After taking up residence in Temple-street, and commencing my employment at Tredgolds, my photographic ambitions had languished for a while, though I continued to correspond with Mr Talbot. But, once settled, I constructed a little dark-room within a curtained-off s.p.a.ce in my sitting-room. Here also I kept my cameras (recently purchased from Horne and Thornethwaite),1 along with my lamps, gauze, pans and bowls, trays and soft brushes, fixing and developing solutions, beakers, gla.s.ses, quires of paper, syringes and dippers, and all the other necessary paraphernalia of the art. I worked hard to familiarize myself with the necessary chemical and technical processes, and on summer evenings would take my camera down to the river, or to picturesque corners of the nearby Inns of Court, to practise my compositional techniques. In this way, I began to build up my experience and knowledge, as well as ama.s.sing a good many examples of my own photographic work.
The satisfaction of close and concentrated observation; the need to observe minute gradations of light and shadow and to select the correct angle and elevation; the patient scrutiny of backdrop and setting these things I found gave me intense fulfilment, and transported me to another realm, far away from my often sordid duties at Tredgolds. My princ.i.p.al partiality, artistically speaking, the seed planted by seeing a photogenic drawing Mr Talbot had made of Lac.o.c.k Abbey, was to capture the essence of place. London offered such a variety of subjects ancient palaces, domestic dwellings of every type and age, the river and its bridges, great public buildings that I soon developed a keen eye for architectural line and form, shadow and sky, texture and profile.
One Sunday, in June, 1851, feeling I had attained to a good level of competence, I decided I would show Mr Tredgold some examples of my photographic work.
"These are really excellent, Edward," he said, turning over a number of mounted prints I had made of Pump-court and of Sir Ephraim Gadd"s chambers in King"s Bench-walk. "You have an exceptional eye. Quite exceptional." He suddenly looked up, as if struck by a thought. "Do you know, I think I could secure a commission for you. What would you say to that?"
I replied, of course, that I would be very happy for him to do so.
"Excellent. I am obliged to pay a visit to an important client next week, and, seeing what you have done here, it occurs to me that this gentleman might wish to commission some photographic representations of his country property, to provide an indelible record for posterity. The property in question would certainly afford the most ravishing possibilities for your camera."
"Then I shall be even more willing to agree to the proposal. Where is the property?"
"Evenwood, in Northamptonshire. The home of our most important client, Lord Tansor."
Whether Mr Tredgold saw my surprise, I cannot say. He was beaming at me, in his usual way, but his eyes had a guarded look about them, as if in antic.i.p.ation of some disagreeable response. He cleared his throat.
"I thought," he went on, "that you might also be curious to see the former home of Lady Tansor I allude of course to her friendship with your last employer"s late mother, Mrs Simona Glyver. But if this proposal is against your inclinations . . ."
I raised my hand.
"By no means. I can a.s.sure you I have no objections at all to such an expedition."
"Good. Then it is settled. I shall write to Lord Tansor immediately."
How could I possibly have refused to go along with Mr Tredgold"s advent.i.tious proposal, when Evenwood was the one place on earth I wished to see? I was already familiar, from various published accounts, with the history of the great house, the disposition of the buildings, and the topography of the extensive Park. Now I had been given the opportunity to experience, in my waking being, what I had so often fashioned in imagination.
Since commencing my employment at Tredgolds, I had made little progress in my pursuit of some piece of objective evidence that would confirm what I had read in my mother"s journals. I had suggestions and hints strong and, to me, compelling testimony to the truth concerning my birth; but they were not indubitable, and shed no light on the causes of the conspiracy between my mother and Lord Tansor"s first wife, or on how their plan had been accomplished. By now I had read every word of my mother"s journals several times over, as well as making copious notes on them, and had begun to re-examine and index every sc.r.a.p of paper she had left behind, from bills and receipts to letters and lists (my mother, I discovered, had been an inveterate list-maker: there were scores of them). I hoped to find some fragment of the truth that I might have overlooked; but it was becoming clear to me that little more could be gleaned from the doc.u.ments in my possession, and that I would achieve nothing by remaining in my rooms and brooding on my lost inheritance. If that inheritance was to be recovered, I must begin to widen my view; and what better way to start than by seeing my ancestral home for myself?
