Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

‘It is rather close in here, Mr Glapthorn. Shall we walk?’

We left the din and smoke of the tap-room and proceeded over the Town Bridge and up towards the soaring spire of St Mary’s Church, which looked back from atop its little hill towards the River Welland. Mr Carteret set a brisk pace, turning round every now and again as if he expected to see someone following close behind. We had not gone far when it began to rain hard again. He clapped me on the shoulder, and hurried me up the remaining part of the hill.

‘Here,’ he said.

Quickly ascending a short but steep flight of steps, we ran through a cramped little graveyard into the porch of the church, to take shelter from the rapidly intensifying downpour.

Seating himself on one of the rough stone benches hewn out of the inside walls on either side, he signalled to me to take my place opposite. The floor of the porch was still muddied over following a recent interment – the newly filled grave was just within my view beyond the porch opening – and our shelter was lit by two Gothic windows; but they were unglazed and the rain, blown in by strong gusts of wind, soon began to pound against the back of my coat. Mr Carteret, however, seemed not to notice the discomfort, and sat smiling at me, his round hands gripping his parted knees, and looking as settled and comfortable as if he had been sitting before a blazing fire.

‘May I ask, Mr Glapthorn,’ he began, leaning forward a little across the wet and muddy flagstones, ‘how my letter was received in Paternoster-row?’

‘Mr Tredgold was, of course, concerned by its implications.’

He did not reply immediately, and I noticed for the first time a look of weariness in his large round eyes, which regarded me intently from behind his thick round spectacles.

‘You come here, Mr Glapthorn, as I understand, with the full authority and confidence of Mr Christopher Tredgold, whom I have had the pleasure of knowing these many years past. I am perfectly happy, as a consequence, to put my complete trust in Mr Tredgold’s choice of a surrogate.’

I said that I appreciated his sentiments, and assured him that I had been charged with no other task than to listen, note, and report back to my principal. He nodded approvingly, but said nothing; and so we sat in silence for some moments.

‘Your letter mentioned a discovery,’ I ventured at last.

‘A discovery? Yes, certainly.’

‘I am at your service, sir, should you wish to inform me further concerning its nature.’ I took out my note-book and a pencil, and regarded him expectantly.

‘Very well,’ he said; whereupon he leaned back a little and began to tell me something of his history.

‘I was first employed,’ he said, ‘by my cousin, Lord Tansor, as his confidential private secretary over thirty years ago. My dear and much-lamented mother was alive then, but my father had recently died. A good man, but I fear an irresponsible one, like his father before him. He left us with debt and discredit, the consequences of foolish and reckless investments in concerns about which he knew nothing.

‘After my father’s death, Lord Tansor was kind enough to allow my late wife and me, together with my mother, to take up residence with his step-mother in the Dower House at Evenwood, which he refurbished at his own expense. He also offered me employment as his secretary.

‘For my cousin’s treatment of me, when my brother and I were left almost destitute, I shall always feel the deepest gratitude. While I live as his employee, I intend to serve him as well as I can, with no other end in view than to earn my salary to the best of my ability.

‘Mr Tredgold will, I’m sure, have told you that Lord Tansor has no heir. His only son, Henry Hereward, died when still quite a boy, not long after his seventh birthday. The shock to my cousin was beyond words, for he loved the child to excess. The loss of his son was terrible enough; the loss of his only direct heir compounded his grief dreadfully.

‘The continuation of his line has been the dominant – I may say the animating – principle of my cousin’s life. Nothing else matters to him. He had received much from his father, who had received much from his father before him; and Lord Tansor intended that his son should receive much from him, in a cycle of giving and receiving, the maintenance of which he held to be a trust and duty of the highest order.

‘But when that cycle was broken – when the golden chain was snapped, so to speak – the effect on him was almost catastrophic, and for several weeks after the death of Henry Hereward he locked himself away, refusing to see anyone, hardly eating, and coming out only at night to wander the rooms and corridors of Evenwood like some tormented spirit.

‘Gradually, he recovered himself. His dear son was gone, but time, he realized, was still on his side and could yet furnish him with an heir, for he was only then in his thirty-ninth year.

‘This, I’m sure, will all be familiar to you, Mr Glapthorn, but you must hear it all again from me for this reason. I do not look upon his Lordship as most people do, who see him as cold and aloof, concerned only with his own affairs. I know he has a heart, a feeling heart, a generous heart even, though it has only been revealed in extremis . It is there, nonetheless.’

I let him talk on, and still the rain came down.

By and by he said: ‘It does not improve, and we are getting a little wet here. Let us walk in.’ So we stood up and moved towards the great black studded door of the church, only to find it was shut fast.

‘Oh well,’ he sighed, ‘we must stay where we are.’

‘A metaphor of Fate, perhaps,’ said I.

He smiled as he took his seat again, this time tucking himself tightly into the corner of the porch away from the window, beneath an already blackening memorial tablet erected to Thomas Stevenson and his wife Margaret, deceased three months apart (also their daughter Margaret, ob. 1827, aet. 17).

‘I knew Tom Stevenson,’ he said, observing me looking up at the memorial. ‘His poor daughter drowned, down by the bridge there.’

He was silent for a moment.

‘I shared Lord Tansor’s sorrow, you see, for our first-born child had been taken from us the year before poor Henry Hereward. Drowned, if you will believe it, like Tom Stevenson’s girl, but in the Evenbrook, which runs through Evenwood Park. She was walking along the top of the carriage-road bridge, in the way that children love to do. Her nursemaid had turned back to retrieve something she had dropped. All over in a moment. Six years old. Just six.’ He sighed, and leaned his round head back against the cold stone. ‘The ever-flowing stream that took her has gone to its own unknown ends. But the heart’s lacerations, Mr Glapthorn: they remain.’

He gave another deep sigh, and then continued.

‘The death of a child, Mr Glapthorn, is the saddest thing. Tom Stevenson was mercifully spared knowledge of his poor daughter’s fate – he predeceased her, as you see from the dates. But it was not given to Lord Tansor to be so spared, nor to me. We both suffered the keenest pangs of grief and loss. Prince or pauper, all of us must endure such trials alone. In this, Lord Tansor was – is – no different to you or I, or to any other human soul. He occupies a privileged station in life, but there are burdens, too, mighty ones. But I expect you are not persuaded. Perhaps you perceive the servility of the old retainer in me?’

I said that I was very far from possessing the natural temperament of the sans culotte, * and that I was quite happy for Lord Tansor to enjoy what had been given to him by a kind Fate.

‘Well, we can agree on that,’ said Mr Carteret, smiling. ‘These are democratic and progressive times, I know – my daughter constantly tells me so.’ He sighed. ‘Lord Tansor does not see it – I mean the inevitability of it all, that it will all end one day, which is perhaps not too far distant. He believes in a perpetual, self-sustaining order. It is not hubris, you know, but a kind of tragic innocence.’