The Meaning of Night (35 page)

words, for he loved the boy to excess. The loss of his son was terrible enough; the loss of

his only direct heir compounded his grief dreadfully.

‘The continuation of his line has been the dominant – I may say the animating –

principle of my cousin’s life. Nothing else matters to him. He had received much from

his father, who had received much from his father before him; and Lord Tansor intended

that his son should receive much from him, in a cycle of giving and receiving, the

maintenance of which he held to be a trust and duty of the highest order.

‘But when that cycle was broken – when the golden chain was snapped, so to

speak – the effect on him was almost catastrophic, and for several weeks after the death

of Henry Hereward he locked himself away, refusing to see anyone, hardly eating, and

coming out only at night to wander the rooms and corridors of Evenwood like some

tormented spirit.

‘Gradually, he recovered himself. His dear son was gone, but time, he realized,

was still on his side and could yet furnish him with an heir, for he was only then in his

forty-second year.

‘This, I’m sure, will all be familiar to you, Mr Glapthorn, but you must hear it all

again from me for this reason. I do not look upon his Lordship as most people do, who

see him as cold and aloof, concerned only with his own affairs. I know he has a heart, a

feeling heart, a generous heart even, though it has only been revealed in extremis. It is

there, nonetheless.’

I let him talk on, and still the rain came down.

Bye and bye he said: ‘It does not improve. Let us walk in.’ So we stood up and

moved towards the great black studded door of the church, only to find it was shut fast.

‘Oh well,’ he sighed, ‘we must stay where we are.’

‘A metaphor of Fate, perhaps,’ said I.

He smiled as he took his seat again, this time tucking himself tightly into the

corner of the porch away from the window, beneath an already blackening memorial

tablet of erected to Thomas Stevenson and his wife Margaret, deceased three months

apart (also their daughter Margaret, ob. 1827, aet. 17).

‘I knew Tom Stevenson,’ he said, observing me looking up at the memorial. His

poor daughter drowned, down by the bridge there.’

He was silent for a moment.

‘I shared Lord Tansor’s sorrow, you see, for our first-born child had been taken

from us just the previous year. Drowned, like Tom Stevenson’s girl, but in that river’s

companion’ – he nodded down the hill towards the Welland – ‘walking along the top of

the bridge in the Park, as children will do. All over in a moment. Seven years old. Just

seven.’ He sighed, and leaned his round head back against the cold stone. ‘But there. The

ever-flowing stream that took her has gone to its own unknown ends. But the heart’s

lacerations, Mr Glapthorn: they remain.’

He gave a deep sigh, and then continued.

‘The death of a child, Mr Glapthorn, is the saddest thing. Tom Stevenson was

mercifully spared knowledge of his poor daughter’s fate. But it was not given to Lord

Tansor to be so spared, or to me. We both suffered the keenest pangs of grief and loss.

Prince or pauper, all of us must endure such pangs alone. In this, Lord Tansor was – is –

no different to you or I, or to any other human soul. He occupies a privileged station in

life privileged, but there are burdens, too, mighty ones. But I expect you are not

persuaded. Perhaps you perceive the servility of the old retainer in me?’

I said that I was very far from possessing the natural temperament of the sans

culotte, and that I was quite happy for Lord Tansor to enjoy what had been given to him

by a kind Fate.

‘Well, we can agree on that,’ said Mr Carteret. ‘These are democratic and

progressive times, I know – my daughter Emily constantly tells me so.’ He sighed. ‘Lord

Tansor does not see it – I mean the inevitability of it all, that it will all end one day, and

perhaps not too far distant. He believes in a perpetual, self-sustaining order. It is not

hubris, you know, but a kind of tragic innocence.’

And then he apologized for inflicting what he called his usual homily on me and

went on to speak of the present Lady Tansor and of his Lordship’s increasing

desperation, over the years following his marriage to her, that no heir had been

forthcoming.

