Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

Gradually, a story began to emerge from the shadows; or, rather, the fragmentary and incomplete elements of a story. As if extracting broken shards from the imprisoning earth, I painstakingly gathered the fragments together, and laid them out, piece by piece, seeking the linking pattern, the design that would bring the whole into view.

One word gave me the vital clue. One word. The name of a place that echoed faintly in my memory at first, but which began to ring out more clearly, bringing with it two seemingly unconnected images: one of a lady in grey silk; the other of a bag, an ordinary valise, carrying a label with the owner’s name and address written on it.

Evenwood. In a journal entry of July 1820, my mother – inadvertently, I supposed – had written out the name in full. Prior to this entry, and subsequently, it appeared simply as ‘E—’ and, in this form, I had stupidly failed to identify it. But once I had this name, links began to form: Miss Lamb had lived at Evenwood; Phoebus Daunt had come from a place with the same name. But was there perhaps more than one Evenwood? My mother had amassed a large working library, to assist her in her work, and Bell’s Gazetteer and Cobbett’s Dictionary * quickly supplied the answer. No, there was only one: Northamptonshire; Easton, four miles; Peterborough, twelve miles; Evenwood Park – the seat of Julius Verney Duport, 25th Baron Tansor.

That first night at Eton, in Long Chamber, I had asked Daunt whether he knew Miss Lamb, and, later, he had enquired whether I had ever been to Evenwood. We had both answered in the negative, and I had thought no more about the coincidence. But, as I recalled it for the first time in fifteen years, his question seemed odd; or, rather, the guarded, almost suspicious tone in which it had been posed now struck me as being significant in some way. Yet what could Daunt have to do with all this?

I next considered the identity of ‘L’, the character at the centre of the mystery. Could it be Miss Lamb? For days I searched through piles of letters and other documents, in an attempt to establish that her Christian name, like her surname, began with the letter ‘L’; but, to my amazement, I could find not a single piece of correspondence from this person, nor, indeed, any mention of her. Yet this lady had visited us as my mother’s friend, and, as I thought, had showed extraordinary generosity towards me.

Frustrated and perplexed, I had retreated to the one certainty that I had: the place that connected Miss Lamb, Phoebus Daunt, and my mother. Taking down the 1830 edition of Burke’s Heraldic Dictionary, * I turned to the epitome of the Tansor Barony:The Baron Tansor (Julius Verney Duport), of Evenwood Park, co. Northampton in England, b. 15 Oct., 1790, s. his father Frederic James Duport 1814 as 25th holder of the title; educ . Eton Coll., Trinity Coll., Cambridge; m. 1stly, 5 Dec., 1817, Laura Rose Fairmile (who d. 8 Feb., 1824), only dau. of Sir Robert Fairmile, of Langton Court, Taunton, Somerset, and had issue,Henry Hereward, b. 17 Nov., 1822, and d. 21 Nov., 1829. He m . 2ndly, 16 May, 1827, Hester Mary Trevalyn, 2nd dau. of John David Trevalyn, of Ford Hill, Ardingly, Sussex …

I read the paragraph over again, dwelling particularly on Lord Tansor’s first wife, the daughter of Sir Robert Fairmile, of Langton Court. Now, this latter was a name I knew well: he had been the employer of Mr Byam More, my mother’s uncle and my former trustee. My heart began to beat a little faster as I wrote down the date of the first Lady Tansor’s death. Then, opening one of the little black volumes, I turned to the entry dated the 11th of February 1824, which I now read for the first time:A letter from Miss E telling me that the end came on Friday evening. A light has passed from the world, and from my life, and I must now walk on through the twilight of my days until I too am called. In her letters L had seemed distracted and wildered of late, and I had begun to fear for her mind. But Miss E says the end was peaceful, with no preceding agonies, for which comfort I thank God. I had not seen her since she came here with the box for little E and to tell me what arrangements she had prepared for the time he should go to school. She was much changed, and I almost wept to see her thin face and hands. I remember E was playing at her feet all the time she was here, and oh! the pitiful look in her sweet eyes! He is such a fine, spirited young fellow, any mother would be proud of him. But she knew he would never know her, or that she had given him life, and it was a deadly pain to her. I marvelled at the persistence of her will, and told her so; for even at that moment, if she had been resolved at last to undo all that had been done, I would have surrendered him, though I love him like my own. But L was as fixed in her determination, though by now dreadfully oppressed by it, as she had been when she first recruited me to her cause, and I saw that nothing would ever move her. ‘He is yours now,’ she said softly before she left, and I wept to hear it. If she had been unfaithful to her marriage vows, then the case would perhaps be a little less dreadful. But he was lawfully conceived, and his father must now live out his days in ignorance of his son’s existence. She came to feel most keenly the wrong that she has done him; but nothing would persuade her to undo that wrong. Such is the curse of a passionate nature.We embraced and I walked with her up the path to where her carriage was waiting, with Miss E inside, beneath the chestnut-tree by the gate. I watched them descend the hill from the cliff-top to the village. Almost at the bottom, just as the carriage was turning through the bend in the road, a limp black-gloved hand appeared out of the window and waved a forlorn farewell. I shall never see that hand again. I go now to pray for her soul, that she may find, in eternity, the peace that her restless and impetuous heart was denied on this earth.

‘Miss E’ had been mentioned before, but I gave no thought to her; for it had quickly become apparent that references to ‘L’ began to decrease in succeeding entries until, in April 1824, they ceased altogether. There could be no doubt: Laura Duport, Lady Tansor, was ‘L’.

Yet solving this little puzzle had revealed an altogether greater mystery, the core of which seemed to be alluded to in this extraordinary passage, which fairly floored me when I first read it. I will not weary you further with how I came, by dint of much labour, to understand the implications of what my mother had written, and the identity of the person referred to as ‘little E’. When I did, finally, fit the last fragment of the truth into place, what did I feel? A hideous sense of desolation. An agony too deep for tears. I sat – for how long? An hour? Two hours? – staring out of the window towards the chestnut-tree by the gate, and beyond towards the restless sea. At last, with darkness falling, I rose and made my way down to the beach, where I stood at the water’s edge, and wept until I could weep no more.

Miss Lamb had never existed, other than as a name assumed by Lady Tansor when she visited us – my mother, and I. Now I knew why the lady in grey had looked upon me with such sadness as I had sat and played at her feet; why she had stroked my cheek so tenderly; why she had given me the box of sovereigns on my twelfth birthday; and why I had been sent to Eton at her behest. She had done these things because she was the woman who had given me life. Lady Tansor was my mother.

‘He is yours now.’ Disbelief quickly changed to angry incomprehension. Riddle me this: the mother I had loved was not my mother; my real mother had abandoned me; and yet it seemed that both had loved me. Whose child, then, was I? How my head ached in trying to disentangle it all!