Painting The Darkness (69 page)

‘I think I would have qualified as an attorney and gone on to practise the law with some success had the Civil War not broken out in 1861 and the Union Army claimed me for the duration. I emerged after four years altered for ever by the experience, as were so many of my fellow-recruits, grown harder in some ways, more vulnerable in others, wiser as I thought, yet more fallible as I later discovered.

‘My father urged me to join him in business, where he was greatly in need of help, the war having disrupted the wine trade to a ruinous extent. But I would have none of it. An army friend, Casey Garnham, had gone back to Oregon to run his father’s newspaper, the Portland
Packet
, and had invited me to join him as a partner. Imagining my father’s plight to be exaggerated, I accepted Casey’s offer with alacrity.

The challenge and excitement of the years that followed are hard now to recall. Neither Casey nor I realized that we were to preside over the
Packet
’s decline and ultimate demise. We truly believed it could survive and prosper. By the time events had shown that we were wrong, it was too late to turn to my father for help. He had gone bankrupt in 1866 and had died three years later, leaving my mother to live alone in a rented house in Worcester, Massachusetts. Nor was there much I could do to relieve her situation, my commercial inadequacies being by then as obvious as my father’s.

‘After the final collapse of the
Packet
in 1872, I remained
in
journalism, for it was the only work I knew, but the days of my editorial pretensions were gone. I had to learn the craft of a reporter over again on the staff of half a dozen newspapers from Portland to San Francisco. It was a hard and humbling life, but not an unworthy one. Indeed, I believe it is a life I would have led to this day had I not been so unfortunate as to meet and fall in love with Miss Madeleine Devereux.

‘You know her, of course, by other names. Marion Whitaker. Melanie Rossiter. You know her by all the dreamed and half-formed tempting visions she cared to plant in your receptive mind. And so, for that matter, do I. She was beautiful, yes. She was young and desirable, certainly. She had a quick and subtle mind gifted in all the arts of fascination, it is true. Yet you may set all of that on one scale and still it will not outweigh what rests on the other: the dark enfolding mystery of what, in her, could always conquer reason.

‘I met her in San Francisco in 1878. She was barely twenty-one and already a rising politician’s mistress. He was Howard Ingleby, a candidate for the state governorship. I was working for the Sacramento
Star
, whose editor was running an energetic anti-Ingleby campaign and had instructed me to seek out anything that might discredit the man. When I learned that he spent less time with his wife and family in Sacramento than he did with an expensive mistress in San Francisco, I felt certain that the story would be the breaking of Ingleby and the making of me.

‘I confronted Madeleine at her apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay about a week before the elections. I had learned that she was a pretty, quick-witted actress who might have been called a whore had it not been for the eminence and respectability of her clients. I had visions of persuading or paying her to confess for the benefit of the
Star
’s readers, thus blasting Ingleby’s prospects.

‘But to be with her, as you now know, is to forget every resolution, however firm. To be with her is to begin a
dream
which only she can complete. Thus no exposé of her life with Howard Ingleby was ever written, and he, though he lost the election, did not have me to blame for his defeat. Madeleine won my silence by the same method she has always used to achieve her aims: a brief taste of her pleasures and a distant promise of more.

‘For the next three years, Madeleine Devereux obsessed me. She had deluded me into believing she would one day be mine, but only the force of my infatuation with her sustained such a hope. It was cruelly obvious to me, in rational moments, that, without money and position, I could no more possess her than I could the stars in the sky.

‘I have spoken of being in love with Madeleine, and so I thought I was, but now I see that love was strangely absent from the many ways in which she drew me to her. The ruthless edge to her carnality inspired not adoration but a form of worship, in which jealousy and self-loathing were more often felt than mere desire. What made her as she was I never discovered, for she was as silent about her past as she was expansive about her future. She came to look upon me, I suspect, as somebody with whom she could relax because she owed me nothing: amusing company for an idle hour.