After a while, he fell silent and sat, hands on knees, regarding me as if in

anticipation of my making some remark.

‘Mr Carteret, forgive me.’

‘Yes, Mr Glapthorn?’

‘I am here to listen, not to question you. But will you allow me to ask this one

thing, concerning Mr Phoebus Daunt? He has been mentioned to me, by Mr Tredgold, as

a person who enjoys Lord Tansor’s particular favour. Are you at liberty to say now, or

when we next meet, if this gentleman’s position, in respect to his Lordship, is in any way

germane to the concerns you voiced in your letter?’

‘Well, that is a very lawyerly way of putting it, Mr Glapthorn. If you mean, has

Mr Phoebus Daunt become the object of Lord Tansor’s ambitions to secure an heir, then I

can of course answer immediately in the affirmative. I am sure, in fact, that Mr Tredgold

must have told you as much. Do I blame my cousin for the action he wishes to take with

respect to Mr Daunt? No. Do I feel slighted by it? No. Lord Tansor’s possessions are his

to dispose of as he wishes. Even if I should succeed to the title, it would be an empty

dignity, a name only; and I truly do not desire it – full or empty. However, the matter I

wished to place before Mr Tredgold, and which I am now to place before you, does not

concern Mr Daunt directly, though indirectly it certainly bears – rather critically – on his

future prospects. But if I am to say more, then I think perhaps it will be best to do so at

our next meeting. I see the rain eases a little. Shall we go back?’

20:

Lupus in fabula?

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Back in the hotel, I waited in the doorway of the tap-room while Mr Carteret

retrieved a battered leather bag from the hall-porter and spent some few minutes in

conversation with him. Out of the corner of my eye I observed him hand over a small

package, and speak a few more words to the man. Then he rejoined me and we walked

out together into the stable yard. He had girded his little round body in a capacious

riding-coat, slapped a battered old hat on his head, and secured the bag tightly across his

chest.

‘Will you reach home before dark?’ I asked.

‘If I press on now. And I have the comfortable prospect of tea, and the welcome

of my dear daughter, to light my way.’

We shook hands, and I waited in the yard while he mounted a stocky black horse.

‘Come to tea tomorrow,’ he said. ‘About four o’clock. Dower House, Evenwood.

Just by the Park gates. South side.’

He was about to pass through the archway at the far end of the end of the cobbled

yard when he turned, and shouted back.

‘Bring your bags and stay the night.’

After an early dinner, I retired to my room to write a brief account for Mr

Tredgold of my first meeting with Mr Carteret, which I sent down to the desk to be

despatched by the first post the next morning. Then, overcome with tiredness, and feeling

no need of my usual opiate cordial, I went to bed, and quickly fell into a deep and

dreamless sleep.

After some time, I was conscious of being gradually drawn back into wakefulness

by an insistent tapping against my window. I rose from my bed to investigate, just as the

nearby bell of St Martin’s Church chimed one o’clock.

It was nothing more than a loose tendril of ivy moving in the wind; but then I

happened to glance down into the stable-yard.

Under the archway at the far end was what appeared to be a single red eye.

Slowly, the darkness around it began to coalesce into a darker shape, enabling me to

discern the figure of a man, half lit by the light of the street lamp on the other side of the

archway. He was smoking – I could now make out the glow of his cigar expanding and

contracting as he drew in and released the smoke. He remained motionless for some

minutes; then he suddenly turned and disappeared into the shadows of the archway.

I thought nothing of this at the time. A late dinner guest on his way home,

perhaps, or one of the hotel staff. I shuffled back to bed, and fell fast asleep once more.

The next afternoon, I set off on one of the hotel’s horses to Evenwood, a journey

of some ten miles or so, reaching the village just before three o’clock.

