‘I can’t say I do,’ she replied. ‘But I do know a man called Esguard, strangely enough. It’s an unusual name, so maybe he’s a descendant of your Esguard. He’s also interested in photography. In fact, he’s a member of the society.’
You can imagine my reaction. I actually hugged the poor woman, I was so delighted. She said Milo Esguard was an elderly amateur photographer who’d been a regular user of the library until the last few years, when he’d got less and less mobile and had moved into a nursing home. A secretive and rather grumpy old chap, according to her, but with a charming side to him when he could be bothered to show it. She gave me the address of the nursing home: Saffron House in Bradford-on-Avon.
I wanted to go there straight away, but there wasn’t enough time if I was to get back to London before Conrad came home, so I had to make another trip the next day. I took my car this time and got to the nursing home by late morning. It was a big old place up on a hill on the northern side of Bradford-on-Avon. The weather was exceptionally warm for April. Some of the residents were sitting out in the grounds having their elevenses, Milo Esguard among them. Except he wasn’t actually among them. He’d rolled his wheelchair off to a distant corner of the lawn, where he was sitting reading the Daily Telegraph in a patch of sun, sheltered from the breeze by an overgrown rhododendron. The nurse positively encouraged me to go and speak to him. ‘If you can cheer him up,’ she said, ‘we’ll all be grateful.’
He was a big, heavy, white-bearded old fellow, done up in several woollies, mittens and a hat that looked as if it had been chewed by a dog. He was gruff and not at all welcoming. ‘What do you want?’ was his idea of a courteous introduction. He seemed to think I was some kind of social worker and took a lot of talking out of the idea, which was made more difficult by his come-and-go deafness. But his hearing and his temper both improved dramatically when I mentioned Marian. Then he became a different man, inviting me to pull up a chair and offering to arrange a cup of coffee. He had bright blue eyes and a twinkling grin, but whether the old sweetie or the old curmudgeon was the real him I couldn’t tell.
He was amazed I’d heard of Marian and wanted to know how. My explanation didn’t satisfy him at first. I think he may have suspected I was holding something back, which was understandable, because my story didn’t make a lot of sense. But eventually he seemed to come round. That’s when he began to open up. Still, he wasn’t sure about me. That was clear. He didn’t trust me and he didn’t distrust me. He was trying to make up his mind. I think what helped was how relieved, how overjoyed I was when he confirmed that, yes, Marian had really existed and, yes, she’d been a pioneer photographer. Or might have been. He implied her photographic achievements were basically just a family legend. His own researches had turned up nothing to verify them. What baffled and excited him all at the same time was that I knew about Marian quite independently. But his suspicious nature got in the way. I had to go back there twice the following week to win his confidence sufficiently for him to tell me as much as he ever did.
This is what it amounted to. Milo was a bachelor in his early eighties. Until recently, he’d lived in the same house in Bath as four previous generations of Esguards. His nephew Niall was now in occupation. He’d converted the place into flats after inheriting a half-share from his mother, buying out Milo and packing the old fellow off to the nursing home. A lot of Milo’s conversation was devoted to character assassination of Niall. Anyway, the first Esguard to own the house was Milo’s great-great-grandfather, Barrington Esguard, younger brother of Joslyn, who’d lived in some splendour at a country mansion in Dorset called Gaunt’s Chase with his wife … Marian.
Gaunt’s Chase dated from the family’s golden era as bankers, speculators and East India Company men back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By Joslyn’s time their fortunes were in decline. He was the last Esguard to live there. The house burned down in 1838. Joslyn died in the fire. As for Marian … nobody knew for sure. It was believed she’d deserted her husband by then. Why, and where she’d gone, was a mystery. But what about her photographic activities? Was the fire the reason no trace of them remained? Milo’s answers to those questions were bound up with what he described, rather melodramatically I thought, as ‘the tangled enigma’ of his family’s past. In truth, I realized later, that’s exactly what it was.
