Caught in the Light (14 page)

"That's good to hear, at any rate, in this dog-eat-dog society. If I disappeared, I frankly doubt anyone would bother to look for me. Other than my creditors, of course." He ventured a grin, but swiftly dropped it. "But then I'm not as well worth looking for as your friend sounds to be. More than a friend in your case, I take it. Excuse me, I don't mean to pry. It's just.. . your expression .. ."

"What about it?"

"Haunted is how I'd describe it. By love lost, or mislaid. In the shadows behind our eyes hides the past we run from, or else pursue. Don't you find that, Mr. .. . ?"

"Jarrett."

"Don't you? Honestly? Who are you really looking for? The damsel disparue or yourself?"

"I'm looking for information, Mr. Quisden-Neve. You either have some or you don't."

"Yes." He gave a pained little smile. "And, alas, I don't. Milo never mentioned an Eris Moberly to me."

"What about Marian Esguard?"

Quisden-Neve's eyes sparkled with sudden alertness. "Marian Esguard. My, my, Mr. Jarrett, there's clearly more to this than I thought. Exactly where does the mysterious Marian come into the problem of your missing friend?"

"I'm not sure. Except that she was the reason Eris went to see Milo in the first place."

"Really? In that case it's still more unaccountable .. ." He tailed off into silence and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then piloted his way through the book-stacks and past me to the door, where he slipped the bolt and turned the OPEN sign round to CLOSED. "I usually celebrate the end of a book selling day or non-selling, come to that with a glass of claret. Care to join me, Mr. Jarrett? Then you can tell me all about Eris Moberly."

I didn't tell him anything like all, of course, just enough to whet his appetite. We adjourned to his marginally less cluttered first-floor office, where he made a gulping assault on a ludicrously fine Pomerol while I related a carefully edited version of events. I claimed that Eris had shared her interest in Marian Esguard's putative photographic achievements with me, without explaining how she'd first come to hear of them. I'd thought little of her visits to Milo until her disappearance had left me with few other clues to follow. And, just to test the water, I added that Eris had continued to come down to Bath, ostensibly to see Milo, after his death, which I'd only just found out about.

"Fascinating," pronounced Quisden-Neve when I'd finished. "I really do wish Milo had introduced me to Mrs. Moberly. Alas, he was a man who took pleasure in secrecy for its own sake. It was one of the reasons why he did so little to uncover the truth about Marian Esguard. He believed, on the basis of family rumour, and nothing more so far as I could ever discover, that she developed some sort of viable photographic technique twenty years or so before Daguerre and Fox Talbot. In case you're wondering, however, I should make it clear that wasn't why I first cultivated his acquaintance."

"Why did you, then?"

"Because Marian was married to Joslyn Esguard, and Milo was a repository of information about the husband as well as the wife. The photography question didn't interest me, not at first anyway, for the simple reason that I knew nothing about it. No, no, Joslyn Esguard was the lure for me." He paused theatrically.

"Are you going to tell me why?"

"In view of the romantic nature of your quest, I suppose I must. For some years I've been pursuing a more scholarly quest of my own, with a view to publication and who knows? - bestsellerdom."

"A quest for what?"

"The answer to the mystery contained in the chart on the wall behind you."

I turned and looked at the wall behind Quisden-Neve's office desk. Pinned up between a filing cabinet and a standard lamp was a large genealogical chart of the royal family from George I onwards, with as many fountain-penned additions and extensions as there were original printed entries, plus a spatter of asterisks, daggers and double daggers against various names, some of which were also boxed or underlined in red.

"Shall I explain, Mr. Jarrett?"

"Why don't you?"

"Haemophilia is what it's all about. A hereditary disease which women can carry but only men can suffer from. As you may know, Queen Victoria was a carrier, as were two of her daughters, who, thanks to dynastic marriages, transmitted the disease to the Russian and Spanish royal families. One of Victoria's sons was also a haemophiliac. A peculiarity of the disease, by the way, is that none of the sons of a haemophiliac man will inherit it, but all of his daughters will carry it. None of this was known in the last century, of course. The genetic basis of the disease only became clear more recently. Victoria and Albert married off their children in blissful ignorance of the hereditary, not to say historical, consequences."

