A Night of Errors
A Night Of Errors
First published in 1947
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1947-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755121074 EAN: 9780755121076
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio’s
translation of
Montaigne’s Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President’s Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
…so that night began and continued to the end, in nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called the Night of Errors.
Gesta Grayorum, 1594
The Dromios came to England at the end of the sixteenth century, the precise date being probably 1592. There is no certainty on where they came from – Ephesus and Syracuse have both been suggested – but historians of the family admit that they seem to have been persons somewhat below the middle station of life, if not of actually servile condition. In England, however, they prospered, and already in the reign of James I were importing wines in a large way. On the strength of this they married first into the London citizenry – the Frugals, the Hoards, and the Moneytraps – then into the landed gentry – the Mammons, the Overreaches, the Clumseys, and the Greedys – and finally into the fringes of the aristocracy itself – the Nolands, the Littleworths, the Rakes, the Foppingtons, and the Whorehounds.
In thus uniting to Levantine subtlety and enterprise so many of the solid English virtues the Dromio family gave itself an excellent start. But its ability to do something more than keep its head above water during the succeeding centuries it owed to another hereditary factor. Women who married Dromios found themselves more than commonly likely to have twins – and this not at the end of the child-bearing period but at its beginning. Here was a great political convenience. During the Civil Wars there was a Dromio Roundhead and a Dromio Cavalier of virtually indistinguishable presence and authority. And when party government was established the reigning Dromio and his twin would commonly be found eyeing each other with severity or even bellicosity across the Treasury and Opposition front benches. To be presented at one birth with both a little Liberal and a little Conservative is a blessing for which any man of property may give Lucina, goddess of labour, thanks. Whatever party ruled there was generally a Dromio in some modest corner of the Ministry, ready to make interest for the family.
Towards the close of the eighteenth century the Dromios added to their trade in wine an equally lucrative traffic in oriental rugs. On the strength of this, and some thirty years later, the then reigning Dromio was able to donate and subscribe himself into a baronetcy – a transaction prompting a wit of the time to remark that although carpet-knights were common enough carpet-baronets were something new.
But this Dromio, Sir Ferdinand, achieved another innovation, and one which proved disastrous in its results.
By now the Dromios were immemorially English. If the strongly marked features of the men folk were still discernibly those that looked out of family portraits painted in the time of the Commonwealth, yet centuries of English weather and generations of English brides had bred into the family a dominant complexion which was Saxon enough. Sir Ferdinand, as if assured of the adequacy which this protective colouring had achieved, allowed himself the indulgence of marrying after a different fashion. His bride was the daughter of a Mr Eugenides, a Smyrna merchant who had made a fortune out of currants – and a fortune amply sufficient (so Sir Ferdinand thought) to compensate for any lack of breeding that the family might show. But breeding (in the more substantial sense) proved to be Lady Dromio’s strong point. Some ten months after her marriage she presented Sir Ferdinand not with the traditional Dromio twins but with Dromio triplets. So contrary to all precedent did this odd performance seem that her husband was at first incredulous and sternly bade the nurse go back and count again. But no mistake had been made. It was almost as if nature, prescient in the political as well as biological sphere, was determined that the Dromios should now have not a little Liberal and a little Conservative only but a little Socialist as well.
And Nature is much given to forming habits; if it were otherwise scientists would not be able to deal in what they call Natural Laws. With the Dromios the triplet habit supplanted the twin habit, and this, far from being beneficent, had calamitous results.
Whereas the twins had always worked together hand-in-glove the triplets invariably quarrelled. They quarrelled over bibs and tuckers, peg-tops and puppies, ponies, cronies, and the less virtuous of the village girls. They quarrelled over chloroform and the Corn Laws and the Chamberlains, over the Derby and the Grand National and the Disestablishing of the Church of Wales. But above all they quarrelled over carpets and wines, pitching at one another in venomous dispute the great names of Yquem and Lafite, Peyraguey and Rauzan-Gassies, Sehna and Tabriz, Bokhara, Savast and Kashmir.
The scandal of all this gradually spread abroad and both the commercial and the social world began to view the Dromios somewhat askance. As the prosaic number
Two
had seen the family fortune rise so now the mystical number
Three
bade fair to preside over its fall. Despite the spread of whisky and the ubiquity of beer the English drank as much wine as before; despite the horrid invention of linoleum and the vogue of parquetry they trod as heavily as ever on the products of Benares and Turquestan. But it seemed that nothing of this could save the Dromios from the decline which waits upon a divided house. And when round about the beginning of the twentieth century Sir Romeo Dromio married he prayed for nothing more devoutly than an end to all family tradition and the gift of an only son followed by a quiet nurseryful of girls. But the legacy of Miss Eugenides was with the family still and some hours after Lady Dromio was taken in labour the now customary news was brought to Sir Romeo in his study. Whereupon Sir Romeo, whose temper had suffered much through thirty years of association with intolerable triplet brothers, ran upstairs in a distraction – so family legend had it – and fell to tossing his three newly-born sons about the room like tennis balls. But the infants were none the worse, having inherited from their remoter ancestors a virtual invulnerability to drubbing. And their father, being presently persuaded of the impropriety of his proceeding, retired again to his study to consider the situation with whatever calm he could command.
This was the study in which was to take place the fatality which made the Dromios notorious. Had Sir Romeo hard upon becoming so abundantly a father not thus sat down to brood and to plan, had he accepted a position in the creating of which he had played if a brief yet a decidedly seminal part, then those shocking events which must still linger in the public mind would not have taken place, and the necessity of the present painful and candid narrative would have been obviated. And this should serve as a warning to merchants when closeted in their studies to confine themselves to calculating percentages and casting accounts, since their education has seldom equipped them to deal skilfully in intricate emotional problems. And particularly should they eschew trafficking in
futures
– unless indeed it be those of corn and cotton upon an Exchange.