Michael Cox (23 page)

III
I Contemplate Mortality

I HAVE HESITATED fatally, and now it is impossible for me to leave without being observed. Heart beating wildly, and as noiselessly as I can, I withdraw a few steps into the central chamber and crouch down behind the nearest tomb. I have barely had time to conceal myself when my Lady re-enters the chamber and passes by on the other side of the tomb, the train of her dress dragging through the scatterings of dried leaves with a thin crackling sound. She continues in her slow, ghost-like progress until she reaches the entrance hall.
Panic now grips me. I must leave – but how can I do so without revealing my presence?
As though in a dream, I watch my Lady’s tall, rigid figure proceed across the entrance hall and into the misty outer light. She then turns to pull the metal door shut with a reverberating clang. A moment later, I hear the sound of the key turning in the lock.
I run, heart thumping, to the doors and place my eye to the key-hole.
She is standing, her back towards me, at the head of the path, just beyond the pillared portico. Somewhere in the distance, the mist-muffled bells of St Michael and All Angels are faintly tolling out the hour of eleven. Almost on the last stroke I hear the sound of the returning carriage.
Through the key-hole I watch the coachman assist Lady Tansor into the carriage. There is only one course for me to take.
I begin hammering on the door and shouting out for help; but when I stop, there is only silence. I put my eye to the key-hole once more.
The carriage has gone.

I SINK TO the cold floor, my back against the doors, in numb contemplation of my fate. I cannot stop myself from wondering what it will be like to die – as it seems I must – minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. At first I am sure that I shall be missed, and have no doubt that a party will shortly be sent out to find me; but as the minutes pass, my confident hopes begin to ebb away. Even if a search is made, will anyone think of looking for me here? And if no one comes, until it is too late, what will they find? Nothing but a grinning, shrunken thing, wrapped in a worsted cloak, sucked dry of life by thirsty Death.
In a futile attempt to keep such horrid thoughts at bay, I decide to try to make some notes – as best I can in the dim light – on my surroundings.
I note down, first, the occupants of the various free-standing tombs in the central chamber, coming at last to that of Julius Verney Duport, the 25th Baron, my Lady’s cousin, from whom she had inherited her title and property – a man of almost unrivalled wealth and political power, now reduced to bone and withered flesh, as I must soon be if no one comes to my aid.
I then move away into the adjoining chamber, stopping first before the tomb of Phoebus Daunt to transcribe the inscription thereon:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
PHOEBUS RAINSFORD DAUNT
POET AND AUTHOR
BELOVED ONLY SON OF THE REVEREND
ACHILLES B. DAUNT
RECTOR OF EVENWOOD
BORN 1820
CRUELLY CUT DOWN 11TH DECEMBER 1854
IN HIS 35TH YEAR

For Death is the meaning of night;
The eternal shadow
Into which all lives must fall,
All hopes expire.

P.R.D.

By contrast, the neighbouring tomb carried the briefest of inscriptions, but it instantly held my attention:

LAURA ROSE DUPORT
1796–1824

SURSUM CORDA

Here, then, lay the mortal remains of Lord Tansor’s beautiful first wife, whose portrait in the vestibule had so entranced me on first seeing it, and which had continued to exert a powerful fascination over me. Standing before it, I would sometimes feel as if I were looking upon myself in some former life; at others, I would be moved to a strange certainty that I had known her – actually known her, in the flesh, although the remembrance had the indistinctness of something seen from a great distance. Of course this was impossible, for she had been laid here thirty years and more before my birth; yet whenever I looked upon her lovely face, I would always experience a powerful sense of affinity that I simply could not explain, and which drew me back to the portrait time and time again. Now she, too, like her husband, was nothing but dust and bone.
It was no use. I could not hold back the morbid thoughts that naturally arise when contemplating such monuments to mortality. Shutting up my note-book, I returned to the entrance hall and slumped to the floor, overcome once more by the horror of my situation. Here I remained, unable to stem my tears, until at last I could weep no more.
How long had it been since my Lady had returned to the great house? An hour? Perhaps more. Soon I would be late attending her; then another hour would pass, and then another. Darkness would begin to fall, and what little light there was in the Mausoleum would be extinguished. Then, for sure, the terrors would come.

