The Meaning of Night

the first ages of the world to these times … Collected from the writings of the most approved historians, philosophers, physicians, philologists and others.’ Ed.]

^*[Henry Colburn (d. 1855), the publisher and founder of the Literary Gazette. Ed.]

^†[The French orientalist Antoine Galland (1646–1715) made the first Western translation of The Thousand and One Nights, published in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 as Les mille et une nuits. It was a great success and was followed by several other European translations, including the first English rendering of Galland’s text, published anonymously 1706–8 and known as the ‘Grub Street version’. This is undoubtedly the version referred to by the narrator. The translation was both defective and dull, but it inspired successive generations of English readers, up to and including the Romantic poets. Ed.]

^*[Waterloo Bridge was known as the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ because of the number of suicides who had leaped to their deaths from it. Ed.]

^*[From John Donne, ‘Elegie XIX: To his Mistris Going to Bed’. Ed.]

^†[Boodle’s, a gentleman’s club of a semi-political character at 28 St James’s Street; White’s (originally White’s Chocolate House, established towards the end of the seventeenth century) was another celebrated club-house at 37 and 38 St James’s Street. Ed.]

^‡[An adjective carrying the meaning of licentious or lewd, deriving from Cyprus, an island famed for the worship of Aphrodite. Ed.]

2

Nominatim^*

I had slept fitfully, aware of the soft, warm mass of Bella’s body curled up against mine as I drifted in and out of wakefulness. Though pricked by occasional anxieties, I remained confident that no one could connect me to my victim, and that I had completed my experiment in murder undetected. Having consciously subdued all thought of the man I had killed as a man, I found I had attained a kind of indifference to the enormity of the act that I had so recently committed. I was guilty, and yet I experienced no feeling of guilt. It was true that, when I allowed my eyes to close, images of the red-haired stranger would rise up before me; yet even in this twilight state, between sleeping and waking, when conscience may often call up horrors from the depths of our being, I continued to feel no revulsion at what I had done.

Later, it also struck me as odd that my mind did not keep returning to the fatal moment itself, when the knife had entered the yielding flesh of my victim. Instead, I would see myself following the man along a dark and deserted thoroughfare. From time to time we would emerge into a ring of sickly yellow light thrown out from an open door set in a tall windowless building. Then we would proceed once more into darkness. Over and again, when uncertain sleep came, I would find myself in this perpetual procession through black and nameless streets. Not once did I see his face; his back was always towards me as we walked slowly from one oasis of jaundiced light to another. Then, just before daybreak, as I fell back once more into half-sleep, I saw him again.

We were in a small skiff, which he was rowing lazily down a placid river on a silent, heat-heavy afternoon. I lay in the rear of the vessel, my eyes fixed on the muscles of his back as they flexed beneath his coat with each pull on the oars. Incongruously, on such a day, his clothes were those he wore on that cold October evening, including his muffler and tall black hat. As we entered a narrow channel, he let the oars rest on the surface of the water, turned to face me, and smiled.

But it was not the face of my anonymous victim. It was the face of Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, the man whose life I was studying so assiduously to extinguish.

Leaving Bella asleep, and placing, as I always did on such occasions, a gentle kiss on her flushed cheek by way of good-bye, I made my way to my rooms. The sky was beginning to lighten over the waking city, and the sounds of Great Leviathan stirring were all about me: the rattle of milk cans; a moaning drove of bullocks being driven through the empty street; the early cries of ‘Fresh watercress!’ as I approached Farringdon-market. As the church clocks struck six, I stopped at a coffee-stall near the market entrance to warm my hands, for it was a sharp morning; the man looked at me indignantly, but I faced him down, and he retired mumbling deprecations.

On reaching Temple Bar I considered strolling over once again to the scene of my late encounter with the red- haired man, to satisfy myself that all was well; instead I chose breakfast and a change of linen. At the corner of Temple-street, Whitefriars, I mounted the narrow flight of dark stairs that led up from the street to the top floor of the house in which I lodged, from there entering a long, wainscoted sitting-room under the eaves.

I lived alone, my only visitor being the woman, Mrs Grainger, who came from time to time to undertake some modest domestic chores. My work-table was littered with papers and note-books; a once handsome, but now faded, Turkey carpet covered most of the floor, and about the room were scattered several items of furniture brought from my mother’s house in Dorset. From this apartment a door led off, first to a narrow bedroom lit by a small skylight, and then, beyond, to an even smaller space – really no more than a closet – that served as both wardrobe and wash-room.

The face that greeted me in the little cracked mirror that stood on a shelf above the wash-stand in this cubicle did not seem, to my objective gaze, to be the face of a cold-blooded murderer. The eyes looked back genially, and with calm intensity. Here was a face to trust, to confide in; yet I had despatched another human being with almost as little thought as I might crush an insect. Was I, then, some dissimulating devil in human form? No. I was but a man, a good man at heart, if the truth be told, driven to set right the wrong that had been done to me, absolved – even of murder – by the implacable fatalities to which I was then convinced my life had been subject. To me, this power was the Iron Master, forever forging the chains that bound me to actions I must take. My destiny, I believed, was to take back what was rightfully mine, whatever the consequences.

I peered a little closer into the mirror. A long lean face, with large, heavy-lidded dark eyes; olive-coloured skin; a nose perhaps a little skewed, but still finely shaped; a mouth that carried the merest hint of a smile, even in repose; black hair swept back from the forehead, innocent of Macassar oil, and abundant at the sides, but, I confess, receding fast, and greying a little at the temples. Fine moustachios. Very fine. Taken all in all, I believe that I stood before the world as a moderately handsome fellow.

But what was this? I moved my face closer to the grimy glass. There, on the very tip of my shirt collar, was a splash of dull red.

I stood for a moment, bending towards the mirror, gripped by a sudden fascinated fear. This dumb, yet still eloquent, witness to the night’s activities in Cain-court took me completely by surprise. Its pursuit of me seemed like a violation, and I quickly reviewed the dangerous possibilities that it presented.

Had it been enough to betray me? Had one of the waiters in Quinn’s noticed it when it had still been vivid and unequivocal, or the flower-seller when I had returned – foolishly, as it might now prove – to the scene of my crime? Had Bella observed it, despite the haste of passion? Any of these, on reading or hearing of the murder, might recall