Michael Cox (60 page)

E.A.D.

Evenwood, 1879

38

Envoi

Evenwood, December 1884

I
Hope Vindicated

F
IVE YEARS
have passed since I wrote the words with which – as I then truly believed – I concluded the story of my secret life, that bitter-sweet journey from my childhood home in the Avenue d’Uhrich to the earthly paradise of Evenwood. I must now crave my readers’ indulgence for taking up my pen once more, to recount certain subsequent events, which I believe those who have had the patience to journey with me may wish to know. Whether they will prove to be the end of my story, or constitute the beginnings of a new one, I cannot of course yet say. I undertake only to lay them before you as briefly as I can.

ON A FINE June morning in the year 1880, I was sitting by the Lake, looking out towards the Temple of the Winds, and thinking of the past as usual, when one of the footmen brought me the terrible news that Randolph had died in a fall whilst climbing the mountain of Crib Goch with his old friend and brother-in-law, Rhys Paget.
Randolph and I had maintained a detached but friendly relationship, when family affairs had occasionally brought him back to Evenwood; but I had seen nothing of his widow since the death of my former mistress (it is strange that I should still term her so, but it is a habit I easily fall into).
After her husband’s interment, Mrs Randolph Duport and I had talked alone for a short time on the Library Terrace, where I sometimes sat on fine afternoons, in an old wicker chair of the former Lord Tansor’s, with Bowser by my side.
It was a strange meeting – both of us now sharing the same surname, both of us having once been servants to the 26th Baroness; but she was no longer the woman whom I had known as Mrs Battersby when I was Esperanza Gorst, lady’s-maid. She seemed much aged, and subdued in temper, although her curiously fixed half-smile remained, in confusing contrast to the grief so evident in her sunken, reddened eyes. We spoke of Randolph’s many amiable qualities: his kindness, his engaging ways, his enthusiasms, his sweet temper and openness of disposition – on all of which points, and many others, we could easily agree. Of more sensitive matters relating to times past, however, nothing was said.
I had risen to go when she put out her hand to touch my arm, asking as she did so if she could say one more word. She then confessed that Randolph had lost most of the money that had been left to him in his mother’s will in various failed business speculations. I had also disposed certain sums for his use when I had succeeded to the title; but these, too, it seems, had gone.
‘Like my father, he was such an innocent in these things,’ she said with a sigh, ‘yet so anxious to prove himself as capable as his brother. But he found himself out of his depth, and placed his trust in those who only schemed to take his money, and give nothing back.’
She was looking down into her lap, twisting a handkerchief in her long white hands. I saw how hard it was for the once proud ‘Mrs Battersby’ to humble herself in this way, and I pitied her. She had hated me once, as I would have hated her had our circumstances been reversed; but she was now my kinswoman by marriage, and I could not wholly abandon her.
I therefore said that I would be glad to offer her some assistance, and I have kept my word, although I shall not receive her here again; and whatever I have done has been for the sake of Randolph’s fatherless son, Ernest – a sweet little boy, in whose future prospects I have determined to take a close interest.

RANDOLPH WAS LAID to rest in the Mausoleum, next to the tomb of his mother. Perseus, of course, had been informed of his brother’s death, and had written a brief note informing me that he would be attending the interment, although he would be leaving immediately afterwards to spend a few days at his London residence before returning to Italy.
There had been no direct communication between us since his mother’s death. All our correspondence on the many matters arising from my assumption of the Tansor title had been conducted – at his request – through intermediaries, principally Mr Donald Orr.
As soon as I became Lady Tansor, I had settled a not inconsiderable fund of money on Perseus, to allow him to maintain himself in an appropriate style; but for this act of genuinely disinterested consideration, intended to provide some small measure of compensation for what he had lost, he had condescended to send me only a few curt words of acknowledgement in a letter to Mr Orr. Despite this rebuff, and after much heart-searching, I had subsequently sent him a long account of why I had been sent to Evenwood, which included a digest of the principal events that I have presented in these pages.
I waited for the expected reply; but none came. The note confirming that he would be returning to England for his brother’s interment was the first communication from him that he had written to me personally, in his own hand. Not wishing to part with something so precious, I placed it in a little velvet bag to keep in my pocket, like a kind of talisman, in the foolish hope that it might signify some change for the better in our relations.
Although I had not seen him for nearly three years, Perseus had remained a vivid presence in my life. Hardly a day began but I did not think of him on first waking, and wonder what he was doing, and whether he sometimes thought of me; and hardly a day ended but I did not lay my head on my pillow in the certainty that I would soon be dreaming of him, and of what we had once been to each other. To know that I would be seeing him in person once again filled me with joyful expectation.
The day of the interment arrived. I awoke in the most extraordinarily confused state, grieving for poor Randolph, for whom I had continued to feel great affection, in spite of what had happened between us, but also excitedly anticipating the return of his brother to Evenwood, even though it was only for a day.
The mourners began to assemble in the Entrance Court for the short carriage ride to the Mausoleum; but there was no sign of Perseus. Eleven o’clock struck – the hour when the ceremony should have begun – and still he did not come. Unable to delay any longer, the party began to move off.
In the Mausoleum, the memories of which still sometimes trouble my dreams, Randolph’s coffin was committed to its awaiting loculus, and the iron gates were closed and padlocked. Throughout the short ceremony, conducted by Dr Valentine, successor to Mr Thripp, who had passed away the previous autumn, I had stood nervously in the candlelit gloom, hoping that, even now, at this late hour, Perseus would walk through the open metal doors and take his place by my side. But after Dr Valentine had intoned the final prayer, and the mourners prepared to return to their carriages, I knew that my hopes had been in vain.

