The Meaning of Night (17 page)

shook hands, without speaking, and my school days were over.

As I was making my way to Le Grice’s boarding-house, I came upon Daunt in

School Yard, standing with one of his new companions – none other than Shillito, whose

fat head I had once shut in the door. (You will observe that, in his published

recollections, Daunt stated, quite categorically, that he never saw me again after the

evening we returned from attending Evensong in St George’s Chapel. That was a

deliberate falsehood, as I shall now reveal.)

‘Been to see the Head Master again?’ he called. Shillito gave a little sneer, and I

saw straight away how things were. Daunt had contrived to take the key and remove the

book from the Library; Daunt had passed the note under Dr Hawtrey’s door; Daunt had

then come forward as an unwilling witness – I expect he put on a good show, playing

also, no doubt, on his father’s acquaintance with the Head Master – before enlisting the

help of Shillito in his plot. It was also clear why Dr Hawtrey had been so confident in the

probity of his main witness. He thought we were still friends, you see; that we were still

the inseperable companions we had once been. He was not aware that I’d broken away

from him, and so of course he could not believe that my best friend in the school could

possibly bear false witness against me.

‘Glyver’s a great one for getting his nose into old books,’ I heard Daunt say to

Shillito, as if he were speaking on my behalf. ‘My Pa’s the same. He and the Head belong

to a club for such people.? I expect Glyver’s been talking to the Head about some old

book or other. Isn’t that right, Glyver?’

He looked at me, coolly, insolently, and in that look was concentrated all the petty

envy he harboured against me, and the spiteful desire to make me pay for turning my

back on him in favour of other, and more congenial, companions. It was all written on his

face, and in the attitude of casual defiance he had adopted, like one who believes he has

unequivocally demonstrated his power over another.

‘Care for a walk up town?’ he then asked. Shillito threw out another

contemptuous grin.

‘Not today,’ I replied, with a smile. ‘I have work to do.’

My apparent collectedness appeared to unsettle him, and I saw that his mouth had

tightened.

‘Is that all you can say?’ he asked, blinking a little.

‘Nothing else occurs to me. But wait. There is something.’ I drew closer,

interposing myself between Daunt and his acolyte. ‘Revenge has a long memory,’ I

whispered into his ear. ‘A maxim you might wish to ponder. Good-bye, Daunt.’

In a moment, I had gone. I did not need to look back. I knew I would see him

again.

When I recounted this episode to Le Grice, over twenty years later in the comfort

of Mivart’s, I experienced again the maddening anger that had consumed me on that day.

There was now no chance that I would proceed to Cambridge, and my dream of a

Fellowship would remain forever unrealized.

‘So it was Daunt,’ said Le Grice, after giving a little whistle of surprise. ‘You’ve

kept that damned close.Why did you never tell me?’ He seemed rather put out that I

hadn’t confided in him; and in truth it now seemed absurd to me that I had never thought

to do so.

‘I should have done,’ I conceded. ‘I see that now. I’d lost everything: my

scholarship, my reputation; above all, my future. And it was all because of Daunt. I

wished to make him pay, but in my own time and in my own way. But then one thing

happened, then another, and the opportunity never came. And once you get into the habit

of secrecy, it becomes harder and harder to break it – even for your closest friend.’

‘But why the devil is he trying so hard to find you now?’ asked Le Grice, a little

pacified by my words. ‘Unless, perhaps, he wishes to make amends . . .’

I gave a hollow little laugh,

‘A little dinner à deux? Contrite apologies and regret for blackening my name and

destroying my prospects? I hardly think so. But you must know a little more about our

old schoolfellow before you can understand why I do not think that remorse for what he

did is the reason for Daunt’s present desire to find me.’

‘In that case,’ said Le Grice, ‘let’s settle up and decamp to Albany. We can put

our feet up, and you can talk away till dawn.’

Once settled in Le Grice’s comfortable sitting-roon, before a blazing fire, I

continued with my story.

The journey to Sandchurch was made in the company of Tom Grexby, who had

travelled up to Eton instantly on receipt of my letter. I met him at the Christopher,? but,

before I had a chance to speak, he had taken me aside to give me grave news: my mother

had been taken ill, and it was not expected that she would recover.

Shock had been piled on shock, heaping Pelion on Ossa.? To lose so much, in so

brief a space! I did not weep – I could not weep. I could only stare, wordlessly, as if I had

suddenly found myself in some strange desert landscape, devoid of any familiar

landmark. Taking my arm, Tom led me out into the yard, from where we walked slowly

down the High Street to Barnes Pool Bridge.

In my letter to him, I had held back the circumstances that necessitated my

leaving Eton; but as we reached the bridge, having walked most of the way from the

Christopher in silence, I laid the matter out before him, though without revealing that I

knew the name of the person who had betrayed me.

‘My dear fellow!’ he cried, ‘this cannot stand. You are innocent. No, no, this must

not be allowed.’

‘But I cannot prove my innocence,’ I said, still in a kind of daze, ‘and both

circumstance and testimony appear to prove my guilt. No, Tom. I must accept it, and I

beg you to do the same.’

At last he reluctantly agreed that he would take no steps on my behalf, and we

walked back to prepare for our jouney to Sandchurch.

When we arrived at the front door of the little house on the cliff-top, late that

evening, we were met by Dr Penny. ‘I’m afraid you’ve come too late, Edward,’ he said.

‘She’s gone.’

Her last book, Petrus, had only recently been published, and she had been about to

embark on yet another romance for Mr Colburn – the first few pages still lay on the floor

by her bed, where they had fallen from her hand. The years of unremitting toil had finally

taken their toll, and I could not help feeling glad that her labours were over. Her once

beautiful heart-shaped face was lined and sunken, and her hair – of which she had been

so proud in her youth – was now thin and grey. I placed a parting kiss on her cold

forehead and then sat by her side until morning, wrapped in the oppressive silence of

death and despair.

