The Meaning of Night (22 page)

concerning my future to some later date. And so I remained in the house, alone and

undisturbed, except for brief daily visits from Beth, and devoted myself night and day to

my task, only occasionally leaving the house for a day or so to hunt out information that I

needed to explain or confirm some reference or other.

Besides assiduously committing her private thoughts to her journals, it had been

my mother’s habit, in all her practical dealings, never to throw anything away;

accordingly, there were innumerable items – bills, receipts, tickets, odd scribbled notes,

lists, correspondence, drafts, memorandum – all bound together in bundles on that

battlefield of paper. Through these I now also began to pick, piece by piece, day by day,

night by night. I sifted, collated, sorted, categorized, deploying all the skills of

scholarship, and all the gifts of intellectual application and assimilation at my disposal, to

reduce the mass to order, to bring the light of understanding and fixity to bear on the

fleeting, fluid shadows in which the full truth still lay hidden.

Gradually, a story began to emerge from the shadows; or, rather, the fragmentary

and incomplete elements of a story. Like extracting broken shards from the imprisoning

earth, I had painstakingly gathered the fragments together and laid them out, piece by

piece, seeking the linking pattern, the design that would bring the whole into view.

One word had given me the vital clue. One word. The name of a place that echoed

faintly in my memory at first, but which began to ring out more clearly, bringing with it

two seemingly unconnected images: one of a lady in grey silk; the other of a bag, an

ordinary canvas bag, carrying a label with the owner’s name and address written on it.

Evenwood. In a journal entry of July, 1820, my mother – inadvertently, I

supposed – had written out the name in full. Prior to this entry, and subsequently, it

appeared simply as ‘E—’ and, in this form, had defeated all my attempts to identify it.

But once I had this name, links began to form: Miss Lamb had lived at Evenwood;

Phoebus Daunt had come from a place with the same name. But was there perhaps more

than one Evenwood? My mother had amassed a large working library, to assist her in her

work, and Bell’s Gazetteer and Cobbett’s Dictionary? quickly supplied the answer. No,

there was only one: Northamptonshire; Easton, four miles; Peterborough, twelve miles;

Evenwood Park – the seat of Julius Verney Duport, twenty-fifth Baron Tansor.

That first night at Eton, in Long Chamber, I’d asked Daunt if he knew Miss

Lamb, and, later, he’d enquired if I’d ever been to Evenwood. We had both answered in

the negative, and I had thought no more about the coincidence. But, recalling it for the

first time in fifteen years, his question seemed odd; or, rather, the guarded, almost

suspicious tone in which it had been posed now struck me as being significant in some

way.

I next considered the identity of the mysterious ‘L’, the character at the centre of

the mystery. Could it be Miss Lamb? For days I searched through piles of letters and

other documents, in an attempt to establish that her Christian name began with the letter

‘L’; but, to my amazement, I could find not a single piece of correspondence from this

person, or indeed any mention of her. Yet this lady had visited us as my mother’s friend,

and, as I thought, had showed extraordinary generosity towards me.

Frustrated and perplexed, I’d retreated to the one certainty I had – the place that

connected Miss Lamb, Phoebus Daunt, and my mother. Taking down the 1830 edition of

Burke’s Heraldic Dictionary,? I turned to the epitome of the Tansor Barony:

The Baron Tansor (Julius Verney Duport), of Evenwood Park, co. Northampton

in England, b. 15th October 1793, s. his father Frederic James Duport 1814 as 25th

holder of the title; educ. Eton Coll., Trinity Coll., Cambridge; m. 1stly, 5 June, 1816,

Laura Rose Fairmile (who d. 14 Mar., 1824), only dau. of Sir Robert Fairmile, of

Langton Court, Taunton, Somerset, and had issue,

Henry Hereward, b. 17 Nov., 1822, and d. 10 Sep. 1829.

He m. 2ndly, 5 July, 1827, Hester Mary Trevalyn, 2nd dau. of Patrick David

Trevalyn, of Ford Hill, Ardingly, Sussex . . .

I read the paragraph over again, dwelling particularly on Lord Tansor’s first wife,

the daughter of Sir Robert Fairmile, of Langton Court. Now this latter was a name I knew

well: he had been the employer of Mr Byam More, my mother’s uncle and my former

trustee. My heart began to beat a little faster as I wrote down the date of the first Lady

Tansor’s death. Then, opening one of the little black volumes, I turned to the entry dated

the sixteenth of March, 1824, which I now read for the first time:

A letter from Miss E telling me that the end came on Friday evening. A light has

passed from the world, and from my life, and I must now walk on through the twilight of

my days until I too am called. In her letters L had seemed distracted and wildered of late,

and I had begun to fear for her mind. But Miss E says the end was peaceful, with no

preceding agonies, for which comfort I thank God. I had not seen her for near a

twelvemonth, since she came here with the box for little E and to tell me what

arrangements she had prepared for the time he should go to school. She was much

changed, and I almost wept to see her thin face and hands. I remember E was playing at

her feet all the time she was here, and oh! the pitiful look in her sweet eyes! He is such a

fine, spirited young fellow, any mother would be proud of him. But she knew he would

never know her, or that she had given him life, and it was a deadly pain to her. I

marvelled at the persistence of her will, and told her so; for even at that moment, if she

had been resolved at last to undo all that had been done, I would have surrendered him,

though I love him like my own. But L was as fixed in her determination, though by now

dreadfully oppressed by it, as she had been when she first recruited me to her cause, and I

saw that nothing would ever move her. ‘He is yours now,’ she said softly before she left,

and I wept to hear it. We embraced and I walked with her up the path to where her

carriage was waiting, with Miss E inside, beneath the chestnut-tree by the gate. I watched

them descend the hill from the cliff-top to the village. Almost at the bottom, just as the

carriage was turning through the bend in the road, a limp black-gloved hand appeared out

of the window and waved a forlorn farewell. I shall never see that hand again. I go now to

pray for her soul, that she may find, in eternity, the peace her restless and impetuous heart

was denied on this earth.

