The Meaning of Night

taken hence to a place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. Do you have anything to say?’

I fill my lungs with air, and try to scream out a protest at the top of my voice. But there is only silence.

Back in Temple-street the following day, I remained indoors, beset by a vacillating and porous state of mind in which nothing could be fixed or retained; and so, with the afternoon drawing to a close, I thought I would go down to the Temple Steps, and take my skiff out on the river for half an hour.

Later that evening, Bella received me at Blithe Lodge with her customary warmth, and with many demonstrations of amity.

It was our first meeting since I had made the acquaintance of Miss Carteret, and I was never more conscious of being ‘a thing of sin and guilt’.^* I sat a little way off and watched Bella as she sat by the fire in Kitty Daley’s drawing-room with some of The Academy’s junior nymphs. Whores, every one of them, of course, but a sweeter, kinder, and livelier bunch of girls you could not wish to meet; and Bella was the sweetest and kindest of them all. She looked so fresh and alive, discoursing easily and amusingly to the little sorority gathered all around her of Lord R—’s insistence, during a recent encounter with one of the absent nymphs, that she must dress herself up like the Queen, complete with a diadem of paste diamonds, and a pale blue sash across her bust, whilst he whispered warm encouragements into her ear, in a German accent, as they went to it.

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.’