The Meaning of Night Part 21

'You mentioned a brute, Mary. What did you mean?'

'I meant that murdering villain who took my sister away and killed her.'

'Killed her? You don't say so.'

'I should say I do! Killed her, in cold blood. Married her, then killed her. As soon as I saw him, I knew he was a bad 'un, but Agnes wouldn't hear of it. It was the only time we ever argued. But I was right. He was a bad 'un, for all he charmed her.'

'Go on, Mary.'

'Well, sir, he called himself a gentleman dressed like one, I'll grant you. Even spoke a bit like one. But he weren't no gentleman. Not him. Why, he weren't hardly more than a servant when he first came to Evenwood.'

'And how did you sister meet him?'

'He'd come up from London, with Mr Daunt.'

'Mr Daunt?' I said, incredulously. 'The Rector?'

'Oh no, sir, Mr Phoebus Daunt, his son. He'd come up with Mr Phoebus and another gent, for a great dinner to mark his Lords.h.i.+p's birthday. I was by the gates when they went past. But he wasn't invited to the dinner, just Mr Phoebus and the other gentleman. He seemed like he was a serving-man, or some such, for he was driving the carriage they all came in, and yet he dressed so well, and thought so much of himself, and seemed to be on easy terms with the other two gentlemen. Anyways, that's when he met Agnes, that evening, in the yard by the ice-house. Oh, he was a sly one. He wheedled and cooed, and she, poor fool, took it all in and thought he was such a great man, taking notice of such as she. But he was no better than her no, he was a lot worse. We were decent folk, well brought up. But he'd come from nothing, and made his money, Lord knows how. Why Mr Phoebus took up with him, who could say? He came back a week later, but not with Mr Phoebus, nor to see him neither. And then what do you think? Agnes comes down the next day and says "Well, congratulate me, Mary, for I'm to be married, and here's the proof", and she holds out her hand to show me the ring he'd given her. After a week! There was nothing anyone could say. She just shut her ears and shook her head. And off she went, poor lamb. And, if you'll believe me, sir, that was the last I saw of her. My poor dear sister, who'd been my closest and dearest friend in the whole world.'

'What happened then, Mary?' I asked, feeling increasingly certain I knew where this was leading.

'Well, sir, I had a letter from her a month later to say he'd been as good as his word and had married her, and that she was set up in fine style. And so of course my mind was eased a little, though I still couldn't see how this was to end in anything but trouble for her, being tied to such as he. I waited and waited, longing to hear from her again, but no letter came. Six months pa.s.sed, sir, six whole months, and I was going quite mad with worry you ask Mrs Rowthorn if I weren't. So John Brine, to set my troubled mind at rest, says he would go down to London and find her and send word back. Oh sir, how I trembled when his letter came and weren't I right to tremble! I couldn't open it, so I gave it to Mrs Rowthorn and she read it to me.

'It was the worst news that there could be: my poor sister had been murdered by that brute savagely beaten, so bad, they said, that you could hardly recognize her darling face. But he had been taken and would stand trial, and so I took some comfort that he would be hanged for his evil deed, though that was too good for him. But even that comfort was denied me, for some villainous lawyer got the jury to find another man guilty. They said this other man had been her lover! My Agnes! She'd never do such a thing, never. So her husband was set free to murder again, and the other man was hanged though Lord knows he was as innocent as my poor dear sister.'

She ceased, tears beginning to well up in her pretty brown eyes. I laid my hand on hers to offer some comfort before asking my final question.

'What was the name of your sister's husband, Mary?'

'Pluckrose, sir. Josiah Pluckrose.'

25:.

In limine1 _____*

Pluckrose.

