Michael Cox (58 page)

IT WAS LEFT to the capable Mr Baverstock to supervise the many immediately necessary arrangements that now demanded attention; for, within an hour of their argument, both the Duport brothers had left the house – Perseus, in a black rage, for London, Mr Randolph and his wife for Wales, although he announced his intention to return for the inquest into his mother’s death.
The little world of Evenwood was of course shocked and scandalized to its very core by these extraordinary events. Lady Tansor dead, and implicated in the murder not only of a former servant but also of her own father! Mr Perseus Duport not the son of Colonel Zaluski! Mr Randolph Duport secretly married to the housekeeper! Even the most inveterate below-stairs gossips were almost speechless with amazement. Where would it all end? And what did it mean for them, now – as it appeared – that the mighty Duports had been laid low?
Mr Pocock and the steward, Mr Applegate, attempted to steady everyone’s nerves.
‘It’ll fall to Mr Randolph now,’ the latter told their fellow servants, not knowing that I was now the legitimate heir, ‘which will be no bad thing for us, being, as he is, a good and kindly soul. He’ll look after us, never fear.’

I LEFT EVENWOOD the next day, travelling to London with Mr Wraxall. He had wished me to stay with him for a few days before taking my onward journey to France; but I was adamant that I must get to the Avenue d’Uhrich with all speed. He agreed with reluctance, but insisted on making the arrangements, and on advancing me some money for any unforeseen expenses.
I spent the night in a dark and dusty hotel, situated in a dismal street close to the station from where I was to depart the next morning – a change indeed from the splendours of Evenwood. It was also the first time that I had ever been truly alone, and thrown completely on my own resources, in the great, smoky, heaving capital.
I was sitting at my lonely supper, in the public dining-room, my mind still swimming with many conflicting emotions, when I became aware of someone standing over me.
‘Is everything tasty and tender, miss?’
The question was voiced – without the slightest trace of either geniality or genuine interest – by a lean, lank-haired waiter, with the face of a disappointed undertaker, who concluded his enquiry with the most doleful sigh I have ever heard.
I told him that everything was perfectly satisfactory.
The waiter bowed and moved, with infinite slowness, to the next table, to ask the same question of a capacious gentleman in the act of raising a prodigious portion of dripping beef to his mouth, receiving only an unintelligible grunt by way of reply. The mournful catechism was then repeated, table by table, until at last, having traversed the room, the gloomy interrogator took up a position by the door, placed his wiping-cloth over his right arm, which he proceeded to hold rigidly across his stomach. He then seemed suddenly to subside into rigid immobility, eyes closed, like some life-sized automaton that had run down and now required winding up again.
I do not know why I mention this trifling and irrelevant incident, except that it has somehow fixed in my mind the memory of that day, and of the dismal atmosphere of that dim and dusty dining-room, with its community of transient strangers, each with their own reasons for being there, and each, no doubt, like me, with their own secrets to hide.

37

Inheritance

I
The Four Secrets
1ST JUNE 1877

A
FTER SPENDING
the night in the Hôtel des Bains in v Boulogne, where I had stayed before my departure for England, I finally arrive back in the Avenue d’Uhrich.
Madame is sitting alone, her back to the door, in the high-ceilinged salon on the first floor of the Maison de l’Orme, looking distractedly out at the chestnut-tree beneath which I had played as a child.
For several moments she remains unaware that I have entered, and that I am now standing just behind her; then she suddenly turns her head slightly and, with a little gasp, puts her hand over her mouth with shock and surprise at seeing me.
‘Esperanza! Dear child! What are you doing here?’
As she speaks, I too experience a sudden, and most profound, shock, although I seek to conceal it.
She is dreadfully changed. The girlish face that I remembered so well, and which I had dreamed of so often during my months at Evenwood, is now pinched and careworn; her lustrous pale hair has become coarse and thin; and I see, with dismay, that her once smooth and delicate hands are now almost fleshless, like an old lady’s, and that they tremble uncontrollably. My beautiful, ever-young guardian angel! What has happened to you?
I found my tongue at last, greeted her, and bent down to place a kiss on her lined forehead. She took my hand, and I sat down beside her, on the little tapestried sofa on which we used to read together when the weather prevented us from walking in the Bois.
‘Why did you not tell me you were coming?’ she asked.
There was an urgent, unnerving tremor in her voice, as if my return was in some way unwelcome.
‘Because I wished to surprise you and Mr Thornhaugh, of course,’ I replied, as cheerily as I could. ‘Is he here? Shall I ask Jean to call him down, so that I can tell you both my news together? No – let me go and find him myself. I expect he’s at his books as usual—’
‘Mr Thornhaugh is not here,’ Madame broke in, releasing my hand, and looking away for a moment. ‘He has gone.’
‘Gone? What can you mean? Where has he gone? Will he be back soon?’
‘He will never be back. I do not expect to see him again in this world, except in my memory, and I shall soon be leaving this world myself. Dear child, I am dying.’

