The Meaning of Night

by Michael Cox

  The following morning I rose early, and with small difficulty arrived in Richmond at a little after ten o’clock. I took a late breakfast at the Star and Garter, by the Park gates, where I began to enquire of the waiters whether they knew of a Mr Lewis Pettingale. At my third attempt, I was given the information I sought.

  The house was on the Green, in Maids of Honour Row, a pretty terrace of three-storey brick houses.* It stood at the end of the row, fronted by a well-tended garden. I entered through a wrought-iron gate and proceeded down the path to the front door, which was opened to my knock by a whey-faced girl of about twenty.

  ‘Will you give your master this? I shall wait.’

  I handed her a note, but she looked at me blankly and thrust the note back at me.

  ‘Mr Pettingale is here, is he not, recovering from his injuries?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she said, looking at me with staring eyes, as if I had come to murder her.

  ‘Now then, what’s this?’

  The question was asked by a grim-looking man with a patch over one eye and a white spade beard.

  ‘Is Mr Pettingale at home?’ I asked again, in some irritation.

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ said the man, assuming a protective position in front of the girl.

  ‘Well then, where may I find him?’ was my next question.

  At this the girl began to play somewhat nervously with her pinafore, while casting anxious looks at the man.

  ‘Phyllis,’ he said, ‘go inside.’

  When she had gone, he turned to me, and threw his shoulders back, as if he might be preparing to stand his ground against my assault.

  ‘Mr Pettingale,’ he said at last, ‘has left the country, which, if you were a true friend to him, you would already know.’

  ‘I am not a friend of Mr Pettingale’s,’ I replied, ‘but neither do I wish him any harm. I have only recently made his acquaintance, and so of course do not expect to be taken into his confidence. He has gone to the Continent, perhaps?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said the man, relaxing his stance a little. ‘To Australia.’

  Pettingale’s flight, and the reason for the assault on him, raised yet more perplexing questions; he had also robbed me of the means of exposing Phoebus Daunt to Lord Tansor, and to the world, for the thief and fraudster that he was.

  I returned gloomily to London. Every way I turned, my progress was blocked by unanswered questions, untested presumptions, and unsubstantiated suspicions. The murder of Mr Carteret held the key to the restitution of my birthright, of that I was certain. But how could that key be discovered? I found that I had not the least idea what to do next. Only one man could bring forth into the full light of understanding the weighty truth that so evidently lay behind Mr Carteret’s letter to Mr Tredgold: the author himself; and the dead cannot speak.

  On reaching Temple-street, in this depressed and frustrated state of mind, I took to my bed and immediately fell into a sound slumber, from which I was awoken by a loud knocking at the door.

  When I answered the knock, I saw, to my surprise, one of the office boys from Tredgolds on the landing, holding out a brown-paper parcel.

  ‘Please, sir, this has come for you, to the office. There is a letter as well.’

  I perused the letter first, with some curiosity. It was a short note of apology from Dr Daunt’s friend, Professor Lucian Slake, of Barnack:DEAR SIR, —I am sorry to inform you that I have only just been told by the people at the George Hotel that the package I sent for your attention was mislaid, and has only now come to light. I have written a very strong letter of complaint to the manager, for the inconvenience this has caused to all concerned. But as Dr Daunt took the precaution of giving me the address of your employer, I now send you the proofs of his partial translation of Iamblichus, as he requested. It is, in my opinion, a fine piece of work, a most necessary corrective to Taylor’s rendering; but you will know better than I.I am, sir, yours most respectfully,

  LUCIN M. SLAKE

  This was puzzling. I immediately tore open the package, which did indeed contain the proofs of Dr Daunt’s translation. What, then, was in the other package, the one that had been thrust into my hand by the serving-man from the George Hotel as I was preparing to take the train to Peterborough?

  It still lay on my work-table, hidden under several old copies of The Times, and was addressed to ‘E. Glapthorn, Esq., George Hotel’. I then noticed, for the first time, that it was marked ‘Confidential’.