I remembered the cynical smile of contempt he had given the Jury when he was acquitted of the murder of his wife, Mary Baker's sister, Agnes. 'You fools,' he seemed to be saying. 'You know I did it, but we've been too clever for you.' And he had me to thank me! for escaping the nozzle.2 He was a beast of a man, tall and heavy, though quick on his feet, with shoulders even broader than Le Grice's, and huge hands one of which, the right, was lacking an index finger, amputated accidentally during his butchering career. Now, I am afraid of no man; but there was something about Josiah Pluckrose that I did not care to confront: an intimation in those narrow eyes of a raw, unbridled capacity for purposeless and terrible violence, rendered all the more unsettling by the suavity of his dress and manner. Meet him casually in the street, and by his appearance and manner you would almost think him a gentleman almost. He had long ago scrubbed the gore of Smithfield from his fingers, but the butcher was in him still.

Everything about him proclaimed Josiah Pluckrose to be guilty of the remorseless murder of his poor wife; and yet, because of me, he had cheated the bells of St Sepulchre's,3 and lived to murder again. After his acquittal, he returned to his house in Gerrard-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-Houdin4 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,5 or some other nubbing cove,6 the pleasure of stretching Pluckrose's miserable neck; but I had other well-tried means at my disposal, just as productive of complete persuasion in my audience: doc.u.ments, apparently in his own hand, setting forth the unfortunate dupe's guilty a.s.sociation with Mrs Agnes Pluckrose, nee 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 Dimsdale, chemist's a.s.sistant, 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 the least 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 darkening Park. At last, after walking for an hour or more, I found myself at the foot of the steep path that wound its way up to the Temple of the Winds.

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 ba.s.so continuo to my life. I was completely baffled by the a.s.sociation revealed by Mary. What common cause, I wondered in bewilderment, could possibly unite this murderer and the son of the Rector of Evenwood?

I climbed the shadowed steps leading up to the Temple, and turned for a moment to take in the view back across the Park to the great house. The sun had now dropped behind the line of the western woods, and I could see that lanterns had been lit all along the Library Terrace, where Lord Tansor liked to take his evening stroll.

The door of the Temple's North Portico was open, and so I decided to enter.

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 compa.s.s.7 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s 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 stump. My curiosity aroused, I knelt down.

It was a bird the poor creature must have flown in through the open door of the Temple and dashed itself against a large gilt-framed looking-gla.s.s, 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 its 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, perhaps designed to be attached to some piece of luggage. It bore 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 a.s.sociations.

At length I seemed to hear the voice of Mrs Rowthorn, Mr Carteret's housekeeper. Something she had sad 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 Lords.h.i.+p'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 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 Mr Carteret 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-gla.s.s, 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.

Of course it had been no whim. I was in the Iron Master's hands. 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 sure, 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 a.s.sailant who knew their worth and importance.

I could discern only one reason for bringing the bag to the Temple after the attack: Mr Carteret's murderer had been un homme de main8 acting on someone else's orders, instructed to bring the bag and its contents here, to the Temple, where it was to be examined by his employer. But there had been an altercation, perhaps a violent one to judge by the fallen chair; and in the process the little leather label had become separated from the bag.

All this seemed perfectly plausible, probable even; but I could go no further. The contents of Mr Carteret's bag, and the ident.i.ties 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.

'Do you wish to tell me something, Mr Glapthorn?'

Her voice had a delicious, inviting softness about it that made my blood race with desire, but her inexpressive stare told another story.

'What should I have to tell you, Miss Carteret?'

I tried to strip that gaze of its disconcerting power by looking full into her dark eyes; but I knew 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.

'Why, what you are doing here, in the dark.'

'I might wonder the same about you,' 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, childlike, half-smile and once again she uncovered, for the merest instant, a touching vulnerability.

'Would you believe me if I said 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 your innocence. I merely wondered what brought you here. I'm sure I did not mean to suggest that you were not perfectly ent.i.tled to prowl around this damp place in the dark if you wanted to. 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 broad 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 if 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 a.s.sumed 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 being 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 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 step 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 she had been holding back had begun at last to a.s.sert its natural ascendancy over her spirits through being in a place that had such strong a.s.sociations 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,9 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 a gloved 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 today. John, will you pull up the hood, 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,10 on the day after her twelfth 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 pa.s.sion for Delftware (numerous fine examples of which I had noted on display in various parts of the Dower House), and the close relations.h.i.+p 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 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 ma.s.s 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.

