The Meaning of Night (56 page)

There is no need to do more.’

One by one she cut herself off from all visitors, even my late dear wife, of whom

she had been particularly fond. Only her companion, Miss Julia Eames, was permitted to

stay with her in the gloomy panelled chamber in which she spent most of her days. My

cousin did not quite approve of Miss Eames, and had often questioned the necessity of

her remaining in his house when his wife enjoyed such a wide acquaintance, both in the

country and in Town. But my Lady, alas, as was often the case, would not accede to his

wishes, and it became a regular source of friction between them that she angrily refused

to give up her companion.

It was to Miss Eames, and to her alone, that my Lady turned for comfort and

companionship in the weeks and months following the birth of her son, Henry Hereward.

I became aware of the intimacy that existed between them when one day, a little before

Christmas, my Lady sent word that she wished me to bring up a copy of Felltham’s

Resolves from the Library. It pleased me a great deal to receive the request, thinking it

betokened the beginning of a return to her former habits; for my Lady, though she had

been a great one for dresses and jewels and other fripperies, had always been an earnest

and discriminating reader – unlike my cousin, whose literary tastes were somewhat

rudimentary and who, in this as in so many other aspects of my Lady’s character and

inclinations, found his wife’s fondness for poetry and philosophy incomprehensible.

When I took the volume she had requested up to my Lady’s sitting-room, I

discovered her sitting in close conversation with Miss Eames, heads together talking with

quiet intensity, their chairs drawn round a small work-table on which, open to view, was

an ebony writing-box containing a considerable number of letters and other papers. On

seeing me enter, Lady Tansor slowly closed the box and sat back in her chair, whilst Miss

Eames stood up and walked towards me holding her hand out to receive the book I had

brought, though it seemed to me that her action had also been intended to prevent me

from drawing too close to the writing-box and its contents.

The incident may seem trifling, but it was to gain in significance retrospectively,

as I shall shortly record.

And so to continue my deposition, and to conclude it as quickly as I may.

As Christmas drew near, my Lady’s spirits began to improve a good deal, and one

bright cold day, bundled up in her furs, she left her room for the first time since the birth

of her son – I observed her myself from the window of the Muniments Room taking the

air on the West Terrace, walking slowly up and down, arm in arm with Miss Eames. The

next morning her son was brought by his nurse to be dandled for a minute or two on his

Mamma’s knee; and the morning after that, she began to take her breakfast again with her

husband in the Yellow Parlour.

My cousin treated her return to domestic life with cold civility; for her part, she

regarded him with utter indifference, though she ate her meals with him and sat with him

of an evening, neither of them speaking the whole time, until each retired without a word

of good-night to their own bedchambers at opposite ends of the house. She showed not

much more interest in her son, though she raised no objection when my cousin brought

up Sir Thomas Lawrence to paint the family portrait that now adorns the vestibule at

Evenwood – depicting my Lady, with Henry Hereward in her arms, looking out with a

curious almost-smile on her long pale face, whilst his Lordship stands, a little stiffly,

slightly apart from both wife and child, strongly projecting the air of a man who knows

his duty and is determined to do it.

With the New Year, my Lady began to exhibit worrying signs of a severe nervous

affection, slight at first, but then increasing in frequency and intensity. As an instance, at

the beginning of February, having read of the death of Mrs Radcliffe,? she vehemently

expressed a sudden wish to be taken to London in order to attend her funeral, though she

had enjoyed no personal acquaintance with the celebrated authoress. Her husband

sensibly prohibited such a thing, whereupon she locked herself in her room for two days

and refused to come out, even when begged to do so by Miss Eames, until at last my

cousin was obliged to order that the door be broken down. When his Lordship entered the

apartment, to satisfy himself that she had not harmed herself in any way, she thrust a

piece of paper into his hand, on which was a passage she had copied out of the edition of

Felltham’s Resolves I had taken up to her some months before. This was what was she

had written:

When thou shalt see the body put on death's sad and ashy countenance, in the

dead age of night, when silent darkness does encompass the dim light of thy glimmering

taper, and thou hearest a solemn bell tolled, to tell the world of it; which now, as it were,

with this sound, is struck into a dumb attention: tell me if thou canst then find a thought

of thine devoting thee to pleasure, and the fugitive toys of life.?

She had once been the brightest ornament of society, beautiful and carefree. Now

her thoughts were all centred on the anguished contemplation of her inevitable demise. It

pains me, even now, to speak of these last weeks, during which Lady Tansor became ever

more unpredictable and distracted. My cousin had given instructions that henceforth his

wife must never be left alone and had arranged for a woman from the village, Mrs Marian

Brine, to sleep in a truckle-bed next to my Lady’s own bed, whilst during the day, even

when Miss Eames was with her, a servant was required to sit outside the door of her

apartments, the keys of which had been confiscated to prevent her from incarcerating

herself again.

But these safeguards proved insufficient, and one night at the end of February,

dressed only in her shift, when a late frost had rendered the earth iron-hard, she slipped

out of the house and was found wandering the next morning on the path near the Grecian

Temple that stands on the western edge of the Park, dirty and dishevelled and wailing in

the most terrible fashion, her poor bare feet cut to pieces from walking through brambles

and thorns.

