Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

By my hand, the 23rd of October, in the year 1853.

P. CARTERET

*[Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822). He became Foreign Secretary in February 1812 and, suffering from a form of paranoia, committed suicide by cutting his throat with a penknife in August 1822. Ed. ]

*[Spenser, Faerie Queene , II.xii.65. Ed. ]

†[Named after Hamnet Duport, 19th Baron Tansor (1608–70), who made extensive alterations to Evenwood in the 1650s. Ed. ]

*[Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (c.1520–.1584), French architect and engraver. Ed. ]

*[Felltham, Resolves , xlvii (‘Of Death’). Ed. ]

*[Osborne House, built as a private retreat for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on an estate overlooking the Solent of nearly three hundred and fifty acres, purchased from Lady Isabella Blachford. The work, begun in 1845 and supervised by the Prince Consort, was completed in 1851. Ed. ]

†[The name, no longer in use, of the area of London roughly bounded by the Edgware Road on the east, Bayswater on the west, Hyde Park on the south, and Maida Hill on the north. It was inhabited mainly by professional men and City merchants. ‘Ah, ladies!’ writes Thackeray in Chapter LI of Vanity Fair (1848), ‘ask the Reverend Mr Thurifer if Belgravia is not a sounding brass, and Tyburnia a tinkling cymbal. These are vanities. Even these will pass away.’ Ed. ]

‡[In Covent Garden. A relatively inexpensive establishment; its typical clientele were single gentlemen up from the country. Ed. ]

*[A paraphrase of Psalm 32: 1. Ed. ]

*[The feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) had an illegitimate daughter, Fanny, by the American speculator and author Gilbert Imlay (her second daughter, Mary, future wife of the poet Shelley and author of Frankenstein , was the product of her marriage to the novelist and social theorist William Godwin). Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. One infers that Mrs Glyver’s aunt believed that her niece was pregnant by a lover, rather than by her husband. Ed. ]

†[By this rather obliquely delicate reference she appears to mean that she had recently contrived to have marital relations with Captain Glyver, the potential outcome of which would coincide with the birth of her friend’s child. Ed. ]

*[Sir Charles Stuart (1779–1845), created Baron Stuart de Rothesay in 1828, was British Ambassador to France from 1815 to 1824. I have not identified James Martin. Ed. ]

†[The street in which the British Embassy was, and is, situated. Ed. ]

‡[Part of the so-called Château of Dinan, which is actually built into the town’s ramparts. The Salle des Gisants holds seven carved medieval tombs; that of Roland de Dinan is said to be the oldest armed tomb in Western Europe. The carved figure referred to by Mrs Glyver is probably that of Renée Madeuc de Quémadeuc, second wife of Geoffroi Le Voyer, chamberlain to Duke Jean III of Brittany. Ed. ]

34

Quaere verum *

Overwhelmed by the experience of reading Mr Carteret’s Deposition, I sank back, exhausted and bewildered, in my chair. The dead had spoken after all, and what a world of new prospects the words had revealed!

Pinned to the last page of the document was a short note:To MR GLAPTHORNSIR, —I have made arrangements for the preceding account to be given to you by Mr Chalmers, the manager of the George Hotel, when you leave there. Failing that, he has been instructed to send this directly to Mr Tredgold. I have thought it wise to make these arrangements in case any harm should come to me before I can place my Lady’s letters in your hands. You will at least then know what I wished to tell you.I am not a superstitious man, but I encountered a magpie this afternoon, strutting across the front lawn, and failed to raise my hat to him, as my mother always encouraged me to do. This has been on my mind all this evening, but I shall hope that the morning sun will make me rational once more.The letters from my Lady’s writing-box have been removed to a place of safety, but I shall have recovered them before our meeting. There is more I could say, but I am much fatigued and must sleep.Only one more thing.There was a slip of paper enclosed with the letter I received from Miss Eames. The following phrase – and nothing else – was written on it, in capital letter: SURSUM CORDA. *I puzzled my head at the time what it could mean, but gave up. I have only lately realized – to my shame – what the words may signify, and shall wish to present a possible course of action to you tomorrow relating to them.

P.C.

I gave little thought to this postscript, having been deeply affected by the account of Lady Tansor’s last years, and of her terrible death; and then to learn, in those carefully composed pages, of my birth in the Rue du Chapitre, and how I had been taken to the town of Dinan, and of the making of the box in which, I was sure, ‘Miss Lamb’ had placed her gift of two hundred sovereigns. It filled me with amazement to read these things; for, since the death of her whom I had once called Mother, I had believed these privities were mine – and mine alone – to know. But here they were, written down in another’s hand, like cold universal fact. The sensation was alarming – like turning a corner and meeting oneself.

And to know that I had also been taken to Evenwood as a child! My heart danced with a kind of anguished elation at the thought. That bewitching palace-castle, with its soaring towers, which I had beheld in my dreams when young, had been real after all – no figment of fancy, but the perpetuated memory of my father’s house, which would one day be mine.

Yet there were still so many unanswered questions, still so much to know. I read Mr Carteret’s words over a second time, and then a third. Late into the night I sat, re-reading, thinking, wondering.

I appeared to myself like a man in a dream who rushes headlong, heart fit to burst, towards some eternally receding end; the faster I ran towards my goal, the more it remained tantalizingly out of reach, always just within sight, but never attainable. Yet again, I had been shown a fragment of the whole; but the greater truth, of which the Deposition was a part, was still hidden from me.

The truth? It is always the truth we seek, is it not? A conformity with known fact, or with some agreed standard, or with what experience tells us is the inescapable nature of existence. But there is something beyond the merely ‘true’. What we commonly call ‘true’ – that ‘A’ equals ‘B’, or that Death waits quietly for us all – is often but a shadow or replica of something greater. Only when this shadow-truth conjoins with meaning , and above all with meaning experienced , do we see the substance itself, the Truth of truth. I had no doubt that Mr Carteret’s words had been those of a truthful man; yet still they were but portions of an elusive entireness.

I was sensible, of course, that I now possessed something that considerably advanced my claim to be Lord Tansor’s heir; but I had seen enough clever barristers at work to know that Mr Carteret’s Deposition was susceptible to serious legal objection, and so could not allow myself to believe that it provided in itself the final, incontestable validation that I had been seeking for so long. In the first place, the original documents from which Mr Carteret had quoted could not now be produced; they had been in his bag when he had been attacked. How, then, could it be proved that these letters had actually existed, and that the words cited by Mr Carteret were accurate and truthful, and had not been his own invention? His character and known probity might argue against such an assertion; but a lawyer who knew his business could still make much of the inherent doubt. Or it might be argued that Mr Carteret had produced his Deposition at my behest. I had made a little progress through this document coming into my hands; and, as far as my own position was concerned, the Deposition offered valuable circumstantial corroboration of what had been written in my foster-mother’s journals. But it was not sufficient.