The Meaning of Night

^*[Turkey declared war on Russia in October 1853. The Turks defeated the Russians at Oltenitza on 4 November, but the Turkish naval squadron was destroyed by the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sinope on the 30th of that month – an action that caused outrage in England. These were the preliminary engagements of what was to become the Crimean War. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March 1854. Ed.]

^†[By Charlotte M. Yonge (1823–1901), published in 1853. The novel, which dramatizes the spiritual struggles of its principal character, Guy Morville, reflected its author’s Tractarian beliefs and was one of the most successful novels of the century. Ed.]

^*[The first volume of The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (1819– 1900), in which he championed Gothic architecture, was published in March 1851; volume II followed in July 1853, and volume III in October 1853. Ed.]

^†[Opus 28. Composed 1836–9, published in 1839. Ed.]

^‡[‘At my heart, at my breast’, from Schumann’s song-cycle for female voice and piano, Frauenliebe und Leben (‘A Woman’s Life and Love’, 1840). Ed.]

37

Non sum qualis eram^*

I did not see Miss Carteret the next morning. When Mrs Rowthorn came up with my breakfast, she informed me that her mistress had gone out early, though it was a damp and gloomy day for a walk.

‘But it’s a good sign,’ she said, ‘that Miss is out in the air again. She’s been cooped up in her room for days on end since she came back from London, grieving still for her poor papa, it’s plain. But she seemed brighter this morning, and it fair did my heart good to see.’

I had several hours before my train was due to leave, and so I resolved on a little expedition through the Park, partly to look upon my inheritance once again, and partly in the hope that I might encounter Miss Carteret.

Downstairs, I asked the girl that I found scrubbing the front step to run and fetch John Brine.

‘Brine,’ I asked, ‘I have a mind to see the Mausoleum. Is there a key?’

‘I can get that for you, sir,’ he replied, ‘if you’ll wait till I ride up to the great house. It won’t take more than a quarter of an hour.’

He was as good as his word, and I was soon wandering contentedly along sequestered paths through dripping woods and stately avenues of bare-branched limes, stopping from time to time to look out at the great house through a veil of drizzle. From certain vantage points it lay indistinct and spectral, an undifferentiated mass; from others it gained in definition, its towers and spires rearing sharply up through the mist like the petrified fingers of some titanic creature. It began to seem suddenly, and curiously, imperative to drink in every separate prospect to the brim; each detail of arch or window, each angle and nuance, appeared infinitely and urgently precious to me, as if I were a man gazing on the face of the one he loves for the last time.

At length, I found myself standing – wet and cold, and splashed with mud – before the great double doors of the Mausoleum.

It stood within a dense semi-circle of ivy-clad trees, a substantial domed building in the Graeco-Egyptian style, constructed in the year 1722 by the 21st Baron, who for his design had plundered freely – some might say uncritically – from a number of mausolea illustrated in Roland Freart’s Parallele de l’Architecture Antique et de la Moderne.^*

The building consisted of a large central chamber flanked by three smaller wings, and an entrance hall, the whole being shut off by two massive and forbidding lead-faced doors, carrying representations in relief of six inverted torches, three on each door. Two life-size stone angels on plinths – one bearing a wreath, the other an open book – guarded the entrance. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the key that Brine had given me and placed it in the inverted escutcheon.

In the central chamber were four or five imposing tombs, whilst set around the walls of the three wings were a succession of arcaded and gated loculi, some presently empty and awaiting their occupants, others closed off by slate panels, each bearing an inscription.

The first panel to catch my attention was that of Lord Tansor’s elder brother, Vortigern, whom Mr Tredgold had told me had died of an epileptic seizure; then I turned to the panel closing off the loculus that contained the remains of Henry Hereward Duport, my own brother. And then, next to it, was what I had come to see.

I stood in the cold, dank stillness for some minutes, contemplating the simple inscription on the slate panel; but not in a mood of reverence and regret, as I had expected, but with a pounding heart. This is what I read:

Laura Rose Duport

1796–1824

Sursum Corda

The inscription instantly brought to mind the note that Mr Carteret had appended to his Deposition. SORSUM CORDA: the words from the Latin Eucharist written on a slip of paper sent to him by my mother’s friend and companion, Miss Julia Eames. SURSUM CORDA. Try as I might, I could not wrench significance from the words; and yet Mr Carteret had come to a realization about them that he wished to communicate to me.

Musing on this new puzzle, I left the Mausoleum to silence and darkness, and took my way down a muddy path to a gravelled bridle-way that ran alongside the Park wall back to the South Gates. Disappointed that I had not encountered Miss Carteret on my ramblings, I arrived back at the Dower House, and went into the stable-yard to return the key of the Mausoleum to John Brine.

‘You’ll oblige me by getting a duplicate cut, Brine. Discreetly. You understand?’

‘I understand, sir.’

‘Very good. My compliments to your sister.’ He tipped his cap, and quickly pocketed the coins that I had placed in his hand.

‘Don’t expect we’ll be seeing you for a while, sir.’

I turned back. ‘What? Why do you say that?’

‘I only meant that, with Miss going away—’

‘Going away? What are you talking about?’