Painting The Darkness - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘It was when I asked for time to think that Quinn must have sensed he had me. Indeed, I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that he knew all along the most compelling reason why I might accept. It was not merely that I had little to lose and much to gain. It was that I finally had something to tempt Madeleine away from her tame politicians and fawning businessmen. It was a prize to eclipse anything she might hope to attain in California. I could offer to make her the wife of an English baronet.

  ‘The longer I delayed giving Quinn my final answer, the likelier it became that he would have the answer he wanted. Whatever the cause – my emotionally starved childhood, the disorientating effects of the war, Madeleine’s morbid influence – the fact remained that I was drifting towards a lonely and penurious middle age. Quinn’s plan, however hazardous, offered the only chance I was ever likely to have of a new and better life.

  ‘Even so, I hesitated. It was not that my conscience deterred me from entering upon a criminal conspiracy. After all, I was Sir Gervase Davenall’s eldest son. In that sense, I would only be claiming what was rightfully mine. What held me back was the fear of failure, a dread not so much of arrest and imprisonment as of discovering that I was neither brave enough nor clever enough to sustain the pretence.

  ‘Accordingly, I let Madeleine make up my mind for me. Before meeting Quinn again, I went to her and told her everything. I invited her to join the conspiracy. I asked her if she would agree to become my wife in the event that I succeeded in obtaining the baronetcy and the wealth that went with it.

  ‘Had Madeleine turned me down, I would have rejected Quinn’s proposal. Then none of what has followed would ever have happened. I wish now, with all my heart, that she had done so. But she did not. She swept aside my every scruple and reservation. She granted me what I thought I wanted more than anything in the world: the promise that she would become my wife if I could become Sir James Davenall. In that moment, I realized for the first time that I would go through with it. In that moment, the conspiracy was truly born.

  ‘To my surprise, Quinn raised no objections to Madeleine’s involvement. I had expected him to be reluctant to take a third party into his confidence, especially when that third party was a woman, but instead the two of them established an immediate affinity which I found utterly baffling. Recently, I have come to realize that they recognized in each other the same streak of ruthless remorseless cunning that marked them both out from the rest of weaker-willed humanity. At the time, I merely resented the ease with which Quinn convinced Madeleine that he could provide all the information we would need.

  ‘Not that there was any doubt of his thoroughness. He had brought a dozen different photographs of James Davenall with him, innumerable samples of his handwriting on letters, cheques and bills, tie-pins and cufflinks he had owned, even a silver cigarette-case monogrammed with his initials. There were photographs also of every living member of the Davenall family. There were several pictures of Constance, as well as of her brother, sister and parents. There were notes of James’s measurements, the sizes he took in hats, shirts, trousers and shoes, significant dates in his life, his academic and sporting record at school and university, group photographs of classes, clubs, teams and societies to which he had belonged, together with the names of fellow-members. There was even a copy of the suicide note he had written on the seventeenth of June 1871. Nothing was left to chance.

  ‘Quinn was not prepared to say how he had amassed such a wealth of detailed information. It was apparent, however, that he must have been assembling it prior to his dismissal by Lady Davenall, so resentment of the way she had treated him could not have prompted his approach to me.

  ‘For the present, though, I had more to think about than what Quinn’s motives really were. I had to practise James Davenall’s handwriting and signature for hours on end. I had to be coached by Quinn in the way his former master walked and talked, his favourite expressions, his commonest mannerisms. I had to persuade a dentist to remove a healthy tooth from my mouth to match James’s loss of one. I had to grow a beard and take up cigarette-smoking. All these characteristics, added to my existing similarity to James in weight, height and appearance, made the match as near perfect as could be.

  ‘There was ample time in which to grow accustomed to my new identity during the year I spent working for an advertising agency in Philadelphia. To do so was to make a virtue of necessity, since it was essential to establish a plausible background from which I could in due course emerge as James Davenall, alias Norton. I saw little of Quinn and Madeleine during this time. For safety’s sake, we communicated mostly by letter. They spent six months in England, gathering material, notably regarding James Davenall’s health, which Quinn felt sure held the clue to his reasons for killing himself. By manoeuvring Madeleine into Dr Fiveash’s employment, they were able to discover the truth of the matter. It was then that we hit upon a spontaneous recovery from syphilis as a satisfactory explanation for my reappearance. I was accordingly dispatched to Paris to procure a clean bill of health.

  ‘By the summer of 1882, Quinn had decided we were ready to act. When his message reached me that my year of suspended animation was over, I felt less alarm than relief at the prospect of attempting at last what I had so long planned. There never was a time when I wanted to return to the life I had led in San Francisco. Indeed, I had rehearsed my performance as James Davenall so exhaustively that it no longer seemed a performance at all. In the guise of James Norton and through the months of his cautious painstaking life in Philadelphia, my dead unmet half-brother and I acquired a strange and potent unity. At first only fleetingly, but later for hours at a stretch, I could blank from my mind all awareness of my true past and my real identity. I could become the man I would shortly claim to be.