A few days later, Mr Tredgold informed me that Lord Tansor was happy for me to accompany him to Evenwood, where I would be given liberty to roam as I pleased. Next morning, both of us relieved to be escaping the heat and dust of London, we took the train northwards to Peterborough.
Once we had boarded our train, Mr Tredgold and I immediately fell into our customary bookish talk, which we kept up all the way to Peterborough, despite several attempts on my part to encourage my employer to speak of Evenwood and its princ.i.p.al residents. Having arrived in Easton, some four miles from Evenwood, Mr Tredgold went on ahead to the great house, leaving me to accompany the trunk containing my travelling equipment in the carrier"s cart. At the gate-house, just beyond the village of Evenwood, I got out, leaving the cart to trundle off. It was approaching two o"clock when I ascended the long incline and rested at the top to look down over the river towards the vista spread out before my hungry eyes.
And now, at last, I am to show you Evenwood, which I first beheld on that perfect June afternoon an afternoon, perhaps, like the one that had seen the arrival of Dr Daunt and his family twenty years earlier. I see it again in memory, as clearly as on that day.
It lies in quiet seclusion on the banks of the slow-moving Nene. A church and adjoining rectory, a n.o.ble Dower House of the late seventeenth century, a cl.u.s.ter of cottages, some outlying farms, and the great house itself: similar compositions can be found all over England; but Evenwood is like no other place on earth.
The always-sighing reed beds and the overarching willows, the pale stone houses with their roofs of thatch or Collyweston stone,2 the undulating Park studded with ancient trees, and the faery splendour of the house itself, are sources of deep and abiding solace for those weary of the quotidian world. The whole place seems to be somehow beyond time, shut in and protected from the meanness of existence by the meandering river and the gently wooded slopes on either side, which, on a fine day, dissolve into long soft swathes of grey-green.
If you consult Verekker"s dull but dependable Guide to the County of Northamptonshire (Dr Daunt"s copy of the augmented 1812 edition is now before me as I write),3 you will read of Lord Tansor"s seat being "pleasantly situated on a wooded incline beside the River Nene. The house, or manor, is built of brick and freestone and stands in an extensive park, walled in and well planted with n.o.ble stands of oak, ash, and elm. The accretions of centuries have bestowed upon the house a pleasing irregularity of form, at once imposing and romantic." You will also learn from Verekker the bare architectural facts concerning the house: the licence to crenellate granted in 1330; the Elizabethan extensions to the fortified medieval dwelling; the Jacobean refinements; the remodelling by Talman early in the last century; and the improvements lately effected in the cla.s.sical style by Henry Holland, who also worked on another of the county"s great houses, Althorp.
What you will not find in Verekker, or in any other guide, is an anatomy of Evenwood"s power to bewitch both soul and sense. Possibly, it is beyond human art to convey the sense of something lost, but eternally present, that such places inspire. In every light, and in every season, it possesses a transcendent beauty; but in summer it is very paradise. Approach it if you can as I first did from the south, on a midsummer afternoon. On entering the Park, you ascend a long incline, at the summit of which you pause, to catch your first sight of the great house. To your left, over the low boundary wall, light dances on the river curving gently eastwards; and then you catch sight of the church its delicate spire on such a day set against a cloudless sky of deepening blue facing the ivy-covered Rectory on the far side of a little field of graves.
Proceed a little further. The carriage-drive descends towards the river, crosses it by a fine ball.u.s.trated bridge, then turns to the right, levelling out to give a fuller view of the house and the swaying haze of trees behind; then it divides, to sweep either side of a perfect oval of lawn, with a fine cla.s.sical group Poseidon with Tritons at its centre, before pa.s.sing through a pair of ma.s.sive iron gates into an enclosed and gravelled entrance court.
Always your eye is drawn upwards, to a riot of gables and fluted chimneys, and, dominating all, six soaring towers topped with arched cupolas. Behind the formality of Holland"s frontage, the remains of earlier ages ramble in ravishing confusion: cobbled alleys between high walls, a vaulted cloister opening on to gardens; Tudor brick mingles with smooth ashlar; oriels and battlements oppose cla.s.sical columns and pediments. And in the midst, a sequestered medieval courtyard filled with urns and statuary, heavy in summer with the scent of lavender and lilies, and echoing always to the sound of birds and trickling water.
