The Meaning of Night

Touched by his tone of genuine solicitation, I said that I would remember his words, and thanked him for his kindness.

‘No need to thank me, Edward,’ he said, beaming broadly.

‘You are an extraordinary young man. I consider it a duty – a most pleasant duty – to offer you every assistance, whenever you may feel it needful. And, besides, as I told you when we first met, the ordinary I can leave to others; the extraordinary I like to keep for myself.’

So my life proceeded for the the next three years. On Mondays and Tuesdays I would be engaged on my work as Mr Tredgold’s confidential assistant – sometimes in the office, but more frequently following some investigatory trail that might take me to every corner of London, and occasionally beyond. On Wednesdays, I took the pupils sent to me for instruction by Sir Ephraim Gadd, whilst on Thursdays and Fridays I resumed my duties at Tredgolds. I took my lunch at Dolly’s, and my dinner at the London Restaurant, day in, day out.^*

My free time, except for occasional Sunday visits to the Senior Partner’s private residence, was devoted to a renewed study of my mother’s papers. To facilitate the work, I had begun to acquaint myself with shorthand, using Mr Pitman’s system,^† which I used to make notes on each item or document. These were then indexed and arranged in a specially constructed set of small compartmentalized drawers, somewhat like an apothecary’s chest. But in all the mass of paper through which I had wandered, like some primaeval discoverer on an unknown ocean, I could still find nothing to supplement or advance my original discovery. Time and Death had also done their work: Laura Tansor was no more, and could not now be cross-examined; and her companion, whom I had called Mother, had followed her into eternal silence. My work at Tredgolds, however, had made me wiser in the art of detection, and I now commenced on several new lines of enquiry.

Gradually, through surviving receipts and other documents, I began to trace my mother’s movements during the summer of 1819, visiting several inns and hotels where she had stayed, and seeking out anyone in those places who might have remembered her. I met with no success until I was directed to an elderly man in Folkestone, who had been the Captain of the packet that had taken my mother and her friend to Boulogne, in August 1819. He distinctly remembered the two ladies – one, small of stature and of rather nervous appearance; the other, tall and dark, who ‘bore herself like a queen’, as he said, and who had paid him a substantial consideration so that she and her companion could spend the crossing undisturbed in his cabin.

I then travelled to the West Country, to make enquiries concerning Lady Tansor’s family, the Fairmiles, of Langton Court, a handsome house of Elizabeth’s reign situated a few miles from where my mother was born. In due course, I discovered a voluble old lady, Miss Sykes by name, who was able to tell me something concerning the former Laura Fairmile. Of particular interest to me was what she had to say about Miss Fairmile’s aunt on her mother’s side. This lady, Miss Harriet Gilman, had married the ci-devant Marquis de Quebriac, who had resided in England, visibly impecunious, since the days of the Terror. After the Amiens Peace had been struck,^* the couple returned to the Marquis’s ancestral chateau, which stood a few miles outside the city of Rennes. But the gentleman died soon after, and the chateau was placed in the hands of his creditors, leaving his widow to decamp to a small house in the city, in the Rue du Chapitre, belonging to her late husband’s family. It was to this house that Lady Tansor and her companion later came.

At last the references in my mother’s journals to ‘Mme de Q’ were satisfactorily explained, and so in September 1850, on the basis of this new intelligence, I travelled to France, having obtained permission from Mr Tredgold to take a short holiday.

The house in the Rue du Chapitre was boarded up, but I found an old priest at the Church of St-Sauveur who was able to tell me that Madame de Quebriac had died some twenty years since. He also recalled the time when Madame’s niece, accompanied by a friend, had resided with her for several months, and that a baby had been born, though he could not recall to which lady, or whether it had been a boy or a girl. The priest directed me to a Dr Pascal, who also lived in the Rue du Chapitre; but he, too, proved to be an old man, with few useful memories, and these added little to what the priest had already told me. The doctor did, however, inform me of an ancient retainer of Madame de Quebriac’s who was still living, he thought, just outside the city. I arrived at the place in high hopes, only to learn that the old man had died a few weeks earlier.

Interesting though they were, however, such little discoveries as I was able to make whilst in France served only to show me how far I was from my goal. All my efforts had increased my store of plausible inferences, hypotheses, and suggestive possibilities; but I was no closer to uncovering the independent proof that I required, which would confirm, beyond disputation, that I was Lord Tansor’s lost heir, the son for whom he longed.

As for Phoebus Daunt, my endeavours to gather information on him, with the aim of conceiving some effective means of revenge, had been somewhat more successful, and were spurred on by the recent sight of him at Evenwood. Years had passed sinced my enforced departure from Eton, but my anger at his perfidy was undiminished. He had prospered; he had made his mark on the world, as I had once hoped to do; but my prospects had been blighted because of him. Perhaps I might have been a great figure at the University by now, with even greater distinctions in view. But all that had gone, stolen from me by his treachery.

Since making the acquaintance of Dr T—, during my earlier visit to Millhead, I had been regularly regaled with lengthy epistles from that brazenly indiscreet gentleman on the history of Dr Daunt and his family during their time in Lancashire. The information thus obtained was of only slight significance, though it served to show me how much influence the second Mrs Daunt had wielded, and perhaps wielded still, over her step-son.

Then, one day in Piccadilly, I happened to encounter an old schoolfellow, who, over an expensive dinner at Grillon’s,^* which I could ill afford, was happy to supply me with some tittle-tattle concerning our mutual acquaintance. According to my informant, Daunt had lately enjoyed a little dalliance with a French ballet- dancer, and was rumoured to have proposed to Miss Eloise Dinever, the banking heiress, but had supposedly been refused. He dined at his Club, the Athenaeum, of an evening when in London, kept a box at Her Majesty’s,^† and could be seen riding out in Rotten-row^‡ on most Saturdays, between five and seven, during the Season. He had a good house, in Mecklenburgh -square, and was generally a figure in fashionable, as well as literary, society.

‘But where does he get his money from?’ I asked in surprise, knowing well the cost of maintaining such a life in London, and strongly suspecting that the writing of poetic epics would hardly keep him in dinners, let alone a box at the Opera.

‘Bit of a mystery,’ said my informant, lowering his voice. ‘But there’s plenty of it.’

Now, a mystery was exactly what I was looking for; it spoke to me of something concealed from public gaze that Daunt might not wish to be known – a secret which, once unlocked, could perhaps be used against him. It might prove to be nothing at all; but, where money is in the case, my experience always inclines me to adopt a sceptical view of things. Yet even with all the means at my disposal, having by now begun to accumulate quite a little army of agents and scouts about the capital, I failed to locate the source of Daunt’s evident wealth.

Time went on, but no new information on Daunt came to light, and I had made no further progress in my search for the evidence that would prove my true identity. Weeks came and went; months passed, and slowly I