Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

Of course it had been no whim. I believed then that I was in the Iron Master’s hands, and that he had pulled me hither for the deliberate purpose of finding this thing. But what did it signify? I sat down at the table, dropped my still-smoking cigar on the floor, and buried my head in my hands.

This much I was still absolutely sure of: Mr Carteret had died because of what he had been carrying. I was certain, too, that he had been intending to place the bag’s contents before me at our next meeting, and that he had been attacked by a single assailant who knew their worth and importance.

I began to wonder why the bag had been brought to the Temple after the attack. Had Mr Carteret’s murderer been un homme de main , *acting on someone else’s orders? Perhaps he had been instructed to bring the bag and its contents here, to the Temple, where it was to be examined by his employer. Somehow, the little leather label had become separated from the bag.

All this seemed perfectly plausible, probable even; but I could go no further. What had been carried in Mr Carteret’s bag, and the identities of both the murderer and his master, were mysteries that – as yet – I had no means of unravelling. Until more light could be shed on them, there was nothing else to do but stumble on through the darkness a little longer.

I placed the leather label in my coat pocket, and turned back towards where the dead bird still lay, intending to carry it outside, and then make my way back to the Dower House. In that instant, the guttering candle on the table finally went out and, in the sudden enveloping blackness, I was aware of another presence. There was a figure in the doorway, a dark form against the clear, star-filled sky.

She did not speak, but walked slowly towards me, a small lantern held in her left hand, until her face was close to mine, so close indeed that I could feel and smell her warm breath.

‘Good-evening, Mr Glapthorn. What on earth brings you here at this time?’

Her voice had a delicious, inviting softness about it that made my blood race with desire, but her inexpressive stare told another story. I tried to strip that gaze of its disconcerting power by looking full into her dark eyes; but I knew that I was done for. It was all over with me. A great iron door had come down, separating me from the life I had lived before. Henceforth, I knew, my heart would be hers to command, for good or ill.

‘I might wonder the same about you, Miss Carteret,’ I replied.

‘Oh, but I often come to the Temple. It was a favourite resort of my father’s. He would sometimes bring his writing-case and work here. And it was here that I last saw him alive. So, you see, I have reason enough. But what are your reasons, I wonder?’

She continued to look at me, standing stock-still in her mourning clothes; but then she smiled – a sad, child-like half-smile – and once again she uncovered, for the merest instant, a touching vulnerability.

‘Would you believe me if I said that I had no reason at all for coming here; that I had no other object in view but to take the air, and that I found myself here quite by chance?’

‘Why should I not believe you? Really, Mr Glapthorn, your conscience seems rather too eager to protest the innocence of your motives. I merely wondered what brought you here. I’m sure I did not mean to suggest that you were not perfectly entitled to prowl around this damp place in the dark if you wished to do so. You have no need to answer to me – or to anyone, I dare say.’

All this was spoken in a sweet, low, confiding tone, quite at odds with her teasing words. I said nothing in reply as she turned and walked back to the door, but picked up my hat and stick, and followed her.

She was standing on the steps leading down to a narrow terrace, below which the ground fell away steeply towards the main carriage-road. Where the track from the Temple joined the road, I could see two lights twinkling in the darkness.

‘You have not come alone, then,’ I said.

‘No, John Brine brought me up in the landau.’

She seemed suddenly disinclined to talk, and took a few more steps down towards the terrace. Then, holding her lamp up close to her face, and with a troubled expression, she turned and said: ‘My father believed that everything we do in this life will be judged in the next. Do you believe that, Mr Glapthorn? Please tell me whether you do.’

I said that I feared Mr Carteret and I would have disagreed on this point, and that I favoured a rather more fatalistic theology.

At this, her face assumed a strange look of concentration.

‘So you do not believe in the parable of the sheep and the goats? That those who do good will see Heaven, and those who do evil will burn in the eternal fire?’

‘That was what I was brought up to believe,’ I replied, ‘but as I have been deficient in perfection from an early age, it has never seemed to me a comfortable philosophy. It is so ridiculously easy, don’t you think, to fall into sin? I prefer to believe that I was predestined for grace. It accords far more closely to my own estimation of myself, and of course it relieves one of the tedious necessity of always having to do good.’

I was smiling as I said the words, for I had meant them – partly – as an attempt at levity. But she had become strangely agitated, and began to walk quickly hither and thither about the terrace, apparently talking to herself in a mumbled undertone, her little lamp swinging by her side, until at last she stopped at the top of the steps that led down to the path, and stood staring out into the darkness.

The sudden change in her manner was dramatic and alarming, and I could see no immediate reason for it. But then I concluded that the grief that she had been holding back had begun at last to assert its natural ascendancy over her spirits, through being in a place that had such strong associations with her recently deceased father. I was about to tell her, as tenderly as I could, that there was no shame in mourning her poor papa; but I had hardly stepped down to the terrace when she looked up at me and, in an anxious voice, said she must return to the Dower House, whereat she began running down the path towards where John Brine was waiting with the landau.

I was determined not to run after her, like some panting Touchstone after his Audrey, *but instead set off as coolly as I could, though with long urgent strides, following the bobbing lamp down the path. By the time I caught up with her, she was sitting back in the landau, pulling a rug across her lap.

And then, to my astonishment, she held out her hand and bestowed upon me the most delicious smile.

‘If you have quite finished taking the air, Mr Glapthorn, perhaps you would accompany me back to the Dower House. I’m sure you have walked quite far enough tonight. John, will you take us back, please.’

As we drove along, she began to speak reminiscently about her father – how he had taken her to the coronation of the present Queen, *on the day after her fourteenth birthday, and how, at Lord Tansor’s instigation, Lady Adelaide Paget, one of the train-bearers, had introduced her to the new monarch, then of course not much more than a girl herself. From this recollection she turned to Mr Carteret’s inordinate fondness for anchovies (which she could not abide), his passion for Delftware (numerous fine examples of which I had noted on display in various parts of the Dower House), and the close relationship that he had enjoyed with his mother. How or why these things were connected in her mind, I cannot say; but she continued in this frantic recollective vein, running from one hurried memory of her father’s tastes and character to another in quick succession.

I looked out to see the looming mass of the many-towered house, rearing up against the paler backdrop of the early night sky, and studded here and there with little points of light. My attention was arrested by a fleeting glimpse of the Chapel windows, a subdued flickering glow of ruby-red and azure, illuminated from within by the candles set around Mr Carteret’s coffin. In that moment, the bells of Evenwood began to toll the hour of nine, and I became aware that my companion had fallen silent. When she spoke again, her manner and tone showed clearly that her thoughts had been brought back to the contemplation of her poor father’s fate, and to the trials of the coming days.