Evenwood. I had wandered its corridors and great rooms in dreams, collected representations of it, greedily horded every published account of its history and character, no matter how trite and inconsequential, from William Camden to the pamphlet published in 1825 by Dr Daunt"s predecessor as Rector. For years it had been, not a built thing of stone and timber and gla.s.s that could be touched and gazed upon under the light of sun and moon, but a misty dream-place of unattainable perfection, like the great Pavilion of the Caliphat described so perfectly by Mr Tennyson.4 Now it was spread out before me. No dream, it stood planted deep in the earth my own feet were treading, washed by the rain of centuries, warmed by ten thousand dawns, raised and shaped by dead generations of mortal men.
I am overwhelmed, almost choked by tears at the first sight of the place that I had seen only with the interior eye. And then it is almost like the sensation of physical pain I am certain I have seen it before; not in books and paintings, not in fancy, but with my own eyes. I have been here. I have breathed this air, heard these sounds of wind through the trees, and the music of distant waters. In an instant I am a child again, dreaming of a great building, half palace, half fortress, with soaring spires and towers reaching to the sky. But how can these things be? The name of this place held dim childhood a.s.sociations, but no recollection of ever having been brought here. Whence comes, then, this certainty of re-acquaintance?
In a kind of daze, confused by the confluence of the real and the unreal, I walk a little further, and the perspective begins to shift. Shadows and angles emerge to soften or delineate; definitions harden, elevations extend and attenuate. A dog barks, and I see rooks wheeling and cawing about the towers and chimneys, and white doves fluttering. Between enclosing walls is a fish-pond, dark and still, overlooked by two little pavilions of pale stone. Nearer still, and details of ordinary human activity begin to emerge: planted things, a broom leaning against a wall, window-curtains moving in the warm breeze, smoke drifting up from a chimney stack, a water pail set down in a gateway.
We know, from the account of his life published in the Sat.u.r.day Review, that Evenwood burst upon young Phoebus Daunt like Paul"s vision. It seemed they are his words "almost as if I had not lived before".
I do not blame the boy Phoebus for feeling thus on encountering the beauty of Evenwood for the first time. No one with eyes to see, or a heart to feel, could be unmoved by the place. I, too, felt as he did when I first caught sight of its cupolas and battlements, rising up through the summer haze; and with greater familiarity came greater attachment, until, even in memory, Evenwood a.s.sumed such a power to enthral that it sometimes made me sick with a desire to spend my life within its bounds, and to possess it utterly.
If Phoebus Daunt truly experienced such an epiphany on his first coming upon Evenwood, then I freely absolve him. Remove it from the tally, with my blessing. But if he believed the words he wrote in his public recollections, that Evenwood was "an Eden made for me alone", he was culpably wrong.
It had been made for me.
My travelling chest, containing my camera, tripod, and other necessary equipment, had been placed on a trolley in a little yard leading off the entrance court. I had brought with me a dozen dark slides containing negatives prepared according to the process recently introduced by Monsieur Blanquart-Evrard.5 For three hours I worked away, and was satisfied that Lord Tansor would be well pleased with the results.
I had just finished taking several views of the Orangery and was stepping through a little gate set in an ancient fragment of flint wall when I was brought up short by the sound of someone laughing.
Before me was a broad sweep of close-cut gra.s.s on which four figures, two ladies, and two gentlemen, were engaged in a game of croquet.
I would not have been aware of him had he not laughed; but as soon as I heard that distinctive note, and the concluding snort, I knew it was him.
He seemed to have grown taller, and was broader in the shoulder than I remembered him; and now he had a dark beard, which, with the silk handkerchief he had tied round his head, gave him a slightly piratical air. There he was, in the flesh: P. Rainsford Daunt, the celebrated poet, whose latest volume, The Pharaoh"s Child, had just been published, to great acclaim. I stood spellbound. To see him here, leaning on his mallet, and to hear his voice paying gallant compliments to his partner, a strikingly tall young lady with dark hair, seemed to twist the knife into the wound that had been festering within in me for so long. I considered for a moment whether I should make myself known to him; but then, looking down at my dusty boots, I noticed that I had a tear in the knee of my trousers where I had knelt down on the gravel of the entrance court to adjust my tripod. Altogether I made a rather sorry sight, with my dirty hands and high colour, for it had been warm work pulling the trolley from one location to the next. Daunt, by contrast, stood elegantly at his ease on the new-mown lawn, waistcoat shimmering in the sunlight, unaware of his former friend concealed in the shadow of a large laurel bush. I confess that I could not help feeling envious of him, which gave the knife yet another little turn. He looked so a.s.sured, so settled in comfort. If I had known then the full extent of his good fortune, I might have been tempted into some rash deed. But, in my ignorance, I simply stood observing him, thinking of when we had last spoken together in School Yard, and wondering if he still remembered what I had whispered to him. I doubted it. He looked like a man who slept well. It seemed almost a pity to disturb his peaceful slumbers; but one day my words would come back to him.
