond openly as a second husband—to Charlotte’s indignation. Now they had spent a night together, Mary no longer felt the need to hide her feelings for Esmond. She had always been fascinated by him—ever since that first meeting when Esmond and Lichtenberg had explained Kant’s critical philosophy. Her relation with her hus­band was entirely different; she was fond of him but could not admire him. And she was aware that his mind—such as it was—had been almost entirely formed by Esmond and, to a lesser extent, by Lichtenberg. When Esmond returned to London—he had by this time bought the tall, narrow house in Fleet Street, close to Dr Johnson’s—Mary followed him, staying with Sophia Blackwood; and soon it was common gossip that Esmond slept with Charlotte and Mary in the same bed. There is no evidence for this, although it is likely that Esmond continued to be the lover of both women. We know that on November 23, 1773, Esmond wrote to the Earl of Flaxstead, making a formal pro­posal for the hand of his daughter, and that on the 28th he received a cold and brief note declaring that Charlotte was already betrothed to ‘a gentleman of Kent’. It is not known what pressure the Earl brought to bear on his daughter—who was still under age; Charlotte later told Mary that he had threatened to have her head shaved and send her to a Belgian convent. Two days after Christmas, Charlotte was quietly married to Sir Russell Frazer, of Sevenoaks, a gentleman whom Walpole refers to as ‘imbecilic’. The Earl is said to have remarked to the father of Thomas Creevey, the diarist: ‘Now she is off my hands, I don’t care how she compromises herself.’ Creevey’s story of a duel between Esmond and Charlotte’s father seems to be one of those inventions whose source cannot be traced. If the ‘imbecilic’ Frazer knew the story of his wife’s infatuation for Esmond, he had the sense not to be jealous; for Esmond and Glenney were frequent guests at Blades House, Sevenoaks, during the 1780s. Charlotte came to him with a handsome dowry, and it was said that Frazer kept a French mistress in Dover; so it may have been one of those typically civilised arrangements of the eighteenth century. Sophia Blackwood described Charlotte a year after her marriage as ‘blooming and very happy’.

  The story of Maureen Ingestre, the youngest of the sisters, is probably the most interesting of the three, and is unfortunately the worst documented. Boswell quotes Horace Walpole as saying that it must be a delightful experience to have had the love of three such beautiful sisters, and that it is an experience that every man should have once in a lifetime. When Mary married Horace Glenney, Maureen was only thirteen, and her father refused to allow her to go to London to stay with Elizabeth Montagu, no doubt having heard what had happened to his other daughters there. But once Mary was married, it was impossible to forbid Maureen to stay at Golspie. Besides, oddly enough, the Earl held Horace Glenney in high esteem, and in 1781, when Glenney succeeded to the title, described him as ‘the kindest and most delightful man in England’. This is an aspect of Glenney that should be borne in mind. As Esmond’s Leporello, he appears in an unfortunate light; but when not wracked by jealousy, or trying to emulate Esmond, he seems to have been a charming and kindly man, who became increasingly a typical member of the sporting aristocracy. (Another side of his nature is his interest in Scottish folk-tales. His conviction that Ossian was a forgery led him to seek out the genuine folk-tales of the highlands, which he combined together, rather in the manner of Lönnrot’s Kalevala collection, into a narrative called Reliques of the North [1793].) />
  In the letters at the back of Glenney’s manuscript, there is only one hint of what took place between Esmond and Maureen Ingestre. In the second letter, Esmond writes: ‘A German tribe of the Upper Danube holds that certain virgins are sacred, and should be regarded as the holy receptacle of the mysteries of creation. . . . Such women may be known by a certain dreaminess in the eyes, a softness of expression combined with the natural grace of a goddess. When men encounter such women, they have only one duty: to worship; and in worshipping, to confirm the goddess in her divinity.’ And by this, in the margin, there is a scrawl in Glenney’s hand: ‘He cd have [illegible] Maureen Ing.’