The source of most of Milo’s information was his grandfather, Hilton Esguard, who’d lived into his nineties. Hilton’s source was his own grandfather, Barrington, who’d died when Hilton was in his teens, back in the 1860s. Barrington had actually known Marian, of course. He was a direct witness to events. According to him, Joslyn had frittered away the family fortune through gambling and unwise investments. He’d made the further mistake of marrying not for money but for love, or at any rate lust. He’d met Marian Freeman while visiting friends in Sussex, been instantly captivated by her, and had manoeuvred her into a marriage both of them came to regret. There were no children, something Joslyn regarded as virtual treachery on Marian’s part. But childlessness at least left Marian ample time to pursue her scientific interests, themselves an affront to Joslyn’s ideas of how a wife should behave.
This, then, was one strand of the legend. Marian Esguard, amateur chemist and original thinker, hit on a method of preserving camera obscura images, a process she called heliogenesis, but which we would call … photography. And she did it some fifteen to twenty years earlier than Fox Talbot, working in secret at Gaunt’s Chase. Secrecy was necessary because Joslyn was unlikely to approve of such unfeminine activities. Fortunately he was away more often than not, leading a rake’s life in London. At some point, however, he found out and put a stop to it. Marian was forbidden to continue. Her response was to leave, though how she accomplished that against Joslyn’s wishes wasn’t clear. An additional complication, and a possible explanation, was that she had a secret admirer who’d begun to help her in her work and who aided her escape. Certainly it was an effective escape. Marian vanished and was never heard of again. This would have been around 1820, when she was in her early thirties.
Another strand of the legend concerned the fire at Gaunt’s Chase. According to Barrington, Joslyn’s hopes of recouping his financial losses suddenly soared when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Why wasn’t specified, but Barrington alleged that the fire was no accident and that his brother was in fact murdered. The timing of the event – five days before Victoria’s coronation in June 1838 – was supposed to be significant. A vague and hoary old conspiracy theory didn’t interest me, of course. But the fire must have destroyed any physical evidence of her work Marian had left there. That was the real tragedy of it. It was a dead end in more ways than one. Barrington hadn’t realized the importance of what his sister-in-law had been doing until Fox Talbot published his technique for photogenic drawing in 1839, by which time it was too late to scour Gaunt’s Chase for evidence that Marian had got there first.
Besides, Barrington Esguard was a frightened man, even in old age. That was the verdict of Milo’s grandfather. Barrington was sure Joslyn had been murdered. He didn’t want to share his brother’s fate and, consequently, he didn’t want to do anything to attract attention to the family. Marian’s achievements, whatever they amounted to, were best forgotten.
But she could have publicized them herself, couldn’t she? The question of where she’d gone when she left Gaunt’s Chase, and what she’d done in the years that followed, was the most baffling mystery of all. Why did she abandon her work on heliogenesis? What could have stopped her? Milo didn’t know. I was sure of it. He wasn’t holding out on me about that.
I had the distinct impression he was holding out on me about something, though. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere by badgering him. He’d got to like me, and I’d grown quite fond of him myself. But he was still wary, still faintly suspicious. I couldn’t work out why. What did it matter, after all, if I knew as much as he did? Where was the harm in it? Why wouldn’t he tell me his old address
in Bath, come to that? Was he afraid I might go round there and antagonize his nephew?
A week passed after my third visit, then he phoned me one day at home. I found his creaky old voice waiting for me on the answering machine when I got back from … wherever I’d been. ‘There’s something I can do for you, my dear, and something you can do for me,’ he said. ‘About Marian. I’ve been thinking it over, and I reckon it’s time, high time. Come soon, won’t you? There’s a lot to do and I need your help to do it.’
I drove down to Bradford-on-Avon next morning. I could see at once there was a change in him. The decision he’d taken, whatever it was, had freed something in him. He talked faster and moved himself around in his wheelchair with greater energy than I’d seen him display before. He insisted we go out into the grounds to talk, though it was hardly the weather for it. His cloak-and-dagger streak was showing again. Once out of earshot of his fellow residents, though, I soon found out why.
