The God of the Labyrinth Read online

  I experienced a momentary apprehension as I saw Miss Eileen coming down the steps to meet me; but she dispelled it by taking my hand in her mannish grip and saying: ‘Well, well, it’s pleasant to see you again.’ We went into the library. Miss Tina was not there. I took a seat on a dusty nineteenth-century couch, in the sunlight, and let Miss Eileen do the talking. I had to admire her forthright intellect.

  ‘Well, as we see it, there’s no point in trying to stand in the way of this book. As you say, it was bound to get published sooner or later. So the best idea is to try to keep it in your hands. Which university were you at, by the way?’ I said I wasn’t, but she brushed this aside. ‘Don’t suppose it matters. You’re obviously a competent, intelligent sort of chap. If you get in first with your book on Esmond, the others’ll have to fall in line.’ She was taking it for granted that I would write a full biography of Donelly, and I didn’t want to disappoint her at this stage, so I nodded and said nothing. Miss Tina came in with tea and cakes, and greeted me like an old friend. And when we all had cups and plates of sandwiches, she said:

  ‘I must say, it came as quite a surprise to hear that Esmond was so notorious. I’d never heard of this book about deflowering virgins.’ She said it entirely without embarrassment. I took the opportunity to produce the book out of my briefcase, as well as the typescript of Colonel Donelly’s MS. While they looked at them, I said: ‘I wonder if you’d mind if I look at Donelly’s books again?’ I took down the Observations, and the four-volume Travels, and retired to the window seat, so as not to embarrass them. Periodically, I heard Miss Eileen mutter: ‘I say!’, and she would pass the book to Miss Tina, who would glance quickly at me, then read avidly, making clicking noises with her tongue.

  I opened the Observations and took out the drawing of the phoenix. I held it up to the light. Yes, there was a watermark, partly obscured by the drawing. And then I had to restrain the impulse to laugh loudly. It was in the shape of a phoenix!

  I compared the tinted drawing (or it could have been an etch­ing) with the embossed phoenix on the cover. They were iden­tical in outline, but there were half a dozen differences. Quite definitely, they were not the same bird.

  When Miss Eileen looked over at me, I showed her the draw­ing of the phoenix. She glanced at it, said: ‘Umm, rather nice’, and handed it back to me. She was clearly not interested.

  Miss Tina said: ‘Have you showed Mr Sorme the letters, dear?’

  ‘Ah no, I forgot.’ She went into the small room next door, and returned with a bundle of papers tied with tape. ‘Tina said you wanted to know if there was a wooden phoenix in the attic. So we had a good search. Didn’t find your phoenix, but we found a lot of old papers—great boxes full. I don’t think most of ’em have got anything to do with Esmond, but these seem to be letters addressed to him.’

  I quickly untied the tape. As soon as I began to separate the papers, something fell out of an envelope to the floor. I picked it up. It was an oval miniature, without its frame, and had been painted on a piece of some carved white shell or mother-of-pearl. It was a painting of a very beautiful girl, with her hair in ringlets down to her shoulders. It had nothing written on it.

  The letters themselves were not in Esmond Donelly’s hand­writing; some seemed to be from someone called Thomas Walgrave, some from William Aston, some from Horace Glenney. They seemed to be in no kind of order. Some were in envelopes and some were not. Walgrave was apparently a clergyman of Dublin, and Aston lived in Cork. Glenney, I soon realised, had been a fellow student of Donelly’s at Göttingen, and was appar­ently the son of Lord Glenney of Golspie, in Sutherland.

  In the midst of this pile of letters there was a parchment envelope with nothing written on it. Inside, I found a slip of paper cut to the same shape as the miniature; written on it, in Esmond Donelly’s handwriting: ‘Lady Charlotte Ingestre, 2nd d. Earl of Flaxstead’. Also in the envelope, there was what appeared to be a page of a letter in Donelly’s handwriting. As I read this, I knew I had found something else for my book.

  Voltaire has argued, in his Philosophical Dictionary, that sect and error are synonymous, since there is no room for sectarian opinion in matters that are known to be true; for example, in geometry or science. Our religious professions, he says, should be confined to matters on which all minds agree. But he goes on to assert that all minds agree upon the worship of God and upon honesty. This is not true, for the Bhoudistes do not accept God, and the Jesuits have reservations about honesty. Is there, then, any common ground for religious agreement?

  I would argue, my dear friend, that there is no man of intelligence who does not recognise this world to be a mystery. It takes only a moment’s thought to recognise that our certainties are the certainties of habit, obeyed by us like the rules of piquet or whisk [whist], but in no way self-evident.

  Religions assert that what lies outside the rules of the games we play is unknowable, or known only to God and the angels. But science has taught us that anything may be understood if the method of inquiry be sufficiently subtle and logical.

