Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

Everything about him proclaimed Josiah Pluckrose to be guilty of the remorseless murder of his poor wife following some trivial domestic disagreement; and yet, because of me, he had cheated the bells of St Sepulchre’s, *and lived to murder again. After his acquittal, he had returned to his house in Weymouth-street, in defiance of his neighbours and opinion generally, as if nothing had happened. Of course, Mr Tredgold had never expressed any wish to know how the trick had been done. I had seen the excellent M. Robert-Houdin †perform in Paris, and had witnessed for myself the effect of the art of illusion, when practised by a master, on those who wish to believe in the impossible. I could not use mirrors, or the power of electricity, to produce the impression of guilt that would condemn an innocent man, and deny Calcraft, ‡or some other nubbing cove, §the pleasure of stretching Pluckrose’s miserable neck. Nevertheless, I had other well-tried means at my disposal, just as productive of complete persuasion in my audience: documents, apparently in his own hand, setting forth the unfortunate dupe’s guilty association with Mrs Agnes Pluckrose, née Baker; and witnesses – some ready to swear to the furious temper of the man, and the fact of his being in the house on the fateful afternoon, and others to affirm the presence of Pluckrose in a public-house in Shadwell at the time of the murder. Having done their work, the witnesses – carefully chosen, exhaustively coached, and extremely well paid – had then sunk back into the deeps of London.

And so it was that, following the conclusion of a new investigation, Mr William Cracknell, chemist’s assistant, of Bedford-row, Bloomsbury, stepped out of the Debtors’ Door at Newgate, one cold December morning, to keep his appointment with Mr Calcraft, whilst Josiah Pluckrose, swinging the heavy silver-headed stick with which he had smashed his poor wife’s skull, and wearing the boots that had crushed her ribs as she lay dying, sauntered forth that same morning with a view to taking the air on Hampstead-heath. After the trial, I was not in the least inclined to congratulate myself on my triumph, and neither I nor Mr Tredgold felt any satisfaction that our client had gone free. And so Pluckrose had been forgotten.

After Mary had gone, and I was walking about the stable-yard, I could not help recalling the evidence of Mr Henry Whitmore, surgeon and apothecary of Coldbath-square, Clerkenwell, concerning the violence done to the person of Agnes Pluckrose. Overcome by rage, I left the yard in a kind of daze, walking at a furious pace out into the darkness.

Mary’s tale of her sister’s seduction by this brute had moved me more than I would have thought possible. But there was more than Pluckrose to consider; there was Phoebus Daunt – again! He seemed to haunt me at every turn, a jarring, discordant basso continuo to my life. I was completely baffled by the association revealed by Mary. What common interest, I wondered in bewilderment, could possibly unite this murderer and the son of the Rector of Evenwood?

After wandering aimlessly in this morbid state for an hour or more through the Park, I found myself at the foot of a steep track that wound its way up to the Temple of the Winds. Feeling disinclined to go back to the Dower House just yet, I followed the track up the artificial mound on which the Temple was built, eventually reaching a short flight of steps leading up to a terrace. Here I turned for a moment to look back across the Park to the twinkling lights of the great house.

I was about to make my way back down the steps when I noticed that the door of the Temple’s North Portico was open. On an impulse, I decided to look inside.

The building – partly modelled, like the more famous version at Castle Howard, on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in Vicenza – was in the form of a domed cube, with four glazed porticos set at each point of the compass. *The interior, which, even in the deepening gloom, I could see was decorated in superb scagliola work, smelled of damp and decay, and as I entered I could feel myself treading on fragments of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. In the midst of the space stood a round marble-topped table, and two wrought-iron chairs; a third chair lay on its back some distance away. On the table stood a stub of candle in a pewter holder.

I placed my hat and stick on the table, took out a lucifer *from my waistcoat pocket, and proceeded to light what remained of the candle, followed by a cigar to cheer my dismal and unsettled mood. The flickering light revealed the quality of the Temple’s internal decoration, though it was plain that the place had been in a state of disrepair for some years. Several of the panes in the glazed door of the North Portico were smashed – fragments of dirty glass still littered the floor – and black dust-filled nets of spiders’ webs, undulating eerily in the dank air, hung all about like discarded grave-clothes.

Leaving the candle on the table, I walked over to the upturned chair and set it back on its feet. As I was doing so, I noticed a small dark form on the floor, just discernible amongst the shadows cast by the candle stub. My curiosity aroused, I kneeled down.

It was a blackbird – the poor creature must have flown in through the open door of the Temple, and dashed itself against a large gilt-framed looking-glass, cracked and mottled, that hung on the wall above where it now lay. Its wings were outstretched, as though frozen in flight. From one staring but sightless eye flowed a jagged stream of viscous black liquid, staining the dusty floor; the other eye was closed in peaceful death.

It somehow affronted me that it lay here, in this gloomy place, in plain sight, away from the warm enshrouding earth. Gently, I picked the bird up by the tip of one wing, with the intention of conveying it solemnly to some suitable resting-place outside the Temple. But the act of lifting it up from the dirty floor revealed something curious.

Beneath it, previously hidden by one of the bird’s outstretched wings, was a small piece of battered brown leather, some three inches square, with a hole punched in one corner. I took my discovery over to the candle, now nearly burned down, and saw then what it was – a label, apparently, bearing a name in faded gold letters: ‘J. Earl.’

I recognized the name, but could not for the moment recall how or where I had heard it. It seemed strangely imperative, however, to bring its significance to mind, and so I stood for a minute or more in some perplexity, racking my brains for a clue as to its associations.

At length, I seemed to hear the voice of Mrs Rowthorn, Mr Carteret’s housekeeper. Something that she had said – a trivial fact that I had half heard, and then forgotten. But nothing is ever really forgotten, and slowly the vaults of memory began to open and yield up their dead.

‘I found him an old leather bag of Mr Earl’s – who used to be his Lordship’s gamekeeper – that has been hanging on the back of the pantry door these two years …’

This rough square of leather that I now held in my hand had been attached to Mr Carteret’s bag. I was sure of it. From this deduction quickly followed another: the bag itself must surely have been here, in the Temple of the Winds. But that posed a problem. Had Mr Carteret been here also? It seemed impossible. The testimonies of those who had found him made it certain that he had been attacked soon after he entered the Park through the Western Gates. No, he had not come to the Temple, but the bag had certainly been here.

I looked about me, and began to picture what might have happened. A chair had been overturned, and this piece of leather had somehow become separated from the bag. And then – the following day, perhaps – a bird had flown into the Temple and, in its fear and turmoil, had mistaken a dirty reflection of the outside world for the living freedom of the open sky, dashed itself against the looking-glass, and fallen to the ground, just where the piece of leather lay. And there the bird, and the object beneath it, might have stayed, perhaps for weeks or months, perhaps for years, had I not, on a whim, and in a fury at Mary’s story of the murderous villain Pluckrose, taken the path up to the Temple of the Winds.