  ‘I booked my passage from New York in the name of James Norton of Philadelphia and arrived in Liverpool on the sixteenth of September 1882, feeling as ready as I possibly could for the challenge ahead. From now on, every step had to be taken carefully. Madeleine met me in Birkenhead and we travelled to Chester, where we stayed for three days in a hotel as Mr and Mrs Brown, reviving our American accents in order to mislead the staff whilst rehearsing in private the details of my claim.

  ‘I had not seen Madeleine in months, and those few days in Chester were, in fact, the longest time I had ever spent with her. I had looked forward to our reunion as would a hungry man to the end of a fast; but, strangely, when it came to it, I realized that our enforced separation had in some way broken her spell over me. She remained as beautiful and entrancing as ever, but her body and her mind retained for me too few secrets to reassert their former hold. Whether Madeleine sensed as much I cannot say, for, if she had, she would have taken every care to ensure she did not reveal it, but certain it was that something had changed – or been changed – between us.

  ‘From Chester, we went our separate ways. I travelled to London and booked into the Great Western Hotel, feeling on arrival much as I imagined James Davenall would had he truly been returning. I made no attempt to contact Quinn, even though Madeleine had told me how to do so, for we had agreed that I should henceforth proceed as far as possible alone. The money she had passed on to me from him was ample for my immediate purposes and remained so, later, even in the face of enormous legal costs. Quinn knew, of course, that he would be repaid several times over if we succeeded, but how he amassed the capital to finance my claim I was never told.

  ‘It had been agreed that I would first show my hand by visiting Cleave Court on the twenty-sixth of September, ten days after my arrival in England. That allowed me a week of solitude in London, passed mainly in my hotel room, ingraining the personality that I was about to assume into my very soul. I stood endlessly in front of the mirror, mouthing and practising what I would say and how I would say it. I sat at the desk filling page after page with my altered style of writing, repeating over and again the signature of James Davenall. I visited Wapping and constructed to my own satisfaction a detailed
version of what had happened there on the last night in the life of the man I was about to become. Under cover of darkness, I walked to Chester Square and looked at Bladeney House, matching windows to the layout of rooms Quinn had described and listing in my mind the paintings that had hung on the staircase, and still hung, in the order James Davenall would remember.

  ‘Then, just before midnight on the twenty-fifth of September, I burned all my notes and lists and records: everything, in short, that an impostor would have about him. The following morning, I left the hotel, caught a train to Bath and recommenced a dead man’s life. On the twenty-sixth of September 1882, James Davenall was reborn.

  ‘At first, all my painstaking preparations seemed to have been in vain. The Davenall family set their faces against me and I had always known that, without the acknowledgement of at least one person who had been close to James Davenall, my physical resemblance to him and my knowledge of his affairs would count, in the end, for nothing. There seemed nothing else for it then but to try my luck with Constance. Had just one of the Davenalls accepted me, I like to think I would have left her in peace. But it was not to be.

  ‘Quinn had surmised all along that Constance would be susceptible and he was proved correct. He had told me of her secret meeting with James at the aqueduct, information which I used to make an immediate impression on her. Knowing why James could not explain his reasons gave me a crucial advantage, but, from the moment I set eyes on her, I saw there was more to it than that. She wanted to believe I was James badly enough to overcome any reservations. And why? Because she had passed seven years of sedate and uneventful married life wondering what might have been if only James had not killed himself. Desire, you see, is at the root of all conviction. The Davenalls wanted James to be dead. Constance wanted him to be alive.

  ‘From the first, I must tell you, there was also something uncanny about Constance’s belief in me, something that stemmed as much from me as from her. A sympathy for James’s plight when he had to abandon the woman he loved for her own sake became something more when I saw how poignant Constance still found memories of those times. Initially, I kept the emotion within strict bounds, knowing that to feel affection for her would only be to hamper my efforts to deceive her. But the portents of a stronger bond persisted. How did I guess the means by which she had sought to persuade James not to run away? There is no sure answer save in the strange pervading confidence I felt in all my dealings with her; no answer, that is, but for the intuition that often grows with love.

  ‘Still and all, it was certain that Constance would not testify for me in court if you forbade her to do so and, without her testimony, my prospects were bleak. Her withdrawal to Salisbury gave me some hope, but it proved groundless. The only course open to me appeared to be to subpoena her, but to have done so would have been to break a promise and something else, along with it, of even greater value. There had to be another way, and I was determined to find it.

  ‘A few days before the hearing, I met Quinn at his hideaway in Deptford and put to him my plan: that if we could discredit you in Constance’s eyes she might be persuaded to speak up for me. I had expected Quinn to favour subpoenaing her, but it transpired that he was worried by your attempts to trace him and was therefore keen to move against you. Your eagerness to prove a connection between him and Marion Whitaker was what prompted him to suggest that Madeleine would be ideally placed to spring the trap.

  ‘I deliberately refrained from enquiring into the methods Madeleine chose, but, when I read your account of how Melanie Rossiter had deceived you, it became clear just how effective those methods were.

