I took supper with Dr Tredgold and his sister in a cold, high-ceilinged room, sparsely furnished except for a monstrous faux-Elizabethan buffet that took up nearly a whole wall. Miss Tredgold said little during the meal, which was as sparse as the furniture; but I felt her eye upon me more than once. Her look was one of strained concentration, as though she was attempting, unsuccessfully, to recall something from the depths of memory.
Suddenly, there was a loud knocking at the front door, and a moment or two later a servant came in to announce that Dr Tredgold was wanted urgently at the house of a neighbour who had been taken ill. I used the opportunity to take my leave of the doctor and his sister. Though they pressed me to stay the night, I preferred instead to take a room at the Royal Fountain Hotel. I wished to be alone with my thoughts; for now I had lost my only ally, the one person who could help me find a way through the labyrinth of supposition and speculation surrounding the death of Mr Carteret.
I secured my accommodation with little trouble. Having a headache, I took a few drops of laudanum,* and closed my eyes. But my sleep was troubled by a strange and disturbing dream.
In it, I appear to be standing in a darkened place of great size. At first I am alone, but then, as if a light is slowly being let in from some unseen source, I discern the figure of Mr Tredgold. He is sitting in a chair with a book in his hands, slowly turning over the pages, and lingering every now and again on some point of interest. He looks up and sees me. His mouth is drawn down to one side, and he appears to be mouthing words and sentences, but no sound comes out. He beckons me over, and points to the book. I look down to see what he wishes to show me. It is a portrait of a lady in black. I look closer. It is the painting of Lady Tansor, which I had seen hanging in Mr Carteret’s work-room at Evenwood. Then more light floods in, and behind Mr Tredgold I make out a figure on a black-draped dais, sitting behind a tall desk and writing in a great ledger. This person, too, is dressed in black, and seems to be wearing a grey full-bottomed wig, like a judge; but then I see that it is in fact Miss Rowena Tredgold, with her hair let loose around her shoulders. She stops writing and addresses me.
‘Prisoner at the bar. You will give the court your name.’
I open my mouth to speak, but cannot. I am as dumb as Mr Tredgold. She asks me for my name again, but still I am unable to speak. Somewhere a bell tolls.
‘Very well,’ she says, ‘since you will not tell the court who you are, the verdict of the court is that you shall be taken hence to a place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. Do you have anything to say?’
I fill my lungs with air, and try to scream out a protest at the top of my voice. But there is only silence.
Back in Temple-street the following day, I remained indoors, beset by a vacillating and porous state of mind in which nothing could be fixed or retained; and so, with the afternoon drawing to a close, I thought I would go down to the Temple Steps, and take my skiff out on the river for half an hour.
Later that evening, Bella received me at Blithe Lodge with her customary warmth, and with many demonstrations of amity.
It was our first meeting since I had made the acquaintance of Miss Carteret, and I was never more conscious of being ‘a thing of sin and guilt’.* I sat a little way off and watched Bella as she sat by the fire in Kitty Daley’s drawing-room with some of The Academy’s junior nymphs. Whores, every one of them, of course, but a sweeter, kinder, and livelier bunch of girls you could not wish to meet; and Bella was the sweetest and kindest of them all. She looked so fresh and alive, discoursing easily and amusingly to the little sorority gathered all around her of Lord R—’s insistence, during a recent encounter with one of the absent nymphs, that she must dress herself up like the Queen, complete with a diadem of paste diamonds, and a pale blue sash across her bust, whilst he whispered warm encouragements into her ear, in a German accent, as they went to it.
Laughter filled the room; champagne was brought in; cigarettes were lit; Miss Nancy Blake tripped to the piano-forte to extemporize, con brio, a spirited little waltz, whilst Miss Lilian Purkiss (a flame-haired Amazon) and Miss Tibby Taylor (petite, grey-eyed, and lusciously agile) cantered round and round, in and out of the furniture, giggling as they repeatedly bumped into chairs and tables. Bella, clapping her hands in time to the waltz, looked across to me from time to time, and smiled. For though, as usual, she was at the centre of the gaiety, I knew that she never forgot me; in company, she would always seek me out, or would let me know, by a loving look or by gently pressing my arm as she passed, that I was the true and only occupier of her thoughts. Even when I left that evening, she would continue to think fondly of me, and to muse on what we had done together, and what we would do when I next returned to Blithe Lodge.
But what could I offer her in return? Only neglect, inattention, and betrayal. I was a damned fool, I knew, and did not deserve the tender regard of such an excellent creature. But it was my fate, it seemed, wilfully to cast this treasure from me. She was vividly and gloriously present to my senses at that moment, there in Kitty Daley’s drawing-room. I knew that I would give her but little thought when I once again saw the face of Miss Emily Carteret, whom I loved as I could never love Bella. But I could not bear to give Bella up – not yet. The plain fact was that my affection for her had not yet been quite snuffed out, or negated, by what I felt for Miss Carteret. It remained bright and true, though overshadowed by a greater and stranger force. As I looked at her, it was brought home to me that my heart would be broken, too, if I were to turn away from her then, and for nothing gained.
After the rest of the company had departed, she came over and sat next to me, placing a jewelled hand on mine and looking smilingly into my eyes.
‘You have been quiet tonight, Eddie. Has anything happened?’ ‘No,’ I told her, running my finger-nail gently down her cheek, and then placing her hand to my lips. ‘Nothing has happened.’
*[‘Flame follows smoke’ – i.e. there is no smoke without fire (Pliny). Ed.]
*[A mixture of opium and alcohol. Legal restrictions on the use of opium did not come into force until 1868 and at this period laudanum was widely prescribed, and widely abused. Initially a drug for the poor, laudanum became a favoured means of pain relief for the middle classes; celebrated literary users included Coleridge, De Quincey, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The novelist Wilkie Collins became virtually dependent on it and confessed that much of The Moonstone (1868) had been written under its influence. ‘Who is the man who invented laudanum?’ asks Lydia Gwilt in Collins’s Armadale (1866). ‘I thank him from the bottom of my heart.’ Ed.]
*[Milton, Comus, in a passage describing Chastity: ‘A thousand liveried angels lackey her, / Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.’ Ed.]
32
Non omnis moriar*
It is Thursday, the 3rd of November 1853. I have arrived back at the Town Station in Peterborough and took a coach to the Duport Arms in Easton. The town, which lies some four miles south-west of the great house belonging to the family from which this establishment takes it name, is, as far as I am aware, distinguished for nothing in particular, except for its antiquity (there has been a settlement here since the time of the Vikings), its quaint cobbled market-square, and the picturesqueness of its slate-roofed houses of mellowed limestone, many of which look out across the valley, from atop the gently sloping ridge upon which the town is built, to the village of Evenwood and the wooded boundaries of the great Park.