The autograph album afforded an interesting record of friends and distinguished visitors, both to Evenwood and to his Lordship’s townhouse in Park-lane; and then I lingered for longer than I should have done over a book of delightful pen-and-ink drawings and pencil sketches made by my Lady over several years. A series of French scenes – a record, no doubt, of her Continental escapade – was particularly well done, for my Lady had been a skilled draughtswoman, with a keen eye for composition. Most were signed and dated ‘LRD, 1819’, and one or two carried descriptions. I particularly recall a most striking and romantic sketch, bearing the legend ‘Rue du Chapitre, Rennes, evening’, of an ancient and imposing half-timbered mansion with elaborately carved beams, and a canopied entrance half disclosing an interior courtyard. There were also a number of more finished views of the same location, all of them executed with remarkable feeling and care.
The striking of twelve noon from the Chapel clock roused me from my reveries, and I set about placing the separate bundles, which I had loosely tied together with string, in a small iron-bound chest that lay to hand, to which I affixed an identifying label. I was on the point of descending to my work-room when, on putting away my portmanteau, I noticed a single piece of paper that I had omitted to retrieve.
On examination, it appeared to be of little importance, simply a receipt, dated the 15th of September 1823, for the construction of a rosewood box by Mr James Beach, carpenter, Church-hill, Easton. I do not well know why I make mention of it here, other than from an earnest desire to present as full and as accurate a statement of events as I can, and because it seemed odd to me that her Ladyship should have commissioned such an apparently valueless object on her own account from a man in the town, when Lord Tansor employed an excellent estate carpenter who could have made it for her in a moment. But there it was; I had no justification for spending any more of his Lordship’s time on idle speculation, and had already dallied far too long on the task he had set me. And so I assigned the receipt to the proper bundle in the chest, shut the lid, and proceeded back down to my work-room.
I had no immediate reason of my own to consult Lady Tansor’s private papers further, and received no request from my employer to do so. All financial and legal documents of importance, of course, had already passed under his Lordship’s eye and hand during the course of his marriage, and were now in my custodial possession; consequently, over the course of the next few weeks, the contents of the little iron-bound chest began gradually to recede from my present view until, in time, they disappeared entirely.
I did not have cause to remember the existence of my Lady’s private papers for many years. During the intervening period, life, as it always does, brought us our share of fair weather and foul. Lord Tansor’s step-mother, Anne Duport, with whom we shared the Dower House, departed this life in 1826. The following spring, my cousin had married the Honourable Hester Trevalyn, and it was expected – his Lordship being then only thirty-six years of age, and his new wife ten years his junior – that, in time, their union would be blessed with offspring that would secure the succession to the next generation.
After his first wife’s death, his Lordship had given himself completely to the care and instruction of his son. I have no doubt that he mourned his first wife; but he did so, if I may so put it, in his own way. People called him unfeeling, particularly when, within a year or so of Lady Tansor’s death, he began to set his sights on Miss Trevalyn; but that verdict, I think, arose from the habit of impermeable reticence that characterized his whole demeanour, and from a failure on the part of those who criticized him to comprehend the responsibilities of his position.
Towards his son, he displayed a fine and natural capacity for spontaneous affection. He adored the child. There is no other word for it. The boy bore a striking resemblance to his mother, with his large dark eyes and flowing black hair, and, as he grew up, he began to reveal also something of her Ladyship’s character. He was heedless, argumentative, forever pulling at his father’s sleeve and asking to be allowed to do this or that, and then running off in a howling rage when he was denied; and yet I never saw his father angered by these tantrums, for within a moment the boy would be back, afire with some other scheme that was allowed by his father, and off he would go, skipping and whooping like a happy savage. He had such an air of abounding, irreprehensible vigour about him – an abundant and entirely natural charm that made him the favourite of everyone who met him.
And more than all these natural amiabilities, he was his father’s heir. It is impossible to overstate the importance, in the eyes of my cousin, of the boy’s status in this regard. No father wished more for his son; no father did more for his son. Imagine, then, the effect on my cousin when, one black day, Death came softly knocking and took away, not only his child, but also his sole heir.
It was a catastrophe of the greatest possible magnitude, a gargantuan affront, an indignity that my cousin could neither withstand nor comprehend; it was all these things, and more. He was a father, and felt like a father; but he was also Baron Tansor, the 25th of that name. Who now would be the 26th? It prostrated him utterly. He was lost to all comfort, all consolation; and for some weeks we feared – seriously feared – for his sanity.
It is hard for me to write of these things, for as Lord Tansor’s cousin I had, and have, a place in the collateral succession to the Barony. I state here, most solemnly, that this potentiality never overruled the duty I felt I owed to my cousin; his interest was always my first care. What also makes it difficult for me is that the loss of Henry Hereward came upon my cousin just fifteen months after our own dear girl, Jane, had been so cruelly taken from us. Indeed, the two sweet babes often played together, and had been doing so on the afternoon that our little angel fell from the bridge that carries the road from the South Gates across the river to the great house. Our lives were darkened irredeemably from that day.
But it is of my cousin that I write; and I have dwelled on his grief at the death of his only son for this reason: to demonstrate as clearly as I can the terrible nature of the crime I believe was wilfully visited upon him. In the light of what I have said concerning Lord Tansor’s monomaniacal desire to secure an heir for his line (I do not say he was actually mad on this point, but the phrase, I maintain, is metaphorically apt), what would be the greatest harm, barring physical assault or murder, that could be done to such a man as this?
I leave the question unanswered pro tempore, and will now proceed with my deposition. I fear I have rambled somewhat, through trying my best to anticipate the questions and objections of an imagined interlocutor. Having put pen to paper, it has surprised me to find how difficult it has been to confine myself to the salient points; so many things push themselves forward in my mind for attention.
Well, then, to be as brief as I can. The death of his only son and heir might have been borne by my cousin, as far as such a thing can be borne by a sentient human soul, if his second marriage had been productive of other heirs; but it had not been, nor perhaps would ever be. As the years have passed, his Lordship has therefore been obliged to consider his position afresh; and now, in his sixty-third year, he has devised another method to secure his desires in respect of a successor. I shall return to this critical point in due course.
IV
Sunday, 23rd October 1853
In the summer of 1830, our little circle received a most welcome augmentation when the Reverend Achilles Daunt, whom I am now proud to call my friend, was appointed to the living of Evenwood by my cousin. Dr Daunt, accompanied by his second wife and a son from his first marriage, came to us from a Northern parish with a high, and most deserved, reputation as a scholar. Evenwood offers many blessings, but I fear that men of real intellectual accomplishment are not many in number hereabouts, and the addition of Dr Daunt to our society was a great thing indeed for me, providing, as it did, a man of discernment and wide knowledge with whom to share and discuss my own historical and palaeographical interests. I had the honour of assisting my friend, in a modest way, in the preparation of his great catalogue of the Duport Library; and it was at his suggestion that I later took upon myself the task of collecting material towards a history of the Duport family, in which enterprise I am grateful to have been encouraged and supported by my cousin.