The Glass of Time Read online

  The Glass of Time

  ALSO BY MICHAEL COX

  FICTION

  The Meaning of Night

  BIOGRAPHY

  M. R. James: An Informal Portrait

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (with R.A. Gilbert)

  The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (with R. A. Gilbert)

  The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories

  The Oxford Book of Spy Stories

  EDITOR

  M. R. James: ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories

  (Oxford World’s Classics)

  COMPILER

  The Oxford Chronology of English Literature

  MICHAEL COX

  THE GLASS OF TIME

  The Secret Life of Miss Esperanza Gorst

  NARRATED BY HERSELF

  W. W. Norton & Company

  NEW YORK / LONDON

  Copyright Š 2008 by Michael Cox

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Anna Oler

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cox, Michael, 1948–

  The glass of time: the secret life of Miss Esperanza Gorst /

  narrated by Herself

  Michael Cox.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07069-9

  1. Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837–1901—Fiction.

  2. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction.

  3. Lady’s maids—Fiction.

  4. Secrets—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6103.O976G55 2008

  823'.92—dc22 2008023909

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  [http://www.wwnorton.com] www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For Dizzy–again

  Dedicated also to the Memory of

  Pat Riccioni

  Melissa Allen

  Chris Davenport

  For Truth is like a lone bird singing,

  On the edge of day and night—

  The unseen herald, ever bringing

  Certainty of Light.

  P. VERNEY DUPORT

  FROM Merlin and Nimue

  PRIVATELY PRINTED (1876), CANTO III

  CONTENTS

  Note on the Text

  ACT ONE / A House of Secrets

  Prologue: My Lady and Her Sons

  1. In My Lady’s Chamber

  2. In Which a Friend is Made

  3. The First Day Ends

  4. Nightmares and Memories

  5. A Walk with Mr Randolph

  6. In Which Madame’s First Letter is Opened

  7. In Memoriam P.R.D.

  ACT TWO /Secret Stirrings

  8. Professor Slake is Buried

  9. In Which Madame’s Second Letter is Opened

  10. Dark House Lane

  11. An Announcement in The Times

  12. Mrs Prout Remembers

  13. In the House of Death

  14. A Gift from Mr Thornhaugh

  ACT THREE / The Past Awakens

  15. The Resurrection of Edwin Gorst

  16. Miss Blantyre Meets Her Fate

  17. In Which Lady Tansor Opens Her Heart

  18. Thirty at Table, and What Followed

  19. A Voice from the Past

  20. In Which Mr Vyse Bares His Teeth

  21. A Child is Born

  22. In Which Madame’s Third Letter is Opened

  ACT FOUR / Duty and Desire

  23. At North Lodge

  24. Snow and Secrets

  25. A Lingering Scent of Violets

  26. The Old Man of Billiter Street

  27. The Temptation of Mr Perseus

  28. To the South

  29. An Italian Spring

  ACT FIVE / Time’s Revenge

  30. Mr Barley’s Black Box

  31. A Fatal Correspondence

  32. The Consequences of a Lie

  33. In Which Certain Truths are Faced at Last

  34. Retribution

  35. The Last Sunrise

  36. Aftermath

  37. Inheritance

  38. Envoi

  Acknowledgements

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The manuscript of ‘The Glass of Time’ is held in the Houghton Library at Harvard. Although, like the supposedly confessional text published by the present editor in 2006 as The Meaning of Night, it purports to be a record of actual events connected with the ancient, and now defunct, Duport family, of Evenwood in Northamptonshire, it is firmly novelistic in character and should be read first and foremost as a work of fiction, or at least as highly fictionalized autobiography.

  Consisting of 647 unlined folios of foolscap, tied with a faded black silk ribbon, the manuscript was first catalogued in 1936 as part of the private library of J. Gardner Friedmann of New York, who purchased it on a trip to London in May 1924. After Friedmann’s death in 1948, it found its way to Harvard, along with the rest of his extensive collection of nineteenth-century fiction.

  As with its related literary predecessor, The Meaning of Night, I have supplied explanatory footnotes, where I have felt them to be necessary or helpful to the modern reader, and have silently amended a number of mechanical errors and inconsistencies.

  J.J. ANTROBUS

  Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction

  University of Cambridge

  ACT ONE

  A HOUSE OF SECRETS

  We twayne are one too many (quoth I) for men saie, Three maie keepe a counsell, if two be awaie.