BY FOUR O’CLOCK that afternoon, the mourning guests, including Mrs Randolph Duport, had departed. For the past hour, I had been engrossed in a recent novel by Mr Thomas Hardy, which my bookseller had sent me some months before, but which I had only lately begun to read.
*
Laying the book down, I had happened to glance out of the window.
On the far side of the ha-ha, exactly in the place where I had first seen Captain Willoughby Le Grice, my then unknown friend, one misty morning in 1876, stood a man, staring up at my window. Despite the distance, I recognized him instantly.
In no time at all, I had run downstairs and across the Library Terrace, halting, heart afire, on the edge of the ha-ha. For what seemed an eternity, we stood looking at each other across the steep-sided grassy ditch under the late-afternoon sun – just such a sun as had dazled me on the Ponte Vecchio years before.
Nothing was said; yet everything seemed understood.

THE DEPARTURE OF the steamer that should have brought him from Boulogne to Folkestone had been delayed for several hours. Being unable to make up the lost time, he had only arrived in Easton half an hour since. Leaving his bags at the Duport Arms, he had immediately taken a fly to Evenwood. This I learn after I have greeted him formally in the vestibule.
We are standing, face to face, at the foot of the staircase – in precisely the same spot where we had first met. The portrait of his father as a Turkish Corsair has been removed, on my instructions, to one of the attic rooms. He glances at the space on the wall where it had formerly hung, but says nothing.
He is as handsome as ever, but in a different way from the Perseus Duport whom I had last seen, on that most dreadful day, when they had brought his mother back from the Evenbrook. His frame is a little heavier; his long hair, of which he had once been so proud, is now worn short and cut closer to his head; whilst the thick black beard, which made him look so like his father, has gone, replaced by a neat wax-ended moustache.
His demeanour has also undergone a most notable change. Although I had longed to see him again, I had feared, from the tenor of his note to me, to find him still hurt and resentful at what had befallen him, and at my part in it. To my great delight and surprise, however, these fears prove groundless. He seems in no way aggrieved or antagonistic towards me. His manner and voice are calm and conciliatory, his smile warm and unforced. He seems, indeed, to have accepted his changed condition to a quite remarkable and unexpected degree, and to have put behind him for good all the rage and shame that had consumed him following his mother’s death. Most striking of all, his eyes no longer express a nature bound by the constrictions of introspective pride, but shine with sympathetic energy, like those of a man eager to engage with the world at large. They are no longer his mother’s eyes. Their size, shape, and mesmeric quality are as I remember; but now they declare the character of the whole man, the true Perseus Duport, in all his contradictions. For he is no longer obliged to play the role assigned to him from birth by his mother. Like me, he has thrown away the mask that those closest to him made him wear. He now knows the truth about himself, and who he truly is. All this I clearly see in his face, and hear in his voice; and my heart begins to throb with new hope.
‘Good-afternoon, your Ladyship.’
‘Will you not call me Esperanza, as you used to do?’ I ask.
‘Certainly, if your Ladyship will allow it.’
’That I shall gladly do – as long as it accords with your own wishes.’
This little game of shuttlecock and battledore continues good-humouredly, until the ice is well and truly broken. We then collect ourselves and become serious again as we speak of Randolph, whose death, I see plainly, has affected Perseus more deeply than I might once have supposed that it would.
We continue talking of his poor departed brother as we walk together to the Library, where we stand before one of the soaring windows looking out towards Molesey Woods.
‘I misjudged my brother,’ he says. ‘He was a good fellow, through and through – I can acknowledge that now; but I despised him because I thought he did not deserve to bear the noble name that he and I shared. Yet he had more right than me to call himself a Duport.’
I object that he is being too hard on himself, but he cuts me short.
‘No, no. It is the truth. I know now who I am, and what I am, and the name by which I should properly be called.’
‘Perhaps you now despise me instead,’ I venture, ‘for taking from you what you always believed was yours by right.’
He gives me a most tender look.
‘Do not say so. How could I ever despise you? I admit that I blamed you once for what has happened to me, but no longer. I know now that you are as blameless as I am, and that you have taken back only what was always rightfully yours. You are a true Duport; I am not. We have both been the unwitting victims of others. All the fault is theirs, not ours.’
We then speak of his mother, for whom he expresses a most unexpected sympathy. To my inexpressible relief, he also assures me that he holds me in no way responsible for her death, blaming everything on her blind passion for his father, Phoebus Daunt.
‘Her will was strong,’ he says, as we walk down the central aisle of the Library towards his grandfather’s former work-room, now Mr Wraxall’s, ‘but my father’s was stronger, even in death. She could never break free from it. She has answered for her sins; but what she did, she did for him. She was his slave to the end.’
The sun is now beginning to set behind the wooded horizon, filling the great room with its glorious dying rays. I am making some trite observation on the beauty of the prospect when he interrupts me to say that there is a matter that must be settled between us, and settled once and for all.
His grave look momentarily alarms me, until he gives me another reassuringly tender smile, and explains that it concerns the enmity that existed between our fathers.
‘I must forgive your father, as you must forgive mine. Only then can we be free of them. I believe I can do this – indeed, I have done so. Can you do the same?’
I tell him that I fear we shall never be free of them: their legacy is too great. ‘But I will try to pardon them, if I can, for how can my life ever be my own unless I do? We have both paid a bitter price for their sins.’
‘Then let it be so,’ he says. ‘The past shall claim dominion over us no longer. It is time for us both to face the future as ourselves, not as their puppets.’
The hours pass; darkness falls; and still we go on talking of what has brought us to this point in our lives until there are no more secrets left to tell, and I remark that it is growing late.
‘Will you not stay?’ I ask, my heart in my mouth. ‘For tonight at least?’