  I would argue that our certainties are not seen, but felt, as I now feel the warmth of the sun upon my hand as I write. I would argue that our habit of attempting to get at truth by the method of seeing or reasoning has blinded us to its true nature, like a man who tries to tell the difference between Canary sack and cold tea by sight alone. The mys­tery of the world becomes apparent to us in moments when our spirits are profoundly moved or disturb’d, if the dis­turbance be harmonious. In these moments of mystery, it is as if we became aware of the vibrations of an underground stream, like the one I heard near Vevey, and may sometimes feel so close to it that we can hear the noise of its rushing.

  When I am suffering from ennui, it is like being deaf with a cold in the head; I hear nothing. When I look upon the face of Charlotte Ingestre, the deafness vanishes; I hear the rushing beneath my feet.

  And surely if religion is this sense of the mystery of creation, and of the proximity of the mystery, then there are no objects so conducive to holiness as women and moun­tains? Why should it not be . . .

  The fragment breaks off here, halfway down a page, as if the writer was interrupted. But the words ‘my dear friend’ seemed to suggest that Donelly had been making a preliminary draft of a letter, and that he suddenly decided that he may as well start copying it into the letter itself. Who was its recipient? The envelope containing the fragment was in the midst of letters from Horace Glenney, and Glenney’s own letters to Donelly quoted Voltaire, Fontanelle and d’Alembert; it was a reasonable assumption that Glenney, Donelly’s college friend from Göttingen, was the recipient of his confidences and of his religious specula­tions.

  Miss Eileen had put down the typescript, and was looking out of the window in a slightly dazed manner. I asked her:

  ‘Have you ever heard of a Lady Charlotte Ingestre?’

  Both she and Miss Tina looked startled. It was the latter who said, after a glance at her sister:

  ‘Why, yes. She was the daughter of the Earl of Flaxstead. . . .’

  She paused, as if embarrassed. Miss Eileen finished, in an almost sepulchral voice:

  ‘And the sister of Lady Mary Ingestre, who later became Mary Glenney.’

  I needed no reminding about the latter; the name had been in my head ever since last week, when Miss Eileen had first mentioned it over the phone. I said:

  ‘Did you know that Esmond was in love with Lady Charlotte?’

  Miss Tina said: ‘They say he was in love with all three of them.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Lady Mary, Lady Charlotte and Lady Maureen.’ She glanced nervously at her sister. Miss Eileen shrugged, and said:

  ‘I suppose he’ll have to find out about it anyway.’

  Miss Tina said: ‘They were certainly all very beautiful.’

  ‘Do any pictures exist?’

  ‘Oh yes.
Romney’s portrait is quite famous.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  They looked mildly surprised at my ignorance.

  ‘Here, of course.’

  ‘Could I see?’

  The two of them got up without speaking, and led the way out of the room. In the hall, Miss Eileen vanished for a few minutes. She returned with a huge key. We crossed to a pair of great mahogany doors. Miss Tina said:

  ‘The insurance people insist that we keep the gallery locked. Some of the pictures are worth rather a lot.’

  Miss Eileen unlocked the door, and a breath of cold, musty air came out. She switched on lights, and we went into the ‘long gallery’. It was icy. The windows were covered with shutters, and the tables and chairs with covers. I could well believe that no one had been in it for at least a year. She led me to a rather small picture on the end wall. It needed cleaning, but even that could not detract from the beauty of the three faces. The girls were posed conventionally against a background of trees and part of a fountain. Charlotte, whose portrait I had already seen, was immediately recognisable. The only thing the sisters had in common was beauty. Charlotte’s face was pink-cheeked and inno­cent, an arcadian face. The girl sitting next to her, playing with a poodle, was visibly more intelligent, a fine, delicate face with a swan’s neck, the hair short, almost boyish. Miss Tina identified her as Mary, who later became Lady Mary Glenney. Maureen, clearly the youngest, had a face that would become very beauti­ful, and that was also gentle and generous. She was obviously impulsive and warm-hearted, the kind who would burst into tears at a sad story. One of her hands reached out to caress the dog—a gesture plainly symbolic of a nature that had to give affection.

  Miss Tina said with pride: ‘Esmond only paid Romney thirty guineas for that. We’ve been offered five thousand pounds for it.’

  I could see why Esmond was rumoured to be in love with all three sisters. After staring at the portrait for five minutes, I was close to it myself. Each one had qualities in her face that seemed to emerge as one stared at it; I could have written a novel about the three of them.

  ‘Do you have a portrait of Esmond?’

  ‘Oh yes, two. One by Raeburn and one by someone called Zoffany.’

  The Zoffany portrait told me little; the face was immobile, lacking any spark of life; it showed Donelly in officer’s uniform, leaning against a tree. He was apparently fairly tall and thin. The face was long, lantern-jawed, the nose prominent.

  The Raeburn was altogether more rewarding. It was unpre­tentious, with almost no background; it was in some respects little more than a sketch. But Raeburn had caught a sort of eagerness in the face, which seemed to lean forward as if listening to an interesting anecdote. It was not exactly a handsome face; the bony nose and high cheekbones made me think of Sherlock Holmes, but the mouth was too sensual. Turning back from this to the Zoffany, I now saw other qualities in the latter: the size of the chin, a sort of control about the posture, like a thorough­bred horse standing still at a parade.