'May I ask, Mr Glapthorn, if your parents are still living?'

'My mother is dead,' I replied. 'I never knew my father.' I said the words without thinking, then instantly reflected on the singularity of my situation. For whom did I speak? For the orphaned Edward Glyver, with a dead mother and a father who had died before he was born? Or Edward Glapthorn, whom I had conjured into existence on learning the truth about my birth, and who was the possessor of two fathers and two mothers? Or the future Edward Duport, whose mother was indeed dead but whose father still lived and breathed, here, in this great house, not a quarter of a mile from where we now were?

'I am sorry for you, truly,' she said. 'Every child needs a father's guiding presence.'

'Not every father, perhaps,' I observed, thinking of the execrable Captain Glyver, 'can be considered fit for such a task. But I believe, Miss Carteret, from my brief acquaintance with him, that you may count yourself fortunate that yours was exceptional in that regard.'

'But then some children, perhaps, are unworthy of their parents.'

She had turned her face away and I saw her raise her hand to her face. Was she crying?

'Miss Carteret, forgive me, is anything the matter?'

'Nothing is the matter, I a.s.sure you.' But she continued to look out into the darkness with unseeing eyes, her hand resting against her cheek. I saw that she was suffering, and so I thought I would make another attempt at encouraging her to give expression to her anguish.

'Will you allow me to observe, Miss Carteret, as someone who has your interests most sincerely at heart, that grief should not be denied. It is - '

But I was unable to finish my clumsy peroration, for she instantly turned a furious face upon me.

'Do not presume, sir, to lecture me on grief. I will take no lessons on that subject from any person, least of all from someone who is little more than a stranger to me and mine!'

I attempted to apologize for my forwardness; but she silenced me with her terrible affronted look, as well as with some further strong words, which together induced me to sit back, somewhat nonplussed, and to hold my tongue for the remainder of our journey.

And so, in this awkward state, we turned in through the Plantation and drew up at last before the Dower House.

Her abrupt changes of mood during the short journey from the Temple of the Winds to the Dower House certainly argued for a troubled heart and mind. But the source? Shock and distress at the murder of her father, of course; what could be more natural? Yet the explanation dissatisfied and disturbed me. I own I was confounded, and felt distinctly stupid at my confusion, made worse by my helpless fascination with Miss Carteret.

As the landau came to a halt, I observed that her face had once again reverted to its accustomed look of pa.s.sionless abstraction. Without saying a word, or even bestowing the slightest glance in my direction, she slowly removed the rug from her lap and, a.s.sisted by John Brine, descended from the vehicle.

'Thank you, John,' she said. 'That will be all for tonight.' Then she turned her head and looked at me, with infinite sadness in her eyes.

'I believe my father was right,' she said, almost in a whisper. She seemed to be looking straight through me, as if talking to some unseen distant presence. 'We shall be judged for what we do. And so, there is no hope for me.' And with that, she was gone.

I watched her walk the short distance to the house. She stood for a moment beneath the portico lamp, and I longed for her to turn and retrace her steps; but then I saw Mrs Rowthorn open the front door and say a few words to her that I could not catch, whereupon she instantly picked up her skirts and ran inside.

26:.

Gradatim vincimus1 -___*

I accosted John Brine in the stable-yard as he was unhitching the horses from the landau.

'Brine, I have found something.'

He said nothing in reply but looked at me in that dour, threatening way of his.

Reaching into my pocket, I held out the little square of leather I had discovered in the Temple. He took it from me and began to examine it by the light over the tack-room door.

'James Earl,' he said. 'Gamekeeper here some years past. May I ask, sir, where you found this?'

'In the Temple,' I answered, eyeing him closely. 'Not a much frequented place, I think.'

'Not since the youngster died.'

'Youngster?'

'His Lords.h.i.+p's only boy, Master Henry. He went up there on his pony. He would not be told, that boy, and his Lords.h.i.+p could do nothing but indulge him. It was his birthday, you see, and the pony had been his father's gift.'

'And can you tell me what happened?'

He thought for a moment, and then nodded me towards the open door of the tack-room.