"I don't quite '

"Where did Victoria inherit the gene for haemophilia from, Mr.

Jarrett? That's the question. Neither of her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, had any family history of the disease. Victoria was their only child, but the Duchess had been married before and had borne her first husband a non-haemophiliac son and a daughter whose subsequent lineage proves she wasn't a carrier. The chances of a mutant haemophiliac gene are about one in twenty-five thousand, on a par with being struck by lightning. Compare that with the absolute certainty that the daughter of a haemophiliac man will be a carrier."

"But you just said '

"The Duke of Kent wasn't a haemophiliac. Quite so. That raises the interesting possibility that he wasn't Victoria's father. Sexual mores at the time of Victoria's birth, especially among the aristocracy, were far from what we might term the Victorian ideal. Look at the chart. You'll observe that George the Fourth's only legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, died in November 1817, without issue. The cause of death was blood loss following the delivery of a stillborn son who, had he lived, would one day have been King of England. George was Prince Regent at that time, during his father's mad final years. None of his eleven surviving siblings had any legitimate offspring, though the illegitimate kind were two a penny. The King was past caring, but all that child-bearing must have seemed a cruel waste of effort to the Queen in view of the heirless outcome. By the close of 1817 all her daughters and most of her daughters-in-law were past the menopause, with no living issue to show for it. Hopes for dynastic continuity thus rested on her three unmarried sons: the Dukes of Clarence, Kent and Cambridge. Dutifully disentangling themselves in advanced middle age from their respective irregular unions, they all contracted hasty marriages to promisingly fecund Continental heiresses and did their overdue best to head off the prospect of the crown passing from one elderly brother to another. Kent won the race, fathering Victoria by the widowed Duchess of Leiningen, or at any rate seeming to. He was over fifty at the time and in poor shape. Significantly, even illegitimate offspring had previously been beyond him. Maybe his wife decided to improve his chances, so to speak. And maybe she had the misfortune to improve those chances with ..."

"A haemophiliac?"

"Precisely. Which brings us to Joslyn Esguard."

"You're saying Marian Esguard's husband was a haemophiliac?"

"If only it were that simple. That's what I hoped to learn when I first approached Milo, but he was able more or less to rule it out. His grandfather never even hinted at such a thing, and there's been no sign of the disease in the family in intervening generations."

"What made you think of Joslyn Esguard in the first place?"

"Circumstantial evidence. When the idea occurred to me of basing a book on this apparently whimsical notion, which I'm certainly not the first to have entertained, I searched various archives for potential haemophiliac candidates and turned up a rather puzzling letter written by one Joslyn Esguard early in 1838 to Sir John Conroy, private secretary to the Duchess of Kent. Victoria was on the throne by then, her father was long dead and Conroy was rumoured to be rather more than a secretary to her mother. He'd previously been the Duke's aide-de-camp. Somewhat reluctantly, I'd already ruled him out as a candidate in his own right, but there wasn't much he wouldn't have known about the affairs of his royal mistress pun very much intended hence my interest in his correspondence."

"What did the letter say?"

"Oh, see for yourself." Quisden-Neve walked across to the filing cabinet, pulled open the bottom drawer, riffled through a bulging file and lifted out a flagged document. "This is a photocopy of the original." He passed it over for me to read. "Joslyn Esguard's handwriting was scarcely copperplate, but I think you'll get the gist of it." The writing was indeed a scrawl, but I could follow it easily enough. There wasn't, after all, much to follow.

Gaunt's Chase,

Dorset

12th February '38

Sir John,

I am obliged to return to the issue raised in my earlier letter. I am armed with certain facts which I am prepared to make publicly known if we cannot reach an accommodation. I recommend your early attention to my requirements.

I remain etc." etc.,

Joslyn Esguard

"What were the facts, eh, Mr. Jarrett? Queen Victoria was born on the twenty-fourth of May, 1819. That puts her conception at late August or early September, 1818. We know from the records that the Duke and Duchess were in residence at Kensington Palace during that period. We also know that the Duke visited his mother, who was dying, virtually daily, at Kew, leaving the Duchess to occupy her time ... as she saw fit."

