Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

Laughter filled the room; champagne was brought in; cigarettes were lit; Miss Nancy Blake tripped to the piano-forte to extemporize, con brio , a spirited little waltz, whilst Miss Lilian Purkiss (a flame-haired Amazon) and Miss Tibby Taylor (petite, grey-eyed, and lusciously agile) cantered round and round, in and out of the furniture, giggling as they repeatedly bumped into chairs and tables. Bella, clapping her hands in time to the waltz, looked across to me from time to time, and smiled. For though, as usual, she was at the centre of the gaiety, I knew that she never forgot me; in company, she would always seek me out, or would let me know, by a loving look or by gently pressing my arm as she passed, that I was the true and only occupier of her thoughts. Even when I left that evening, she would continue to think fondly of me, and to muse on what we had done together, and what we would do when I next returned to Blithe Lodge.

But what could I offer her in return? Only neglect, inattention, and betrayal. I was a damned fool, I knew, and did not deserve the tender regard of such an excellent creature. But it was my fate, it seemed, wilfully to cast this treasure from me. She was vividly and gloriously present to my senses at that moment, there in Kitty Daley’s drawing-room. I knew that I would give her but little thought when I once again saw the face of Miss Emily Carteret, whom I loved as I could never love Bella. But I could not bear to give Bella up – not yet. The plain fact was that my affection for her had not yet been quite snuffed out, or negated, by what I felt for Miss Carteret. It remained bright and true, though overshadowed by a greater and stranger force. As I looked at her, it was brought home to me that my heart would be broken, too, if I were to turn away from her then, and for nothing gained.

After the rest of the company had departed, she came over and sat next to me, placing a jewelled hand on mine and looking smilingly into my eyes.

‘You have been quiet tonight, Eddie. Has anything happened?’ ‘No,’ I told her, running my finger-nail gently down her cheek, and then placing her hand to my lips. ‘Nothing has happened.’

*[‘Flame follows smoke’ – i.e. there is no smoke without fire (Pliny). Ed. ]

*[A mixture of opium and alcohol. Legal restrictions on the use of opium did not come into force until 1868 and at this period laudanum was widely prescribed, and widely abused. Initially a drug for the poor, laudanum became a favoured means of pain relief for the middle classes; celebrated literary users included Coleridge, De Quincey, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The novelist Wilkie Collins became virtually dependent on it and confessed that much of The Moonstone (1868) had been written under its influence. ‘Who is the man who invented laudanum?’ asks Lydia Gwilt in Collins’s Armadale (1866). ‘I thank him from the bottom of my heart.’ Ed. ]

*[Milton, Comus , in a passage describing Chastity: ‘A thousand liveried angels lackey her, / Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.’ Ed. ]

32

Non omnis moriar *

It is Thursday, the 3rd of November 1853. I have arrived back at the Town Station in Peterborough and took a coach to the Duport Arms in Easton. The town, which lies some four miles south-west of the great house belonging to the family from which this establishment takes it name, is, as far as I am aware, distinguished for nothing in particular, except for its antiquity (there has been a settlement here since the time of the Vikings), its quaint cobbled market-square, and the picturesqueness of its slate-roofed houses of mellowed limestone, many of which look out across the valley, from atop the gently sloping ridge upon which the town is built, to the village of Evenwood and the wooded boundaries of the great Park.

After I had settled myself in my room – a long low-beamed apartment overlooking the square – I opened my bag and took out a small black note-book, a remnant of my student days in Germany. Tearing out some notes that I had made on Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis , †I wrote on the new first page the words: JOURNAL OF EDWARD DUPORT, NOVEMBER MDCCCLIII. I pondered this title for some time, and decided that it looked very well. But the sensation of forming the letters of my true name for the first time had engendered a frisson that was both exhilarating and productive of a strange feeling of unease – as though, in some way that I could not comprehend, I had no right to possess what I knew to be rightfully mine.

I had decided, before leaving for Northamptonshire, that I would begin recording, in brief, the daily course of my life, partly in emulation of my foster-mother’s habit, but with the additional purpose of providing myself, and perhaps posterity, with an accurate digest of events as I embarked on what I had become convinced would be a critical phase of my great project. Enough of irresolution and fluctuation. Not only had I forgotten who I was, and what I was capable of; I had also forgotten my destiny. But now I seemed to hear the Iron Master’s hammer once more, like gathering thunder, rolling ever closer – the blows raining down faster and harder to fashion the unbreakable links, sparks flying up to the cold sky, the great chain tightening around me as I was dragged ever closer, and now more swiftly than ever, to meet the fate that he had reserved for me. For it is the afternoon of my life, and night approaches.

So I began to write in my new journal, and it is from this source that I have mainly drawn for the remainder of my confession.

Ten o’clock. The square was deserted. A thin rain had been falling for the past hour but was now pattering harder against my window, beneath which a creaking board carrying the ancient arms of my family – with the painted motto ‘FORTITUDINE VINCIMUS’ – swayed back and forth in the wind.

I took dinner in one of the public rooms, with only a sullen, lank-haired waiter for company. Self: ‘Quiet tonight.’

Waiter: ‘Just you, sir, and Mr Green, up from London like yourself.’

Self : ‘Regular?’

Waiter: ‘Sir?’

Self: ‘Mr Green: a regular here, perhaps?’ Waiter: ‘Occasional. Another glass, sir?’

Back in my room I lay down on my bed, and took out an octavo volume of Donne’s Devotions , which I had brought with me for its inclusion of the incomparable ‘Deaths Duell’ – Donne’s last sermon. The book was an old companion of mine, which I had purchased during my long sojourn on the Continent. *I contemplated the reproduction of the striking frontispiece to the 1634 edition, showing an effigy of the author in a niche wrapped in his winding sheet, and then mused for a moment on my youthful signature on the fly-leaf: ‘Edward Charles Glyver’. Edward Glyver was gone; Edward Duport was to come. But in the here and now, Edward Glapthorn fell asleep over John Donne’s great rolling periods, and woke up with a start to hear the church clock striking midnight.

I went over to the window. The square was lit by one gas-lamp on the far side. It was still raining hard. I noted a late wanderer in a long cloak and a slouch hat. My breath clouded the window-pane; when I wiped the glass clean with my sleeve, the wanderer had gone.

I laid my head back on the pillow and slept for an hour or more, but on a sudden I was clear awake. Something had roused me. I lit my candle – twenty minutes past one o’clock by my repeater. †There was no sound, except the rain against the window, and the creaking of the inn sign. Was that the sign swinging on its hinges? Or a footfall on the shrunken boards outside my door?

I sat up. There, again – and again! Not the sign swaying in the wind; but another sound. I reached for my pistol as the door handle slowly and silently turned.