‘So your husband would have had the opportunity to open such an account in person?’
‘I really—’
‘But he never discusses his financial affairs with you.’ Gow smiled. ‘I’m sorry. It quite slipped my mind. Of course he doesn’t. What about his other affairs?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The third name in which the Zurich account is held is that of a woman, ma’am: Miss M. Devereux. Do you know the lady?’
‘No.’
‘The name means nothing to you?’
Constance’s mouth set in a determined line. ‘Nothing at all, Inspector.’ But the colour that had come to her face suggested a different answer.
X
The first snowfall of winter had come to the grounds of Ticehurst Asylum in its sheltered fold of the Sussex Weald. No bird sang in the powdered privets, nor wind stirred the festooned firs. Even the ivy-clad façade of Ticehurst House wore a beard of white to complete the scene of frozen strangeness.
Down a long straight path leading away from the house towards the distant roof of an ornamental pagoda, two men walked at a sombre pace, hats pulled well down over their ears, greatcoat collars turned up round their chins, the snow crunching beneath their feet in time with their strides. One was William Trenchard, an inmate of the asylum. The other was Abel Kitson, his attendant. To the untrained eye, however, they would have appeared like two friends of similar backgrounds and tastes discussing the ways of the world during an afternoon stroll. Kitson himself, had he been asked, would readily have admitted that Trenchard was neither well-bred nor addle-brained enough to fit readily into the bizarre but ordered society of Ticehurst.
Nor would he have needed to look far for examples of the type of inmate Trenchard clearly was not. Beyond the rhododendron hedge that lined the path, the Reverend Sturgess Phelps and Lord Tristram Benbow were currently engaged in a snowballing contest, the Reverend Phelps having temporarily forgotten his oft-voiced conviction that he had been unfrocked as a result of an Anglo-Catholic conspiracy (affecting the highest reaches of Church and State) in order to indulge the forty-eight-year-old Lord Tristram’s unshakeable belief that he was still a boy of twelve.
‘Do I take it, Mr T,’ Kitson said, smiling as a stray snowball arced across their path, ‘that you’re shortly to be leaving us?’
‘What makes you think so, Abel?’
‘Well, you’ve been looking around the grounds this afternoon with what I can only describe as an expectation of nostalgia.’
‘Hah!’ Trenchard clapped Kitson on the shoulder. ‘Why the devil does Newington employ doctors in this place when you could give him all the psychological insights he needs?’
‘Because, Mr T, I’m too busy playing the double bass at his musical teas to play the doctor as well.’
‘You’re wasted, Abel, believe me.’
‘You admit the diagnosis is correct, then?’
‘Perhaps. I have hopes, as you know.’
‘More than hopes, I should say.’
‘I assure you—’
‘Two visitors in as many days, one a solicitor? The signs are clear, Mr T, crystal clear.’
‘Richard Davenall comes every month. As for my brother—’
‘Brother?’ Now it was Kitson’s turn to laugh aloud. ‘That man was no brother of yours.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Call it a psychological insight.’
Suddenly, bursting on to the path between the rhododendrons in a scatter of snow and a cloud of frosting breath, came the crouched and black-clad figure of the Reverend Sturgess Phelps. ‘You two!’ he cried at sight of them. ‘Which way did he go?’
‘If you mean Lord Tristram …’ Kitson began.
‘Not Lord Tristram, you dolt,’ Phelps screeched. ‘The stranger!’
‘I’m afraid we haven’t—’
‘He’s a Puseyite spy, not a doubt of it! But never fear: he won’t escape me!’ With that, Phelps lurched away through the bushes.
Kitson watched the troubled priest describe a purposeful zig-zag away across the snow-covered lawns, before deciding, on balance, that he would come to no harm. When he looked back along the path, he saw that Trenchard had gone ahead and was standing now on the wooden veranda of the pagoda, gazing out to the south across the white-wreathed countryside.
‘Looking for something, Mr T?’ Kitson said, on catching him up.
‘Waiting more than looking, Abel. Tomorrow is the twenty-ninth, isn’t it?’
‘I believe it is.’
