Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

*[Built in 1724 for the Maids of Honour of George II’s wife, Caroline of Anspach. Ed. ]

*[The author’s narrative temporarily concludes on this page of the manuscript. The following account, transcribed in the author’s hand, has been bound in at this point. Ed. ]

DEPOSITION OF

P. CARTERET, ESQ.

Concerning the Late

Laura, Lady Tansor

I

Friday, 21st October 1853

To whom it may concern.

I, Paul Stephen Carteret, of the Dower House, Evenwood, in the County of Northamptonshire, being of sound mind and in full possession of my faculties, do hereby solemnly swear that the following deposition is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God.

I begin in this fashion because I wish to establish, from the outset, that I intend hereafter to assume the character and responsibilities of a witness to certain events, though I do not stand in any dock to deliver my evidence. Nevertheless, I beg most earnestly to be regarded as such a person by whomsoever may read this, taking my place – though in imagination only – before the bar of Blind Justice, with due solemnity, and delivering myself, as fully and as accurately as I can, of my testimony.

Crimes, like sin itself, are various both in form and in the severity of their effects; consequently, various are the punishments meted out to those who perpetrate them. But the crime I must herein expose – where does it stand amongst the divisions of wrong-doing, and what penalty does it deserve? That it was a crime, I have no doubt; but what to call it? Here lies my first difficulty.

I must leave it to sager minds than mine to deliver judgment on this point. But of this I am confident: the matter of which I shall speak was an active and considered act of moral harm against another person. And what does that signify, if not a crime? No material possessions were taken, and no blood spilled. And yet I say that it was theft – of a kind; and that it was murder – of a kind. In short, that it was a crime – of a kind.

There is a further difficulty: the perpetrator is dead, whilst the victim is ignorant of the outrage that has been visited upon him. Yet I persist in calling this a crime, and my conscience will not let me rest until I have set down the facts of the case, as far as they are known to me. I cannot yet see how it will all end; for though I know something , I do not know all. I write this, therefore, as a necessary preliminary to some future process whose outcome I cannot as yet foresee, and in which I myself may, or may not, play a part. For I believe that dangerous consequences have been set in motion by what I have uncovered, which cannot now be averted.

In four days’ time, I am engaged to meet a representative of the firm of Tredgold, Tredgold and Orr, my employer’s legal advisers. I am not acquainted with this gentleman, though I am assured he has the full trust of Mr Christopher Tredgold, whom I have known and respected, as a business correspondent and friend, these twenty-five years and more. I have undertaken to reveal in person to Mr Tredgold’s agent a matter that has given me the greatest possible concern, since making certain discoveries in the course of my work.

To set things in their proper light, I must first say something about myself and my situation.

I began my present employment, as secretary to my cousin, the 25th Baron Tansor, in February 1821. I had come down from Oxford three years earlier with little notion of what I would do in life, and for a time, I fear, idled most irresponsibly at home.

We lived then – my father and mother and I, my elder brother having by then secured a diplomatic position abroad – in a good deal of comfort, just across the river from Evenwood, at Ashby St John, in a fine old house that had been purchased by my paternal greatgrandfather, the founder of the family’s prosperity. But, as the younger son, I could not remain in a state of dependency on my father indefinitely; and, besides, I wished to marry – wished very much to marry – the eldest daughter of one of our neighbours, Miss Mariana Hunt-Graham. And so I resolved at last, after a little travelling, to follow my elder brother Lawrence into the Foreign Service, having at my disposal, besides a respectable degree and the good offices of my brother, a powerful recommendation from my cousin, Lord Tansor, to the then Foreign Secretary. *On the strength of this resolve, my father – albeit reluctantly – agreed to my proposing to Miss Hunt-Graham, and to providing us with a small allowance until I had established myself in my new career. She accepted me, and we were married in December 1820, on a day that I shall always regard as one of the happiest of my life.

But, within a month of my marriage, my father was taken ill and died; and with his death came ruin. Unknown to us all, even to my mother, the former Sophia Duport, he had committed all his capital to ruinous speculations, had borrowed most injudiciously, and, as a consequence, left us almost destitute. The house, of course, had to be sold, along with my father’s prized collection of Roman coins; and there was no question now that my new wife and I could make a new life for ourselves in London. My poor mother suffered greatly with the shame of it all, and if it had not been for the generosity of her noble nephew, in immediately offering me a position as his private secretary, together with accommodation for us all with his stepmother in the Dower House at Evenwood, I do not well know what we should have done. I owe him everything.

At the time that I took up my employment, my cousin was married to his first wife, Laura, Lady Tansor, whose people, like my father’s, were from the West Country. There had recently been a rift between Lord and Lady Tansor, apparently now healed, during which her Ladyship had left her husband to spend over a year in France. She had returned from the Continent in late September 1820, a changed woman.

I cannot think of her Ladyship without affection. It is impossible. I acknowledge that her character was flawed, in many ways; but when I first knew her, in the early years of her marriage to my cousin, she seemed to my impressionable mind to be like Spenser’s Cyprian goddess, ‘newly borne of th’ Oceans fruitfull froth’. *I was already in love with Miss Hunt-Graham, and had eyes for no one else; but I was flesh and blood, and no young man so composed could fail to admire Lady Tansor. She was all beauty, all grace, all spirit; lively, amusing, accomplished in so many ways; a soul, as I may say, so fully alive that it made those around her seem like dumb automata. The contrast with my cousin, her husband, could not have been greater, for he was by nature grave and reserved, and in every way the opposite of his vivacious wife; yet, for a time, they had seemed curiously suited to each other; each, as it were, neutralizing the excesses of the other’s temperament.

I had almost daily opportunity to observe my cousin and his wife after the latter’s return from France. I had been given a work-room adjoining the Library at Evenwood, on the ground floor of what is called Hamnet’s Tower, †the upper storey of which comprised the Muniments Room, containing legal documents, accounts, estate and private correspondence, inventories, and so forth, relating to the Duport family, and dating to the time of the 1st Baron Tansor in the thirteenth century. To this work-room I would come every day to undertake my duties, which soon also began to encompass general stewardship of the Library – then uncatalogued – after I evinced an informed interest in the manuscript books, stored in the Muniments Room, which had been collected by our grandfather.