I MUST HAVE fallen asleep, although for how long I cannot say; but I am awoken with a start by a sound, just a few inches above my head.
At first, I think that I have been dreaming; but then the sound comes again. It is the key turning in the lock.
Jumping to my feet, I turn to face the door; but it does not open. I hesitate for a moment, thinking perhaps that it might be my Lady returning. I consider rapidly whether I should conceal myself in the far shadows of the entrance hall, and then attempt to make my escape without being observed. But still no one enters.
I reach forward and open the door.
There is no one there. The clearing is deserted, and there is no sign of anyone on the road.
Startled by my sudden appearance, a wood-pigeon, perching on the head of one of the stone angels, flaps noisily away into the murk; but all else is silence. I step outside, and then turn to look back at the doors.
The key has gone, and with it my unknown liberator.

14

A Gift from Mr Thornhaugh

II
Receive an Apology

D
OWN THE
muddy track skirting the Park wall I ran, heart beating furiously, afire with blessed relief that I had been released from a most terrible fate, but anxious that it was now long past the hour when my Lady had instructed me to attend her.
I had half expected to catch up with my liberator; but I reached the southern gates, hard by the Dower House, without encountering a living soul, and the carriage-road winding its way up the Rise was deserted.
On reaching the Entrance Court, hot and breathless, I looked up at the Chapel clock. Ten minutes to two o’clock. I would not be late to read to my Lady.
‘What did you do this morning, Alice?’ she asked when I entered, picking up a copy of Phoebus Daunt’s
Epimetheus
,
*
which had recently become a particular favourite of hers.
‘I spent the morning reading, my Lady.’
‘And what were you reading?’
‘Mr Wilkie Collins’s
No Name
, my Lady.’
She looked at me sourly.
‘I am not acquainted with the work of Mr Collins,’ she said, in her most preposterously pompous manner.
‘I rather wonder, Alice,’ she went on, ‘that you cannot spend your leisure time more profitably. There must be many books that you have not read, of a more improving character than such trivial stuff. I am sure your Mr Thornhaugh would agree with me.’
I was tempted very much to retort that fiction could be just as improving as poetry, and that my tutor was a great admirer of Mr Collins, and of such fiction in general, but prudently refrained.
‘Have you written to him, by the by,’ she then asked, ‘to enquire whether he would care to visit you here?’
Of course I said that I had written, but that he had been absent from Paris for some time, engaged on his researches.
‘Ah, yes. His researches,’ she said. ‘But that is a pity. I find your Mr Thornhaugh quite fascinating already, and rather mysterious in his way, even though I have yet to meet him. Isn’t that curious? Well then, shall we begin?’
She handed me the book.
‘Wait—’
She was looking down at the hem of my skirt.
‘What are those? Cobwebs?’
I followed her eye, alarmed to see that the hem was indeed laced with a skein of grey and dusty cobwebs, picked up from my temporary imprisonment in the Mausoleum.
‘I believe they are, my Lady,’ I replied.
‘But where have they come from?’
I thought as quickly as I could.
‘I have developed a habit of exploring the house, my Lady,’ I told her, ‘before I come to you in the mornings – I hope you will not disapprove. History is another of my passions, and there is so much here to interest me. This morning, early, I went down to look at the Chapel under-croft, which was very dirty and dark, and I had not taken a light. I suppose the dress must have become dirtied there. I apologize, my Lady, that I did not notice it earlier.’
‘And is that mud on the hem also, and on your shoes?’
‘I’m sorry, my Lady. I have just taken a walk in the rose-garden. I should have noticed.’
‘Well, well, it’s of no consequence. No doubt you were too absorbed in Mr Wilkie Collins to pay attention to the condition of your dress. Have you enough light there? Good. I should like to hear “The Song of the Captive Israelites”, and then the sequence of sonnets that follows.’
She leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes.
‘Page ninety-six,’ she said, this woman who, only a short time before, had been on her knees, in agony of spirit, before the tomb of her dead lover. No sign remained of that pathetic lost soul; gone was that face, racked with unalloyed torment, on which her secret history had been so visibly stamped. In its place was her customary mask of haughty, unfathomable composure. But I had seen what I had seen; and so, with a curious sense of triumph, I began to read.
O who can contend
With the wrath of angels,
Or resist the righteous anger
Of the just?
