The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox Read Free Book Online Page B

The change
    brought no improvement in his behaviour: he merely exchanged the Bell and Book in
    Church Langton for the King’s Head in Sandchurch. I have said enough, I hope, to
    demonstrate the Captain’s execrable character, and his utter contempt for the duties of a
    husband and father.

    In the summer of 1819, my mother accompanied her friend, Laura Tansor, to
    France, where she stayed for several months. I was born there, in the Breton city of
    Rennes, the following spring. Some weeks later, the two companions travelled together to
    Dinan, where they took lodgings near the Tour de l’Horloge. Lady Tansor then departed
    for Paris whilst my mother remained in Dinan for several more days. But just as she was
    preparing to leave for St-Malô, she received terrible news from England.

    The Captain, returning home late one pitch-black night from the King’s Head in
    an extreme state of inebriation, had wandered off the path, missed his footing, and
    tumbled over the cliff not twelve yards from his door. Tom Grexby, the village
    schoolmaster, found him the next morning, his neck quite broken.

    The Captain appears to have been perfectly content to let his wife gad off to
    France with her friend. He found it not in the least inconvenient to have the house to
    himself, and to be able to spend his leisure unencumbered by even the few domestic
    duties required of him when his wife was at home. And so he died, a miserable
    mediocrity.

    On a late summer evening, my mother brought me into Dorset, tucked up in a
    plaid blanket and laid on her lap, up the long dusty road that leads from the church to the
    little white-painted house on the cliff-top. Naturally, she received heartfelt sympathy
    from her friends and neighbours in Sandchurch. To return home husbandless, and with a
    fatherless child! All about the village, heads could not stop shaking in disbelief at the
    double calamity. The general commiseration was received by my mother with genuine
    gratitude, for the sudden death of the Captain had been a severe shock to her, despite his
    inadequacies as a husband.

    All these things I came to know much later, after my mother’s death. I pass now
    to my own memories of my childhood at Sandchurch.

    We lived quietly enough – my mother and I, Beth, our maid-of-all-work, and
    Billick, a grizzled old salt, who chopped wood, tended the garden, and drove the trap.
    The house faced south across a stretch of soft turf towards the Channel, and from my
    earliest years the strongest memory I have is of the sound of waves and wind, as I lay in
    my cradle under the apple tree in the front garden, or in my room, with its little round
    window set above the porch.

    We had few visitors. Mr Byam More, my mother’s uncle, would come down from
    the West Country two or three times a year; and I also have a clear memory of a pale,
    sad-eyed lady called Miss Lamb, who would sit talking quietly with my mother whilst I
    played on the rug before the parlour fire, and who would often reach down to stroke my
    hair, or run her fingers across my cheek, in a most gentle and affecting way, which I can
    still vividly recall.

    For a period of my childhood, my mother suffered from severe depression of
    spirits, which I now know was caused by the death of her childhood friend, Laura, Lady
    Tansor, whose name was unknown to me until after my mother’s death. Her Ladyship (as
    I also later learned) had discreetly supported my mother with little gifts of her own
    money, and other considerations. But when she died, these payments ceased, and things
    went hard for Mamma, the Captain’s paltry legacy to her having long since been
    exhausted; but she determined that she would do all in her power to maintain ourselves,
    for as long as possible, in the house at Sandchurch.

    And so it came about that the publisher, Mr Colburn, received on his desk in New
    Burlington-street a brown-paper package containing Edith; or, The Last of the Fitzalans,
    the first work of fiction