HE STAYED FOR a week, then for a second; and so it began. It ended at eleven o’clock on a crisp October morning, in the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Evenwood, when I became the wife of my cousin, Perseus Verney Duport.
Two months earlier, as we were sitting together one evening on the lamp-lit terrace, in the twilight of a hot August evening, talking of old times in the Palazzo Riccioni, he had reached into his pocket to take out a small box. Inside was the ring that he had given to me on the Ponte Vecchio, and which he had thrown on to the fire when he believed that I had spurned him in favour of his brother.
‘I could not leave it there,’ he now admits, taking the ring from its box. ‘It had been yours once, and I wished so very much that it might be yours again. Will you accept it for a second time, as a gift of friendship?’
I tell him that I will accept it, with all my heart, but only on the same terms as before.
He shakes his head.
‘No, that cannot be. Marriage is impossible. Everyone will think that I want only to regain what I have lost by becoming your husband. You may even think that yourself, and that I could not bear, having no means of proving otherwise.’
He will not be moved by my objections and assurances, maintaining most stubbornly that we must remain cousins and friends, nothing more. Patiently, persistently, however, I begin to persuade him that the world’s opinion is of no account, and that we alone must now determine the future course of our lives. For my part, I needed no proof of his sincerity; and why should he not share what is now mine, if I so wish it? He continues to resist; but at last, the ring is on my finger again, the question he asked me on the Ponte Vecchio is asked once more, and the same answer is given.
Thus it was that the son of Phoebus Daunt proposed for a second time to the daughter of his father’s murderer, Edward Glyver, and was accepted by her with a grateful and overflowing heart. To their union, on the 23rd of September 1881, was born a son, Petrus, the precious rock on which all his parents’ hopes for the future of the ancient house of Duport now rest.
He is on the floor by my feet as I write, contentedly looking at a picture-book – my own childhood copy, in fact, of
Straw Peter
, with its coloured picture of the Long-legged Scissor Man snipping off the thumbs of the naughty little boy who would not desist from sucking them. He appears to find this as horridly fascinating as I did, and has not taken his eyes off the page for these five minutes past.
Petrus is three years old now, strong and healthy, already a strikingly handsome child, and very like his father. Sometimes he can be a little wild and wilful, and then I fear that he may have inherited certain aspects of his character and temperament from one or both of his grandfathers, and that these may prove troublesome in later life without firm correction. Perseus insists that the wildness will pass, and that he will make a fine heir. I hope he may be right.