The Meaning of Night

by Michael Cox

  The satisfaction of close and concentrated observation; the need to perceive minute gradations of light and shadow, and to select the correct angle and elevation; the patient scrutiny of backdrop and setting – these things I found gave me intense fulfilment, and transported me to another realm, far away from my often sordid duties at Tredgolds. My principal partiality, artistically speaking – the seed planted by seeing a photogenic drawing that Mr Talbot had made of Lacock Abbey – was to seek to capture the spirit or mood that certain places evoke. London offered such a variety of subjects – ancient palaces, domestic dwellings of every type and age, the river and its bridges, great public buildings – that I soon developed a keen eye for architectural line and form, shadow and sky, texture and profile.

  One Sunday, in June 1850, feeling I had attained to a good level of competence, I decided I would show Mr Tredgold some examples of my photographic work.

  ‘These are really excellent, Edward,’ he said, turning over a number of mounted prints that I had made of Pump-court, and of Sir Ephraim Gadd’s chambers in King’s Bench-walk. ‘You have an exceptional eye. Quite exceptional.’ He suddenly looked up, as if struck by a thought. ‘Do you know, I think I could secure a commission for you. What would you say to that?’

  I replied, of course, that I would be very happy for him to do so.

  ‘Excellent. I am obliged to pay a visit to an important client next week, and, seeing what you have done here, it occurs to me that this gentleman might wish to have some photographic representations of his country property, to provide an indelible record for posterity. The property in question would certainly afford the most ravishing possibilities for your camera.’

  ‘Then I shall be even more willing to agree to the proposal. Where is the property?’

  ‘Evenwood, in Northamptonshire. The home of our most important client, Lord Tansor.’

  Whether Mr Tredgold saw my surprise, I cannot say. He was beaming at me, in his usual way, but his eyes had a guarded look about them, as if in anticipation of some disagreeable response. He cleared his throat.

  ‘I thought,’ he went on, ‘that you might also be curious to see the former home of Lady Tansor – I allude, of course, to her friendship with your last employer’s late mother, Mrs Simona Glyver. But if this proposal is against your inclinations …’

  I raised my hand.

  ‘By no means. I can assure you that I have no objections at all to such an expedition.’

  ‘Good. Then it is settled. I shall write to Lord Tansor immediately.’

  How could I possibly have refused to go along with Mr Tredgold’s adventitious proposal, when Evenwood was the one place on earth I wished to see? I was already familiar, from various published accounts, with the history of the great house, the disposition of the buildings, and the topography of the extensive Park. Now I had been given the opportunity to experience, in my waking being, what I had so often fashioned in imagination.

  Since commencing my employment at Tredgolds, I had made little progress in my pursuit of some piece of objective evidence that would confirm what I had read in my mother’s journals. I had suggestions and hints, providing strong and, to me, compelling testimony to the truth concerning my birth; but they were not indubitable, and shed no light on the causes of the conspiracy between my mother and Lord Tansor’s first wife, or on how their plan had been accomplished. By now, I had read every word of my mother’s journals several times over, as well as making copious notes on them, and had begun to re-examine and index every scrap of paper she had left behind, from bills and receipts to letters and lists (my mother, I discovered, had been an inveterate list-maker; there were scores of them). I hoped to find some fragment of the truth that I might have overlooked; but it was becoming clear to me that little more could be gleaned from the documents in my possession, and that I would achieve nothing by remaining in my rooms, and brooding on my lost inheritance. If that inheritance was to be recovered, I must begin to widen my view; and what better way to start than by seeing my ancestral home for myself?

  A few days later, Mr Tredgold informed me that Lord Tansor was happy for me to accompany him to Evenwood, where I would be given liberty to roam as I pleased. Next morning, both of us feeling relieved to be escaping the heat and dust of London, we took the train northwards to Peterborough.

