The Meaning of Night (43 page)

recalling the evidence of Mr Henry Whitmore, surgeon and apothecary of

Coldbath-square, Clerkenwell, concerning the violence done to the person of Agnes

Pluckrose. Overcome by rage, I left the yard in a kind of daze, walking at a furious pace

out into the darkening Park. At last, after walking for an hour or more, I found myself at

the foot of the steep path that wound its way up to the Temple of the Winds.

Mary’s tale of her sister’s seduction by this brute had moved me more than I

would have thought possible. But there was more than Pluckrose to consider: there was

Phoebus Daunt – again! He seemed to haunt me at every turn, a jarring, discordant basso

continuo to my life. I was completely baffled by the association revealed by Mary. What

common cause, I wondered in bewilderment, could possibly unite this murderer and the

son of the Rector of Evenwood?

I climbed the shadowed steps leading up to the Temple, and turned for a moment

to take in the view back across the Park to the great house. The sun had now dropped

behind the line of the western woods, and I could see that lanterns had been lit all along

the Library Terrace, where Lord Tansor liked to take his evening stroll.

The door of the Temple’s North Portico was open, and so I decided to enter.

The building – partly modelled, like the more famous version at Castle Howard,

on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in Vicenza – was in the form of a domed cube, with four

glazed porticos set at each point of the compass.? The interior, which, even in the

deepening gloom, I could see was decorated in superb scagliola work, smelled of damp

and decay, and as I entered I could feel myself treading on fragments of plaster that had

fallen from the ceiling. In the midst of the space stood a round marble-topped table and

two wrought-iron chairs; a third chair lay on its back some distance away. On the table

stood a stub of candle in a pewter holder.

I placed my hat and stick on the table, took out a lucifer from my waistcoat

pocket, and proceeded to light what remained of the candle, followed by a cigar to cheer

my dismal and unsettled mood. The flickering light revealed the quality of the Temple’s

internal decoration, though it was plain that the place had been in a state of disrepair for

some years. Several of the panes in the glazed door of the North Portico were smashed –

fragments of dirty glass still littered the floor – and black dust-filled nets of spiders’

webs, undulating eerily in the dank air, hung all about like discarded grave-clothes.

Leaving the candle on the table, I walked over to the upturned chair and set it

back on its feet. As I was doing so, I noticed a small dark form on the floor, just

discernible amongst the shadows cast by the candle stump. My curiosity aroused, I knelt

down.

It was a bird – the poor creature must have flown in through the open door of the

Temple and dashed itself against a large gilt-framed looking-glass, cracked and mottled,

that hung on the wall above where it now lay. Its wings were outstretched, as though

frozen in flight. From one staring but sightless eye flowed a jagged stream of viscous

black liquid, staining the dusty floor; the other eye was closed in peaceful death.

It somehow affronted me that it lay here, in this gloomy place, in plain sight,

away from the warm enshrouding earth. Gently, I picked the bird up by the tip of one

wing, with the intention of conveying it solemnly to some suitable resting-place outside

the Temple. But the act of lifting it up from the dirty floor revealed something curious.

Beneath it, previously hidden by one of its outstretched wings, was a small piece

of battered brown leather, some three inches square, with a hole punched in one corner. I

took my discovery over to the candle, now nearly burned down, and saw then what it was

– a label, apparently, perhaps designed to be attached to some piece of luggage. It bore a

name in faded gold letters: ‘J. Earl’.

I recognized the name, but could not for the moment recall how or where I had

heard it. It seemed strangely imperative, however, to bring its significance to mind, and

so I stood for a minute or more in some perplexity, racking my brains for a clue as to its

associations.

At length I seemed to hear the voice of Mrs Rowthorn, Mr Carteret’s

housekeeper. Something she had sad – a trivial fact that I had half heard, and then

forgotten. But nothing is ever really forgotten, and slowly the vaults of memory began to

open and yield up their dead.

‘I found him an old leather bag of Mr Earl’s – who used to be his Lordship’s

gamekeeper – that has been hanging on the back of the pantry door these two years . . .’

This rough square of leather that I now held in my hand had been attached to Mr

Carteret’s bag. I was sure of it. From this deduction quickly followed another: the bag

itself must have been here, in the Temple of the Winds. But that posed a problem. Had

Mr Carteret been here also? It seemed impossible. The testimonies of those who had

found him made it certain that Mr Carteret had been attacked soon after he entered the

Park through the Western Gates. No, he had not come to the Temple, but the bag had

certainly been here.

I looked about me, and began to picture what might have happened. A chair had

been overturned, and this piece of leather had somehow become separated from the bag.

And then – the following day, perhaps – a bird had flown into the Temple and, in its fear

and turmoil, had mistaken a dirty reflection of the outside world for the living freedom of

the open sky, dashed itself against the looking-glass, and fallen to the ground, just where

the piece of leather lay. And there the bird, and the object beneath it, might have stayed,

perhaps for weeks or months, perhaps for years, had I not, on a whim, and in a fury at

Mary’s story of the murderous villain Pluckrose, taken the path up to the Temple of the

Winds.

Of course it had been no whim. I was in the Iron Master’s hands. He had pulled

me hither for the deliberate purpose of finding this thing. But what did it signify? I sat

down at the table, dropped my still smoking cigar on the floor, and buried my head in my

hands.

This much I was still absolutely sure of: Mr Carteret had died because of what he

had been carrying. I was sure, too, that he had been intending to place the bag’s contents

before me at our next meeting, and that he had been attacked by a single assailant who

knew their worth and importance.