THE RECOLLECTION OF what followed these words of Madame’s festers perpetually within me, like a wound that will never heal.
As the late afternoon darkened into evening, and rain drummed heavily against the tall windows, the secrets came tumbling out.
Secrets! Would there never be an end to them? Where was honesty and open dealing between those who professed to love each other? So much had been hidden away, so much entombed in dark places. Why did they never tell me? I had placed all my trust in them, and they had deceived me. An arrow pulled from my living flesh could not have produced the exquisite and enduring agony that I suffered as the truth was finally laid before me, by the person I had trusted and esteemed more than anyone in the world.
I shall not – cannot – attempt a
verbatim
account of what Madame now told me. Instead, let me have final recourse, as my story draws to its close, to the epitome of that dreadful day that I committed to my Book of Secrets – that brimming repository of hidden things, which I had so dutifully maintained on Madame’s instructions.
MADAME’S CONFESSION
MAISON DE L’ORME, 24TH MAY 1877
These are the Four Secrets I learned from Madame on this day.
1. After the death of my mother, ‘Edwin Gorst’ – who was really Edward Glyver – left the Maison de l’Orme to embark on his eastern travels. This much was true.
It was then put out that he had died in Constantinople, and that his body had been brought back to Paris. This was a lie.
He never died. The coffin mouldering beneath the granite slab in the Cemetery of St-Vincent contained nothing more than stones and dirt. He never died, at the age of forty-two, in the year 1862, as his gravestone proclaimed. He lives still. My father lives still.
This was the First Secret.
2. A year after the supposed death of ‘Edwin Gorst’, Mr Basil Thornhaugh came to live at the Maison de l’Orme, to take charge of my education.
Three weeks earlier, Basil Thornhaugh and the widowed Madame de l’Orme had been married secretly, in a village church near Fontainebleau. They have lived together, surreptitiously, as man and wife, ever since.
This was the Second Secret.
3. Riddle me this.
The moustachioed ‘Edwin Gorst’ was thought dead and buried – yet he lived. Clean-shaven Basil Thornhaugh lived and breathed – yet he never existed.
The answer is simple enough.
Basil Thornhaugh was – is – my father. Basil Thornhaugh was – is – Edward Glyver, who murdered Phoebus Daunt.
Duport – Glyver – Glapthorn – Gorst – Thornhaugh. Five names. One man. One living man. One living father.
This was the Third Secret.
4. Madame had loved my father, since first meeting him, years earlier, when he was attached to another, her dearest friend in all the world. But this friend, together with the man
she
truly loved, had sought to destroy him, in order to gain for themselves what was rightfully his.
Does more need to be said?
The friend was the former Miss Emily Carteret.
Her lover was Phoebus Daunt.
Madame de l’Orme’s maiden name was Marie-Madeleine Buisson.
This was the Fourth Secret.
Here my epitome broke off, although more secrets, of less consequence, were still to be revealed.
At intervals in her confession, Madame had been obliged to pause, in order to cough into a large linen handkerchief that she had by her. She attempted to hide them, but I clearly saw the ominous spots of blood staining the white material, and instantly recognized their fatal significance.
‘The doctor says that I shall not live to see the leaves fall,’ she said, looking out at the swaying branches of the chestnut-tree, barely visible now in the deepening darkness.
Although she had deceived me, I loved her still, and the doctor’s prognosis cut me to the heart.
‘Well, you must prove him wrong,’ I said gaily, trying to force a smile. ‘I shall take you away – to Italy. To Florence. And then you’ll come back, recovered and happy, to see the leaves falling until the tree is quite bare, and then you’ll see the new ones come in the spring, and for many springs to come.’
She returned a sad, indulgent smile, but did not reply.
I got up from the sofa and stood looking down into the wind-swept garden, remembering the golden days of my childhood, and little Amélie Verron, guileless to the depths of her sweet soul, my truest and most faithful friend, as it now seemed.
Love, and the secrets it spawned, had betrayed us all – Madame, Emily, and me. Madame’s love for my father had made her his ever-willing slave, ready to do whatever his will demanded. The consequences of Emily Carteret’s love for Phoebus Daunt, despite the affection she professed for my father, had driven her, at the last, to the commission of murder and to self-destruction. As for me, I had loved and trusted Madame, and the man I knew as Basil Thornhaugh, to the utmost degree, only to be given deception and lies in return.