  Once we had boarded our train, Mr Tredgold and I immediately fell into our customary bookish talk, which we kept up all the way to Peterborough, despite several attempts on my part to encourage my employer to speak of Evenwood and its principal residents. Having arrived in Easton, some four miles from Evenwood, Mr Tredgold went on ahead to the great house, leaving me to accompany the trunk containing my travelling equipment in the carrier’s cart. At the gatehouse, just beyond the village of Evenwood, I got out, leaving the cart to trundle off. It was approaching two o’clock when I ascended the long incline that carries the road from the gates, and rested at the top to look down over the river towards the vista spread out before my hungry eyes.

  And now, at last, I am to show you Evenwood, which I first beheld on that perfect June afternoon in 1850 – an afternoon, perhaps, like the one that had seen the arrival of Dr Daunt and his family twenty years earlier. I see it again in memory, as clearly as on that day.

  The village lies, in quiet seclusion, close to a slow-moving tributary of the River Nene, the Even, commonly called the Evenbrook by the local inhabitants, which winds through the Park to join the main river a few miles to the east. A church and adjoining Rectory, a noble Dower House of the late seventeenth century, clusters of picturesque cottages, some outlying farms, and then the great house itself: similar compositions can be found all over England; but Evenwood is like no other place on earth.

  The always-sighing reed-beds and the overarching willows, the pale stone houses with their roofs of thatch or Collyweston stone,* the undulating Park with its lake and ancient trees, and in the midst, the faery splendour of Lord Tansor’s residence, are sources of deep and abiding solace for those weary of the quotidian world. The whole place seems to be somehow beyond time, shut in and protected from the meanness of existence by the meandering river, and the gently wooded slopes on either side, which, on a fine day, dissolve into long soft swathes of grey-green.

  If you consult Verekker’s dull but dependable Guide to the County of Northamptonshire (a copy of the augmented 1812 edition is now before me as I write),† you will read of Lord Tansor’s seat being ‘pleasantly situated in a well-wooded Park of many acres, planted with noble stands of oak, ash, and elm, and watered by the Even, or Evenbrook. The house, or manor, is built of brick and freestone. The accretions of centuries have bestowed upon the house a pleasing irregularity of form, at once imposing and romantic.’ You will also learn from Verekker the bare architectural facts concerning the house: the licence to crenellate granted in 1330; the Elizabethan extensions to the fortified mediaeval dwelling; the Jacobean refinements; the remodelling by Talman early in the last century; and the improvements lately effected in the Classical style by Henry Holland, who also worked on another of the county’s great houses, Althorp.

  What you will not find in Verekker, or in any other guide, is an anatomy of Evenwood’s power to bewitch both soul and sense. Possibly, it is beyond human art to convey the sense of something lost, but eternally present, that such places inspire. In every light, and in every season, it possesses a transcendent beauty; but in summer it is very paradise. Approach it if you can – as I first did – from the south, on a mid-summer afternoon. On entering the Park, you ascend the incline that I have mentioned, at the summit of which you will certainly pause, as I did, to catch your first sight of the great house. To your left, over the low boundary wall, light dances on the river curving gently westwards; and then you glimpse the church – its delicate spire on such a day set against a cloudless sky of deepening blue – facing the ivy-covered Rectory on the far side of a little field of graves.

  Proceed a little further. The carriage-drive
descends towards the river, crosses it by a fine balustraded bridge, then turns to the right, levelling out to give a fuller view of the house, and the swaying haze of trees behind; then it divides, to sweep either side of a perfect oval of lawn, with a fine Classical group – Poseidon with Tritons – at its centre, before passing through a pair of massive iron gates into an enclosed and gravelled entrance court.

  Always your eye is drawn upwards, to a riot of gables and fluted chimneys, and, dominating all, six soaring towers topped with arched, intricately leaded cupolas. Behind the formality of Holland’s frontage, the remains of earlier ages ramble in picturesque confusion: cobbled alleys between high walls, a vaulted cloister opening onto gardens. Tudor brick mingles with smooth ashlar; oriels and battlements oppose Classical columns and pediments. And, in the midst, a sequestered mediaeval courtyard filled with urns and statuary, heavy in summer with the scent of lavender and lilies, and echoing always to the sound of birds and trickling water.