‘What time do you think it’ll get light?’
‘Between eight and half-past, I should say.’
Trenchard nodded thoughtfully. ‘A little over sixteen hours, then.’
‘Who was he, Mr T, your mysterious visitor? Not your brother: you’ve described him to me before, and that fellow who came here yesterday didn’t match him by a mile. So who was he? He spent nearly all day with you. You must have had a lot to talk about.’
‘We did, Abel. We did.’
‘But you’re not going to tell me what, are you?’
Trenchard smiled ruefully. ‘No, I’m not.’
Kitson clicked his tongue in mock disappointment. ‘After all you’ve confided in me.’
‘Don’t take it to heart, Abel. What he told me I can’t tell another living soul.’
Trenchard did not exaggerate. He was bound to silence by the most solemn of promises. Two days before, he would have dismissed the idea of keeping a secret for Sir James Davenall as absurd, yet he had since agreed to do just that. For now he knew the truth – and knew also that it could never be told.
‘What do you want with me?’ he remembered demanding, when he had seen who was waiting for him in the empty visiting-room: not his brother, as he had been informed, but the tall, slim, irksomely elegant, infernally cool figure of Sir James Davenall. ‘Come to gloat, have you?’
‘Far from it.’
‘Then, why have you come?’
‘Because I want to tell you freely what I’ve tried till now to prevent you finding out at all costs: the truth. I want to confess, you might say.’
It was a trick, Trenchard had felt certain, some vile twisted scheme to increase his agony of mind. ‘Confess that you’re not James Davenall, you mean?’
‘Exactly.’
Still Trenchard had believed Norton was taunting him. ‘You want to provoke me into making accusations which will be taken as further proof of my insanity. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘No. It isn’t.’
‘It must be. Constance has married you, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes. Five days ago.’
‘Believing you to be James?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, what do you mean by coming here now and admitting you’re not? Is it because we’re alone, without witnesses, because I’m a certified lunatic whose word counts for less than nothing? Is that why you feel free to torment me? Damn you, Norton, you’ve taken my wife and my liberty – isn’t that enough?’
‘Yes. It’s enough. Enough to make you the one man entitled to hear the truth from my own lips. You’re not mad. We both know that. And now I’m prepared to tell the world so. To end your confinement here. On one condition.’
Trenchard had not dared to believe release was possible. Yet he could not have denied that, if any man could bring it about, it was Norton. ‘What condition?’
‘Hear me out. That’s all I ask. Listen to what I have to say. As to witnesses, when I’ve finished I think you’ll be glad there aren’t any.’
And so Trenchard had been. Now, as he heard again in his mind Norton’s long and calmly told story, the story he had heard in silence as they sat together in that dismal room, he was more certain than ever that Norton was right: it must remain secret for ever.
‘My real name is Stephen Alexander Lennox. I was born at Murrismoyle, County Mayo, on the twenty-eighth of July 1843. My father, Andrew Lennox, was agent for the Carntrassna estate of S
ir Lemuel Davenall, whose estranged wife Mary lived in Carntrassna House whilst he remained in England. My parents were both Scottish by birth. They had married, and kept a farm, in Scotland before moving to Ireland in 1840.
‘Although my earliest memories of Mayo date from the famine years, when the peasantry died in their thousands and most of those who survived fled across the Atlantic, I can only recollect a carefree, not to say cosseted, childhood, insulated in my nursery at Murrismoyle from the tragedy unfolding about me. Not until Denzil O’Shaughnessy became my tutor and shared with me his knowledge of the world and its ways, did I begin to understand how privileged my upbringing was.
‘Privilege, however, did not extend to warmth. My father was a cold remote figure to me, and my mother, though affectionate at times, could as often lapse into timid tight-lipped reserve. They gave me every comfort and advantage, yet seemed to take no pleasure in doing so. It was strange indeed to see the tenants on the estate raising large and happy broods of children in turf-hutted squalor whilst I grew up in pampered joyless solitude.
‘Only when I had grown to manhood did the contradictions of my early life become apparent to me. At the time, I did not wonder why I should be educated at home rather than banished to a distant school. Nor did it ever occur to my mind that my father treated me more as a dutiful guardian would than a loving parent.
