me enter, Lady Tansor slowly closed the box and sat back in her chair, whilst Miss Eames stood up and walked towards me, holding her hand out to receive the book that I had brought, though it seemed to me that her action had also been intended to prevent me from drawing too close to the writing-box and its contents.
The incident may seem trifling, but it was to gain in significance retrospectively, as I shall shortly record.
And so to continue my deposition, and to conclude it as quickly as I may.
Still my Lady could not be persuaded to give up her self-imposed exile from society, and she absolutely refused to quit her apartment under any circumstance. But then, as the summer days began to shorten, her spirits gradually revived, and one bright cold day, at the beginning of October 1823, bundled up in her furs, she finally left her rooms, for the first time since the birth of her son – I observed her myself from the window of the Muniments Room taking the air on the Library Terrace, walking slowly up and down, arm in arm with Miss Eames. The next morning, Master Henry was brought by his nurse to be dandled for a minute or two on his mamma’s knee; the following morning, she began to take her breakfast again with her husband in the Yellow Parlour.
My cousin treated her return to domestic life with cold civility; for her part, she regarded him with utter indifference, though she ate her meals with him and sat with him of an evening, neither of them speaking the whole time, until each retired without a word of good-night to their own bedchambers at opposite ends of the house. She showed not much more interest in her son, though she raised no objection when my cousin brought up Sir Thomas Lawrence to paint the family portrait that now adorns the vestibule at Evenwood.
But then my Lady began to exhibit worrying signs of a severe nervous affection, slight at first, but increasing in frequency and intensity. In November 1823, as I noted in my journal, she repeatedly expressed a strong and intemperate desire to go and see the old friend she had previously visited on the south coast. Her husband sensibly prohibited such a thing; but her Ladyship contrived a means of leaving Evenwood when Lord Tansor was required to be in town on business. On her return, angry words were spoken; whereupon she locked herself in her room for two days and refused to come out, even when begged to do so by Miss Eames, until at last my cousin was obliged to order that the door be broken down. When his Lordship entered the apartment, to satisfy himself that she had not harmed herself in any way, she thrust a piece of paper into his hand, on which was a passage she had copied out of the edition of Felltham’s
She had once been the brightest ornament of society, beautiful and carefree. Now her thoughts were all centred on the anguished contemplation of her inevitable demise. It pains me, even now, to speak of these last months, during which Lady Tansor became ever more unpredictable and distracted. My cousin had given instructions that, henceforth, his wife must never be left alone, and had arranged for a woman from the village, Mrs Marian Brine, to sleep in a truckle-bed next to my Lady’s own bed, whilst during the day, even when Miss Eames was with her, a servant was required to sit outside the door of her apartments, the keys of which had been confiscated to prevent her from incarcerating herself again.
But these safeguards proved insufficient, and one night, dressed only in her shift, when a late frost had rendered the earth iron-hard, she slipped out of the house and was found wandering the next morning on the path near the Grecian Temple that stands on the western edge of the Park, dirty and dishevelled and wailing in the most terrible fashion, her poor bare feet cut to pieces from walking through brambles and thorns.
They covered her, and she was brought back in the arms of Gabriel Brine, then his Lordship’s groom, and husband of the woman who had been set to watch over her at night. Brine himself told me how she had continued to babble and moan as he had carried her, crying out over and over again, ‘He is lost to me, my son, my son’; but when he attempted to comfort her by telling her that all was well, and that Master Henry was safe in his cradle, she became maddened, and began to shriek and kick and writhe, cursing him in the most dreadful manner until, coming into the Front Court at last and seeing her husband standing beneath the light of the portico lamp, anxiously awaiting her return, she quietened herself, closed her eyes, and sank back, her strength exhausted, into Brine’s arms.
Lord Tansor stood for a moment, silently contemplating the destruction of his once beautiful wife. I, too, was there, just inside the door. I saw his Lordship nod to Brine, who proceeded to carry his pathetic burden upstairs, where she was laid in Lady Constantia’s great carved bed, from which she was to rise never more.
She died peacefully on the 8th of February 1824, at a little after six o’clock in the evening, and was laid to rest three days later in the Mausoleum built by her husband’s great-grandfather.
So ended the life of Laura Rose Duport,
III
Saturday, 22nd October 1853
Immediately after the interment of his wife, Lord Tansor called for Miss Eames, her Ladyship’s former companion, and requested her to leave Evenwood at her earliest convenience. To what she was owed by way of remuneration, he added a generous additional payment, thanking her coldly for the services that she had rendered to his late wife. He hoped that she would have no cause to complain that she had been treated badly by him, to which she replied that he need have no fear on that score, and that she was properly grateful for the consideration she had received in his house.
He did not stop to ask, either Miss Eames or himself, whether she had a home to go to. As it happens, she did not; her father, a widower, had died soon after her Ladyship had absconded to France, and her other sisters were all married. One of these, however, lived in London, and to her, by means of a telegraphic message sent from Easton, Miss Eames now applied for temporary sanctuary.
Leaving Miss Eames to arrange her few possessions for departure, his Lordship then came to my work-room and instructed me to gather up all Lady Tansor’s private papers, and place them in the Muniments Room. Did he wish to peruse them himself after they had been collected? He did not. Did he wish me to examine or order them in any way? He did not. Were there any further instructions concerning her Ladyship’s papers? There were not. Only one more thing was required: the unfinished painting of her Ladyship was to be removed from the Yellow Parlour and placed ‘in a less conspicuous position’. Did his Lordship have a specific location in mind? He did not. Would there be any objection to my hanging it here, in my workroom? None whatsoever.
An hour or so later, there was another knock at my door. It was Miss Eames, come to bid me farewell. She spoke most kindly of the little services that I had been happy to provide for her during the time I had been employed at Evenwood, and said that she would always think of me as a friend. Then she said something that struck me as very odd:
‘You will always think well of me, won’t you, Mr Carteret? I would not like it – I could not bear it – if you did not.’