And then he would remember.
I remained out of sight behind the laurel bush for a quarter of an hour or more, until Daunt and his companions picked up their mallets and returned to a small shaded terrace, where tea had been laid out for them. He strolled back with the tall young lady, whilst the other two followed behind chatting and laughing.
It was now a little before five o"clock, and so I returned to the entrance court. I was beginning to pack up my things when Mr Tredgold appeared on the steps.
"Edward, there you are. I trust you have had a productive afternoon? Very good. My business with his Lordship is concluded, but there is one more thing you might do before we leave."
"Certainly. What is it?"
He gave a little cough.
"I have persuaded his Lordship that it would be a great thing, for his posterity, to have an unmediated likeness of himself made. I urged him to consider what it would mean for his descendants to have an image of him as he really is, at this very time. I said it would be as if he lived again in their eyes. I hope it will not be too much trouble for you? His Lordship is waiting for us on the Library Terrace."
The Library Terrace was on the west side of the house; Daunt and his friends were taking tea on the south. I quickly weighed up the risks of our meeting each other, and decided they were small. Besides, the opportunity to study the man whom I believed to be my father was irresistible; and if Daunt did appear, I was confident that my recently acquired mustachios would prevent discovery.
"Not in the least," I replied, as calmly as I could. "I have one negative left, and will be very glad to oblige his Lordship. If you will allow me a moment to gather up my things . . ."
When we arrived at the terrace, Lord Tansor was pacing up and down, the silver ferrule of his stick clattering on the stones, the sunlight glinting off his immaculate silk hat.
"Your Lordship," said Mr Tredgold, advancing towards him. "This is Mr Glapthorn."
"Glapthorn. How d"ye do. You have all your instruments, cameras, and what not? I see. A travelling chest? Of course. Everything to hand, what? Very good. That"s the way. Now then, let"s get on."
I began to set up my tripod as Lord Tansor continued to walk up and down, conversing with Mr Tredgold. But I found I could not take my eyes off him.
Now in his fifty-seventh year, he was a smaller man than I had expected, but with a straight back and strong shoulders. I became immediately fascinated by his little mannerisms: the left hand placed behind him as he walked; the way he tilted his head back when he spoke; the gruff, staccato phrases and the barking interrogatives with which his speech was populated; the impatient tic in his left eye when Mr Tredgold directed some observation to him, as if his toleration were about to expire at any second. Above all, my attention was held by the complete absence of either humour or vulnerability in the heavy-lidded, close-set eyes, and especially in the small, almost lipless mouth. I noticed the curious fact that one rarely saw Lord Tansor"s teeth. His mouth appeared to be permanently clamped shut, even when he spoke, which naturally conveyed the impression that here was a man in whom disapproval and suspicion of his fellow human beings was instinctive and irreversible. Everything about him was tight, ordered, contained. There was so much concentrated potency and will in the way he looked you up and down, and in the stance of purposeful readiness he habitually adopted shoulders pulled sharply back, feet slightly apart that you quickly forgot the shortness of his stature. I have met many impressive men, but few have impressed me with the completeness of their self-possession, born of the long exercise of personal and political authority, as he did. I have strong arms and a strong body, and am a giant compared to him; but as he approached to ask if all was ready, I could hardly look him in the eye.
Yet I believed he was my father! Could it be true? Or had I been deluding myself? Perhaps his first wife had played him false; perhaps I had been the fruit of some illicit liaison, which she had sought to cover over with the help of her closest friend. It had sometimes seemed the likeliest explanation for her extraordinary action. But the elaborateness of the plot, as far as I presently understood it, seemed to argue for a deeper and more complex purpose, and left room for doubt to creep in. Say, then, that he was my father, standing next to me in the bright June sunshine, and seeing only a stranger busying himself with his camera and tripod. Would the day ever come when I would turn and face him in my true self?