‘I’ve been trying to see my way round a problem that’s been itching at me ever since I came here from Bentinck Place,’ Milo announced, so revealing at last where in Bath the family had lived. ‘Now I’ve realized you’re the solution, my dear. I want you to retrieve something I left at the house when I moved out. I wasn’t too well at the time and I couldn’t risk Niall finding it, so I decided to leave it where it lay until I could go back later. But I’m not sure later is ever going to come. I need somebody fitter than me, somebody I can trust, to fetch it. Niall mustn’t know, but that’s not a problem because I still have a key to the front door and a pretty good idea of his comings and goings.’
It was then that I realized fetching whatever it was meant fetching it clandestinely, which Niall Esguard could well regard as burglary if he caught me in the act. Milo must have noticed the worried look on my face.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The item belongs to me. I have every right to remove it. You’d simply be acting as my agent.’
‘Why the subterfuge, then?’
‘Because Niall has no proper regard for Marian’s reputation.’
‘So this … article … concerns Marian, does it?’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t ask you to take such …’ He smiled mischievously. ‘I wouldn’t put you to the bother otherwise.’
Then I asked the only question that really mattered: ‘What is it, Milo?’
‘It’s what you’re looking for, my dear. Evidence – if not proof itself – of Marian Esguard’s genius.’
The old devil knew he had me hooked then. I didn’t even care if he was exaggerating, which I reckoned he probably was. I had to see this … evidence … for myself. To do that I had to stake out the house in Bentinck Place, make sure Niall Esguard was off the premises, then let myself in with Milo’s key and go straight to the cupboard tucked under the stairs leading to the first floor. At the end of the cupboard, I’d find that the space beneath the lowest three stairs had been panelled in. This was what Milo had found five years previously while clearing out some junk dating from his mother’s days. The discovery had revived his suspicion that Barrington Esguard, if he had possessed evidence of Marian’s work, would have been sufficiently worried in the wake of his brother’s death either to destroy it … or to hide it. Behind the panel, where he’d subsequently replaced it, Milo had found a small wooden box with a sliding lid, the sort of thing that might have been designed to hold chess pieces or draughtsmen. But it had been used to store something else altogether.
‘What was in the box, Milo?’ I pleaded.
‘See for yourself,’ he replied. ‘Then bring it back safely to me. It’s time it saw the light of day.’
We agreed I’d make the attempt the following afternoon. Neither of us wanted to delay, and with Conrad in Tokyo, cutting one of his sharper deals, I could come and go as I pleased. Aside from fancying himself as a rentier, Niall Esguard was a semi-professional gambler; it’d be a rare afternoon that didn’t find him at one racecourse or another. He lived alone, and the tenants of the first-, second- and third-floor flats would probably be at work. Milo had thought it all out, you see. A clear run was what he predicted. I’m not sure I cared how difficult it was likely to be. My reluctance was mostly show. The temptation was simply too great to resist.
‘I had to be sure I could trust you with this,’ he said when he saw me off. ‘And now I know I can. Godspeed, my dear.’
Bentinck Place is one of Bath’s more dilapidated Georgian terraces, though its location – halfway up Sion Hill, with most of the city spread out below it – probably made it an exclusive development back in 1807, when Barrington Esguard bought number six as his seasonal residence. I couldn’t stop myself imagining Bath as it must have been then: calm, refined, car-free and classically elegant. In fact, keeping watch on the Esguard house for an hour or so to make sure the absence of Niall’s Porsche meant what I hoped, there were several stretches of time, probably no more than minutes in reality, when I felt I was almost back in 1807. If I screwed my eyes nearly shut, I could believe Barrington and his brother, maybe his sister-in-law, too, were about to step out, dressed in the fashions of the day, to savour the clear spring sunshine.
But nobody stepped out, real or imaginary. Eventually I realized I’d waited quite long enough. So, trying to look bold and casual all at once, I got out of my car, walked along to number six, opened the door with Milo’s key and went inside.