‘By the spring of 1881, I was living and working in San Francisco, the Sacramento
Star
and I having long since parted company. Madeleine had discarded Ingleby about a year before and now divided her attentions between a wealthy hotelier and a shipping magnate. On the few occasions when she consented to see me, she tormented me. When she refused to see me, it was worse. I knew that to go on pursuing her was futile and foolish. Nevertheless, I went on. To you, at least, I need not explain why.

‘One day, as I was leaving the newspaper offices, I was approached by a stranger who identified himself as Alfred Quinn and asked me to give him a few minutes of my time. Thinking he might have a story to sell, I went with him to a nearby bar and heard him out.

‘I did not recognize Quinn, but he recognized me. He had been in the service of the Davenall family for more than twenty years and had accompanied Sir Gervase to Carntrassna in 1859; it was from that visit that he remembered me. He had expended much time and effort in finding me, my mother having died the previous year and having maintained, besides, no connections with Carntrassna that I knew of. Quinn refused to say how he had traced me, and I could not imagine any reason why he should have wanted to do so, until, that is, he outlined the plan he had devised.

‘You know what Quinn’s plan was. You suspected something of the kind from the first. He showed me photographs of James Davenall, missing heir to the baronetcy, and I was taken aback by the similarity: they might have been photographs of me. Quinn explained that the resemblance was not so very surprising, since I was James Davenall’s half-brother. My mother had succumbed to Sir Gervase’s charms during a visit to Carntrassna in 1842 and I was the issue of their brief liaison. My father had been persuaded to raise me as his own by Lady Davenall, who had known how matters stood from the first. She it was who had insisted I should have a good education and she it was who had paid for it. Sir Gervase had remained ignorant of my existence until his next visit to Carntrassna, in 1859. Horrified by my resemblance to his legitimate son and fearful that the relationship might become generally known, he had paid my father a great deal of money to emigrate, taking me with him.

‘So at last did many things become clear to me: my father’s lack of paternal feeling; the care he nevertheless lavished on me; the source of the money with which he had set himself up in America; my mother’s nervous guilt-ridden silences. Not that any of it seemed to matter much any more. The people involved were all dead, their secrets and their sins long forgotten. So why had Quinn come halfway round the world to seek me out? Not to square the account for his dead master, that was certain. His
reason
, it emerged, was rooted very much in the present and in our mutual profit.

‘The James Davenall I so closely resembled had been missing, presumed dead, since 1871. Were he to reappear, he could claim the wealth, property and title recently inherited by his younger brother. Quinn’s proposal was that, armed with his considerable knowledge of the family, I should pass myself off as James Davenall and thus make both of us rich men. Sir Gervase and my parents were dead. So, Quinn told me, was old Lady Davenall. Nobody but he and I knew the truth of the matter. We stood to gain a fortune. In his judgement, we could scarcely fail.

‘My first inclination was to reject the idea as madness. A striking physical resemblance was one thing, but even Quinn could not know all that I would need to know in order to carry it off. Besides, was not the so-called Tichborne Claimant even then rotting in an English gaol for attempting a similar fraud? Quinn conceded that he was, but insisted we might learn from his mistakes. I would spend a year constructing a new life far from San Francisco under an assumed name. Quinn, for his part, would find out why James Davenall might have wanted to commit suicide. We would prepare for every eventuality, guard against every challenge, research every aspect of the dead man’s life. Only when absolutely certain of our ground would we act. And then we would be sure to win.

‘It was when I asked for time to think that Quinn must have sensed he had me. Indeed, I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that he knew all along the most compelling reason why I might accept. It was not merely that I had little to lose and much to gain. It was that I finally had something to tempt Madeleine away from her tame politicians and fawning businessmen. It was a prize to eclipse anything she might hope to attain in California. I could offer to make her the wife of an English baronet.

‘The longer I delayed giving Quinn my final answer, the likelier it became that he would have the answer he wanted. Whatever the cause – my emotionally
starved
childhood, the disorientating effects of the war, Madeleine’s morbid influence – the fact remained that I was drifting towards a lonely and penurious middle age. Quinn’s plan, however hazardous, offered the only chance I was ever likely to have of a new and better life.