The sun had moved westwards and was now illuminating the far end of the terrace, beyond which was a raised pavement, with a half-glazed door set in the return. We stepped down to a gravel path and Lord Tansor grasping his stick firmly in his right hand and holding his left arm straight to his side positioned himself a foot or two in front of this pavement, with the door behind his left shoulder. Through the lens of my camera, each individual detail of his appearance increased in clarity and definition: his square-toed boots, brightly polished as always; the surmounting gaiters, grey like his trousers and waistcoat; his black four-b.u.t.ton coat and black stock; his gleaming hat. He stood straight and still, tight-lipped, white side-whiskers trimmed to perfection, small black eyes gazing out over bright pleasure-grounds and sunlit parkland, and beyond to the distant prospect of farms and pasture, rivers and lakes, woods and quiet hamlets. Lord of all he surveyed. The twenty-fifth Baron Tansor.
My hands were shaking as I completed the exposure, but at last it was done. In a moment he had thanked me brusquely for my time, and was gone.
Mr Tredgold and I pa.s.sed the night in Peterborough, returning to London the next morning. We left Evenwood without catching further sight of Phoebus Daunt; but I could not rid myself of the fixed image I now had of him: standing in the sun, laughing, gay and self-a.s.sured, as if he were lord of the world.
We had both been too tired the previous evening to discuss the events of the day, and during the homeward journey, on the following morning, my employer seemed no more inclined to talk. He"d settled himself into his seat immediately on boarding the train and taken out the latest number of David Copperfield,6 with the deliberate air of someone who does not wish to be disturbed. But as we were approaching the London terminus, he looked up from his reading and regarded me inquisitively.
"Did you form a favourable impression of Evenwood, Edward?"
"Yes, extremely favourable. It is, as you said, a most ravishing place."
"Ravishing. Yes. It is the word I always use to describe it. It transports one, does it not, almost forcibly, carrying one rapturously away, to another and better world. What it would be to live there. One would never wish to leave."
"I suppose you have been there frequently," I said, "in the course of business."
"Yes, on many occasions, though not so often now as formerly, when the first Lady Tansor was alive."
"You knew Lady Tansor?" I heard myself asking the question somewhat eagerly.
"Oh yes," said Mr Tredgold, looking out of the carriage window as we entered under the canopy of the terminus. "I knew her well. And now, here we are. Home again."
IV.
The Pursuit of Truth _*
I did not see Mr Tredgold again for several weeks. He left London to visit his brother in Canterbury, and I was just then investigating a case of fraud, which obliged me to be out of the office a good deal. It was not until a month after we returned from Evenwood that I received an invitation to spend a Sunday with the Senior Partner.
We quickly fell into our old bibliological ways; but it appeared to me that there was not that unalloyed surrender to our shared enthusiasm for book-lore as before. He beamed; he polished his eye-gla.s.s; he brushed his feathery hair away from his face; and his hospitality was as warm as ever. But there was a change in him, detectable and troubling.
The negatives exposed at Evenwood had been developed, fixed, and printed, and all the views, with the exception of the portrait of Lord Tansor, had been mounted, at my own expense, in an elegant alb.u.m, embossed with the Duport arms. The portrait, which I had placed in a morocco case, would have been a fine piece of work, had it not been spoiled by the face of an inquisitive servant, whom I had failed to notice, peeping through the glazed door just behind where Lord Tansor had been standing. But Mr Tredgold complemented me on the work, and said he would arrange for the alb.u.m and the portrait to be sent to Evenwood.
"His Lordship will be happy to remunerate you," he said, "if you would care to let him have a note of your charges."
"No, no," I replied, "I shall not hear of it. If his Lordship is satisfied with the results, then I am well rewarded."
"You have a generous nature, Edward," said Mr Tredgold, closing the alb.u.m. "To have worked so hard, and then to refuse reward."
"I did not expect to be rewarded."
"No, I"m sure you did not. It is my belief, however, that good deeds will always be rewarded, in this life or the next. This accords with another belief of mine, that what has been taken from us will one day be restored by a loving providence."
