Painting The Darkness (72 page)

III

On the tussocky summit of the last dune before a plain of Belgian sand reached towards the North Sea, Sir James Davenall sat smoking a cigarette and gazing into the mist-shrouded distance. Apart from a periodic motion of his arm as he raised the cigarette to his lips, he was perfectly still; immune, it seemed, to the bitter chill, content to wait calmly till the dawn brought him what he knew it must.

Striding back and forth across the sand at the foot of the dune was a second man: tall, black-caped and top-hatted, with a habit of tossing his head and sniffing loudly as he gazed impatiently around. A black goatee beard and harshly aquiline nose would have suggested a brutally autocratic nature even without the long scar running down one side of his face, which had snagged the right eyebrow in permanent semi-closure and showed now, in the ice-cold air, as a livid red against his white and wasted cheek.

Looking up at Sir James, the man drew the neck of a flask from an inner pocket and raised his unscarred left eyebrow. Several seconds passed, then Sir James shook his head. The man shrugged his shoulders and let the flask fall back into his pocket. Then he tossed his head, sniffed and said, in a heavily Germanic accent: ‘A drink might steady your hand, Sir James.’

In answer, Sir James held his right arm out straight. The cigarette was rigid between his fingers, a length of ash undisturbed on its tip, the thin plume of its smoke unwavering in the windless air.

‘The tide is coming in,’ the other man continued. ‘Do you think your brother will be very late?’

The hint of anxiety in his voice did not escape Sir James, who smiled faintly, as if to signal that he knew what had prompted it.

‘Perhaps—’

Some upward dart of Sir James’s gaze silenced him. He turned and saw, emerging from a rough track between the
dunes
on to the beach about fifty yards away, two men, one of whom was carrying something beneath his arm: a slender wooden case.

‘Ah,’ the man said, in unmistakable relief. ‘So he has come after all.’

‘Yes,’ Sir James responded, breaking his long silence. ‘He has come. So please remember what we agreed, Herr Major. I want no mistakes.’

‘There will be no mistakes, Sir James, believe me. Everything will go according to plan.’ At that, he smiled, though perhaps it was as well for Sir James’s peace of mind that he could not see him do so, nor perceive therefore how much worse than a scowl a smile is on such a face.

IV

As the clock in his sitting-room at Ticehurst Asylum struck the half-hour, Trenchard rose from the chair where he had passed a sleepless night and moved towards the window. It was the same dull metallic note that had recorded all the many thousand other intervals of his confinement, but this time its accuracy was not wasted. This time, it did not remind him how little had changed; rather, how much was about to.

He threw open the curtains and stared out at the slowly waking world. No birds were soaring across the threatening sky, no figures moving on the cleared gravel of the drive. All was silent and immobile, imprisoned by the tensions of the night, held captive by his foreknowledge of the day.

He glanced back at the clock. Another minute had passed, another fragment of Saturday 29th December 1883 had faded from its face. It was happening, he knew, even as he stood there in remote and unprotesting witness. On a beach, on the other side of the Channel … He knew, because Norton had told him.

‘I did not expect to hear from Madeleine again. I assumed that my marriage to Constance would end her pursuit of me, that she would see the futility of further harassment, take what she thought she was due from the bank account I had opened in Zurich and so vanish from my life.

‘On Christmas Day, however, three days after Constance and I had arrived at Cleave Court as Sir James and Lady Davenall, a letter was delivered to the house by unseen hand and brought in to me during tea. I recognized Madeleine’s writing on the envelope at once, but opened it casually enough to persuade Constance that nothing was amiss.

‘“Be at the Dundas Aqueduct”, it read, “at half-past eight tomorrow morning. Do not fail me this last time. M.”

‘What had prompted her to make such a demand of me I could not guess. My first inclination was not to go, if only because her choice of meeting-place seemed so needlessly pointed. Then I reflected that, if I did not meet her as she asked, she might come to the house. Though I could scarcely believe she would expose herself to the danger such a visit would entail, it was not a risk I could afford to take. Besides, she referred to it as a “last” meeting, and I could not help feeling that I owed her that much in view of my refusal to make her Lady Davenall.

