by Michael Cox
So things went on until the 17th of November, in the year ’22, when, at a little after three o’clock in the afternoon, my Lady gave birth to a son. The boy, who would be christened Henry Hereward, was a hale and hearty creature from the first; but his mother, grievously weakened by the exertion of bringing him into the world, sank into a deep decline that lasted several days. She lay, hardly breathing, lingering between life and death, in the great curtained bed, fashioned to a fantastic design by du Cerceau,* that had been brought to Evenwood by Lady Constantia Silk on her marriage to Lord Tansor’s father. Gradually, she began to revive, take a little food, and sit up. A week to the day after the birth of her son, her husband, accompanied by the wet-nurse, brought the child to her for the first time; but she would not look at it. Propped up in the heavy-curtained bed, she closed her eyes and said only that she wished to sleep. My cousin remonstrated gently that she ought to make the acquaintance of their fine son and heir; but, with her eyes still shut, she told him, in a barely audible whisper, that she had no wish to see him.
‘I have done my duty,’ was all she would say when pressed by her husband to open her eyes just a little and look upon her son’s face for the first time. She would not even consent to attend the boy’s christening, which had been held off until she should have recovered sufficiently.
So Lord Tansor left her alone, and did not return. Thenceforth, he devoted himself to the nurture of his son, where formerly his wife had been his only care.
II
Friday, 21st October 1853 (continued)
The winter of 1822 came on, damp and raw. Her Ladyship left her bed, but refused to dress, sitting instead wrapped up in a shawl in an arm-chair before the fire, which burned night and day, and sometimes falling asleep there until her maid came in to draw back the window-curtains in the morning. The weeks passed, but still she would not see her son or quit her apartments. Her reply, when urged by friends to rouse herself and take up the duties of motherhood, was always the same: ‘I have done my duty. The debt is paid. There is no need to do more.’
One by one, she cut herself off from all visitors, even my late dear wife, of whom she had been particularly fond. Only her companion, Miss Julia Eames, was permitted to stay with her in the gloomy panelled chamber in which she spent most of her days. My cousin did not quite approve of Miss Eames, and had often questioned the necessity of her remaining in his house when his wife enjoyed such a wide acquaintance, both in the country and in town. But my Lady, alas, as was often the case, would not accede to his wishes, and it became a regular source of friction between them that she angrily refused to give up her companion.
It was to Miss Eames, and to her alone, that my Lady turned for comfort and companionship in the weeks and months following the birth of her son. I became particularly aware of the intimacy that existed between them when, one day, in the late spring of 1823, my Lady sent word that she wished me to bring up a copy of Felltham’s Resolves from the Library. It pleased me a great deal to receive the request, thinking it betokened the beginning of a return to her former habits; for my Lady, though she had been a great one for dresses and jewels and other fripperies, had always been an earnest and discriminating reader – unlike my cousin, whose literary tastes were somewhat rudimentary and who, in this as in so many other aspects of my Lady’s character and inclinations, found his wife’s fondness for poetry and philosophy incomprehensible.
When I took the volume she had requested up to my Lady’s sitting-room, I discovered her in close conversation with Miss Eames, heads together, talking with quiet intensity, their chairs drawn round a small work-table on which, open to view, was an ebony writing-box containing a considerable number of letters and other papers. On seeing me enter, Lady Tansor slowly closed the box and sat back in her chair, whilst Miss Eames stood up and walked towards me, holding her hand out to receive the book that I had brought, though it seemed to me that her action had also been intended to prevent me from drawing too close to the writing-box and its contents.
The incident may seem trifling, but it was to gain in significance retrospectively, as I shall shortly record.
And so to continue my deposition, and to conclude it as quickly as I may.
Still my Lady could not be persuaded to give up her self-imposed exile from society, and she absolutely refused to quit her apartment under any circumstance. But then, as the summer days began to shorten, her spirits gradually revived, and one bright cold day, at the beginning of October 1823, bundled up in her furs, she finally left her rooms, for the first time since the birth of her son – I observed her myself from the window of the Muniments Room taking the air on the Library Terrace, walking slowly up and down, arm in arm with Miss Eames. The next morning, Master Henry was brought by his nurse to be dandled for a minute or two on his mamma’s knee; the following morning, she began to take her breakfast again with her husband in the Yellow Parlour.
My cousin treated her return to domestic life with cold civility; for her part, she regarded him with utter indifference, though she ate her meals with him and sat with him of an evening, neither of them speaking the whole time, until each retired without a word of good-night to their own bedchambers at opposite ends of the house. She showed not much more interest in her son, though she raised no objection when my cousin brought up Sir Thomas Lawrence to paint the family portrait that now adorns the vestibule at Evenwood.