  And this, for the moment, was the sum of my knowledge of Maureen Ingestre. Later that day, Alastair, Angela and myself went through every item in the chest from the attic; but we found nothing more to our purpose. I shall write elsewhere of the manuscript of Esmond’s early novel Allardyce and Leontia, written when he was nineteen, at Göttingen, and the long poem In Memory of Charles Churchill, written at about the same time. Both these were found in the library at Golspie House, and they were no doubt passed on to Horace Glenney junior in accordance with Esmond’s will. The latter is by no means without merit. Charles Churchill was one of the best-known poets of his period; a clergyman, satirist, bruiser (he had a tremendous physique), member of the Hell Fire Club, he died at the age of thirty-three of a fever contracted when visiting Wilkes in France. Esmond met him, and apparently admired him, and in the manuscript of Letters from a Mountain, ‘Churchell’ [sic] is mentioned as ‘one of the most notorious of the Society of the Phoenix’. If this is true—and from all accounts of Churchill, it is very likely—then it raises the interesting possibility that Churchill was the first person to tell Esmond of the Sect.

  I was so excited by the discovery of these further materials that I wrote a long letter to Fleisher from Golspie House, out­lining my discoveries so far—including the information about the Sect of the Phoenix—and suggesting that I might write this present book as an introductory volume to Esmond’s Memoirs. There were still many unanswered questions: how had Horace Glenney died? what became of Maureen Ingestre? above all, what happened to Esmond in his later years? But these could be left for later researchers.

  Before I left Golspie House, two days later, I had discovered partial answers to two of these questions. We decided to leave at about ten o’clock in the morning, to try to get to Edinburgh late at night. We had breakfast early; and then, while Angela did some last-minute packing, I looked around the library. Many of the books had been spoiled by damp at some time, and someone had made a pile of these in one corner of the room, perhaps with the intention of having them re-bound. I was aware that this room must have looked much the same when Esmond and Horace Glenney did their late-night drinking here—and decided to exchange beds. I tried several times to place my mind in a passive state, to try to ‘receive’ Esmond, but the house was too busy and I could not concentrate. Then, very suddenly, it came; the library became familiar in an unfamiliar manner—this is the only way I can describe it. Our feeling for places is made up mostly of memories and associations. Esmond’s memories of this library were very different from mine. So, in a sense, it became a different place. And I found myself looking at a high shelf in the corner, close to the window. I went across to this. Already, ‘Esmond’ had faded. The shelf was empty, and the woodwork behind it was warped and stained with damp. It struck me that if there had been books on this shelf, they might now be among the piles in the corner of the room. I went over to them and arranged them in a row on the floor, with the spines turned upwards. None of the titles seemed at all interesting: sermons, a few travel books, Cowper’s poems, some Scott; even a Tauchnitz edition of Henry James. I began opening them at random, glancing at title pages. I picked up An Account of the Sandwich Islands that was badly mildewed, the pages corrugated with damp. And as I looked at the title page, I knew I had found what I was looking for. It was by Maureen Ingestre. It was printed by Murray, Byron’s publisher, in London in 1812, by which time Maureen would have been fifty-two. The book was dedicated ‘To the memory of Horace, Lord Glenney’. Under­neath this, someone had written: ‘was stabbed in the right eye by unknown assassin, July 28, 1796’. The words, badly stained, were hardly legible.

  So when we left Golspie House that morning, I knew two more things about the Glenney family: that Horace had been stabbed, and not shot; and that Maureen Ingestre travelled in the East in her later years, visiting Japan, Australia and the Sandwich Islands. I later ascertained that the words written under the dedication were in the handwriting of Glenney’s son.

  I was well pleased with myself; the visit had not yielded as much as I might have hoped; but everything it had yielded was valuable. Alastair and Angela were also happy. They had not found the rest of the Donelly journals; but they had found a Bible worth twenty thousand pounds.