‘So, next morning, before dawn, I rose and slipped from the house, leaving Constance asleep. I intended to tell her later that I had gone for a walk, which would have seemed innocent enough. Certainly I had no doubt as I hurried down the drive that I would soon be back to calm any fears that might have arisen in my absence. I even stopped for a word with Nanny Pursglove and told her that I would look in on my way back. I would be, I assured her, no more than half an hour.

‘Then, as I strode north along the towpath, eager to reach the aqueduct and have done with the encounter, I saw him. It was a still, cold, misty morning, with neither sound nor movement on the canal to break the lifeless grip of winter. The water was a flat and unrelenting grey,
the
reeds along the bank sagging and forlorn, the trees beside the path stark and bare. There were no leaping fish or dabbling moorhens to flit across the edge of my vision. When I saw him, albeit at the margins of my sight, there could be no mistake. He was there.

‘I had seen him twice before. In Salisbury Cathedral, when Canon Sumner had offered to pray for me, he had appeared opposite me in the choir-stalls. At Wapping Old Stairs, when I had retraced too well his final steps in this world, his body, drowned then as before, had floated into view. Now he had come again. A glimpsed figure on the opposite bank of the canal, keeping pace with me as I strode purposefully on, seeming not to hurry yet never falling back even when I accelerated.

‘When I stopped, he stopped. When I went on, so did he. Whatever hope I had contrived to retain that he was not who I thought was dashed when I summoned my courage to turn and look directly across at him. For then the opposite bank was empty. Yet, when I turned away, he reappeared. He would not leave me, yet he would not let me face him.

‘No, Trenchard, I am not mad. What do you or I know of him? What do we care about the man whose place in this world we both tried, in different ways, to take? Was he the man I portrayed for the benefit of a gullible jury? Or someone else, someone nobler and finer than I had any right to claim to be?

‘When I first learned of what had driven him to suicide, do you know what I felt? I have told nobody till now. They would have thought it absurd. I felt proud of him. Perhaps it
is
absurd, but I felt proud of my brother James. What spurred me on, of course, was envy and ambition, but somewhere, buried deep, there was a wish to give some solemn form of meaning to his life – and to his death.

‘I do not expect you to understand. But I think he understands. At first, I feared his visitations. Now I see the truth. They were his own fraternal gesture. He did not come to threaten me. He came to warn me.

‘That is why he vanished when I turned the bend in the canal and saw Madeleine waiting for me on the aqueduct. Because then he knew that the warning was in vain. I would hear what she had to say.’

V

Freddy Cleveland glanced from one Davenall to the other. Hugo stood like a graven image, staring straight ahead, only the sound of his rapid shallow breaths betraying the turmoil he felt. James’s responding stare, by contrast, was almost too casual to warrant the description, the only movement on his face being an occasional twitch at the side of his mouth that might have denoted a smile he would not permit to appear.

As for James’s second, whom he had introduced as Major Reinhardt Bauer of the Austrian Imperial Army, Freddy had seldom set eyes on anyone he so instinctively distrusted. Scar-faced and sour-mouthed like some croaking bird of prey, he was here, Freddy wondered, for what? Amusement? Money? Or the satisfaction of a depraved taste for vicarious bloodshed?

Whatever the reason, Freddy knew it was one he could neither share nor respect. Wrenching his thoughts back to what seemed to be growing more inevitable with every moment, he struggled to recollect how he would normally have laughed aloud to see four gravely dressed and sombre-faced men standing on a remote and empty beach with the serious intention of observing a redundant code of honour. It could only be, he concluded, something in the time and place – this hour so grudgingly yielded by a cold grey winter’s morning, this shoreline of limitless sea-rippled sand where infinity seemed almost tangible – that compelled him to play his obedient part. When he spoke, it was not to demand that his companions come to their senses, but to utter the only appeal to reason that the canons of duelling would allow.

‘Major Bauer, does Sir James feel able to say anythin’ that would placate my friend? I’m sure you agree it’s not too late to patch up the quarrel.’ But his words were sustained by the most unreasonable of hopes. Compromise was a drum to whose beat Major Bauer had never marched.