  ‘Quinn knew Sir Gervase was slowly dying of syphilis long before his family. He had it, as he had much else that was later of use to him, from his master’s own mouth. To relieve the symptoms, Sir Gervase became a regular user of laudanum. Later, when the dosage had become heavy as well as regular and recourse to it an addiction no longer strictly related to his ills, Quinn became his accomplice, buying and frequently administering the drug. Thus he became familiar with its effects not only on the senses but also on the imagination. And Madeleine became his willing pupil.

  ‘It was opium, not madness, that deceived you that night, Trenchard. Madeleine slipped some either into the food you ate or the whisky you drank. She came to you while you were asleep and under the drug’s influence. She planted ideas in your mind, which, in the receptive state of your imagination, expanded into the visions which later seemed to confirm your insanity. She lured you to her bed so that, when Constance came in answer to your telegram, she would find you there.

  ‘I wish I could let you off as lightly as that, for all that you tried to kill me, but I fear you cannot be rid of the experience so easily. Opium cannot create desires, it can only expand them. In other words, what the drug made you believe you were doing was what you secretly wanted to do. She is still in your mind, is she not? She is still, in some world of wishes you can neither confess nor fulfil, all and more than she was that night.

  ‘At the time, of course, all I wanted to know was that the plan had succeeded. Horrified by your apparent betrayal of her, Constance came to me and volunteered to testify on my behalf. The gamble had paid off. Only when I saw you pointing that gun at me in the hour of my triumph did I realize that it had paid off too well.

  ‘But I survived. Call it luck if you will, but reflect as you do how fickle an ally luck can be. It preserved me that day, yes, but only to make of me its perpetual plaything. And you, Trenchard? Did you think I was your enemy? I have never been that. I bore you no ill will for what you did. I would have done the same. Perhaps, indeed, I may be about to emulate you. It was not merely to spare Constance’s feelings that I had you sent here rather than to prison or some squalid institution for the criminally insane. It was also to spare my own.

  ‘As I slowly recovered my health under Constance’s devoted care, I came to see the ultimate contradiction in the method I had chosen by which to win her to my cause. I had supplanted you in her affections so completely that she now wanted what I had implied could be hers without reservation: a future as the wife of James Davenall, her first and only true love. To pile complication on contradiction, I realized that she, too, had supplanted another. Madeleine’s hold over me had withered in the face of what I had come to feel for Constance. For she had given me something Madeleine never could: happiness.

  ‘To make matters worse, I had time aplenty in which to indulge my new-found state. Madeleine expected me to sustain Constance’s belief that I would marry her until my claim had finally been upheld. Only then would she require me to abandon Constance and make her my wife instead. This, I knew, would be an unalterable condition. She might be piqued that I no longer cared for her, but no more than that. What she would not accept was my refusal to give her the social status she craved. That would be the sticking-point. For months to come, I could delay the choice; but, sooner or later, it would have to be made.

  ‘Not that there was ever any real doubt as to what my choice would be. Even had I not grown to love Constance, I would still have felt incapable of abandoning her. To inspire love in another is to breed it in oneself; to betray it becomes unthinkable. Therefore my vows to Constance were always bound to take precedence over my promises to Madeleine.

  ‘As soon after the trial as it could decently be arranged, I took Constance and Emily on a European tour. I dare say Richard told you of it. To Constance it seemed an agreeable way of passing the months until we could marry. To me it was a way of delaying still further the confrontation with Madeleine. Not that it achieved its purpose, for she followed us wherever we went, never showing herself openly but ensuring I knew she was close at hand, waiting impatiently for me to honour our bargain. At last, in Florence, we met and there I told her that I could not marry her.

  ‘I knew she would be angry. I could hardly blame her, after all, when I who had gained the baronetcy denied her the share of it she had been promised. She tried every argument she kne
w to sway me. She even offered me the affection of which I knew her to be incapable. But I, as I believed, held the trump card. Now that the world recognized me as Sir James Davenall, I was beyond her reach. I no longer needed her help. Now that I was a wealthy man, she was welcome to as much money as she wanted, but her claim against me ended there.

  ‘Or so I thought. When Madeleine threatened me with dread but unnamed consequences if I married Constance, I thought she was bluffing. I truly believed she could no longer touch me. But I was wrong. Madeleine Devereux’s threats are never empty. The consequences she spoke of were real enough and more dreadful than I could ever have imagined.

  ‘Meanwhile, however, there was peril from a different quarter. The steps we had taken to cover my tracks in the United States ensured that nobody could connect James Norton of Philadelphia with Stephen Lennox of San Francisco unless I let slip that I knew something of Lennox’s life. To guard against this, I took advantage of Hugo’s decision to involve Prince Napoleon by reminding him of a scandalous episode in his past. Quinn had learned from Sir Gervase in a moment of opium-induced candour that he had fathered a child by his wife’s governess. What better false clue to plant in my opponents’ minds, therefore, than information which might imply I was that child? Only Richard seemed to see through it. What first made him suspect that he had been wrong to change his mind about me I do not know, but certain it is that by February of this year he had begun to harbour serious doubts about my identity and to connect them with events at Carntrassna. He returned to the subject over and again, like a dog to his bone, seemingly with even greater energy after the trial than before.