She had been looking fixedly once more through the misted pane of glass on which she had begun to write her lover’s name; but now she turned her face towards me, and I shivered to see the look of rage in her great dark eyes, and to hear the hard echo of an injury long borne in her voice.
‘I loved my father; but I also hated him, for hating Phoebus, and for allowing his unfounded prejudice of him to keep us apart. The loss of my sister was, I think, the cause. He wanted me always by him, to be his alone; and when my mother died, of course I became all in all to him. And so I remained ever dutiful, long after I had come of age; I submitted to his will, to please him, and to keep a promise made to my dear mother that I would not abandon him while he lived. He told me more than once that he would never again receive me as his daughter if I were to marry Phoebus, and that prospect I could not bear. But it was cruel to deny me so – to keep me from my heart’s desire, when he knew that I would continue to love and esteem him, and that I would never abandon him.’
‘But surely he did not deserve to die!’
‘No,’ she said, more softly. ‘He did not, and was not meant to. Pluckrose went too far, as usual. Phoebus was wrong to have brought him into it – he acknowledges it, and we have both suffered grievously for what Pluckrose did. Afterwards, when Pluckrose brought the letters to Phoebus and told him what he’d done, Phoebus was beside himself with fury. No. He should not have died. He should not have died.’
The repeated phrase trailed off into silence. Was she weeping? Really weeping? She was not lost, then, to all decent feeling. Some humanity remained.
‘You have said enough to show me how utterly I have been deceived.’ She did not look at me. Her head was now pressed against the window-pane, through which she was gazing vacantly out into the deepening gloom. ‘But this I must know: how did you first discover what Lady Tansor had done?’
‘Dear Edward!’ Oh, her voice! So tender, so inviting, so beguiling! The cold fury had melted quite away; in its place was a look of pitying compliance, as if she wished to show me her secret side, and so spare me further anguish and uncertainty. She held out her hand, long and white. I took it, and sat down beside her.
‘I did not mean you to love me, you know. But when it was clear that you did – well, it made things so much easier. I know Marie-Madeleine warned you—’
‘Miss Buisson! She knew?’
‘But of course. Marie-Madeleine and I had no secrets. We were the closest of friends. Sometimes I told her things that even Phoebus didn’t know about me. But, I suppose, by the time that she wrote to you, things had gone too far, hadn’t they? Poor sweet Edward!’ She leaned forward and began to brush my hair away from my forehead; in my mesmeric state, I seemed powerless to stop her.
‘And, you know, I found your attentions rather pleasant. It made Marie-Madeleine terribly cross.’ She gave a sly little laugh. ‘On more than one occasion she told me I shouldn’t encourage them – that it was unnecessarily cruel. But I found I couldn’t help myself; and as time went on, well, I began to think I might be falling in love with you – just a very little bit. It was bad of me, I know, and it shocked Marie-Madeleine even more when I told her. The little minx! I think she would have liked to have had you for herself! But you were asking me how we came to learn about Lady Tansor’s little escapade.
‘It happened purely by chance. My father had asked me to assist him in the translation of some letters in French. It was rare for my father to allow anyone into his work-room, except of course Lord Tansor, but on this occasion he made an exception. When I had finished the task, he requested me to take the papers up to the Muniments Room. As I was about to go back down, my eye was caught by an iron-bound chest. It bore a label identifying the contents as the private papers of Lord Tansor’s first wife. Now, I have always been fascinated by Laura Tansor. The most beautiful woman in England, they used to say. And so of course I could not help peeping into the chest. What do you think I pulled out first? A letter, dated the 16th of June 1820, to Lady Tansor in Paris, from a friend – identified only by the initial letter “S” – in the town of Dinan, in Brittany.’
Her look told me immediately that Fate had placed into her hands the very letter written by my foster-mother to her friend, and excerpted by Mr Carteret in his Deposition, in which it was clearly intimated that Lady Tansor had given birth to a child.
‘I did not have time to read the letter in its entirety,’ she continued, ‘for I heard my father’s step on the stairs; but I had read enough to know that it contained an extraordinary possibility. Naturally, I immediately told Phoebus of my little adventure. He tried, several times, to get up to the Muniments Room, but with little success; and this vexed him greatly. By now, you see, he knew that he was to be made Lord Tansor’s heir. If a child had been born legitimately to Lady Tansor – well, I do not need to tell you what Phoebus thought of
And then she told me how she had kept watch on her father, by offering to assist him further in his work. In this way, she learned that Mr Carteret was planning to remove certain of Lady Tansor’s letters to the bank in Stamford, which he later retrieved in advance of his meeting with me at the George Hotel. Daunt then conceived the plan of using Pluckrose to waylay Mr Carteret on his return to Evenwood from Stamford and take the papers, under the guise of a robbery. A note was sent to the hotel, purporting to be from Lord Tansor and requesting her father to attend his Lordship at the great house. This ensured that he would take the most direct road into the Park from Easton, through the woods on the western side.
‘But’, I objected, ‘I was told, quite categorically that Daunt was away on Lord Tansor’s business when I came to meet your father.’
‘He was. But he returned a day early, unknown to his family, in order to be here when you arrived. Pluckrose had been watching you – indeed, he was on the same train from London that you took. We knew you had been sent by Mr Tredgold, you see. Phoebus knows everything.’
‘And did you know that I was Edward Glyver before I told you?’
She shook her head.
‘Not for certain, though we suspected as much.’
‘How?’
She stood up, walked over to a cabinet on the far wall, and took out a book.
‘This is yours, is it not?’
It was my copy of Donne’s
‘It was given to Mrs Daunt by Luke Groves – the waiter at the Duport Arms in Easton. Groves thought it must