In the main street, I pulled up my horse to look about me. There was St Michael

and All Angels, with its soaring spire, a little beyond which stood the creeper-covered

Rectory, home of the Reverend Achilles Daunt and his family. A great stillness had

descended, broken only by the faint sound of a breeze passing through the trees that lined

both sides of the lane that led down to the church. I moved off, following the line of the

Park wall until I reached the towered gate-house – put up in the gloomy Scottish style by

Lord Tansor in 1815, in a temporary fit of enthusiasm after reading Scott’s Waverley.

Once in the Park, the main carriage-drive begins to ascend, for the great house is hidden

from here, a pleasure cunningly deferred by ‘Capability’ Brown when he remodelled the

Park. But a building can be glimpsed to the left, through a narrow plantation of trees.

A spur from the main driveway passed through the plantation and brought me to a

gravelled space. From here, it dissected an area of well-tended lawn, and led up to the

main entrance of the Dower House – a fine four-storeyed building of creamy Barnack

stone, built in the second year of King William and Queen Mary,? as proclaimed by the

incised numbers on the semi-circular pediment above the shallow portico. It struck me as

looking like a beautiful doll’s house for some giant’s child, perfect both in its simple

proportions and in the well-mannered taste of its construction. A flight of a dozen or so

steps led up to the pillared portico. I dismounted, ascended the steps, and knocked at the

tall unglazed double doors; but no one came to my knock. Then I heard the sound of a

woman crying, somewhere at the back of the house.

I tethered my mount and followed the sound through a gate and down a short

flight of steps into a walled garden, lying now in the shadows of late afternoon, then

towards an open door in the rear of the residence.

A young serving girl was sitting on a chair by the door being comforted by an

older lady in cap and apron.

‘There, there, Mary,’ the older lady was saying, stroking the girl’s hair and

attempting to brush away her tears with the hem of her apron. ‘Try to be strong, my dear,

for Missie’s sake.’

She looked up and saw me.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I have been knocking at the front door.’

‘Oh, sir, there is no one here – Samuel and John are up at the great house with his

Lordship. We are all at sixes and sevens, you see. Oh sir, such a terrible thing . . . ’

She continued in this, to me, incomprehensible way for some moments until I

interrupted her.

‘Madam, perhaps there is some misunderstanding. I am here by appointment to

see Mr Paul Carteret.’

‘No, no, sir,’ she said, as Mary began to wail with renewed force, ‘Mr Carteret is

dead. Killed on his road back here from Stamford last evening, and we are all at sixes and

sevens.’

I prided myself on my coolness under duress – a necessary quality for my work at

Tredgolds. But I simply could not disguise my shock, my complete shock, at this news.

‘Dead?’ I cried, almost frantically. ‘Dead? What are you saying? It cannot be.’

‘But it is true, sir,’ said the lady, ‘only too true. And what will Miss Emily do

now?’

Leaving Mary to her tears, the lady, who introduced herself as Mrs Rowthorn, the

Carterets’ housekeeper, escorted me through the kitchen and up a short flight of stairs,

from which we emerged at the rear of the vestibule.

As was my custom, I quickly sought to fix the details in my mind. A floor of

black-and-white tiles; two windows flanking the front door, which was secured by two

bolts, top and bottom, and a sturdy central mortice. Pale-green walls with fine stucco

work, equally fine plasterwork on the ceiling, and a plain white marble fireplace. A

staircase with an elegant wrought-iron handrail leading to the first floor. Four doors

leading off, two at the front, two at the rear; a further door leading back into the garden.

Out of one of the front rooms, a young woman now stepped out.

She was tall, unusually so for her sex, nearly indeed my own height, and was

dressed in a black gown and a matching cap that was almost indistinguishable from her

jet hair.

As I looked upon her extraordinary face, I thought I had not known what human

beauty was until that moment. The beauty I thought I had known, even Bella’s, now

seemed delusive and figmental, a half-realized dream of beauty, moulded by invention

and desire. But now beauty stood in plain sight, real and unmediated, like starlight, or

sunrise over a snow-covered land.

She stood, in the diminishing afternoon light, with her hands folded in front of