  JOHN HEYWOOD, Dialogue of Proverbs (1546)

  PROLOGUE

  My Lady and Her Sons

  Observed by Miss Gorst, 8th November 1876

  I

  The View from the Gallery

  I WISH YOU, first of all, to imagine that you are standing beside me, peeping over the rail of an arched and curtained gallery, set – like the stage of some aerial theatre – high above a long and imposing room.

  From our vantage point, if we push our noses out just a very little way through the narrow gap in the curtains, we may see down to where the assembled company of fine ladies and gentlemen are sitting at table. The thick velvet curtains smell of time and dust, but do not mind them. We shall not be here long.

  The room below us, decorated in crimson and gold, is richly furnished and, although grandly proportioned, deliciously warm, even on this chill November evening, from the heat thrown out from blazing piles of pine logs in the two great stone fire-places.

  On every wall there are mirrors in gilded frames that give back endless reflections as you pass them. Above us, spanning the whole space, soars a panelled ceiling, curved like a barrel, on which – although you must take my word for it, being now lost to sight in shadow – are painted scenes depicting the marriage of Heracles and Hebe. (I had this information from Mr Pocock, the butler, and, as is my habit, wishing always to improve myself and extend my knowledge, wrote it down as soon as I could in one of the note-books I keep constantly about me.)

  The fourteen persons at dinner tonight have come together to pay tribute to Lord Edward Duport, a Government man who lost a finger on this day in November 1605, during the attack on Holbeche House, to where several of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had fled.

  Just below us, on our left, is lumpish Miss Fanny Bristow, stupid but harmless; next to her sits Mr Maurice FitzMaurice, the proud new owner of the Red House at Ashby St John, who thinks he is such a fine fellow, though a
ll the world knows better. (By the look on his face, he appears to have taken it very ill that he has been obliged to sit out his dinner in Miss Bristow’s simpering company. It serves him right, I say, for thinking so well of himself.)

  Directly opposite is Sir Lionel Voysey, of Thorpe Laxton Hall, with his absurd wife, ugly and coarse; on her right you may see the smirking face of Dr Pordage, who always touches me slyly on the hand with a damp finger when I see him to the door, as if this betokened some secret understanding between us, which it most assuredly does not.

  The Rector, Mr Thripp, and his captious wife, are sitting next to the doctor, in strained silence as usual. I believe Mrs Thripp harbours some deep and perpetual resentment against her husband, though what it is I cannot say. The remaining guests we can pass over, being of no consequence to my story.

  We now come to the three members of this evening’s party in which I – and you – have a particular interest: the permanent residents of this great house.

  First, of course, my Lady – the former Miss Emily Carteret, now the 26th Baroness Tansor.

  Look at her. She sits at the head of the board, as a queen ought, in black and shimmering silver silk. Who can deny that she is beautiful still, or that her fifty-two years have been uncommonly kind to her? In the candlelight below us, fluttering shadows play delightfully across her pale skin (she never allows the gas to be lit: candlelight is so much more flattering).

  She captivates and charms the men gathered in her Crimson-and-Gold Dining-Room. See how they ogle her when they think no one else is looking! Mr FitzMaurice, Dr Pordage, even red-faced Sir Lionel Voysey (always comically maladroit in her presence): they all fall under her spell like silly boys, and see her only as she wishes to be seen.

  Naturally, her famously tragical past – a father murdered, and the great love of her life slain a month before their marriage – only increases her allure. Men, I think, are such fools, at least men such as these. If she has suffered, well, there is suffering enough in the world, and we shall each have our share before we are released.

  Yet she has been richly compensated for her suffering, which is by no means the least of her attractions, especially to her bachelor admirers. Beautiful, romantically scarred by tragedy, the possessor of an immense fortune and an ancient title – and now a widow! Charlie Skinner, one of the junior footmen, who is sweet on me, told me that Mr FitzMaurice could hardly credit his good fortune on meeting his fair neighbour for the first time, and that he returned to the Red House in a perfect jitter of excitement. It was soon reported at his club that he had been heard hinting, to anyone who would listen, that his bachelor days were numbered.

  Alas for poor deluded Mr Maurice FitzMaurice! He is scarcely alone in his ambitions. She is far too great a prize, perhaps still one of the greatest prizes in England. His rivals are many and distinguished, his own hand as weak as can be; and yet he persists in entertaining the rosiest of hopes, without ever enjoying the least encouragement from the object of his desire.