  Inside were some thirty or forty sheets of unlined paper, folded like the leaves of a small quarto book, the first leaf being in the form of a title-page laid out in neatly formed capitals. Each of the remaining leaves was covered to the edges with small, close-packed writing – but in a different hand from the one that had inscribed the wrapper.

  Intrigued, I put a match to the fire, pulled my chair a little closer to the hearth, and turned up the lamp. Holding the pages close to the light with shaking hands, I began to read.*

  *[‘There is danger in delay’ (Livy, Ab urbe condita). Ed.]

  †[Celebrated pleasure gardens near Battersea Bridge. Regular entertainments included fireworks, dancing, concerts, and balloon ascents. It was open from three in the afternoon until midnight. After its respectable patrons had departed, it became an infamous haunt of prostitutes. It finally became so great an annoyance to its neighbours that in 1877 it was forced to close. Ed.]

  *[Built in 1724 for the Maids of Honour of George II’s wife, Caroline of Anspach. Ed.]

  *[The author’s narrative temporarily concludes on this page of the manuscript. The following account, transcribed in the author’s hand, has been bound in at this point. Ed.]

  DEPOSITION OF

  P. CARTERET, ESQ.

  Concerning the Late

  Laura, Lady Tansor

  I

  Friday, 21st October 1853

  To whom it may concern.

  I, Paul Stephen Carteret, of the Dower House, Evenwood, in the County of Northamptonshire, being of sound mind and in full possession of my faculties, do hereby solemnly swear that the following deposition is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God.

  I begin in this fashion because I wish to establish, from the outset, that I intend hereafter to assume the character and responsibilities of a witness to certain events, though I do not stand in any dock to deliver my evidence. Nevertheless, I beg most earnestly to be regarded as such a person by whomsoever may read this, taking my place – though in imagination only – before the bar of Blind Justice, with due solemnity, and delivering myself, as fully and as accurately as I can, of my testimony.

  Crimes, like sin itself, are various both in form and in the severity of their effects; consequently, various are the punishments meted out to those who perpetrate them. But the crime I must herein expose – where does it stand amongst the divisions of wrong-doing, and what penalty does it deserve? That it was a crime, I have no doubt; but what to call it? Here lies my first difficulty.

  I must leave it to sager minds than mine to deliver judgment on this point. But of this I am confident: the matter of which I shall speak was an active and considered act of moral harm against another person. And what does that signify, if not a crime? No material possessions were taken, and no blood spilled. And yet I say that it was theft – of a kind; and that it was murder – of a kind. In short, that it was a crime – of a kind.

  There is a further difficulty: the perpetrator is dead, whilst the victim is ignorant of the outrage that has been visited upon him. Yet I persist in calling this a crime, and my conscience will not let me rest until I have set down the facts of the case, as far as they are known to me. I cannot yet see how it will all end; for though I know something, I do not know all. I write this, therefore, as a necessary preliminary to some future process whose outcome I cannot as yet foresee, and in which I myself may, or may not, play a part. For I believe that dangerous consequences have been set in motion by what I have uncovered, which cannot
now be averted.

  In four days’ time, I am engaged to meet a representative of the firm of Tredgold, Tredgold and Orr, my employer’s legal advisers. I am not acquainted with this gentleman, though I am assured he has the full trust of Mr Christopher Tredgold, whom I have known and respected, as a business correspondent and friend, these twenty-five years and more. I have undertaken to reveal in person to Mr Tredgold’s agent a matter that has given me the greatest possible concern, since making certain discoveries in the course of my work.

  To set things in their proper light, I must first say something about myself and my situation.

  I began my present employment, as secretary to my cousin, the 25th Baron Tansor, in February 1821. I had come down from Oxford three years earlier with little notion of what I would do in life, and for a time, I fear, idled most irresponsibly at home.