‘Even so, I hesitated. It was not that my conscience deterred me from entering upon a criminal conspiracy. After all, I was Sir Gervase Davenall’s eldest son. In that sense, I would only be claiming what was rightfully mine. What held me back was the fear of failure, a dread not so much of arrest and imprisonment as of discovering that I was neither brave enough nor clever enough to sustain the pretence.

‘Accordingly, I let Madeleine make up my mind for me. Before meeting Quinn again, I went to her and told her everything. I invited her to join the conspiracy. I asked her if she would agree to become my wife in the event that I succeeded in obtaining the baronetcy and the wealth that went with it.

‘Had Madeleine turned me down, I would have rejected Quinn’s proposal. Then none of what has followed would ever have happened. I wish now, with all my heart, that she had done so. But she did not. She swept aside my every scruple and reservation. She granted me what I thought I wanted more than anything in the world: the promise that she would become my wife if I could become Sir James Davenall. In that moment, I realized for the first time that I would go through with it. In that moment, the conspiracy was truly born.

‘To my surprise, Quinn raised no objections to Madeleine’s involvement. I had expected him to be reluctant to take a third party into his confidence, especially when that third party was a woman, but instead the two of them established an immediate affinity which I found utterly baffling. Recently, I have come to realize that they recognized in each other the same streak of ruthless remorseless cunning that marked them both out from the rest of weaker-willed humanity. At the time, I
merely
resented the ease with which Quinn convinced Madeleine that he could provide all the information we would need.

‘Not that there was any doubt of his thoroughness. He had brought a dozen different photographs of James Davenall with him, innumerable samples of his handwriting on letters, cheques and bills, tie-pins and cufflinks he had owned, even a silver cigarette-case monogrammed with his initials. There were photographs also of every living member of the Davenall family. There were several pictures of Constance, as well as of her brother, sister and parents. There were notes of James’s measurements, the sizes he took in hats, shirts, trousers and shoes, significant dates in his life, his academic and sporting record at school and university, group photographs of classes, clubs, teams and societies to which he had belonged, together with the names of fellow-members. There was even a copy of the suicide note he had written on the seventeenth of June 1871. Nothing was left to chance.

‘Quinn was not prepared to say how he had amassed such a wealth of detailed information. It was apparent, however, that he must have been assembling it prior to his dismissal by Lady Davenall, so resentment of the way she had treated him could not have prompted his approach to me.

‘For the present, though, I had more to think about than what Quinn’s motives really were. I had to practise James Davenall’s handwriting and signature for hours on end. I had to be coached by Quinn in the way his former master walked and talked, his favourite expressions, his commonest mannerisms. I had to persuade a dentist to remove a healthy tooth from my mouth to match James’s loss of one. I had to grow a beard and take up cigarette-smoking. All these characteristics, added to my existing similarity to James in weight, height and appearance, made the match as near perfect as could be.

‘There was ample time in which to grow accustomed
to
my new identity during the year I spent working for an advertising agency in Philadelphia. To do so was to make a virtue of necessity, since it was essential to establish a plausible background from which I could in due course emerge as James Davenall, alias Norton. I saw little of Quinn and Madeleine during this time. For safety’s sake, we communicated mostly by letter. They spent six months in England, gathering material, notably regarding James Davenall’s health, which Quinn felt sure held the clue to his reasons for killing himself. By manoeuvring Madeleine into Dr Fiveash’s employment, they were able to discover the truth of the matter. It was then that we hit upon a spontaneous recovery from syphilis as a satisfactory explanation for my reappearance. I was accordingly dispatched to Paris to procure a clean bill of health.

‘By the summer of 1882, Quinn had decided we were ready to act. When his message reached me that my year of suspended animation was over, I felt less alarm than relief at the prospect of attempting at last what I had so long planned. There never was a time when I wanted to return to the life I had led in San Francisco. Indeed, I had rehearsed my performance as James Davenall so exhaustively that it no longer seemed a performance at all. In the guise of James Norton and through the months of his cautious painstaking life in Philadelphia, my dead unmet half-brother and I acquired a strange and potent unity. At first only fleetingly, but later for hours at a stretch, I could blank from my mind all awareness of my true past and my real identity. I could become the man I would shortly claim to be.