  The truth is that she will never marry again, and certainly not a prize fool like Mr Maurice FitzMaurice. Marriage would bring her no material advantage. Nor will she succumb to Love again, for her heart is shut fast against all further assault from that quarter. No man can ever displace the memory of her first and last love, whose terrible death has been the great affliction of her life, greater even than the murder of her father. Her late husband, Colonel Zaluski, could not do it – that at least is the common opinion. I never met the gentleman; but Sukie Prout (my great friend below stairs) says that the two of them rubbed along well enough, and that the colonel had a smiling, accommodating way about him that made you instantly like him. I must suppose, therefore, that his wife liked him too, and that this was enough for her.

  The fruits of this unremarkable union are now sitting on either side of their mother: Mr Perseus Duport, the heir to her title and fortune, on her right hand, his younger brother, Mr Randolph Duport, on her left. But they are not at all unremarkable.

  Mr Perseus – who has just raised a toast to gallant Lord Edward Duport – will shortly attain his majority, and is very like his mother in appearance: tall, deliberate in movement, watchful in attitude, and with the same fathomless eyes. His hair – as dark as those eyes – is worn long, so that it falls about his shoulders in a consciously romantic way, as befits the poet he aspires to be. He is very proud of his hair, a trait that he also gets from his mother. A most handsome young gentleman, undoubtedly, made more so by a carefully tended black beard, which gives him a dangerously heroic look, exactly like the portrait of the Turkish Corsair that hangs at the foot of the vestibule stairs, and for which, on first seeing it, I thought he must have sat, had it not been painted over twenty years since.

  His younger brother, Mr Randolph Duport, is nearly twenty, and is no less striking than his brother, although very differently composed. He is shorter and stockier, stronger in limb, with warm brown eyes (Sukie says they are the spit of his late father’s), a rosy, outdoors colouring, and unruly brown hair. There is not the least resemblance to his mother; nor is there any discernible trace of her temperament in him, which makes people like him far more than Mr Perseus. Unlike his brother, he has none of Lady Tansor’s haughtiness and pride. He is, by contrast, a singularly unaffected and spontaneous soul, appearing to take things as they come, and (so goes the general opinion) hardly ever thinking of consequences, for which I am told he has often felt the sting of his mother’s displeasure. Yet, possessing the uncommon ability to acknowledge his faults, which Mr Perseus appears to lack, he is said never to complain, but promises to apply himself more soberly in the future to the art of properly considering matters.

  Perhaps it is being the younger son that makes him so philosophical. Mr Perseus, on whom all his mother’s expectations rest, is ever mindful of his future responsibilities, when he becomes the head of this great family. He takes his privileged position as his mother’s future successor very seriously, to the extent that, following the death of his father, Colonel Zaluski, a year since, he insisted on giving up his studies at the University in order to assist Lady Tansor, who had formerly relied on her husband for such things, in overseeing the running of the estate, and to advise her – as he could – on the many other Duport interests.

  Mr Randolph does not appear to resent the accident of his brother’s seniority, or the material benefits that this will bring when at last Mr Perseus comes into his inheritance. He claims that he would be rather alarmed than otherwise if, by some misfortune befalling his elder brother, he were to succeed in his place.

  These three persons have become the principal and constant objects of my attention in this house, to which I have been sent for reasons that – at the time of which I am writing – have not been fully revealed to me. Thus I continue to wait, and watch, as I have been instructed to do.

  I AM USUALLY required to be in constant readiness to attend my Lady, day or night; but on this particular evening I had been excused from all duties. After I had dressed my Lady for dinner, the hours that lay ahead had been mine to do with as I wished – a precious respite, during which the bell in my room would (I hoped) remain silent, even through the cold night watches.

  My Lady does not sleep well, and I am regularly called down to her when she wakes from her often troubled slumbers, to read to her, or to brush her long dark hair (a service to which she is especially partial) until she is ready to return to her bed. If sleep does not then take her, she soon reaches for the bell-rope to summon me down again.

  Sometimes the bell rings only once in my room, two floors above hers; at others, I might stumble, half asleep, out of my warm bed and descend the stairs to her panelled bed-chamber five or six times, returning to my own room vexed and fatigued. But on this particular occasion, my Lady had assured me that I would not be called until the morning.

  After performing my evening duties, I had therefore closed my door with the most luxurious sense of relief. At first I curled up on my bed to read a new novel by Miss
Braddon (novels are my passion), but found I could not settle; so, throwing the book aside, I tip-toed down to the gallery that overlooks the Crimson-and-Gold Dining-Room, to watch my mistress, her two sons by her side, entertain her guests.