‘Sir James, Herr Cleveland, has nothing to say. Naturally, if Herr Davenall were to make an unconditional apology and withdraw his slander against Sir James, we could—’

‘Never!’ Hugo put in sharply, ‘I won’t withdraw a damn thing.’ Then he added, staring at James: ‘This man is an impostor. Is that clear enough?’

‘Clear enough,’ Bauer responded, ‘to render further discussion useless, would you not agree, Herr Cleveland?’ Then, taking Freddy’s silence for affirmation, he went on: ‘Perhaps, therefore, you would be so good as to open the case and let Sir James choose his weapon.’

VI

‘Madeleine stood against the parapet, gazing down at the river where it wound through the mist-layered fields. She knew I had met Constance there fifteen months before. She knew because we had planned the meeting together. What we had not planned was how much the occasion would come to mean to me. So now, I suppose, she had chosen the place again, when winter had squeezed all colour and warmth from the setting, to remind me of how I had betrayed her.

‘I leaned against the parapet and tried to look into her face, but she kept it averted, kept it trained on the river and the frosted meadows below. What seemed an age passed, though it cannot have been more than a minute, then she said softly: “So you came.”

‘“I came because your note called it ‘this last time’.”

‘“Oh, it will be that, you may be sure.”

‘“If it’s an apology you want—”

‘“An apology?” Suddenly, she turned and stared straight at me. “You think you can apologize for marrying that woman in secret, when you had promised to marry me?”

‘“You’ve known for months that I intended to marry Constance. The wedding wasn’t brought forward to deceive you.”

‘“You expect me to believe that?”

‘“It happens to be the truth.”

‘“I gave you till Sunday to be rid of her. Then I went to Bladeney House and was told by a
servant
that you had married her the previous afternoon.”

‘The simmering rage in her look was beginning to trouble me. I had expected contempt, not anger; threats, not recriminations. “I’ve explained as best I can that I love Constance and can never love you. What could possibly make you think I wanted to be rid of her?”

‘“Honour. Honour among thieves, if you like.”

‘“What are you talking about?”

‘“I’m talking about what you owed me – what you still owe me – for saving you from O’Shaughnessy.”

‘“Saving me? What do you mean?”

‘“Why do you think he spared you? Why do you think he let you off the hook?”

‘Amongst all the possible explanations that had occurred to me for O’Shaughnessy’s conduct, intervention by Madeleine had never featured – till now. Suddenly, I realized what I should have realized before: that if anybody could have brought about what had seemed so improbable, it was she. “Are you saying you’re the reason he didn’t identify me?”

‘“Yes. When we met in the British Museum, you seemed convinced there was nothing to be done. Well, you were wrong.”

‘“How? How did you do it?”

‘“I went to Holyhead and waited for him to arrive from Ireland. With the description you’d given me, it wasn’t difficult to pick him out from the crowd. I travelled on the same train with him to London last Friday. During
the
journey, I made his acquaintance. He was surprised when I revealed that I knew the nature of his business in London. And even more surprised when I explained the compelling reason why he should say you were
not
Stephen Lennox.”

‘I did not understand. For all his Bohemian airs and epicurean ways, O’Shaughnessy was a man of honour and principle, to whom truth was the noblest of callings. Not even Madeleine’s formidable wiles could have induced him to stray from it.

‘“I thought you would realize that you had me to thank for what he did. I thought it would bring you to your senses and make you keep your promise to me.”

‘“How did you do it?” I gripped her arm and pulled her towards me. “How did you persuade him to lie?”

‘She looked down at my hand clasping her arm, then back up into my face, ensuring by our proximity that I would recognize the meaning in her gaze when she said, in a measured undertone: “Take your hand off me.”

‘In San Francisco, that very first time, when she had given herself to me for what had seemed the most transparent of purposes, she had used those same words, married to the same look, to warn me of what about her was least transparent of all: her strange ability, not to command obedience, but to plant it within those who pursued her, so that, to them, it seemed not a voluntary act, but an instinctive reaction.

‘I let go of her arm. Several seconds passed in silence, then she said: “You were right about O’Shaughnessy. He is a man of rare fidelity to the truth. Had you offered to marry me after all, I would have told you he’d succumbed to my usual charms, but I see now you would never have believed that.”