  The knowledge that Glenney had been stabbed provided material for speculation, particularly in view of the postscript to Esmond’s first letter: ‘I beg you to destroy, or at least suppress this work, not only in the name of our old friendship, but of your safety, and mine.’ Could Esmond have been in any danger from the Sect? Could it be that Glenney’s death was the result of his decision to ignore Esmond’s warning? There was at least one odd feature of the murder: that it took place in a small room on the second floor. If Glenney was killed in bed, why was he not in one of the large bedrooms overlooking the loch? I found myself wishing that I could contact Esmond and ask him; but no amount of concentration gave me the clue I needed.

  We arrived back at Alastair’s London flat at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon. It was a superb day; in fact, slightly too warm for comfort; I found myself wishing I’d brought summer clothes. I was thinking of Esmond—whose body had been mouldering in the family vault for more than a hundred years—and wishing I could somehow share the day with him.

  Alastair had business in the City; Angela and I ate a late lunch together. It is impossible for two people to become sud­denly and violently intimate, and not continue to think of one another, in some sense, as lovers; and the kind of warmth that had grown up between us was not unlike that of husband and wife. I found myself telling her about these odd experiences of ‘being’ Esmond, and how the last one had led me to the finding of the book by Maureen Ingestre. I expected her to find it inter­esting, perhaps amusing, but not really credible; after all, I had been soaking myself rather intensely in Esmond, so it was natural that I should feel like him sometimes. Her reaction surprised me; she was perplexed and worried. I said:

  ‘It’s nothing to get excited about. I find it rather interesting.’

  I found myself arguing the rationalist point of view I had expected her to take. She said that Alastair had talked about ‘feeling strange’ at Golspie, and wondered if his bedroom was haunted.

  Half an hour after lunch, when I was examining the manu­script of Glenney’s novel, she said:

  ‘Do you think he’s trying to tell you something?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Esmond.’

  I tried to explain that I didn’t have a feeling of Esmond’s presence; I simply saw things through his eyes, as if I were Esmond. You don’t try to tell yourself something.

  She said: ‘I think we ought to ring that Dr Körner.’

  I had intended to, but I meant to leave it another twenty-four hours. I wanted to spend a quiet evening going through the various papers we had brought with us. Angela said:

  ‘Let me ring him.’

  ‘All right. If you want to.’

  Ten minutes later, she said:

  ‘I’ve invited him over for a drink at six o’clock.’

  At about half past five, the phone rang; Angela took the call. She put her hand over the receiver and said:

  ‘It’s Anna Dunkelman . . .’

  I shook my head heavily, to indicate that I didn’t want to spea
k to her. Angela told her I was out and wouldn’t be back until late. I went out to the bathroom while they talked, and had a shower. When I came back in, ten minutes later, she was still talking. She hung up while I was changing in the bedroom.

  ‘That woman’s quite dreadful. I wish I hadn’t given her this number.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She must have second sight. She said she’d just heard that Körner was in London, and wanted to advise you not to see him. Then she went on with long, rambling stories about how wicked he is.’

  ‘What did she say he’d done?’

  ‘Oh . . . quarrels about what Reich meant, and so on. But she said he’d been spreading false rumours about them, and that she intended to sue him for slander. What it all amounts to is that she wants you to avoid Körner, and if you happen to meet him, don’t believe a single word he says.’

  I was sitting on the bed, tying my tie; Angela came over, and placed her hand on my damp hair. I was mildly surprised, but assumed she was a little shaken and wanted comforting. I put my arm round her waist and gave her a squeeze. She took my hand in both her hands and pressed it against her breasts. I stood up, bent my head to give her a reassuring kiss, and found myself holding her very closely, her body pressed tightly to mine. After we had kissed for a moment, she said in a strained voice:

  ‘It’s dreadful, but I want you to make love to me.’

  ‘There’s hardly time.’

  But she could feel me hardening against her. She slipped her hand into the top of my trousers, which were still unbelted, and gripped my erect member. I slid my hand up her mini-skirt, and inside the crotch of her panties; she was more than ready to be made love to. Then suddenly, she twisted away from me. I said: ‘What is it?’ She burst into tears and said: ‘I hate myself.’