It happened as I closed the door gently behind me, shutting out the noise of the world, and looked along the hall towards the entrance to Niall’s flat and the stairs leading up to the other floors. The place was dowdily decorated, with chips out of the paintwork and stains on the wallpaper. The carpet showed a grubby track of footprints to and from the stairs. There was no furniture at all. It was a predictably featureless no man’s land, shared between Niall and his tenants. But, as I glanced round, a sudden visual sensation hit me of the same hallway, with cream walls, polished floorboards, a blue and gold runner to the foot of the stairs, a console table, a mirror, a chandelier, a grandfather clock, an umbrella stand holding several walking sticks and parasols, numerous gilt-framed oil paintings and a shadow thrown across the ceiling by the fanlight behind me of a bonneted figure standing outside and raising a hand as if to knock—
It came and went in a flash. I don’t know what you’d call it. A hallucination, maybe. It shook me, anyway. I had to lean against the door for a minute or so to let my heart stop thumping and my hands stop shaking before I could carry on. Then I tried to put it out of my mind and concentrate on what I was there to do. I hurried along the hall to the door of the cupboard under the stairs, pulled it open, switched on the light and looked in.
The cupboard was full of the usual sort of stuff: old coats, pots of paint, brooms, brushes, buckets and bundles of yellowing newspapers, plus, of all things, a surfboard. I cleared a path through to the back as best I could and soon found the panel blocking off the space beneath the lowest few stairs. It was cobwebbed at the corners, which was a relief, because it suggested nobody had examined it since Milo’s departure. Milo hadn’t said so specifically, but I had the feeling Niall wanted what was hidden there. If so, he presumably had a pretty good idea what it was. How hard he’d tried to wheedle the secret out of his uncle I couldn’t tell, but he certainly wasn’t likely to relish the thought of a total stranger taking it from under his nose. Except that I no longer felt like a stranger. Something close to déjà vu was clinging to me in that house. I’d never been there before, but everything about it seemed familiar yet different. It was as if I’d gone home to find somebody else living there. It touched a part of my memory that had been dormant so long I hadn’t even known it existed, like having a dim childhood recollection stirred years later by a coincidental experience. And it was getting stronger – more intoxicating yet also more stifling – all the time.
I prised out the retaining nails with the pliers Milo had warned me to take along, pulled the panel aside and saw at once the small wooden box he’d descri
bed. I lifted it out with a sort of reverential slowness and slid the lid open just far enough to be sure there was something inside. It looked like nothing more than paper in the forty-watt half-light. I put the box down by the door and started the trickiest part of my task: replacing everything so that it looked undisturbed. I wanted to grab the box and run, but I knew I had to do a thorough job if Niall’s suspicions weren’t to be aroused.
As soon as I’d finished, I switched the light off, picked up the box, closed the door and started back down the hall. Then it happened again, only more intensely, more immediately. What I’d seen before was there again, in front of me, in colour and detail. And now in sound as well. The clock ticked. A floorboard creaked. A horse clip-clopped past outside. The shadow moved again. The person standing on the other side of the front door raised their hand to the knocker. I heard the creak of the knocker being pulled up. I closed my eyes and stretched every fibre of my imagination to resist the sound I knew was about to follow.
And it didn’t. There was a brief silence. Then I opened my eyes and everything was normal. But I didn’t feel normal. I’d never felt less normal. I ran to the door, pulled it open and rushed outside. It was OK there. I was back in the real world. I slammed the door behind me and made for my car, trembling now from the sheer frightening novelty of the experience. I drove round the corner, then stopped to try to calm my nerves, which were pretty much shot. What had it been? Some sort of delusion? It was crazy. If you’d asked me to say what it had seemed like, I’d have said … like it had once been. Bentinck Place in the past. Yesterday rather than today. Or a lot of days before yesterday. And so real. So abundantly and authentically actual. As if, for those two split seconds, I’d truly been there. As if, but for my own fear wrenching me back, I could have heard the knocker fall and seen some capped and aproned maid approach the door and open it to the visitor whose shadow I’d glimpsed.
Caught In the Light Page 8