  Evenwood. I had wandered its corridors and great rooms in dreams, collected representations of it, greedily hoarded every published account of its history and character, no matter how trite and inconsequential, from William Camden to the pamphlet published in 1825 by Dr Daunt’s predecessor as Rector. For years it had been, not a built thing of stone and timber and glass, which could be touched and gazed upon under the light of sun and moon, but a misty dream-place of unattainable perfection, like the great Pavilion of the Caliphat described so perfectly by Mr Tennyson.*

  Now it was spread out before me. No dream, it stood planted deep in the earth that my own feet were treading, washed by the rain of centuries, warmed and illuminated by countless dawns, raised and shaped by dead generations of mortal men.

  I was overwhelmed, almost choked by tears, at the first sight of the place that I had seen only with the interior eye. And then – it was almost like the sensation of physical pain – I became certain that I had seen it before; not in books and paintings, not in fancy, but with my own eyes. I said to myself: I have been here. I have breathed this air, heard these sounds of wind through the trees, and the music of distant waters. In an instant I was a child again, dreaming of a great building, half palace, half fortress, with soaring spires and towers reaching to the sky. But how could these things be? The name of this place held dim childhood associations, but no recollection of ever having been brought here. Whence came, then, this certainty of re-acquaintance?

  In a kind of daze, confused by the confluence of the real and the unreal, I walked a little further, and the perspective began to shift. Shadows and angles emerged to soften or delineate; definitions hardened, elevations extended and attenuated. A dog barked, and I saw rooks wheeling and cawing about the towers and chimneys, and white doves fluttering. Between high enclosing walls was a fishpond, dark and still, overlooked by two little pavilions of pale stone. As I drew nearer still, details of ordinary human activity began to emerge: planted things, a broom leaning against a wall, window-curtains moving in the warm breeze, smoke drifting up from a chimney stack, a water pail set down in a gateway.

  We know, from the account of his life published in the Saturday Review, that Evenwood burst upon young Phoebus Daunt like Paul’s vision. It seemed – they were his words – ‘almost as if I had not lived before’.

  I do not blame the boy Phoebus for feeling thus on encountering the beauty of Evenwood for the first time. No one with eyes to see, or a heart to feel, could be unmoved by the place. I, too, felt as he did when I first caught sight of its cupolas and battlements, rising up through the summer haze; and with greater familiarity came greater attachment, until, even in memory, Evenwood assumed such a power to enthral that it sometimes made me sick with a desire to spend my life within its bounds, and to possess it utterly.

  If Phoebus Daunt truly experienced such an epiphany on his first coming upon Evenwood, then I freely absolve him. Remove it from the tally, with my blessing. But if he believed the words that he wrote in his public recollections, that Evenwood was ‘an Eden made for me alone’, he was culpably wrong.

  It had been made for me.

  My travelling chest, containing my camera, tripod, and other necessary equipment, had been placed on a trolley in a narrow yard leading off the entrance court. The footman who assisted me in the task, one John Hooper, was a pleasant, amenable fellow, and we chatted easily as he helped pull the trolley to the first location. In due course, I would have occasion to apply to him, discreetly, for information concerning certain matters connected with Evenwood, which he was happy to supply.

  I had brought with me a dozen dark slides containing negatives prepared according to the process recently introduced by Monsieur Blanquart-Evrard.* For three hours I worked away, and was satisfied that Lord Tansor would be well pleased with the results.

  I had just finished taking several views of the Orangery, and was stepping through a little gate set in an ancient fragment of flint wall, when I was brought up short by the sound of someone laughing. Before me was a broad sweep of close-cut grass on which four figures, two ladies, and two gentlemen, were engaged in a game of croquet.

  I would not have been aware of his presence had he not laughed; but as soon as I heard that distinctive note, and the concluding snort, I knew it was him.

