The Seance by John Harwood Read Free Book Online Page B

age; I had no particular talent or ambition, and certainly no desire to marry. And yet there was
something
I craved, a nameless, faceless yearning that could only be assuaged by walking for hours at a time in all kinds of weather, until I knew every street in the district, all the way to the edge of Hampstead where the houses gave way to lanes and fields. But I never went back to Holborn.
    In the end I found a situation as day-governess to the children of a Captain Tremenheere, who was serving with the Royal Horse Artillery at the barracks on Ordnance Hill. My uncle was a little put out by this, but as I reminded him, my allowance from my father would end soon enough, and I could not live upon his charity. I was happier for the occupation, and grew very fond of my three pupils, and yet the restlessness remained; I could not shake off the feeling that I was sleepwalking through my days, waiting for my real life – whatever that might be – to begin.
    In the spring of 1888, my father died suddenly of a stroke. I had the news in a letter from my aunt, who wrote that he had left everything to her, with instructions to continue my allowance until I came of age the following January. She did not invite me to attend the funeral, nor did I wish to go; I knew that I had meant nothing to him, and grieved, I think, for my own lack of feeling, rather than for the man I had scarcely known.
    The ensuing summer was so cold and wet that it scarcely merited the name, and the autumn was overshadowed by the continuing news of the atrocities in Whitechapel. My solitary walks were curtailed; I no longer felt at ease beyond the boundaries of St John’s Wood; and then in December Captain Tremenheere was posted to Aldershot, taking his family with him.My twenty-first birthday had passed without my finding another situation, until one morning after breakfast, while I was idly browsing through the personal column in
The Times
, I came upon the following advertisement:
If Constance Mary Langton, daughter of the late Hester Jane Langton (née Price), formerly of Bartram’s Court, Holborn, will contact Montague and Venning, Commissioners for Oaths, at their offices in Wentworth Road, Aldeburgh, she may learn something to her advantage.
     

    I had imagined that all would be revealed in Mr Montague’s reply, but his letter merely requested ‘such proofs as may readily be furnished’ that I was indeed the Constance Mary Langton in question. My uncle joked, as he drafted a statement to this effect, that for all he knew I might simply have wandered into the house in Bartram’s Court on the day he happened to call – a remark which troubled me more than he realised. I was also required to give the date and place of my birth – for the latter I could only put ‘in the country near Cambridge’ – and to say whether I had any sisters ‘or other close female relatives’ living, to which I replied that to the best of my knowledge I had none. In response to this, I received a note from Mr Montague saying that he would be coming up to London in a few days’ time, and would like to call upon me, whenever might be convenient, ‘regarding a bequest’. My uncle thought from the wording of the advertisement that the legacy must have come from someone on my mother’s side, but could shed no further light; he had never taken much interest in their history. Most likely, he warned me, it would be a small sum of money, or a few decrepit pieces of furniture, willed to my mother by some forgotten aunt or cousin. But the prospect had reawakened my childhood fancy that there might be some mystery about my birth. I had never mentioned this to my uncle, and was secretly relieved when he declined to attend theinterview, saying that it was my own business, now that I was of age; he could always be fetched from his studio if he were needed.
    Mr Montague came to see me on a freezing January morning; I was standing by the window when Dora showed him into the