ALTHOUGH THE HARD frosts of recent days had now abated, they were replaced by several more of bitter driving rain, which denied my Lady her usual habit of morning and evening exercise on the Library Terrace. Confined to her rooms, except for meal-times and the hours spent each morning with her secretary, she became crotchety and impatient, often sending me away angrily when I failed to perform some task to her satisfaction. Then, when I was called down again, she would try to make amends for her bad-temperedness – perhaps by opening a new book of Paris fashion-plates and asking me what I thought of this or that gown, or bringing out for my inspection an item of jewellery from Giuliano’s, or some other piece of expensive frippery that had been sent up from Town.
On the day before the weather finally began to improve, as we sat before the fire, she asked me to read to her. I had hardly begun when she suddenly told me to stop, complaining that she had a headache. Then she expressed a wish to discuss some topic of current interest, but quickly became bored with the conversation and threw herself, with an irritated sigh, into the window-seat, leaving me to wait, without instruction, for nearly half an hour, while she gazed morose across the rain-lashed Park towards the dimly grey outline of the western woods.
I had picked up my needle and thread, to re-commence some work I had earlier laid aside, while carefully keeping one eye on my Lady as she sat in distracted contemplation. I wondered what she was thinking. What rough gales of guilt and fear were roaring beneath that impassive exterior? I was used to her abrupt changes of mood; but it was only too apparent that her mind was more than usually perturbed.
Towards four o’clock, she suddenly rose to her feet, announcing that she wished to rest.
‘Please come and take out my pins, Alice,’ she said, walking towards the bed-chamber.
I put down my work and followed her to her dressing-table, where I began to loosen her long black hair.
‘Oh, Alice,’ she sighed. ‘What a world of trouble it is!’
I saw by her look that she did not expect a response, and so I continued with unpinning and brushing out her hair.
‘How long have you been here, Alice?’ she asked.
‘Three months and six days, my Lady.’
‘Three months and six days! How like you to be so precise! No doubt you know the hours and minutes also.’
‘No, my Lady. But I am particular about these things.’
Our eyes meet in the looking-glass, and for the briefest space I think that she has seen through my disguise; but then she looks away, picks up a silver hand-mirror, and begins to examine her eye-brows with apparent nonchalance.
‘Well, you have been a treasure – despite the occasional lapses in punctuality.’
She gives a little smile, which I return demurely.
‘Good servants are increasingly hard to find. They are not what they once were, especially the females. I had a maid once, when I lived in the Dower House, Elizabeth Brine by name, who gave very satisfactory service for many years; but she changed for the worse, and I was obliged to let her go. Since then, I’ve been disappointed with every individual who has been given the position – except with you, my dear. I hope you are happy. I would not like to lose you.’
‘Oh no, my Lady,’ I assured her gaily. ‘I am very happy here, and flattered that you think so well of me. It is a daily pleasure to serve you – and to do so in such a beautiful place as Evenwood. I could wish for no better position, and no other home.’
‘That is most kindly said, Alice. If only all one’s servants thought as you do, for I’m sure that there can be few places so enchantingly situated as Evenwood, which must be a constant compensation for the labours of service. I hope you will stay a very long time, Alice – perhaps you might even grow old here. My good and faithful servant!’
‘I should like that, my Lady, and to be as dear to you as your old nurse, Mrs Kennedy.’
As I spoke, I was reaching forward to lay one of the hair-pins on the dressing-table. At the same moment, my Lady gave a little cry, and dropped the mirror she was holding on the floor, shattering the glass. Pushing back the chair, she turned her face towards me.
Her black eyes were opened to their widest extent, as if transfixed by some sight of the utmost horror; but then, her cheeks colouring, she began to rail at me in the most intemperate manner.
‘You stupid, clumsy girl! Look what you’ve made me do! That mirror was my dear mamma’s, and now it’s broken because of you. And just when I thought you were different from those other stupid creatures! But you’re as stupid as they were, I see. Leave me! Leave me!’
By now she was walking quickly towards the great carved bed with its blood-red hangings, her loosened hair tumbled all about her. Throwing herself on to the coverlet, she pulled one of the pillows towards her, cradling it in her arms like a child.