"Those are comforting convictions."
"I find them so. To believe otherwise, that goodness will receive no recompense in some better place, and that loss real loss is irreversible, would be the death of all hope for me."
I had never before heard Mr Tredgold speak in so serious and reflective a manner. Nothing more was said for a moment or two, as he sat contemplating the portrait of Lord Tansor.
"You know, Edward," he said at last, "it seems to me that there is a kind of correspondence between these convictions of mine and the photographic process. Here you have captured and fixed a living person, permanently imprisoning light and form and all the outward individualities of that person. Perhaps the lineaments of our souls, and of our moral characters, are similarly imprinted on the mind of G.o.d, for His eternal contemplation."
"Then woe to all sinners," I said, smiling.
"But none of us are wholly bad, Edward."
"Nor wholly good, either."
"No," he said slowly, still looking down at Lord Tansor"s portrait, "nor wholly good." Then, more brightly: "But what an age we live in to have the power to seize the evanescent moment and fix it on paper for all to see! It is quite extraordinary. Where will it all lead? And yet how one wishes that some earlier age had made these wonderful discoveries. Imagine looking upon the face of Cleopatra, or gazing into the eyes the very eyes of Shakespeare! To see things as they were, long ago, which we can now only dream of that would be wonderful indeed, would it not? And not only to look upon the dead of ages past, but also upon those we have recently lost, whom we yearn to see in their living forms again, as those who come after us will now be able to see Lord Tansor when he is no more. Our friends who died before this great miracle was discovered can never now be rendered permanently visible to our eyes, in the full flower of their lives, as his Lordship has been rendered, here in this photographic portrait. They must live only in our imperfect and inconstant memories. Do you not find that affecting?"
He looked up and, for a moment, I thought his eyes were moist with tears. But then he jumped up and went over to his cabinet to retrive some item he wished to show me. We talked for another half hour, but then Mr Tredgold said he had a slight headache and begged me to excuse him.
As I was leaving, he asked me if I had many friends in London.
"I can claim one good friend," I replied, "which I find sufficient for my needs. And then of course I have you, Mr Tredgold."
"Do you think of me as a friend, then?"
"Most certainly."
"Then, speaking as a friend, I hope you will always come to me, if you are in any difficulty. My door is always open to you, Edward. Always. You will not forget that, will you?"
Touched by his tone of genuine solicitation, I said I would remember his words, and thanked him for his kindness.
"No need to thank me, Edward," he said, beaming broadly. "You are an extraordinary young man. I consider it a duty a most pleasant duty to offer you every a.s.sistance, whenever you may feel it needful. And, besides, as I told you when we first met, the ordinary I can leave to others; the extraordinary I like to keep for myself."
This, then, was the pattern of my life over the next two years. On Mondays and Tuesdays I would be engaged on my work as Mr Tredgold"s confidential a.s.sistant sometimes in the office, but more frequently following some investigatory trail that might take me to every corner of London, and occasionally beyond. On Wednesdays, I took the pupils sent to me for instruction by Sir Ephraim Gadd, whilst on Thursdays and Fridays I resumed my duties at Tredgolds. I took my lunch at Dolly"s, and my dinner at the London Restaurant, day in, day out.1 My free time, except for occasional Sunday visits to the Senior Partner"s private residence, was devoted to a renewed study of my mother"s papers. To facilitate the work, I had begun to acquaint myself with shorthand, using Mr Pitman"s system,2 which I used to make notes on each item or doc.u.ment. These were then indexed and arranged in a specially constructed set of small compartmentalized drawers, somewhat like an apothecary"s chest. But in all the ma.s.s of paper through which I"d wandered, like some primeval discoverer on an unknown ocean, I had found nothing to supplement or advance my original discovery. Time and Death had also done their work: Laura Tansor was no more and could not now be cross-examined; and her companion, whom I had called mother, had followed her into eternal silence. My work at Tredgolds, however, had made me wiser in the art of detection, and I now commenced on several new lines of enquiry.