But then my Lady began to exhibit worrying signs of a severe nervous affection, slight at first, but increasing in frequency and intensity. In November 1823, as I noted in my journal, she repeatedly expressed a strong and intemperate desire to go and see the old friend she had previously visited on the south coast. Her husband sensibly prohibited such a thing; but her Ladyship contrived a means of leaving Evenwood when Lord Tansor was required to be in town on business. On her return, angry words were spoken; whereupon she locked herself in her room for two days and refused to come out, even when begged to do so by Miss Eames, until at last my cousin was obliged to order that the door be broken down. When his Lordship entered the apartment, to satisfy himself that she had not harmed herself in any way, she thrust a piece of paper into his hand, on which was a passage she had copied out of the edition of Felltham’s Resolves that I had taken up to her some months before. This was what she had written:When thou shalt see the body put on death’s sad and ashy countenance, in the dead age of night, when silent darkness does encompass the dim light of thy glimmering taper, and thou hearest a solemn bell tolled, to tell the world of it; which now, as it were, with this sound, is struck into a dumb attention: tell me if thou canst then find a thought of thine devoting thee to pleasure, and the fugitive toys of life.*
She had once been the brightest ornament of society, beautiful and carefree. Now her thoughts were all centred on the anguished contemplation of her inevitable demise. It pains me, even now, to speak of these last months, during which Lady Tansor became ever more unpredictable and distracted. My cousin had given instructions that, henceforth, his wife must never be left alone, and had arranged for a woman from the village, Mrs Marian Brine, to sleep in a truckle-bed next to my Lady’s own bed, whilst during the day, even when Miss Eames was with her, a servant was required to sit outside the door of her apartments, the keys of which had been confiscated to prevent her from incarcerating herself again.
But these safeguards proved insufficient, and one night, dressed only in her shift, when a late frost had rendered the earth iron-hard, she slipped out of the house and was found wandering the next morning on the path near the Grecian Temple that stands on the western edge of the Park, dirty and dishevelled and wailing in the most terrible fashion, her poor bare feet cut to pieces from walking through brambles and thorns.
They covered her, and she was brought back in the arms of Gabriel Brine, then his Lordship’s groom, and husband of the woman who had been set to watch over her at night. Brine himself told me how she had continued to babble and moan as he had carried her, crying out over and over
again, ‘He is lost to me, my son, my son’; but when he attempted to comfort her by telling her that all was well, and that Master Henry was safe in his cradle, she became maddened, and began to shriek and kick and writhe, cursing him in the most dreadful manner until, coming into the Front Court at last and seeing her husband standing beneath the light of the portico lamp, anxiously awaiting her return, she quietened herself, closed her eyes, and sank back, her strength exhausted, into Brine’s arms.
Lord Tansor stood for a moment, silently contemplating the destruction of his once beautiful wife. I, too, was there, just inside the door. I saw his Lordship nod to Brine, who proceeded to carry his pathetic burden upstairs, where she was laid in Lady Constantia’s great carved bed, from which she was to rise never more.
She died peacefully on the 8th of February 1824, at a little after six o’clock in the evening, and was laid to rest three days later in the Mausoleum built by her husband’s great-grandfather.
So ended the life of Laura Rose Duport, née Fairmile, wife of the 25th Baron Tansor. I now turn to the hidden consequences of that tragic life, and – at last – to the crime that I believe was committed against the closest interests of my cousin, for which I hope – constantly and most fervently – that the soul of the perpetrator has been forgiven by the grace of Him into whose hands we all must fall.
III
Saturday, 22nd October 1853
Immediately after the interment of his wife, Lord Tansor called for Miss Eames, her Ladyship’s former companion, and requested her to leave Evenwood at her earliest convenience. To what she was owed by way of remuneration, he added a generous additional payment, thanking her coldly for the services that she had rendered to his late wife. He hoped that she would have no cause to complain that she had been treated badly by him, to which she replied that he need have no fear on that score, and that she was properly grateful for the consideration she had received in his house.
He did not stop to ask, either Miss Eames or himself, whether she had a home to go to. As it happens, she did not; her father, a widower, had died soon after her Ladyship had absconded to France, and her other sisters were all married. One of these, however, lived in London, and to her, by means of a telegraphic message sent from Easton, Miss Eames now applied for temporary sanctuary.
Leaving Miss Eames to arrange her few possessions for departure, his Lordship then came to my work-room and instructed me to gather up all Lady Tansor’s private papers, and place them in the Muniments Room. Did he wish to peruse them himself after they had been collected? He did not. Did he wish me to examine or order them in any way? He did not. Were there any further instructions concerning her Ladyship’s papers? There were not. Only one more thing was required: the unfinished painting of her Ladyship was to be removed from the Yellow Parlour and placed ‘in a less conspicuous position’. Did his Lordship have a specific location in mind? He did not. Would there be any objection to my hanging it here, in my workroom? None whatsoever.
An hour or so later, there was another knock at my door. It was Miss Eames, come to bid me farewell. She spoke most kindly of the little services that I had been happy to provide for her during the time I had been employed at Evenwood, and said that she would always think of me as a friend. Then she said something that struck me as very odd:
‘You will always think well of me, won’t you, Mr Carteret? I would not like it – I could not bear it – if you did not.’