THE ATTAINMENT, AT last, of my rightful inheritance, as I could now report to Madame, stood fair to succeed; but the prospect gave me no joy. Lord, what a poor deluded fool I had been! I recalled, with a kind of shame, the bitter tears I had shed on reading Mr Lazarus’s memories of my father, and the anguish I had suffered at never having known him in life. The inscription on that shadowed slab of granite had told me that he was dead. Another betrayal. Another lie. He had been with me, throughout my childhood, without my knowing, watching over me as a father ought, day after day, in the guise of my tutor, but never revealing himself to me.
Madame assured me that he had loved me. Why, then, had he never thrown off his disguise? Why had he let me believe that I was fatherless? Could a loving parent be capable of such refinement of cruelty?
‘He had his reasons,’ Madame had urged, ‘and nothing would move him. He could not escape his fate. It pursues him still, and he will never be free of it, until Death releases him. Nothing else matters to him but the restitution of what was stolen by Emily Carteret and Phoebus Daunt. This imperative – implacable and constant – has infected everything he does, and all else must bend to that relentless necessity. It is his curse, and we must all suffer for it, as he does.
‘Following his exile,’ she went on, ‘he could no longer achieve his ambition himself; and so he has directed all his energies, all his will, to making you, dear child, his surrogate. I say again that he loves you – he has always loved you; but there is a power at work here even greater than love.’
‘But where has he gone?’ I asked her. ‘And why has he left you, when you are ill, and in such distress?’
‘He left yesterday,’ she replied. ‘I do not know where he has gone, only that he says he will never return.’
‘But why?’ I repeated.
‘Because I am no longer of any use to him. Because he believes the Great Task has failed. And because
she
is dead.’
I sat in silent disbelief. How could he have known of Emily’s death so soon?
My father’s reach, it appeared, was a long one. He had recruited a paid spy in the Detective Department, from whom he had learned the nature of the evidence against Emily, and had thus discovered the truth concerning Perseus’s birth, and the conspiracy between Emily and Lord Tansor.
‘It was a most grievous blow,’ said Madame, ‘to learn that the Great Task could not now be accomplished through your marrying Perseus Duport. For several days your father shut himself away, eating little, and seeing no one. He had begun to recover his spirits a little when he received a telegraphic message with the news of Lady Tansor’s death, and also that the younger Duport brother was already married.’
‘A telegraphic message!’ I exclaimed in amazement. ‘From whom?’
‘Your father is a most resourceful man – it comes from his former time as confidential assistant to the late Mr Christopher Tredgold. He has retained many associations with people, not always of the most elevated character, who are willing, and well able, to help him obtain almost any information he may require. He himself has travelled incognito to London, and on several occasions to Northamptonshire, when it was necessary for him to do so.
‘You should also know that he has employed someone at Evenwood, who has been constantly observing events there. It was this person who sent the telegraphic message.’
‘That will be Captain Willoughby,’ I said, confidently.
‘No,’ replied Madame. ‘Not Captain Willoughby, not exactly, although he, too, as you now know, was assigned by your father to keep a daily watch over you. It was Jonah Barrington, the head footman, who served under the captain during the Russian War. It has been through Barrington that we have been regularly assured of your safety and well-being, which you must believe have always been our greatest concern.
‘As for Captain Willoughby, his real name is Willoughby Le Grice, and he is your father’s oldest and most trusted friend, who stood by him through all his years of exile, and on whom he will always be able to depend.’
Barrington! Bleak-faced, ever-silent Barrington, who had brought me my supper on my first night at Evenwood! Every day since then, it now appeared, he had been my unseen and unrecognized guard, for which I supposed I must be in his debt. His familiar presence had never once raised the slightest suspicion in me that he was anything other than he seemed, and as I had described him in my Book of Secrets. Yet I saw now that it was the very fact of his being so unobtrusive and unremarkable that made him a most efficient spy.
To my further astonishment, it also appeared that it was Barrington who, at my father’s instigation, had contrived to have my predecessor, Miss Plumptre, dismissed. Having removed the brooch that the maid had been accused of stealing, and hidden it in her room, he had then solemnly sworn that he had seen her leaving Emily’s apartments, on a day when her mistress was absent in London, at the very time that the object was thought to have been taken. A search of her room had then been instigated; the brooch had been discovered; and, despite her continued – and most outraged – protestations of innocence, the hapless Miss Dorothy Plumptre had instantly been sent away, so providing Madame with the opportunity she had needed to try to place me in Lady Tansor’s employ.