"But not with Joslyn Esguard."

"Not if my theory is correct, no. Yet clearly he knew something. The threat implicit in the letter is a scarcely veiled one. We shall never know for certain, alas."

"Because of the fire at Gaunt's Chase in which Joslyn Esguard lost his life, five days before Victoria's coronation."

"Yes. And four months after he wrote that letter. All of which is consistent with Barrington Esguard's claim that his brother was murdered. But if the fire was some sort of cover-up it was undeniably effective. The letter didn't take me anywhere along the haemophilia road. Instead, I found myself diverted by Milo down the unrelated byway of Marian Esguard's possible role as a photographic pioneer. It promised to make my book still more commercially viable, I can't deny, which is why I pursued it as far as I could. Royal scandal and Regency feminism sounded like a winning combination to me. But I simply hit another brick wall. Milo had no evidence to back up the family legend, and I was unable to unearth any beyond a single tantalizing document."

"What was it?"

"Another letter, written by Marian Esguard to her father, Dr. Thomas Freeman, in the spring of 1817. I found it in the archives of the Chichester Infirmary, where Dr. Freeman worked, addressed to him there rather than at the Freeman residence, which is odd in itself." By now Quisden-Neve was once more burrowing through his files. "Here we are. Marian had a more elegant hand than her husband, no question."

Even in the form of a photocopy, a letter written by Marian Esguard carried with it a magical charge. I sat down and slowly read it through and, as I did so, I realized it had a significance that Quisden-Neve couldn't possibly appreciate.

Gaunt's Chase, Sunday 20th April 1817

My dear Papa,

I shall burst with excitement if I do not tell you how much I have accomplished in the realm of scientific inquiry I have dubbed heliogenesis. I could not have made such progress without your assistance as my secret pharmaceutical supplier. The results, enhanced by the fine spring weather we have enjoyed here of late, have been quite, quite extraordinary, and I shall send you a sample, if you do not think it too indiscreet of me, as soon as I have one that will satisfy your exacting aesthetic standards. Hyposulphite of ammonia is the key. But the world beyond the door it unlocks is one I had never thought to see. The principle was purely a mental construction. The practice is real and true and visible. You will be astonished, as I already am. I hope you will also be a little proud. I shall write again soon. Ever your loving daughter, Marian

"Did Milo Esguard ever see this letter?" I asked when I'd finished.

"Sadly, no. He died before I came across it."

"So he couldn't have told Eris about it?"

"Absolutely not." Quisden-Neve retrieved the letter from me and slipped it back into the file. "I'm always on the qui vive for rival researchers, Mr. Jarrett. In this case, I'm happy to say nobody had got there before me. Only you and I are at all likely to be aware of what Marian Esguard wrote to her father in April 1817."

By the time I left Bibliomaufry, Quisden-Neve having insisted I finish the bottle of Pomerol with him, it was too late to visit Saffron House, as I'd originally intended, so I booked into a hotel in the middle of Bath and phoned Daphne from there. I was excited by the contents of Marian's letter. To me it seemed inconceivable that Eris could have imagined an encounter with Dr. Freeman that was clearly as close to the truth as it could be without having, in some sense at least, shared a genuine experience of Marian's. For some reason I wouldn't have cared to analyse, I wanted to prove Daphne wrong. I wanted to prove Eris wasn't deluded. I wanted Marian as well as her.

But Daphne was reluctant to accept my argument. And far more interested in the name of my informant than in the issue of what the letter did or didn't prove. "You were told all this by Montagu Quisden-Neve?"

"Yes. Do you know him?"

"Not exactly. But Eris does."

"No, no. You've got that wrong. Quisden-Neve's never met her."

"Describe him to me."

Before I'd got much further than the pink bow tie, she cut me short.

"She does know him."

"How can you be sure?"

I heard Daphne give a long, thoughtful sigh. "God, this is difficult. I wish ..."

"What's difficult?"

"You'll have to listen to the second tape, Ian. As you wanted to. As I didn't want you to."

"I won't try to talk you out of it, but why the change of heart?"

"You'll understand that as soon as you hear it. Until you do, I strongly advise you not to speak to Mr. Quisden-Neve again."