The Meaning of Night (28 page)

clients to the firm, I do not think I can avoid. He protests his innocence, of course, but

still it is all a little distasteful.’ He then asked me if I could possibly see any way round

this particular ‘little problem’.

To be short, I did find a way – and, for the first time since I began such work, it

went a little against my conscience. The details need not detain us here, but Pluckrose

was duly acquitted of the murder of his wife, and an innocent man later went to the

gallows. I am not proud of this, but I did my work so well that no one – not even Mr

Tredgold – ever suspected the truth. Good riddance to the odious Pluckrose, then.

Or so I thought.

With the business of Madame Mathilde began a life of which I could have had no

conception only six months earlier, so alien was it to my former pursuits and interests. I

soon discovered that I had a distinct talent for the work I was called upon to perform for

Mr Tredgold – indeed I took to it with a degree of proficiency that surprised even my

self-assured nature. I gathered information, establishing a network of connexions

amongst both high and low in the capital; I uncovered little indiscretions, secured fugitive

evidence, watched, followed, warned, cajoled, sometimes threatened. Extortion,

embezzlement, crim. con.,? even murder – the nature of the case mattered not. I became

adept in seeking out its weak points, and then supplying the means by which the

foundations of an action against a client could be fatally undermined. My especial talent,

I found, was sniffing out simple human frailty – those little seeds of baseness and

self-interest which, when brought to the light and well watered, turn into self-destruction.

And so the firm would prosper, and Mr Tredgold’s seraphic beam would grow all the

broader.

London itself became my workshop, my manufactory, my study, to which I

devoted all my talents of application and assimilation. I sought to master it intellectually,

as I had mastered every subject to which I had turned my mind in the past; to tame and

throw a leash round the neck of what I came to picture as the Great Leviathan, the

never-sleeping monster in whose expanding coils I now existed.

From the heights to the depths, from brilliant civility and refinement to the sinks

of barbarity, from Mayfair and Belgravia to Rosemary-lane and Bluegate-fields, I quickly

discerned its lineaments, its many intertwining natures, its myriad distinctions and

gradations. I watched the toolers and dippers,? and all the other divisions of the swell

mob, do their work in the crowded affluence of the West-end by day, and the rampsmen?

at their brutal work as the shadows closed in. Observed, too, with particular attention, the

taxonomy of vice: the silken courtesans brazenly hanging on the arms of their lords and

gentlemen; the common tails and judies, and every other class of gay? female. Each day I

added to my store of knowledge; each day, too, I extended my own experience of what

this place – unique on God’s earth – could offer a man of passion and imagination.

I have no intention of laying before you my many amorous adventures: such

things are tedious at best. But one encounter I must mention. The female in question was

of that type known as a dress-lodger. It was not long after the affair of Madame Mathilde,

and I had returned to Regent-street to look again at the wares of Messrs Johnson & Co.

She was about to cross the street when she caught my eye. Well dressed, petite, with a

dimpled chin and delicate little ears. It was a dull, damp morning, and I was close enough

to see tiny jewels of moisture clinging to her ringlets. She was about to join a small group

of pedestrians on a swept passage across the street. On reaching the opposite pavement

she stopped, turned half back, fingering an errant lock of hair nervously. It was then I saw

an elderly woman crossing the roadway a few yards behind her. This, I knew by now,

was her watcher, paid by the girl’s bawd to ensure that she did not abscond with the

outfits provided for her – girls such as she were too poor to deck themselves out in the

finery required to hook in custom, like the sharp bobtails of the theatre porticos and the

Café Royal.

I began to follow her. She walked with quick steps through the crowds, sure of

her way. In Long Acre, I drew level with her. The business was swiftly concluded, her

watcher retired to a nearby public-house, whilst the girl and I entered a house on the

corner of Endell-street.

Her name was Dorrie, short for Dorothy. She did it, she said afterwards, to

support her widowed mother, who could find no employment of her own. We talked for

some time, and then she took me, with her watcher still a few paces behind us, to a

cramped and damp chamber in a dreary court hard by.

Her mother, I guessed, was only some forty years of age herself, but she was bent

and frail, with a harsh wheezing cough.

An arrangement was made – I felt it was an appropriate gesture, and never

regretted it. For several years, until circumstances intervened, Mrs Grainger came two or

three times a week to Temple-street, to sweep my room, take my washing away, and

empty my slops.

As she entered of a morning, I would say: ‘Good morning, Mrs Grainger. How is

Dorrie?’

‘She is well, sir, thank you. A good girl still’

And that is all we would ever say.

III

Evenwood

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After taking up residence in Temple-street, and commencing my employment at

Tredgolds, my photographic ambitions had languished for a while, though I continued to

correspond with Mr Talbot. But, once settled, I constructed a little dark-room within a

curtained-off space in my sitting-room. Here also I kept my cameras (recently

purchased from Horne and Thornethwaite),? along with my lamps, gauze, pans and

bowls, trays and soft brushes, fixing and developing solutions, beakers, glasses, quires of

paper, syringes and dippers, and all the other necessary paraphernalia of the art. I worked

hard to familiarize myself with the necessary chemical and technical processes, and on

summer evenings would take my camera down to the river, or to picturesque corners of

the nearby Inns of Court, to practise my compositional techniques. In this way, I began to

build up my experience and knowledge, as well as amassing a good many examples of

my own photographic work.

The satisfaction of close and concentrated observation; the need to observe

minute gradations of light and shadow and to select the correct angle and elevation; the

patient scrutiny of backdrop and setting – these things I found gave me intense fulfilment,

and transported me to another realm, far away from my often sordid duties at Tredgolds.