They covered her and she was brought back in the arms of Gabriel Brine, then his

Lordship’s groom, and husband of the woman who had been set to watch over her at

night. Brine himself told me how she had continued to babble and moan as he had carried

her, crying out over and over again, ‘He is lost to me, my son, my son’; but when he

attempted to comfort her by telling her that all was well and that Master Henry was safe

in his cradle, she became maddened and began to shriek and kick and writhe, cursing him

in the most dreadful manner until, coming into the Front Court at last and seeing her

husband standing beneath the light of the portico lamp, anxiously awaiting her return, she

quietened herself, closed her eyes, and sank back, her strength exhausted, into Brine’s

arms.

Lord Tansor stood for a moment silently contemplating the destruction of his once

beautiful wife. I, too, was there, standing just inside the door. I saw his Lordship nod to

Gabriel Brine, who proceeded to carry his pathetic burden upstairs, where she was laid in

Lady Constantia’s great carved bed, from which she was to rise never more.

She died peacefully on the fourteenth of March, 1824, at a little after six o’clock

in the evening, and was laid to rest in the Mausoleum built by her husband’s

great-grandfather three days later.

So ended the life of Laura Rose Duport, née Fairmile, wife of the twenty-fifth

Baron Tansor. I now turn to the hidden consequences of that tragic life, and – at last – to

the crime I believe was committed against the closest interests of my cousin, for which I

hope – constantly and most fervently – that the soul of the perpetrator has been forgiven

by the grace of Him into whose hands we all must fall.

Saturday, 22nd October, 1853.

III.

I now propose to deal with events successive to the death of Laura, Lady Tansor.

Immediately after the interment of his wife, Lord Tansor called for Miss Eames,

her Ladyship’s former companion, and requested her to leave Evenwood at her earliest

convenience. To what she was owed by way of remuneration, he added a generous

additional payment, thanking her coldly for the services she had performed. He hoped she

would have no cause to complain that she had been treated badly by him, to which she

replied that he need have no fear on that score, and that she was properly grateful for the

consideration she had received in his house.

He did not stop to ask, either Miss Eames or himself, if she had a home to go to.

As it happens, she did not: her father, a widower, had died soon after her Ladyship had

absconded to France, and her other sisters were all married. One of these, however, lived

in London, and to her, by means of a telegraphic message sent from Easton, Miss Eames

now applied for temporary sanctuary.

Leaving Miss Eames to arrange her few possessions for departure, his Lordship

then came to my work-room at the base of Hamnet’s Tower and instructed me, at my

earliest convenience, to gather up all his late wife’s private papers and place them in the

Muniments Room. Did he wish to peruse them himself after they had been collected? He

did not. Did he wish me to examine or order them in any way? He did not. Were there

any further instructions concerning her Ladyship’s papers? There were not. Only one

more thing was required: the unfinished painting of his late wife was to be removed from

the Yellow Parlour and placed ‘in a less conspicuous position’. Did his Lordship have a

specific location in mind? He did not. Would there be any objection to my hanging it

here, in my work-room? None whatsoever.

An hour or so later there was another knock at my door. It was Miss Eames, come

to bid me farewell. She spoke most kindly of the little services I had been happy to

provide for her during the time I had been employed at Evenwood, and said she would

always think of me as a friend. Then she said something that struck me as very odd:

‘You will always think well of me, won’t you, Mr Carteret? I would not like it – I

could not bear it – if you did not.’

I assured her that I could think of no circumstance that would alter my very high

opinion of her, for indeed I regarded her as a very sensible and dependable soul, in whom

resided a great deal – a very great deal – of natural goodness and sympathy; I told her as

much, and also that no one could have served her late mistress better, or more faithfully.

That alone would always command my admiration, the prosecution of one’s duty to an

employer or benefactor being, to my mind, a cardinal virtue.

‘Then I am content,’ she said, giving me a rather wan smile. ‘We are both loyal

servants, are we not?’ And with that, to me, rather curious interrogative, she retired to

ready herself for her journey. And that was the last I saw of Miss Julia Eames.

The next morning, after waiting on my cousin as usual, I began searching through

my Lady’s apartments for letters and other papers to remove to the Muniments Room, as

I had been instructed. I collected a good many items from my Lady’s green-lacquer desk

that stood by the window in her sitting-room, and many more from various table-drawers

and cabinets; but of the ebony writing-box I had seen on several occasions, and which I

particularly remembered from the time I had brought my Lady the copy of Felltham’s

Resolves she had asked for, there was no sign. I searched most diligently, going through

the contents of every cupboard and drawer two or three times over, and even getting

down on my hands and knees to look underneath the great curtained bed; but without

success. Somewhat puzzled as to the box’s whereabouts, I placed my haul in the

portmanteau I had brought with me and returned downstairs to my work-room, from

where I ascended the narrow flight of steps to the Muniments Room above.

It went against my nature simply to leave the papers in a disordered state; and so I

thought I would sort them roughly according to type, and then make a preliminary

general inventory before storing them. This was quickly and easily done, and within an

hour I had several separate bundles of receipts, bills, letters, sketch-books, notes and

memoranda, correspondence and drafts of letters from her Ladyship, and a number of

miscellaneous items, principal amongst which were an autograph album, a

commonplace-book with red silk wrappers inserted in a gilt steel cover, a note-book

containing what appeared to be original poems and prose fragments, and an address book

contained within an embossed calf wallet. I could not resist – who could? – looking over

a number of the items as I placed them in their allotted pile, though I acknowledge that I

did so a little guiltily, having received a specific instruction from my employer to leave

the papers in an unclassified state.

The autograph album afforded an interesting record of friends and distinguished

visitors, both to Evenwood and to his Lordship’s Town-house, and then I lingered for