  He seemed to have grown taller, and was broader in the shoulder than I remembered; and now he had a dark beard, which, with the silk handkerchief that he had tied round his head, gave him a distinctly piratical air. There he was, in the flesh: P. Rainsford Daunt, the celebrated poet, whose latest volume, The Conquest of Peru, had just been published, to great acclaim.

  I stood spellbound. To see him here, leaning on his mallet, and to hear his voice paying gallant compliments to his partner, a strikingly tall young lady with dark hair, seemed to twist the knife into the wound that had been festering within in me for so long. I considered for a moment whether I should make myself known to him; but then, looking down at my dusty boots, I noticed that I had a tear in the knee of my trousers where I had kneeled down on the gravel of the entrance court to adjust my tripod. Altogether I made a rather sorry sight, with my dirty hands and high colour, for it had been warm work, pulling the trolley from one location to the next. Daunt, by contrast, stood elegantly at his ease on the new-mown lawn, waistcoat shimmering in the sunlight, unaware of his former friend concealed in the shadow of a large laurel bush.

  I confess that I could not help feeling envious of him, which gave the knife yet another little turn. He looked so assured, so settled in comfort. If I had known then the full extent of his good fortune, I might have been tempted into some rash deed. But, in my ignorance, I simply stood observing him, thinking of when we had last spoken together in School Yard, and wondering whether he still remembered what I had whispered to him. I doubted it. He looked like a man who slept well. It seemed almost a pity to disturb his peaceful slumbers; but one day my words would come back to him.

  And then he would remember.

  I remained out of sight behind the laurel bush for a quarter of an hour or more, until Daunt and his companions picked up their mallets, and returned to a small shaded terrace, where tea had been laid out for them. He strolled back with the tall young lady, whilst the other two followed behind, chatting and laughing.

  It was now a little before five o’clock, and so I returned to the entrance court. I was beginning to pack up my things when Mr Tredgold appeared on the steps.

  ‘Edward, there you are. I trust you have had a productive afternoon? Very good. My business with his Lordship is concluded, but there is one more thing you might do before we leave.’

  ‘Certainly. What is it?’

  He gave a little cough.

  ‘I have persuaded his Lordship that it would be a great thing, for his posterity, to have a photographic likeness of himself made. I urged him to consider what it would mean for his descendants to have an unmediated image of him as he really is, at this very time. I said it would be as if he lived again in their eyes. I
hope it will not be too much trouble for you? His Lordship is waiting for us on the Library Terrace.’

  The Library Terrace was on the west side of the house; Daunt and his friends were taking tea on the south. I quickly weighed up the risks of our meeting each other, and decided that they were small. Besides, the opportunity to study the man whom I believed to be my father was irresistible; and if Daunt did appear, I was confident that my recently acquired moustachios would prevent discovery.

  ‘Not in the least,’ I replied, as calmly as I could. ‘I have two negatives left, and will be very glad to oblige his Lordship. If you will allow me a moment to gather up my things …’

  When we arrived at the terrace, Lord Tansor was pacing up and down, the silver ferrule of his stick clattering on the stones, the sunlight glinting off his immaculate silk hat.

  ‘Your Lordship,’ said Mr Tredgold, advancing towards him. ‘This is Mr Glapthorn.’

  ‘Glapthorn. How d’ye do. You have all your instruments, cameras, and what not, I see. A travelling chest? Everything to hand, what? Very good. That’s the way. Now then, let’s get on.’

  I began to set up my tripod as Lord Tansor continued to walk up and down, conversing with Mr Tredgold. But I found that I could not take my eyes off him.

  Now in his fifty-ninth year, he was a smaller man than I had expected, but with a straight back and strong shoulders. I became immediately fascinated by his little mannerisms: the left hand placed behind him as he walked; the way he tilted his head back when he spoke; the gruff, staccato phrases, and the barking interrogatives with which his speech was punctuated; the impatient tic in his left eye when Mr Tredgold directed some observation to him, as if his toleration were about to expire at any second.