My principal partiality, artistically speaking, the seed planted by seeing a photogenic

drawing Mr Talbot had made of Lacock Abbey, was to capture the essence of place.

London offered such a variety of subjects – ancient palaces, domestic dwellings of every

type and age, the river and its bridges, great public buildings – that I soon developed a

keen eye for architectural line and form, shadow and sky, texture and profile.

One Sunday, in June, 1851, feeling I had attained to a good level of competence, I

decided I would show Mr Tredgold some examples of my photographic work.

‘These are really excellent, Edward,’ he said, turning over a number of mounted

prints I had made of Pump-court and of Sir Ephraim Gadd’s chambers in King’s

Bench-walk. ‘You have an exceptional eye. Quite exceptional.’ He suddenly looked up,

as if struck by a thought. ‘Do you know, I think I could secure a commission for you.

What would you say to that?’

I replied, of course, that I would be very happy for him to do so.

‘Excellent. I am obliged to pay a visit to an important client next week, and,

seeing what you have done here, it occurs to me that this gentleman might wish to

commission some photographic representations of his country property, to provide an

indelible record for posterity. The property in question would certainly afford the most

ravishing possibilities for your camera.’

‘Then I shall be even more willing to agree to the proposal. Where is the

property?’

‘Evenwood, in Northamptonshire. The home of our most important client, Lord

Tansor.’

Whether Mr Tredgold saw my surprise, I cannot say. He was beaming at me, in

his usual way, but his eyes had a guarded look about them, as if in anticipation of some

disagreeable response. He cleared his throat.

‘I thought,’ he went on, ‘that you might also be curious to see the former home of

Lady Tansor – I allude of course to her friendship with your last employer’s late mother,

Mrs Simona Glyver. But if this proposal is against your inclinations . . .’

I raised my hand.

‘By no means. I can assure you I have no objections at all to such an expedition.’

‘Good. Then it is settled. I shall write to Lord Tansor immediately.’

How could I possibly have refused to go along with Mr Tredgold’s adventitious

proposal, when Evenwood was the one place on earth I wished to see? I was already

familiar, from various published accounts, with the history of the great house, the

disposition of the buildings, and the topography of the extensive Park. Now I had been

given the opportunity to experience, in my waking being, what I had so often fashioned

in imagination.

Since commencing my employment at Tredgolds, I had made little progress in my

pursuit of some piece of objective evidence that would confirm what I had read in my

mother’s journals. I had suggestions and hints – strong and, to me, compelling testimony

to the truth concerning my birth; but they were not indubitable, and shed no light on the

causes of the conspiracy between my mother and Lord Tansor’s first wife, or on how

their plan had been accomplished. By now I had read every word of my mother’s journals

several times over, as well as making copious notes on them, and had begun to

re-examine and index every scrap of paper she had left behind, from bills and receipts to

letters and lists (my mother, I discovered, had been an inveterate list-maker: there were

scores of them). I hoped to find some fragment of the truth that I might have overlooked;

but it was becoming clear to me that little more could be gleaned from the documents in

my possession, and that I would achieve nothing by remaining in my rooms and brooding

on my lost inheritance. If that inheritance was to be recovered, I must begin to widen my

view; and what better way to start than by seeing my ancestral home for myself?

A few days later, Mr Tredgold informed me that Lord Tansor was happy for me to

accompany him to Evenwood, where I would be given liberty to roam as I pleased. Next

morning, both of us relieved to be escaping the heat and dust of London, we took the

train northwards to Peterborough.

Once we had boarded our train, Mr Tredgold and I immediately fell into our

customary bookish talk, which we kept up all the way to Peterborough, despite several

attempts on my part to encourage my employer to speak of Evenwood and its principal

residents. Having arrived in Easton, some four miles from Evenwood, Mr Tredgold went

on ahead to the great house, leaving me to accompany the trunk containing my travelling

equipment in the carrier’s cart. At the gate-house, just beyond the village of Evenwood, I

got out, leaving the cart to trundle off. It was approaching two o’clock when I ascended

the long incline and rested at the top to look down over the river towards the vista spread

out before my hungry eyes.

And now, at last, I am to show you Evenwood, which I first beheld on that perfect

June afternoon – an afternoon, perhaps, like the one that had seen the arrival of Dr Daunt

and his family twenty years earlier. I see it again in memory, as clearly as on that day.

It lies in quiet seclusion on the banks of the slow-moving Nene. A church and

adjoining rectory, a noble Dower House of the late seventeenth century, a cluster of

cottages, some outlying farms, and the great house itself: similar compositions can be

found all over England; but Evenwood is like no other place on earth.

The always-sighing reed beds and the overarching willows, the pale stone houses

with their roofs of thatch or Collyweston stone,? the undulating Park studded with ancient

trees, and the faery splendour of the house itself, are sources of deep and abiding solace

for those weary of the quotidian world. The whole place seems to be somehow beyond

time, shut in and protected from the meanness of existence by the meandering river and

the gently wooded slopes on either side, which, on a fine day, dissolve into long soft

swathes of grey-green.

If you consult Verekker’s dull but dependable Guide to the County of

Northamptonshire (Dr Daunt’s copy of the augmented 1812 edition is now before me as I

write),? you will read of Lord Tansor’s seat being ‘pleasantly situated on a wooded

incline beside the River Nene. The house, or manor, is built of brick and freestone and

stands in an extensive park, walled in and well planted with noble stands of oak, ash, and

elm. The accretions of centuries have bestowed upon the house a pleasing irregularity of