‘I was told of my father’s decision to emigrate, like all of his decisions, without warning. I was sixteen at the time and hopeful of winning a place at Trinity College, Dublin. Our sudden removal to Canada, and thence to the United States, came as a complete and far from welcome surprise. Nor was I given any explanation of the move. There had been no disagreement with Lady Davenall – that I could discover. It was simply that my father had somehow acquired sufficient money to warrant our making a new and independent life elsewhere.
‘And a new life it certainly was. We moved to New York, where my father bought a vineyard on the north shore of Long Island and an elegant house near Port Jefferson. How he financed or conceived his transition into the wine trade I did not understand, but, at first, he prospered and was able to send me to Yale to complete my education. A year there converted me into an arrogantly well-educated young man happy to forget his obscure Irish origins.
‘I think I would have qualified as an attorney and gone on to practise the law with some success had the Civil War not broken out in 1861 and the Union Army claimed me for the duration. I emerged after four years altered for ever by the experience, as were so many of my fellow-recruits, grown harder in some ways, more vulnerable in others, wiser as I thought, yet more fallible as I later discovered.
‘My father urged me to join him in business, where he was greatly in need of help, the war having disrupted the wine trade to a ruinous extent. But I would have none of it. An army friend, Casey Garnham, had gone back to Oregon to run his father’s newspaper, the Portland Packet, and had invited me to join him as a partner. Imagining my father’s plight to be exaggerated, I accepted Casey’s offer with alacrity.
The challenge and excitement of the years that followed are hard now to recall. Neither Casey nor I realized that we were to preside over the Packet’s decline and ultimate demise. We truly believed it could survive and prosper. By the time events had shown that we were wrong, it was too late to turn to my father for help. He had gone bankrupt in 1866 and had died three years later, leaving my mother to live alone in a rented house in Worcester, Massachusetts. Nor was there much I could do to relieve her situation, my commercial inadequacies being by then as obvious as my father’s.
‘After the final collapse of the Packet in 1872, I remained in journalism, for it was the only work I knew, but the days of my editorial pretensions were gone. I had to learn the craft of a reporter over again on the staff of half a dozen newspapers from Portland to San Francisco. It was a hard and humbling life, but not an unworthy one. Indeed, I believe it is a life I would have led to this day had I not been so unfortunate as to meet and fall in love with Miss Madeleine Devereux.
‘You know her, of course, by other names. Marion Whitaker. Melanie Rossiter. You know her by all the dreamed and half-formed tempting visions she cared to plant in your receptive mind. And so, for that matter, do I. She was beautiful, yes. She was young and desirable, certainly. She had a quick and subtle mind gifted in all the arts of fascination, it is true. Yet you may set all of that on one scale and still it will not outweigh what rests on the other: the dark enfolding mystery of what, in her, could always conquer reason.
‘I met her in San Francisco in 1878. She was barely twenty-one and already a rising politician’s mistress. He was Howard Ingleby, a candidate for the state governorship. I was working for the Sacramento Star, whose editor was running an energetic anti-Ingleby campaign and had instructed me to seek out anything that might discredit the man. When I learned that he spent less time with his wife and family in Sacramento than he did with an expensive mistress in San Francisco, I felt certain that the story would be the breaking of Ingleby and the making of me.
‘I confronted Madeleine at her apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay about a week before the elections. I had learned that she was a pretty, quick-witted actress who might have been called a whore had it not been for the eminence and respectability of her clients. I had visions of persuading or paying her to confess for the benefit of the Star’s readers, thus blasting Ingleby’s prospects.
‘But to be with her, as you now know, is to forget every resolution, however firm. To be with her is to begin a dream which only she can complete. Thus no exposé of her life with Howard Ingleby was ever written, and he, though he lost the election, did not have me to blame for his defeat. Madeleine won my silence by the same method she has always used to achieve her aims: a brief taste of her pleasures and a distant promise of more.
