Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

‘What do you wish to do?’

‘With your permission, I wish to put my conviction to the test.’

‘And if I cannot give you my permission?’

‘Then of course I shall take no further action.’

‘Dear Edward,’ he said, the light returning to his eyes, ‘you always say the right thing. I have protected her memory for too long. Carteret was right. What she did was a crime – and I was party to it. She had no right to deny you what should have been yours, and to make you a stranger to your own family. I shall always love her, but the dead must take care of themselves. You are my care now – you, her living son. You have my permission, therefore, to do whatever is required, for the sake of the truth. Come back as soon as you can, and may God forgive us both. And now I feel a little cold. Will you help me inside?’

He leaned on me as we walked slowly down a winding gravel path towards the house, still deep in conversation as we went.

‘One thing has never been clear to me,’ I said, as we made our way through a tunnel of pale roses. ‘It is the thing on which all else hangs, and yet my foster-mother’s journals, and Mr Carteret’s Deposition, are silent on the matter.’

‘You refer, I suspect,’ replied Mr Tredgold, ‘to the reason for Lady Tansor’s embarking on her extraordinary action.’

‘Why, yes. That is it exactly. What could possibly have driven a woman of Lady Tansor’s station to abandon her child, born in legitimate wedlock, to the care of another?’

‘It was quite simple. She denied her husband the one thing he craved above all others because he had denied her something which, to her, was equally paramount. Quid pro quo. There you have it, in a nutshell.’

He saw my puzzled expression and proceeded to elaborate.

‘It all came from Lord Tansor’s treatment of her father. Miss Fairmile, as she was before her marriage, was exceedingly beautiful, and of an old and decent West Country family. But they were not the Duports, or anything like them, with respect to wealth and position. She met Lord Tansor in London, soon after his Lordship had succeeded to the Barony; it was not in his nature to play the gallant, but something about Laura Fairmile inspired him to pay court to her, despite his rather low opinion of her family. Many men more handsome than Lord Tansor had found themselves in a tangle over Miss Fairmile, though none could pretend to offer her what he could. It appears, strange as it may seem, that he harboured real affection for her; though it is also the case that, ever mindful of his public position, even at that age, he also wished to provide himself with an agreeable wife and companion to accompany him tamely through life, and provide him with the heir that he so desired.

‘He proposed; he was accepted. No one blamed her. The inequalities – their temperaments, their respective positions in Society – seemed of slight account compared to the advantages that both secured by the match. Her Ladyship quickly became the perfect adornment to her husband’s person. Oh Edward, if you could have seen her, riding by her husband’s side in Rotten-row, clad in her riding-habit of bright-green silk and violet velvet, topped by a jaunty hat with swaying plumes! She never failed to please him, she supported him in every way; and she was widely liked and admired in Society, which duly reflected back on him.

‘However, there was a worm in the bud. Their characters and temperaments soon proved to be fatally at odds. His Lordship was cold and detached, whereas his wife would light up a room with her bustle and laughter; he kept his counsel, she gossiped without compunction; he was respected, sometimes feared, but not widely liked, whilst she was admired by all; he lived for politics and business, and the increasing of his inheritance, whilst she loved quiet pleasures and the company of friends, and valued above all the deep affection that existed between herself and her family – especially her father. In the course of quite a short time, these differences became exaggerated and entrenched, so that when disagreements occurred, truces became impossible. The attachment that had sustained their union in the early months began to wither away, to be replaced by mere civility in company, and frozen silence in private.

‘Then matters came to a head. I have said that the Fairmiles were an old and respectable family, but they were almost bankrupt. In marrying Lord Tansor, Miss Fairmile had believed that an end would be made to her father’s desperate financial state, reasoning that, by her union with Lord Tansor, the Fairmiles would be welcomed into the wider dynastic embrace of the Duports. But she was soon disappointed. Instead of paying off Sir Robert’s debts, as she had expected, Lord Tansor simply bought out the mortgages on his father-in-law’s house and grounds at Church Langton, and set the premiums at a lower level than before; but when Sir Robert was unable to honour even these reduced payments, his Lordship took the only course of action a man of business can take, and duly foreclosed on the loan. Lady Tansor was outraged; she cajoled, she pleaded, she threatened to leave, she wheedled – all to no avail. His Lordship could make no exception to the inviolable principles that governed his business dealings. Sir Robert had defaulted. Lord Tansor’s firm principle in such cases was to foreclose. He pointed out that he had already been generous in allowing his father-in-law a year to put his affairs in order, something that he would not ordinarily have contemplated. But an end must be made. The loan must be called in.

‘The business finished Sir Robert, who was forced to sell the house in which he had been born, along with the last small holdings of land he had retained, and move to cramped accommodation in Taunton, leaving nothing to pass onto his only son. The old man died not long afterwards, a broken and bitter man.

‘Her Ladyship, as I have indicated, adored her father. She had behaved in all things just as her husband had wished; now she had asked him to make this one exception to his rules of business, and he had refused her. She felt powerless, and trapped by the inequality of her position. However, soon afterwards, she discovered that she was with child; and this, in the extremity of her grief and rage, gave her a weapon that she could not resist using against her husband. She therefore resolved, first, to keep Lord Tansor in ignorance of her condition, and then, to compound her revenge in the most terrible fashion: to conspire with her closest friend that the latter should bring the child up as her own.’

I objected that the punishment still appeared out of all proportion to the crime.

‘Well, you may think so,’ Mr Tredgold replied. ‘But when a passionate nature is thwarted in its desires, the consequences can be extreme. Lady Tansor had asked this one thing of her husband. It would have been a small concession to marital harmony, for a man of his wealth, to have written off the debt, for his wife’s sake. But he would not do this for her – he would not even consider it, and he managed only a conventional show of remorse when Sir Robert Fairmile died. That, perhaps, was the final straw.’

At the foot of a short flight of steps, we stopped for a moment to allow Mr Tredgold to catch his breath.

‘So it was simple revenge then?’ I asked.

‘Revenge? Yes, but not simple. On her marriage, Lady Tansor had suppressed what might be described as somewhat Jacobinical views, for the sake of her family. She told me this herself, adding that she wished her child to escape what she called the curse of inherited wealth and privilege, which had trampled so implacably on the claims of common human feeling and family connexion. It was a fanciful notion, no doubt, but it was real enough to her, who had seen her adored father hurried to his grave by the holder of one of the most ancient peerages in England, and for no other reason than the maintenance of his public position. She told me that she did not wish her child to become like his father – and who can deny that she succeeded? Yet a beneficial outcome in that respect is no justification for what she did, and what I helped her to do. She knew that she had done wrong, but it was not in her nature to undo it, though she tried to make amends to her husband in the only way she could – by subsequently giving him the heir that he so desired. But, alas, he, too, was to be taken from him, as you know.’