‘Your father wrote to Mr Tredgold on a matter pertaining to the Tansor succession. My principal felt that it would not be appropriate for him to meet Mr Carteret in person, as he had requested; and so I was sent instead.’
‘A matter pertaining to the succession? Surely that is something that my father would have felt obliged to put before Lord Tansor, not Mr Tredgold.’
‘I can make no comment on that,’ I replied. ‘I can only say that it was your father’s express wish that his communication to Mr Tredgold should be kept strictly confidential.’
‘But what could possibly have made him act in such a way? He was a most loyal servant to Lord Tansor. It would have been against his deepest principles to go behind his Lordship’s back.’
‘Miss Carteret,’ I said, ‘I have already revealed more of the business than my employer would have wished me to do; and, indeed, I can add nothing more to what I have already said. Your father told me nothing when we met in Stamford, and his untimely death has sealed my ignorance concerning the reason for his letter to my principal. Whatever he wished to reveal to Mr Tredgold, through me, must now remain forever unknown.’
How I hated myself for the lie. She did not deserve to be treated so, as if she were an enemy to my interests, like Phoebus Daunt, whom she appeared to detest almost as much I did. I had no reason not to trust her, and every reason to draw her into my confidence. She had declared herself my friend, and had shown me courtesy and kindness, and a degree of partiality that I flattered myself betokened incipient affection. She had a right, surely, to claim my trust. Yes, she had a right to know what her father had written in his Deposition, and to understand what it signified for me, and for her. This, however, was not the time, not quite yet; but just a little longer, and then I would put all deceit aside for ever.
Had she sensed the falsehood? I could not tell, for nothing disturbed the enigmatic serenity of her face. She appeared to be turning over what I had said. Then, as if a thought had struck her, she asked:
‘Do you suppose it might concern Mr Daunt – I mean, the matter that my father wished to bring to Mr Tredgold’s attention?’
‘I really cannot say.’
‘But you would tell me, if you knew, wouldn’t you? As a friend.’
She had moved closer to me and was standing, with one hand resting on the piano-forte, looking directly into my eyes.
‘It would be impossible to deny a true friend,’ I said.
‘Well then, we have balanced the books, Mr Glapthorn.’ The smile broadened. ‘Confidences have been exchanged, and our debts to each other paid. I am so glad you came. When we next meet, I shall have left here for good. It will be strange, to pass by the Dower House and know that someone else is living here. But you will come and see me again, I hope, at the great house, or in London?’
‘Do you need to ask?’ I repeated the question that she herself had put to me after our walk in Green-park.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I do not think I do.’
*[‘Love conquers all’ (Virgil, Eclogues). Ed.]
*[Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638) by the English poet Francis Quarles (1592–1644). Ed.]
*[Colza was a thick, viscous vegetable oil used in lamps before the invention of paraffin in 1878. Ed.]
*[Turkey declared war on Russia in October 1853. The Turks defeated the Russians at Oltenitza on 4 November, but the Turkish naval squadron was destroyed by the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sinope on the 30th of that month – an action that caused outrage in England. These were the preliminary engagements of what was to become the Crimean War. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March 1854. Ed.]
†[By Charlotte M. Yonge (1823–1901), published in 1853. The novel, which dramatizes the spiritual struggles of its principal character, Guy Morville, reflected its author’s Tractarian beliefs and was one of the most successful novels of the century. Ed.]
*[The first volume of The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (1819–1900), in which he championed Gothic architecture, was published in March 1851; volume II followed in July 1853, and volume III in October 1853. Ed.]
†[Opus 28. Composed 1836–9, published in 1839. Ed.]
‡[‘At my heart, at my breast’, from Schumann’s song-cycle for female voice and piano, Frauenliebe und Leben (‘A Woman’s Life and Love’, 1840). Ed.]
37
Non sum qualis eram*
I did not see Miss Carteret the next morning. When Mrs Rowthorn came up with my breakfast, she informed me that her mistress had gone out early, though it was a damp and gloomy day for a walk.
‘But it’s a good sign,’ she said, ‘that Miss is out in the air again. She’s been cooped up in her room for days on end since she came back from London, grieving still for her poor papa, it’s plain. But she seemed brighter this morning, and it fair did my heart good to see.’
I had several hours before my train was due to leave, and so I resolved on a little expedition through the Park, partly to look upon my inheritance once again, and partly in the hope that I might encounter Miss Carteret.
Downstairs, I asked the girl that I found scrubbing the front step to run and fetch John Brine.
‘Brine,’ I asked, ‘I have a mind to see the Mausoleum. Is there a key?’
‘I can get that for you, sir,’ he replied, ‘if you’ll wait till I ride up to the great house. It won’t take more than a quarter of an hour.’
He was as good as his word, and I was soon wandering contentedly along sequestered paths through dripping woods and stately avenues of bare-branched limes, stopping from time to time to look out at the great house through a veil of drizzle. From certain vantage points it lay indistinct and spectral, an undifferentiated mass; from others it gained in definition, its towers and spires rearing sharply up through the mist like the petrified fingers of some titanic creature. It began to seem suddenly, and curiously, imperative to drink in every separate prospect to the brim; each detail of arch or window, each angle and nuance, appeared infinitely and urgently precious to me, as if I were a man gazing on the face of the one he loves for the last time.
At length, I found myself standing – wet and cold, and splashed with mud – before the great double doors of the Mausoleum.
It stood within a dense semi-circle of ivy-clad trees, a substantial domed building in the Graeco-Egyptian style, constructed in the year 1722 by the 21st Baron, who for his design had plundered freely – some might say uncritically – from a number of mausolea illustrated in Roland Fréart’s Parallele de l’Architecture Antique et de la Moderne.*
The building consisted of a large central chamber flanked by three smaller wings, and an entrance hall, the whole being shut off by two massive and forbidding lead-faced doors, carrying representations in relief of six inverted torches, three on each door. Two life-size stone angels on plinths – one bearing a wreath, the other an open book – guarded the entrance. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the key that Brine had given me and placed it in the inverted escutcheon.
In the central chamber were four or five imposing tombs, whilst set around the walls of the three wings were a succession of arcaded and gated loculi, some presently empty and awaiting their occupants, others closed off by slate panels, each bearing an inscription.
The first panel to catch my attention was that of Lord Tansor’s elder brother, Vortigern, whom Mr Tredgold had told me had died of an epileptic seizure; then I turned to the panel closing off the loculus that contained the remains of Henry Hereward Duport, my own brother. And then, next to it, was what I had come to see.