She had been my only parent, and my sole provider until the generosity of my

benefactress brought some relief to our circumstances; yet even then she had continued to

write, with the same determination, day after day. What had driven her, if not love? What

had sustained her, if not love? My dearest mother – no, more than a mother: the best of

friends and the wisest of counsellors, who had given me the greatest of gifts: to be

myself.

I would see her no more, bent over her work-table; nor sit with her, excitedly

unwrapping her latest production before we placed it proudly on the shelf – made by

Billick from the timbers of a French man-of-war shattered at Trafalgar – with all the

others. She would tell me no more stories, and would never listen again, with that sweet

half-smile, as I read to her from Les milles et une nuits. She had gone, and the world

seemed as cold and dark as the room in which she now lay.

We buried her in the church-yard overlooking the sea at Sandchurch, next to her

errant husband, the little-lamented Captain. Her death provided a reason for my returning

home from school that no one questioned. Only Tom knew the truth, and to him I now

turned.

Mr Byam More, my only surviving relative, offered to become my guardian; but,

firmly disinclined as I was to remove to the West Country, it was agreed that Tom would

temporarily stand in loco parentis, and that I would be placed under his educational care

once again whilst remaining – alone but for Beth and old Billick – in the house at

Sandchurch, which had been left to me by my mother. The fifty sovereigns I had insisted

that she should keep as her own had been laid out on a number of unavoidable expenses;

and so it became necessary to apply to Mr More, as my trustee, to release some of my

remaining capital in order to keep things running along. In the meantime, I sought to

accustom myself to the curious sensation of being master in my own house, at the age of

seventeen. To be there alone, without my mother, gave me the most curious sensation at

first, as if I half-expected to meet her on the stairs, or see her walking down the garden

path when I looked out from my bedroom window. Sometimes, at night, I became certain

that I could hear her moving around in the parlour. I would hold my breath, heart beating

fast, straining to make out what I’d heard – whether it was indeed the sound of her poor

ghost, unable to find rest from pressing pen to paper, pulling up her chair to the great

work-table to take up some eternally unfinished work, or simply the timbers of the old

house creaking and straining as the wind howled in from the sea.

I lived at Sandchurch, tutored by Tom, and under his informal guardianship, until

the autumn of 1838. My former schoolfellows, including Phoebus Daunt, were preparing

to leave Eton for the Varsity, and I too wished to continue my studies at some suitable

seat of learning. Thus it was that, at Tom’s suggestion, I went to Heidelberg, where I

enrolled at the University to take a number of classes, and indulged myself to the full in

the pursuit of my many interests. My intellectual ambitions had been frustrated by having

to leave school prematurely, thus forfeiting the chance of proceeding to Cambridge and a

Fellowship there; and so, though I did not intend to take a degree, I determined to use the

time as well as I could.

I attended lectures and read like a perfect fiend, by day and by night: philosophy,

ethics, jurisprudence, rhetoric, logic, cosmology – I fairly guzzled them down, like a man

dying of thirst. Then I would run furiously back to the favourite subjects of my early

youth – the old alchemical texts, the Rosicrucian teachings, and the ancient Greek

Mysteries – and, through one of the professors at the University, I imbibed a new passion

for the archaeology of the ancient seats of civilization, Assyria, Babylonia, and Chaldea.

Then I would be eager to search out paintings by the old German Masters in lonely

forest-wrapped castles, or would travel on a whim all over the region to hear some local

virtuoso play Buxtehude on an early eighteenth-century organ, or a village choir sing a

Bach chorale in some white-painted country church. I would haunt the bookshops of the

old German towns, unearthing glowing rarities – prayer-books, missals, illuminated

manuscripts from the court of Burgundy, and other bibliographical treasures of which I

had knowledge but had never, until now, seen. For I was mad to see, to hear, to know!

That was my golden time (Phoebus Daunt is welcome to his): in particular, the

bliss of tracing the track of the Philosophenweg? with an armful of books on a bright

summer’s morning; to find my private spot high above the Neckar, from where I could

gaze down on the Heiliggeist Church and the Old Bridge through the clear new air; and

then to lie back on soft grass beneath sun-seeped branches with my books and my

dreams, with swallows wheeling against clouds that had been painted by Poussin, and an

infinity of blue above me.

(

Down comes the great unstoppable hammer. Clang! Clang!

The links are forged; the chain runs out a little further.

He and I. Closer, ever closer, until we are fast bound together.?

13:

Omnia mutantur?

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A man of knowledge increaseth strength, says the proverb;? and this saying I

proved to be true, as I daily increased my store of understanding in the subjects to which I

applied myself. I experienced a dizzying feeling of expanding power in my mental and

physical capabilities, until I could conceive of no subject too abstruse for my

apprehension to grasp, and no task too great for my ability to accomplish.

And yet I suffered continually from bouts of gnawing rage, which often

threatened to undermine this swelling self-confidence. A fearful black humour would

descend upon me without warning, even on the brightest of days, when the world about

me was fresh and new and alive with flowers and hope. And then I would shut out the

light and pace about my room like a caged beast, for hours on end, eaten up by only one

thought.

How would I be revenged? I turned the question over and over in my mind,

imagining the ways in which Phoebus Daunt might be made to feel what I had felt, and

the means by which his hopes could be destroyed. He was at Cambridge now, as I knew

from Le Grice, both having taken their places at our School’s sister foundation, King’s

College. Daunt, as expected, had secured the Newcastle, and was received at King’s with