I could discern only one reason for bringing the bag to the Temple after the

attack: Mr Carteret’s murderer had been un homme de main? acting on someone else’s

orders, instructed to bring the bag and its contents here, to the Temple, where it was to be

examined by his employer. But there had been an altercation, perhaps a violent one to

judge by the fallen chair; and in the process the little leather label had become separated

from the bag.

All this seemed perfectly plausible, probable even; but I could go no further. The

contents of Mr Carteret’s bag, and the identities of both the murderer and his master,

were mysteries that – as yet – I had no means of unravelling. Until more light could be

shed on them, there was nothing else to do but stumble on through the darkness a little

longer.

I placed the leather label in my coat pocket and turned back towards where the

dead bird still lay, intending to carry it outside and then make my way back to the Dower

House. In that instant, the guttering candle on the table finally went out and, in the

sudden enveloping blackness, I was aware of another presence. There was a figure in the

doorway, a dark form against the clear, star-filled sky.

She did not speak, but walked slowly towards me, a small lantern held in her left

hand, until her face was close to mine, so close indeed that I could feel and smell her

warm breath.

‘Do you wish to tell me something, Mr Glapthorn?’

Her voice had a delicious, inviting softness about it that made my blood race with

desire, but her inexpressive stare told another story.

‘What should I have to tell you, Miss Carteret?’

I tried to strip that gaze of its disconcerting power by looking full into her dark

eyes; but I knew I was done for. It was all over with me. A great iron door had come

down, separating me from the life I had lived before. Henceforth, I knew, my heart would

be hers to command, for good or ill.

‘Why, what you are doing here, in the dark.’

‘I might wonder the same about you,’ I replied.

‘Oh, but I often come to the Temple. It was a favourite resort of my father’s. He

would sometimes bring his writing-case and work here. And it was here that I last saw

him alive. So, you see, I have reason enough. But what are your reasons, I wonder?’

She continued to look at me, standing stock still in her mourning clothes; but then

she smiled – a sad, childlike, half-smile – and once again she uncovered, for the merest

instant, a touching vulnerability.

‘Would you believe me if I said I had no reason at all for coming here; that I had

no other object in view but to take the air, and that I found myself here quite by chance?’

‘Why should I not believe you? Really, Mr Glapthorn, your conscience seems

rather too eager to protest your innocence. I merely wondered what brought you here. I’m

sure I did not mean to suggest that you were not perfectly entitled to prowl around this

damp place in the dark if you wanted to. You have no need to answer to me – or to

anyone, I dare say.’

All this was spoken in a sweet, low, confiding tone, quite at odds with her teasing

words. I said nothing in reply as she turned and walked back to the door but picked up

my hat and stick and followed her.

She was standing on the steps leading down to a broad terrace, below which the

ground fell away steeply towards the main carriage-road. Where the track from the

Temple joined the road, I could see two lights twinkling in the darkness.

‘You have not come alone, then,’ I said.

‘No, John Brine brought me up in the landau.’

She seemed suddenly disinclined to talk and took a few more steps down towards

the terrace. Then, holding her lamp up close to her face, and with a troubled expression,

she turned and said: ‘My father believed that everything we do in this life will be judged

in the next. Do you believe that, Mr Glapthorn? Please tell me if you do.’

I said that I feared Mr Carteret and I would have disagreed on this point, and that I

favoured a rather more fatalistic theology.

At this, her face assumed a strange look of concentration.

‘So you do not believe in the parable of the sheep and the goats? That those who

do good will see Heaven, and those who do evil will burn in the eternal fire?’

‘That was what I was brought up to believe,’ I replied, ‘but being deficient in

perfection from an early age, it has never seemed to me a comfortable philosophy. It is so

ridiculously easy, don’t you think, to fall into sin? I prefer to believe I was predestined

for grace. It accords far more closely to my own estimation of myself, and of course it

relieves one of the tedious necessity of always having to do good.’

I was smiling as I said the words, for I had meant them – partly – as an attempt at

levity. But she had become strangely agitated, and began to walk quickly hither and

thither about the terrace, apparently talking to herself in a mumbled undertone, her little

lamp swinging by her side, until at last she stopped at the top of the step that led down to

the path and stood staring out into the darkness.

The sudden change in her manner was dramatic and alarming, and I could see no

immediate reason for it. But then I concluded that the grief she had been holding back

had begun at last to assert its natural ascendancy over her spirits through being in a place

that had such strong associations with her recently deceased father. I was about to tell

her, as tenderly as I could, that there was no shame in mourning her poor papa; but I had

hardly stepped down to the terrace when she looked up at me and, in an anxious voice,

said she must return to the Dower House, whereat she began running down the path

towards where John Brine was waiting with the landau.

I was determined not to run after her, like some panting Touchstone after his

Audrey,? but instead set off as coolly as I could, though with long urgent strides,

following the bobbing lamp down the path. By the time I caught up with her, she was

sitting back in the landau, pulling a rug across her lap.

And then, to my astonishment, she held out a gloved hand and bestowed upon me

the most delicious smile.

‘If you have quite finished taking the air, Mr Glapthorn, perhaps you would

accompany me back to the Dower House. I’m sure you have walked quite far enough

today. John, will you pull up the hood, please.’

As we drove along, she began to speak reminiscently about her father – how he

had taken her to the coronation of the present Queen,? on the day after her twelfth

birthday, and how, at Lord Tansor’s instigation, Lady Adelaide Paget, one of the

train-bearers, had introduced her to the new monarch, then of course not much more than

a girl herself. From this recollection she turned to Mr Carteret’s inordinate fondness for