16
Labor vincit*
Later that morning, I heard Tom’s knock on the front door. When I opened it to him, I did not have to feign exhaustion.
‘My dear fellow,’ he said stepping in and helping me back to my chair by the fireplace, where I had fallen asleep, fully clothed, only an hour before. ‘What is the matter? Shall I call for Dr Penny?’
‘No, Tom,’ I replied, ‘no need for that. I shall be right as rain soon, I’m sure. A temporary indisposition only.’
He sat with me for a while as I took a little breakfast. Then, noticing the copy of Buckingham’s book lying on the window-seat, he asked whether I had thought more about the expedition to Mesopotamia. He could see from the evasiveness of my reply that my interest in the project had lessened, but was friend enough to say that he expected I would see things differently when the indisposition had passed. But I could not let him think so, and told him straight out that I had definitely fixed against joining Professor S—in Nimrud.
‘I’m sorry to hear it, Ned,’ he said, ‘for I think it was a promising opening, with much to gain in all respects. Perhaps you have other possibilities in view for earning a living?’
I had not often seen Tom angry with me, but I could not blame him for feeling somewhat put out. The prospect of adventure and advancement in the field of archaeology had only been a temporary passion, and I should have squashed it firmly underfoot at the start, in fairness to Tom. I tried to mend the mood by saying that I was also considering an opening at the British Museum, but then spoiled it by adding that this, too, might not be quite suitable for me at the present time.
‘Well, then,’ said Tom, standing up to go, ‘I shall write to the Professor. Good morning, Ned. I hope to see you improved soon.’
I took the unspoken reprimand in his parting words without reply, and stood at the window gloomily watching him make his way back down the path to the village.
I should never now see Mesopotamia, and Great Russell-street would have to get on without me. For I was being drawn irresistibly back to the little black books that now lay scattered across my mother’s work-table. The urge to discover the meaning of what my mother had written was to grow ever stronger, and soon became all- consuming, leading inexorably to ends of which I could not then have conceived.
The decipherment of my mother’s journals and papers – for that, in effect, is what it became – began in earnest the next day, and continued in its first phase almost unabated for two or three months. Tom had departed to spend some time with a cousin in Norwich, feeling no doubt that it was best, for both of us, to leave any further discussions concerning my future to some later date. And so I remained indoors, 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 to 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, memoranda – 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. As if extracting broken shards from the imprisoning earth, I 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 gave 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 valise, 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, I had stupidly failed 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
That first night at Eton, in Long Chamber, I had asked Daunt whether he knew Miss Lamb, and, later, he had enquired whether I had ever been to Evenwood. We had both answered in the negative, and I had thought no more about the coincidence. But, as I recalled 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. Yet what could Daunt have to do with all this?
I next considered the identity of ‘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, like her surname, began with the letter ‘L’; but, to my amazement, I could find not a single piece of correspondence from this person, nor, 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 had retreated to the one certainty that I had: the place that connected Miss Lamb, Phoebus Daunt, and my mother. Taking down the 1830 edition of Burke’s
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 11th of February 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
