Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seems that I have been very nicely skewered. I congratulate you both.’

‘I warned you, when we first met, not to underestimate Phoebus; and then I warned you again. But you would not listen. You thought you could outwit him; but you can’t. He knows all about you – everything. He is the cleverest man I know. No one will ever get the better of him.’ She gave me an arch smile. ‘Don’t you wonder that I’m not afraid of you?’

‘I will not harm you.’

‘No, I don’t believe you will. Because you love me still, don’t you?’ I did not answer. I had nothing left to say to her. She continued to speak, but I was barely listening. Somewhere, a half-formed thought was beginning to crawl out of the darkness into which my mind had been plunged. It grew stronger and more distinct, until at last it filled my mind to overflowing, and I could think of nothing else.

‘Edward! Edward!’

Slowly I focused my attention on her; but I felt nothing. Yet one question remained.

‘Why did you do this? Once my identity had been proved, I could have offered you everything Daunt could give you – and more.’

‘Dear Edward! Have you not been listening? I love him! I love him!’

I had no reply to make; for I, too, knew what it was to love. I would have gone to the flames for her, suffered any torment for her sweet sake. How, then, could I blame her, bitter though her betrayal was, for doing these things, when she did them for love?

In a daze, I reached for my hat. She said nothing, but watched closely as I picked up my volume of Donne and walked to the door. As I was unlocking it, my eye was caught by an open box of cigars on a nearby table. With cold satisfaction, I noted the maker’s name: Ramón Allones.

Opening the door, I walked out into the corridor.

I did not look back.

I remember little of the journey home, only tumbled impressions of stone towers and stars and waving trees, and the sound of water, and of walking up a long dark hill; and then of a cold journey to Peterborough, followed by lights and noise and interrupted dreams; of emerging at last into the roar and smoke of London, and of finally dragging myself up the stairs to my rooms.

I passed a fearful night contemplating the ruin of my great project. The gates of Paradise had been closed upon me, and would never be opened again. I had been played with infinite skill, until the hook had pierced my gullet; and now I must live out my life drained of all hope, tormented night and day by the loss of my true self, and of her – so beautiful, so treacherous! – whom I would love to my last breath. I have been betrayed, too, it seems, by the Iron Master. Another place has been prepared for me – not Evenwood, the dream-palace of my childhood fancies, but some modest dwelling amongst other modest dwellings, where I shall live and die, unnoticed and unremembered, in perpetual exile from the life that should have been mine.

But I shall not die unavenged.

*[‘The day of wrath’. Ed. ]

44

Dictum, factum *

For a week after returning from Evenwood I confined myself to my rooms, eating little, and sleeping less.

A note came from Le Grice proposing supper, but I pleaded indisposition; another arrived from Bella, asking why I had not called at Blithe Lodge for so long, to which I replied that I had been out of town on urgent business for Mr Tredgold but would call the following week. When Mrs Grainger came to sweep my floor and clean the grate, I told her that I had no need of her, gave her ten shillings, and asked her to go home. I had no desire to see another human face, and no wish to do anything but reflect over and over again on my ruination, and the means by which it had been accomplished. After so much labour, to have lost everything so easily! The deceiver well and truly deceived! And then, whenever I closed my eyes, night or day, I experienced a recurring vision of her room at Evenwood just as it had been on the day of my betrayal, and of her face pressed against the window-pane, and the look she wore as she had traced the letters of his name on the glass. Where was she now? What was she doing? Was he with her – kissing her, whispering into her ear, making her sigh with delight? Were they congratulating themselves once again on their triumph? Thus I added my own exquisite torments to those I was already suffering.

On the seventh day, as I was sitting in my arm-chair, idly examining the rosewood box in which my mother had hidden the documents that would have undone the wrong she did to me, I looked about me and saw what I had come to.

Was this my kingdom? Were these my sole possessions? This narrow panelled chamber, with its faded Turkey rug laid over bare boards; this blackened grate, these grimy windows; this great work-table on which my mother wrote her life away, and on which I, too, had laboured so futilely; these little reminders of happier times – the clock from my mother’s bedroom, a watercolour of the house in Church Langton where she was born that used to hang in the hall at Sandchurch, a print of School Yard at Eton? Were these things my inheritance? Poor enough, to be sure, even with the addition of the few pounds that I had left at Coutts & Co., and my modest collection of books. But it did not signify. I had no heir; nor would I ever have one. I smiled to think that Mr Tredgold and I were united in our fates: both chained to the memory of a love lost for ever; both incapable of loving again.

I walked over and pulled back the piece of patched velvet curtain behind which my photographic equipment lay unused and gathering dust. Propped up on a shelf was a single view of Evenwood, the only exposure that I had not considered good enough to put into the album that I had made up for Lord Tansor back in the summer of 1850.

It had been taken within the walled area of the grounds enclosing the fish-pond, looking across the black water to the South Front of the house. The building lay in deep shadow, with only patches here and there of pale sunlit stone. I must have knocked the camera, for one of the great cupola-topped towers was out of focus; but though the execution had been flawed, the composition, and the mood it evoked, was striking. I took it down and gazed at it. But the longer I gazed, the more furious I became that I had been shut out for ever from this wonderful place, the home of my ancestors, by a worthless usurper. I was a Duport; he was a nonentity, an atom, a nullity. How could such a nothing presume to take that ancient name as his own? He could not. He would not.

And then, with my rage, came a determination to hazard one final throw of the dice. I would go to Evenwood once again, though it might be for the last time. I would present myself to Lord Tansor, telling him to his face the truth that had been kept from him for over thirty years. I had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Eye to eye, man to man, surely he would now recognize me as his own?

I was seized by this new resolve, desperate though it might be, and instantly leaped to my feet to begin my preparations. Then I ran down the wooden stairs, boots clattering, past Fordyce Jukes’s door, and out into the world for the first time in a week.

It was a raw, dull day, and a flat and depressing sky hung over the city. I pushed through the morning crowds and was soon at the terminus, where I took my seat once more in the train that had so often carried me north, to Evenwood.

Once set down in the market-square at Easton by the Peterborough coach, I entered the Duport Arms to take some refreshment before commencing my walk to the great house. As I sat drinking my gin-and-water, served by my old friend, the sullen waiter Groves, who had been the unwitting means by which my identity had been confirmed to Mrs Daunt and her son, the thought struck me that Lord Tansor might not be in residence at Evenwood; that he might be in town, or away somewhere else; and then I grew angry at my impetuosity. To come all this way without establishing this one essential fact only demonstrated to me that I was not myself, and that I must take better care of matters in future. But then I saw that I must take whatever came; and so I drank back my gin, buttoned up my great-coat, and set off down the hill, under a creaking canopy of bare branches, towards Evenwood.