‘For the next three years, Madeleine Devereux obsessed me. She had deluded me into believing she would one day be mine, but only the force of my infatuation with her sustained such a hope. It was cruelly obvious to me, in rational moments, that, without money and position, I could no more possess her than I could the stars in the sky.
‘I have spoken of being in love with Madeleine, and so I thought I was, but now I see that love was strangely absent from the many ways in which she drew me to her. The ruthless edge to her carnality inspired not adoration but a form of worship, in which jealousy and self-loathing were more often felt than mere desire. What made her as she was I never discovered, for she was as silent about her past as she was expansive about her future. She came to look upon me, I suspect, as somebody with whom she could relax because she owed me nothing: amusing company for an idle hour.
‘By the spring of 1881, I was living and working in San Francisco, the Sacramento Star and I having long since parted company. Madeleine had discarded Ingleby about a year before and now divided her attentions between a wealthy hotelier and a shipping magnate. On the few occasions when she consented to see me, she tormented me. When she refused to see me, it was worse. I knew that to go on pursuing her was futile and foolish. Nevertheless, I went on. To you, at least, I need not explain why.
‘One day, as I was leaving the newspaper offices, I was approached by a stranger who identified himself as Alfred Quinn and asked me to give him a few minutes of my time. Thinking he might have a story to sell, I went with him to a nearby bar and heard him out.
‘I did not recognize Quinn, but he recognized me. He had been in the service of the Davenall family for more than twenty years and had accompanied Sir Gervase to Carntrassna in 1859; it was from that visit that he remembered me. He had expended much time and effort in finding me, my mother having died the previous year and having maintained, besides, no connections with Carntrassna that I knew of. Quinn refused to say how he had traced me, and I could not imagine any reason why he should have wanted to do so, until, that is, he outlined the plan he had devised.
‘You know what Quinn’s plan was. You suspected something of the kind f
rom the first. He showed me photographs of James Davenall, missing heir to the baronetcy, and I was taken aback by the similarity: they might have been photographs of me. Quinn explained that the resemblance was not so very surprising, since I was James Davenall’s half-brother. My mother had succumbed to Sir Gervase’s charms during a visit to Carntrassna in 1842 and I was the issue of their brief liaison. My father had been persuaded to raise me as his own by Lady Davenall, who had known how matters stood from the first. She it was who had insisted I should have a good education and she it was who had paid for it. Sir Gervase had remained ignorant of my existence until his next visit to Carntrassna, in 1859. Horrified by my resemblance to his legitimate son and fearful that the relationship might become generally known, he had paid my father a great deal of money to emigrate, taking me with him.
‘So at last did many things become clear to me: my father’s lack of paternal feeling; the care he nevertheless lavished on me; the source of the money with which he had set himself up in America; my mother’s nervous guilt-ridden silences. Not that any of it seemed to matter much any more. The people involved were all dead, their secrets and their sins long forgotten. So why had Quinn come halfway round the world to seek me out? Not to square the account for his dead master, that was certain. His reason, it emerged, was rooted very much in the present and in our mutual profit.
‘The James Davenall I so closely resembled had been missing, presumed dead, since 1871. Were he to reappear, he could claim the wealth, property and title recently inherited by his younger brother. Quinn’s proposal was that, armed with his considerable knowledge of the family, I should pass myself off as James Davenall and thus make both of us rich men. Sir Gervase and my parents were dead. So, Quinn told me, was old Lady Davenall. Nobody but he and I knew the truth of the matter. We stood to gain a fortune. In his judgement, we could scarcely fail.
‘My first inclination was to reject the idea as madness. A striking physical resemblance was one thing, but even Quinn could not know all that I would need to know in order to carry it off. Besides, was not the so-called Tichborne Claimant even then rotting in an English gaol for attempting a similar fraud? Quinn conceded that he was, but insisted we might learn from his mistakes. I would spend a year constructing a new life far from San Francisco under an assumed name. Quinn, for his part, would find out why James Davenall might have wanted to commit suicide. We would prepare for every eventuality, guard against every challenge, research every aspect of the dead man’s life. Only when absolutely certain of our ground would we act. And then we would be sure to win.
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