‘Miss E’ had been mentioned before, but I gave no thought to her; for it had

quickly become apparent that references to ‘L’ began to decrease in succeeding entries

until, in April, 1824, they ceased altogether. There could be no doubt: Laura Duport was

‘L’.

Yet solving this little puzzle had revealed an altogether greater mystery, the core

of which seemed to be alluded to in this extraordinary passage, which fairly floored me

when I first read it. I will not weary you further with how I came, by dint of much labour,

to understand the implications of what my mother had written, and the identity of the

person referred to as ‘little E’. When I did, at last, fit the last fragment of the truth into

place, what did I feel? A hideous sense of desolation. An agony too deep for tears. I sat –

for how long? An hour? Two hours? – staring out of the window towards the

chestnut-tree by the gate, and out towards the restless sea. At last, with darkness falling, I

rose and made my way down to the beach, where I stood at the water’s edge, and wept

until I could weep no more.

Miss Lamb had never existed, other than as a name assumed by Lady Tansor

when she visited us – my mother, and I. Now I knew why the lady in grey had looked

upon me with such sadness as I’d sat and played at her feet; why she had stroked my

cheek so tenderly; and why she had given me the box of sovereigns on my twelfth

birthday, and why I had been sent to Eton at her behest. She had done these things

because she was the woman who had given me life. Lady Tansor was my mother.

‘He is yours now.’ Disbelief quickly changed to angry incomprehension. Riddle

me this: the mother I had loved was not my mother; my real mother had abandoned me;

and yet it seemed that both had loved me. Whose child, then, was I? How my head ached

in trying to disentangle it all! The bare bones of the plot, at least, were now clear to me:

my mother and her friend, Laura Tansor, who was in the early stages of pregnancy, had

gone to France together; I had been born there, and had been brought back to England as

the son of Simona Glyver, not of Lady Tansor. But the motives and passions that lay

behind this simple sequence of events were still hidden from me, in an unknown number

of secret places, and how could they now be brought into the light?

Towards her who had sat on my bed every night as a child, who had walked with

me on the cliff-top to watch the sun setting, and who had been the axis on which my little

world had revolved, I felt both bitterness and pity: bitterness for keeping the truth from

me; pity for what she must have suffered to maintain her friend’s secret. Her actions had

been a kind of betrayal, for which I must censure her; and yet what better mother could I

have had?

There was still so much to discover, but, slowly, I came to an acceptance: I was

not the son of Captain and Mrs Edward Glyver. My blood was not theirs. It connected me

instead to other places and times, and to another name – an ancient and distinguished

name. I had nothing of the man I’d thought was my father in me, nothing of the woman I

had called my mother. The eyes that were reflected in my mirror on rising every day were

not her eyes, as I had always liked to think. But whose were they? Did I resemble my real

father, Lord Tansor; or his first wife; or my dead brother? Who was I?

The questions went round and round in my head, day and night. I would wake

from fitful sleep in a state of extreme agitation, as if the ground had been cut away from

under my feet and I was falling through infinite space. I would then get up and wander

the silent house, sometimes for hours on end, trying to repudiate this dreadful feeling of

abandonment. But I could not. I did not belong here, in this place I had previously called

home, where the past no longer seemed to hold any meaning.

Little by little, I began to examine my situation with a clearer and cooler eye. I did

not know yet why this thing had been done – that knowledge would only come later, and

gradually; but if what I had deduced from my mother’s journals was true, then a simple

fact, of extraordinary consequence, would follow: I was the heir to one of the most

ancient and powerful families in England.

It seemed extraordinary, completely absurd; surely there must be some other

explanation? But, after returning again and again to the journals, I could reach no other

conclusion. Yet what use was the knowledge I was convinced I now possessed? Who else

would believe that what my mother – I still could not call her by any other name – had

written was the plain truth, and not some fantastic fiction? Even if believed, how could it

be proved? Unsubstantiated imputations, uncorroborated possibilities – nothing more.

Such, surely, would be the immediate verdict if I went to law. But where was the

substantiation? Where the corroboration? The questions began to multiply once more,

hammering insistently in my brain until I thought I would go quite mad.

One day, at the end of October, 1848, I looked again at the synoptic history of the

Tansor peerage in Burke’s Dictionary. Four densely packed columns contained the names

and pedigrees of people of whom I had never before heard, but who I must now call my

ancestors. Maldwin Duport, the first Baron Tansor, summoned to Parliament in 1264;

Edmund Duport, the seventh Baron, made an Earl under Henry IV, but who died without

issue; Humfrey Duport, the tenth Baron, attainted and executed for treason in 1461;

Jasper Duport, the eighteenth Baron, who turned Papist and went into exile with James II;

and then my nearer relatives – William Duport, the twenty-third Baron and founder of the

great Library at Evenwood; and at last my father, Julius Duport, the twenty-fifth Baron,

who had succeeded to the title because of the death of his older brother; and my own

brother, Henry Hereward. I began to fill a note-book with their names, the dates of their

births and deaths, and with every fact concerning their lives that I could glean from

Burke, or from other authorities to which I then had access.

How strange it was, how infinitely strange, to consider myself as a member of this

ancient line! But would I ever be given a place in some future epitome? Would a curious

heraldic scholar, a hundred years hence, look into Burke and read of Edward Charles

Duport, b. 23rd April, 1820, in Rennes, Ille-et-Vilaine, France? Only if I could find some

source of unequivocal and incontrovertible proof to supplement the indirect and oblique

testimony of my mother’s journals. Only then.