  We lived then – my father and mother and I, my elder brother having by then secured a diplomatic position abroad – in a good deal of comfort, just across the river from Evenwood, at Ashby St John, in a fine old house that had been purchased by my paternal greatgrandfather, the founder of the family’s prosperity. But, as the younger son, I could not remain in a state of dependency on my father indefinitely; and, besides, I wished to marry – wished very much to marry – the eldest daughter of one of our neighbours, Miss Mariana Hunt-Graham. And so I resolved at last, after a little travelling, to follow my elder brother Lawrence into the Foreign Service, having at my disposal, besides a respectable degree and the good offices of my brother, a powerful recommendation from my cousin, Lord Tansor, to the then Foreign Secretary.* On the strength of this resolve, my father – albeit reluctantly – agreed to my proposing to Miss Hunt-Graham, and to providing us with a small allowance until I had established myself in my new career. She accepted me, and we were married in December 1820, on a day that I shall always regard as one of the happiest of my life.

  But, within a month of my marriage, my father was taken ill and died; and with his death came ruin. Unknown to us all, even to my mother, the former Sophia Duport, he had committed all his capital to ruinous speculations, had borrowed most injudiciously, and, as a consequence, left us almost destitute. The house, of course, had to be sold, along with my father’s prized collection of Roman coins; and there was no question now that my new wife and I could make a new life for ourselves in London. My poor mother suffered greatly with the shame of it all, and if it had not been for the generosity of her noble nephew, in immediately offering me a position as his private secretary, together with accommodation for us all with his stepmother in the Dower House at Evenwood, I do not well know what we should have done. I owe him everything.

  At the time that I took up my employment, my cousin was married to his first wife, Laura, Lady Tansor, whose people, like my father’s, were from the West Country. There had recently been a rift between Lord and Lady Tansor, apparently now healed, during which her Ladyship had left her husband to spend over a year in France. She had returned from the Continent in late September 1820, a changed woman.

  I cannot think of her Ladyship without affection. It is impossible. I acknowledge that her character was flawed, in many ways; but when I first knew her, in the early years of her marriage to my cousin, she seemed to my impressionable mind to be like Spenser’s Cyprian goddess, ‘newly borne of th’ Oceans fruitfull froth’.* I was already in love with Miss Hunt-Graham, and had eyes for no one else; but I was flesh and blood, and no young man so composed could fail to admire Lady Tansor. She was all beauty, all grace, all spirit; lively, amusing, accomplished in so many ways; a soul, as I may say, so fully alive that it made those around her seem like dumb automata. The contrast with my cousin, her husband, could not have been greater, for he was by nature grave and reserved, and in every way the opposite of his vivacious wife; yet, for a time, they had seemed curiously suited to each other; each, as it were, neutralizing the excesses of the other’s temperament.

  I had almost daily opportunity to observe my cousin and his wife after the latter’s return from France. I had been given a work-room adjoining the Library at Evenwood, on the ground floor of what is called Hamnet’s Tower,† the upper storey of which comprised the Muniments Room, containing legal documents, accounts, estate and private correspondence, inventories, and so forth, relating to the Duport family, and dating to the time of the 1st Baron Tansor in the thirteenth century. To this work-room I would come every day to undertake my duties, which soon also began to encompass general stewardship of the Library – then uncatalogued – after I evinced an informed interest in the manuscript books, stored in the Muniments Room, which had been collected by our grandfather.