Gradually, through surviving receipts and other doc.u.ments, I began to trace my mother"s movements during the summer of 1819, visiting several inns and hotels where she had stayed, and seeking out anyone in those places who might have remembered her. I met with no success until I was directed to an elderly man in Folkestone, who had been the Captain of the packet that had taken my mother and her friend to Boulogne, in August, 1819. He distinctly remembered the two ladies one, small of stature and of rather nervous appearance; the other, tall and dark, who "bore herself like a queen", as he said, and who had paid him a substantial consideration so that she and her companion could spend the crossing undisturbed in his cabin. I then travelled to the West Country, to make enquiries concerning Lady Tansor"s family, the Fairmiles, of Langton Court, a handsome house of Elizabeth"s reign situated few miles from where my mother was born. In due course, I discovered a voluble old lady, Miss Sykes by name, who was able to tell me something concerning the former Laura Fairmile. Of particular interest to me was what she had to say about Miss Fairmile"s aunt on her mother"s side. This lady, Miss Harriet Gilman, had married the ci-devant Marquis de Quebriac, who had resided in England, visibly impecunious, since the days of the Terrror. After the Amiens Peace had been struck,3 the couple (neither of whom were in the first flush of youth) returned to the Marquis" ancestral chateau, which stood a few miles outside the city of Rennes. But the gentleman died soon after, and the chateau was placed in the hands of his debtors, leaving his widow to decamp to a small house in the city, in the Rue du Chapitre, belonging to her late husband"s family. It was to this house that Lady Tansor and her companion later came.
The references in my mother"s journals to "Mme de Q" were now satisfactorily explained, and so in September, 1850, on the basis of this new intelligence, I travelled to France, having obtained permission from Mr Tredgold to take a short holiday.
The house in the Rue du Chapitre was boarded up, but I found an old priest at the Church of St-Sauveur who was able to tell me that Madame de Quebriac had died some twenty years since. He also recalled the time when Madame"s niece, accompanied by a friend, had resided with her for several months, and that a baby had been born, though he could not recall to which lady, or whether it had been a boy or a girl. The priest directed me to a Dr Pascal, who also lived in the Rue du Chapitre; but he, too, proved to be an old man, with few useful memories, and these added little to what the priest had already told me. The doctor did, however, mention an English servant, who had travelled to France with Madame. She had married a Frenchman, but had left Rennes after her husband"s death. He could not remember the woman"s married name, or tell me where she had gone. But then he informed me of an ancient retainer of Madame de Quebriac"s who was still living, he thought, just outside the city. I arrived at the place in high hopes, only to learn that the old man had died a few weeks" earlier.
Interesting though they were, however, such little discoveries as I was able to make whilst in France served only to show me how far I was from my goal. All my efforts had increased my store of plausible inferences, hypotheses, and suggestive possibilities; but I was no closer to uncovering the independent proof I required, which would confirm, beyond disputation, that I was Lord Tansor"s lost heir, the son for whom he longed.
As for Phoebus Daunt, my endeavours to gather information on him, with the aim of conceiving some effective means of revenge, had been somewhat more successful, and were spurred on by the recent sight of him at Evenwood. Years had pa.s.sed sinced my enforced departure from Eton, but my anger at his perfidy was undiminished. He had prospered; he had made his mark on the world, as I had once hoped to do; but my prospects had been blighted because of him. Perhaps I might have been a great figure at the University by now, with even greater distinctions in view. But all that had gone, stolen from me by his treachery.
Since making the acquaintance of Dr T-, during my visit to Millhead, I had been regularly regaled with lengthy epistles from that brazenly indiscreet gentleman on the history of Dr Daunt and his family during their time in Lancashire. The information thus obtained was of only slight significance, though it served to show me how much influence the second Mrs Daunt had wielded, and perhaps wielded still, over her step-son. Then, one day in Piccadilly, I happened to encounter an old school fellow, who, over an expensive dinner at Grillon"s,4 which I could ill afford, was happy to supply me with some t.i.ttle-tattle concerning our mutual acquaintance. According to my informant, Daunt had enjoyed a little dalliance with a French ballet-dancer, and was rumoured to have proposed to Miss Eloise Dinever, the banking heiress, but had supposedly been refused. He dined at his club (the Athenaeum) of an evening when in London, kept a box at Her Majesty"s,5 and could be seen riding out in Rotten Row6 on most Sat.u.r.days, between five and seven, during the Season. He had a good house, in Mecklenburgh-square, and was generally a figure in fashionable, as well as literary, society.