I assured her that I could think of no circumstance that would alter my very high opinion of her, for, indeed, I regarded her as a very sensible and dependable soul, in whom resided a great deal – a very great deal – of natural goodness and sympathy; I told her as much, and also that no one could have served her late mistress better, or more faithfully. That alone would always command my admiration, the prosecution of one’s duty to an employer or benefactor being, to my mind, a cardinal virtue.
‘Then I am content,’ she said, giving me a rather wan smile. ‘We are both loyal servants, are we not?’ And with that rather curious interrogative, she retired to ready herself for her journey. That was the last I saw of Miss Julia Eames.
The next morning, after waiting on my cousin as usual, I began searching through my Lady’s apartments for letters and other papers to remove to the Muniments Room, as I had been instructed. I collected a good many items from her green-lacquer desk that stood by the window in her sitting-room, and many more from various table-drawers and cabinets; but of the ebony writing-box that I had seen on several occasions, and which I particularly remembered from the time I had brought my Lady the copy of Felltham’s Resolves, there was no sign. I searched most diligently, going through the contents of every cupboard and drawer two or three times over, and even getting down on my hands and knees to look underneath the great curtained bed; but without success. Somewhat puzzled as to the box’s whereabouts, I placed my haul of documents in the portmanteau that I had brought with me, returned downstairs to my work-room, and ascended from thence to the Muniments Room.
It went against my nature simply to leave the papers in a disordered state; and so I thought that I would sort them roughly according to type, and then make a preliminary general inventory before storing them. This was quickly and easily done, and within an hour I had several separate bundles of receipts, bills, letters, sketch-books, notes and memoranda, correspondence, and drafts of letters from her Ladyship, and a number of miscellaneous items, principal amongst which were an autograph album, a commonplace-book with red silk wrappers inserted in a gilt steel cover, a note-book containing what appeared to be original poems and prose fragments, and an address book enclosed within an embossed calf wallet. I could not resist – who could? – looking over a number of the items as I placed them in their allotted pile, though I acknowledge that I did so a little guiltily, having received a specific instruction from my employer to leave the papers in an unclassified state.
The autograph album afforded an interesting record of friends and distinguished visitors, both to Evenwood and to his Lordship’s townhouse in Park-lane; and then I lingered for longer than I should have done over a book of delightful pen-and-ink drawings and pencil sketches made by my Lady over several years. A series of French scenes – a record, no doubt, of her Continental escapade – was particularly well done, for my Lady had been a skilled draughtswoman, with a keen eye for composition. Most were signed and dated ‘LRD, 1819’, and one or two carried descriptions. I particularly recall a most striking and romantic sketch, bearing the legend ‘Rue du Chapitre, Rennes, evening’, of an ancient and imposing half-timbered mansion with elaborately carved beams, and a canopied entrance half disclosing an interior courtyard. There were also a number of more finished views of the same location, all of them executed with remarkable feeling and care.
The striking of twelve noon from the Chapel clock roused me from my reveries, and I set about placing the separate bundles, which I had loosely tied together with string, in a small iron-bound chest that lay to hand, to which I affixed an identifying label. I was on the point of descending to my work-room when, on putting away my portmanteau, I noticed a single piece of paper that I had omitted to retrieve.
On examination, it appeared to be of little importance, simply a receipt, dated the 15th of September 1823, for the construction of a rosewood box by Mr James Beach, carpenter, Church-hill, Easton. I do not well know why I make mention of it here, other than from an earnest desire to present as full and as accurate a statement of events as I can, and because it seemed odd to me that her Ladyship should have commissioned such an apparently valueless object on her own account from a man in the town, when Lord Tansor employed an excellent estate carpenter who could have made it for her in a moment. But there it was; I had no justification for spending any more of his Lordship’s time on idle speculation, and had already dallied far too long on the task he had set me. And so I assigned the receipt to the proper bundle in the chest, shut the lid, and proceeded back down to my work-room.
I had no immediate reason of my own to consult Lady Tansor’s private papers further, and received no request from my employer to do so. All financial and legal documents of importance, of course, had already passed under his Lordship’s eye and hand during the course of his marriage, and were now in my custodial possession; consequently, over the course of the next few weeks, the contents of the little iron-bound chest began gradually to recede from my present view until, in time, they disappeared entirely.
I did not have cause to remember the existence of my Lady’s private papers for many years. During the intervening period, life, as it always does, brought us our share of fair weather and foul. Lord Tansor’s step-mother, Anne Duport, with whom we shared the Dower House, departed this life in 1826. The following spring, my cousin had married the Honourable Hester Trevalyn, and it was expected – his Lordship being then only thirty-six years of age, and his new wife ten years his junior – that, in time, their union would be blessed with offspring that would secure the succession to the next generation.
After his first wife’s death, his Lordship had given himself completely to the care and instruction of his son. I have no doubt that he mourned his first wife; but he did so, if I may so put it, in his own way. People called him unfeeling, particularly when, within a year or so of Lady Tansor’s death, he began to set his sights on Miss Trevalyn; but that verdict, I think, arose from the habit of impermeable reticence that characterized his whole demeanour, and from a failure on the part of those who criticized him to comprehend the responsibilities of his position.