  My first duty of the morning would be to call upon my cousin at eight o’clock to receive his instructions for the day. He would usually be taking breakfast with his wife in what was known as the Yellow Parlour, sitting at a small table set in a bow-window, looking out upon a secluded walled garden on the south side of the house. Lady Tansor had been back in England, and seemingly reconciled with her husband, for nearly a year when I began my employment at Evenwood. A portrait of her, begun before the rift of which I have just spoken, hung unfinished on one of the walls of this modest apartment, and provided a salutary daily reminder of the strange transformation of her physical appearance that had taken place since the artist had first begun to paint her – from the dazzling, captivating beauty of former times, with proud flashing eyes and abundant raven hair, to the gaunt and slightly stooped figure, her hair now prematurely flecked with grey, who sat opposite her husband each morning, come rain or shine, and whatever the season, silently staring out over his shoulder into the garden, whilst he, with his back to the window, read The Times and drank his coffee. Such a change! And so sad to see! As I entered the room each morning, she barely noticed my presence, and would take no part in my conversations with her husband. Sometimes she would rise absently from the table, letting her napkin drop to the floor, and, without a word, would drift from the room like some poor ghost.

  She would spend days on end, especially during the dreary winter weeks, shut away in her rooms above the Library, and generally saw no one, except her maid and her companion, Miss Eames, and of course her husband at meal-times. But, as time went by, she would sometimes, and on a sudden, take it into her head to go up to town, or to some other place, regardless of the weather and the state of the roads. Once, for instance, she insisted, with something of her old force, that she absolutely must go to see an old friend, and so off she went to the South Coast in the midst of a most ferocious downpour, accompanied only by Miss Eames, to the considerable disapproval of my cousin, and the consternation of those of us who loved her and fretted after her well-being. This, I see from my journal, was towards the close of the year 1821.

  I remember the incident particularly because, after she returned from the coast, she appeared to have regained a little of her former spirit, almost as if a weight had been lifted from her. Little by little, she began to show her husband small considerations, and as I came into the Yellow Parlour of a morning I would sometimes even catch her smiling at some trifling pleasantry of Lord Tansor’s – a slight, pained smile, to be sure; but it gladdened my heart to see it. Then, as the spring came on, she began to busy herself a little – planning a new area of garden, replacing the window-curtains in her private sitting-room, arranging a weekend party for some of her husband’s political associates, sometimes accompanying his Lordship to town. And so a kind of contentment returned to my cousin’s marriage, though things were not – nor ever would be – as they had been formerly, and my Lady’s eyes never regained the radiant energy captured so well in the unfinished portrait that hung by the breakfast-table in the Yellow Parlour.

  This partial restoration of happiness between my cousin and his wife, muted and delicate though it was, continued, culminating in an announcement, made to the general delight of their many friends, that her Ladyship was with child. Lord Tansor’s joy at the news was plain for all to see
, for it had been the cause of much distress and anxiety for my cousin that his union with Lady Tansor had, so far, denied him the thing he desired above all others: an heir of his own body.

  The change in him was quite remarkable. I even remember hearing him whistle, something I had never heard him do before, as he was coming down the stairs one morning, a little later than usual, to take his breakfast. He became wonderfully solicitous towards his wife, showing her every attention she could have desired; so absorbed in her welfare did he become that he would often send me away of a morning, saying that he could not put his mind to business at such a time, or reprimanding me sharply for intruding when, as he said, I could see that her Ladyship was tired, or that her Ladyship needed his company that morning, or strongly conveying by word or look some other mark of his determination to do nothing else that day but devote himself to my Lady’s service.

  The object of his concern, however, received these unwonted demonstrations of partiality with little outward show of satisfaction; indeed, she appeared to regard them with an increasing irritation that seemed likely to throw into disarray the state of peace and equilibrium that had latterly been established between them. This did not in the least deflect her husband from his purpose, but it produced an uncomfortable atmosphere in which my cousin doggedly, and with unusual patience, sought even more ways of expressing his care for his wife’s condition, whilst she became peevish and captious, brushing off his well-meant enquiries with a brusqueness that I fear he did not deserve. Once, when I was about to knock at the door of the Yellow Parlour as usual one morning, I heard her telling him sharply that she did not want to be molly-coddled so by him, that she neither desired it nor deserved it. I reflected afterwards on her words, concluding that some residual action of guilt for having abandoned her husband was responsible, in concert with the natural anxieties of impending motherhood, for her peppery behaviour.