"But where does he get his money from?" I asked in surprise, knowing well the cost of maintaining such a life in London, and strongly suspecting that the writing of poetic epics would hardly keep him in dinners, let alone a box at the Opera.
"Bit of a mystery," said my informant, lowering his voice. "But there"s plenty of it."
Now, a mystery was exactly what I was looking for: it spoke to me of something concealed from public gaze that Daunt might not wish to be known a secret which, once unlocked, could perhaps be used against him. It might prove to be nothing at all; but, where money is in the case, my experience always inclines me to adopt a sceptical view of things. Yet even with all the means at my disposal, having by now begun to acc.u.mulate quite a little army of agents and scouts about the capital, I failed to locate the source of Daunt"s evident wealth Time went on, but no new information on Daunt came to light, and I had made no further progress in my search for the evidence that would prove my true ident.i.ty. Weeks came and went; months pa.s.sed, and slowly I began to sink into an enfeebling gloom that I could not shake off. This was a black time indeed. I was perpetually on edge, eaten up by frustrated rage. To ease my spirits, I pa.s.sed long oblivious hours in Bluegate-fields, under the deft ministrations of Chi Ki, my customary opium-master. And then, night after night, I would wander the streets, taking my accustomed way from the West-end via London-bridge, along Thames-street, past the Tower, and so on to St Katherine"s-dock and the fearful lanes and courts around and about the Ratcliffe-highway, in order to observe the underside of London in all its horror. It was on such excursions, pushing my way through dirty crowds of Lascars and Jews, Malays and Swedes, and every form of our British human sc.u.m, that I became truly acquainted with the character of our great metropolis, and learned to trust my ability to frequent its most deadly quarters with impunity.
Whilst I languished thus in my dull sublunary life, pulled hither and thither by my demons, the rise of Daunt"s literary star had been ceaseless. The world, I concluded, had gone quite mad. I could not open a newspaper or a magazine without coming across some piece of eulogistic clap-trap extolling the genius of P. Rainsford Daunt. The volumes had flowed thick and fast from his pen, an unstoppable torrent of drivel in rhyming couplets and blank verse. In 1846 had come that ever-memorable monstrosity, The Cave of Merlin, in which the poet out-Southeyed Southey at his most execrable, but which the British Critic unaccountably considered to be "sublime in conception", averring that "Mr Phoebus Daunt is without equal, a master of the poetic epic, the Virgil of the nineteenth century". This production was followed, in tedious succession, by The Pharaoh"s Child, Montezuma, and, in 1850, The Conquest of Peru. With every publication, more inflated estimates of the poet"s oeuvre would greet me as I idly perused Blackwood"s or Fraser"s, whilst paragraphs would rise up before my affronted eyes in The Times informing his eager and adoring public that Mr Phoebus Daunt, "the celebrated poet", was presently in town, and then proceeding to enumerate his doings in tedious detail. In this way, I learned that he had been to Gore House to sit to the pencil of the Count d"Orsay,7 who also later modelled a fetching bust of the young genius in plaster. Naturally, his inclusion with other notables at the ceremonial opening of the Great Exhibition8 excited no little interest amongst a certain impressionable section of society. I recall opening the Ill.u.s.trated London News over breakfast that spring and being greeted by a preposterous engraving of the poet dressed in dark paletot, light trousers strapped under the instep, embroidered waistcoat, and stove-pipe hat together with his n.o.ble patron, Lord Tansor, standing proudly with the Queen and the Prince Consort beside the gilded cage containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond.9 With the rest of the world, I had also attended the Exhibition, drawn there by a desire to view the latest photographic advances. Accompanying me had been Rebecca Harrigan, Mr Tredgold"s housekeeper, with whom I had struck up a kind of friendship. On more than one occasion, I had caught her looking at me in an interested way. She had a fine little figure, and was pretty enough; but, as I quickly discovered, after engaging her in a little conversation, she also possessed a sharp mind, and a pleasingly audacious spirit. I soon began to take quite a fancy to her.
One evening, in St Paul"s Church-yard, I encountered her sheltering under the portico of the Cathedral from a shower of rain. We chatted inconsequentially until the rain began to ease, and then I asked her if she might care to take some dinner with me. "If your husband wouldn"t mind," I added.