The Meaning of Night

began to sink into an enfeebling gloom that I could not shake off. This was a black time indeed. I was perpetually on edge, eaten up by frustrated rage. To ease my spirits, I passed long oblivious hours in Bluegate-fields, under the deft ministrations of Chi Ki, my customary opium-master. And then, night after night, I would wander the streets, taking my accustomed way from the Westend via London-bridge, along Thames-street, past the Tower, and so onto St Katharine’s-dock, and the fearful lanes and courts around and about the Ratcliffe-highway, in order to observe the underside of London in all its horror. It was on such excursions, pushing my way through dirty crowds of Lascars and Jews, Malays and Swedes, and every form of our British human scum, that I became truly acquainted with the character of our great metropolis, and learned to trust my ability to frequent its most deadly quarters with impunity.

Whilst I languished thus in my dull sublunary life, pulled hither and thither by my demons, the rise of Daunt’s literary star had been ceaseless. The world, I concluded, had gone quite mad. I could hardly open a news-paper or a magazine without coming across some piece of eulogistic clap-trap extolling the genius of P. Rainsford Daunt. The volumes had flowed thick and fast from his prodigal pen, an unstoppable torrent of drivel in rhyming couplets and blank verse. In 1846 had come that ever-memorable monstrosity, The Cave of Merlin, in which the poet out-Southey-ed Southey at his most execrable, but which the British Critic unaccountably considered to be ‘sublime in conception’, averring that ‘Mr Phoebus Daunt is without equal, a master of the poetic epic, the Virgil of the nineteenth century’. This production was followed, in tedious succession, by The Pharaoh’s Child in 1848, then Montezuma in 1849, and, the following year, by The Conquest of Peru. With every publication, more inflated estimates of the poet’s oeuvre would greet me as I idly perused Blackwood’s or Fraser’s, whilst paragraphs would rise up before my affronted eyes in The Times, informing his eager and adoring public that Mr Phoebus Daunt, ‘the celebrated poet’, was presently in town, and then proceeding to enumerate his doings in tedious detail. In this way, I learned that he had been to Gore House to sit to the pencil of the Count d’Orsay,^* who also later modelled in plaster a fetching bust of the young genius. Naturally, his inclusion with other notables at the ceremonial opening of the Great Exhibition^† had excited no little interest amongst a certain impressionable section of society. I recall opening the Illustrated London News over breakfast in the spring of 1851 and being greeted by a preposterous engraving of the poet – dressed in dark paletot, light trousers strapped under the instep, embroidered waistcoat, and stove-pipe hat – together with his noble patron, Lord Tansor, standing proudly with the Queen and the Prince Consort, beside the gilded cage containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond.^‡

With the rest of the world, I had also attended the Exhibition, drawn there by a desire to view the latest photographic advances. Accompanying me had been Rebecca Harrigan, Mr Tredgold’s housekeeper, with whom I had struck up a kind of friendship. On more than one occasion, I had caught her looking at me in an interested way. She had a fine little figure, and was pretty enough; but, as I quickly discovered, after engaging her in a little conversation, she also possessed a sharp mind, and a pleasingly audacious spirit. I soon began to take quite a fancy to her.

One evening, in St Paul’s Church-yard, I encountered her sheltering under the portico of the Cathedral from a shower of rain. We chatted inconsequentially until the rain began to ease, and then I asked her whether she might care to take some dinner with me. ‘If your husband wouldn’t mind,’ I added, believing that she and Mr Tredgold’s manservant, Albert, were man and wife.

‘Oh, ’e ain’t my ’usband,’ she said, looking at me as cool as you like.

‘Not your husband?’

‘Not ’im.’

‘Then …’

‘I’ll tell you what Mr Glapthorn,’ she butted in, giving me a quite delightfully sly smile, ‘you take me to dinner, and I’ll come clean.’

She was respectably and soberly dressed in blue taffeta, with a matching stole and bonnet, an ensemble which, with her delicate little reticule, made her look like a vicar’s daughter. So, after walking a little way, I hailed a hansom in Fleet-street and took her off to Limmer’s,^* where I asked the waiter to find a table for myself and my sister.

Over the course of the evening, Rebecca recounted something of her history. Her real name was Dickson. Orphaned at the age of nine, she had been obliged to fend for herself on the unforgiving streets of Bermondsey. But – like me – she was resourceful and had quickly found a protector, a noted cracksman,^† for whom, as she said, she ‘thieved like a good ’un’ in return for food and a roof over her head. In due course, she graduated to whoring; but then, through the good offices of one of her customers, she succeeded in gaining a place in service, as a maid in the house of a Director of the East India Company. It was there that she had met Albert Harrigan, a servant in the same establishment. She and this Harrigan soon formed an attachment, even though her paramour (whose real name was Albert Parker) had an abandoned wife and child somewhere in Yorkshire. All went along nicely until their employer lost all his money in a failed railway speculation, and committed suicide. His legal adviser had been none other than Mr Christopher Tredgold, who happened just then to be in need of a manservant for his private residence. Harrigan was duly taken on, to be joined after a few weeks by his supposed wife. But their relationship had quickly soured, and now only convenience kept them together.

She told me all this – peppering her account with several anecdotes of questionable propriety – with all the gusto of a tavern raconteur; but as soon as the waiter arrived with each course, the wily little slut instantly assumed an expression of the most perfect demureness, smiling sweetly and turning the conversation, without once dropping her aitches, to some topic of unimpeachable dullness.

In the weeks following, Rebecca and I found occasion to promote our friendship, in ways that I am sure I do not need to describe. If Harrigan guessed how things lay between us, then it did not appear to trouble him. As for Rebecca, her good humour and healthy natural appetites, together with that optimistic artfulness that comes from having successfully made the most of a very bad lot, soon began to have a beneficial effect on me; and, as she had no wish to put a rope round my neck and lead me to the altar, we got on very well, meeting when the inclination took us, and pursuing our own interests whenever we wished.

This, then, was my life, from 1849 to 1853. And so things would perhaps have continued, but for two events.

The first occurred in March, of the latter year. I found myself in St John’s Wood, on Mr Tredgold’s business, and had just turned into a pleasant tree-lined street when the name on the gate-piers of a large white-painted villa, half hidden behind a screen of shrubs, brought me up short. Blithe Lodge – where the beauteous Isabella Gallini had lived for the past four years – stood before me. I have already written of how I renewed my acquaintance with Bella and how, under the auspices of Mrs Kitty Daley, she became my mistress. Until the great events of the autumn of that same year broke upon me, I discovered that I was able to remain faithful to Bella, saving a few minor and quite meaningless indiscretions, which I confess here for honesty’s sake. Rebecca, however, I did give up. She received the news with little emotion.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that don’t matter. I’ve still got Albert, such as ’e is. An’ I reckon we’ll stay friends, you an’ me.