  As we left the room—all three of us frozen—I said:

  ‘I think that Esmond has all the qualifications for attracting crowds of admirers and commentators.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ They both looked eager.

  ‘This business of being in love with three beautiful girls makes him quite a figure of romance—very Byronic. What a pity the rest of his journals have disappeared. He’s a far more interesting character than Boswell.’

  Miss Tina said: ‘I once saw a film about Chopin. They did it rather well. I cried all the way through.’

  ‘I imagine they might want to make a film about Esmond.’

  ‘Would we make a lot of money?’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘We’d share with you, of course,’ said Miss Tina.

  ‘Do you know any details of the romance with the three sisters?’

  ‘Not really. It’s just a family story.’

  ‘What about the death of Lord Glenney?’

  Miss Eileen said: ‘He was shot. I don’t know many details, but my father once looked them up in the Dublin National Library, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to check. There was talk about Esmond being suspected, but Father said he couldn’t pos­sibly be guilty. I hope you’ll make that clear.’

  ‘I’ll certainly do my best.’

  Before I left, they showed me up to the attics. They were very dark, very dusty, and full of lumber that had accumulated for centuries: broken picture frames, baulks of timber with no obvious purpose, broken furniture, porcelain wash-bowls, bundles of paper that might have been anything from farming accounts to the missing diaries. I glanced into some of these and under­stood what Professor Abbott must have felt in the attic at Forbes House, surrounded by manuscripts. But the memory of Abbott gave me an idea.

  ‘Have you any idea whom Esmond appointed as his literary executor?’

  They looked at each other blankly.

  ‘No. We’ll try to find out.’

  Before I left, I said that I might have to come back again very soon to look at the papers. At which, to my astonishment, Miss Tina said: ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler if he took them with him, dear?’, and Miss Eileen said without hesitation: ‘Oh, certainly.’ They helped me bundle them into the back seat of the car, and waved aside my offer of a receipt. I drove off feeling rather oppressed by their trust. Then, as I thought about it, I began to understand the reason. They were lonely and rather broke, living alone in magnificent but draughty grandeur, with no expecta­tions except to get older. They probably wondered which one would go first. When they were dead, the house would probably pass to some distant member of the family in Canada or New Zealand. And now the great world was knocking on their door; there was something to dream about—publishers, film rights, scholars visiting them. They wanted to believe in all this, and therefore they wanted to believe in me, to accept me completely, to regard me with a certain affection. What I had regarded as the greatest obstacle—Esmond’s reputation as a writer of porno­graphy—turned out to be nothing of the sort, since I declared the pornography spurious, and meant to state this opinion in print. The fragment of Donelly’s journal I had obtained from Colonel Donelly was sexually frank, but no more so than Boswell; above all, it was well written.

  These considerations made me feel better. I thought there was a very fair chance that there would be a Donelly revival when Fleisher brought out the Memoirs. Altogether, it was a satis­factory outlook.

  When I examined the new batch of letters, I knew that we now had a book, whether or not any further Donelly MSS turned up. Apart from the Donelly manuscript, this was the most fascinating material yet.

  It is difficult to imagine three correspondents more completely different in character than Thomas Walgrave, William Aston and Horace Glenney, and they revealed the complexity of Donelly’s own personality. Walgrave was a Dublin man whose chief inter­ests were astronomy and mathematics, and his letters to Donelly were mainly concerned with these subjects. Aston was studying theology at a Protestant seminary in 1772, the date of the first letter, and later became a clergyman at Ballincollig, near Cork (where his family home was situated). He was greatly troubled by what appeared to be two opposing trends in Donelly’s character: towards infidelity and towards ‘enthusiasm’ (i.e. fanaticism or mysticism). When Donelly quoted Voltaire, Bayle or Montesquieu, Aston replied with arguments from the sermons of Jortin, Ogden, Tillotson, Smalridge and Sherlock. All this I found unbelievably stuffy and dull—the lengthy hair-splitting on transubstantiation, predestination, the truth of the Scriptures, etc. But it was clear that Esmond did not find it boring, for Aston’s replies were long-winded and circumstantial, indicating that his correspondent’s were equally so.

  It was the Glenney letters that fitted in with what I already knew of Esmond Donelly. When sorted into their correct order (with a certain amount of guesswork—several were undate
d), they ran from May 1767 to Christmas 1771. Glenney and Esmond were together at Göttingen for most of this time, so the corres­pondence was not as voluminous as in the case of Aston. Clearly, they exchanged letters when they were apart for any length of time, and this was not often, for they were very close friends.

  The story of their relationship, which I was able to piece together from Glenney’s letters,* is as follows. When Esmond Donelly had met Rousseau and Boswell at Neuchâtel, he pro­ceeded on to Milan, where he spent the Christmas of 1764. In January, he spent a week in Venice, then spent a further week in Graz en route to Göttingen. Here he made the acquaintance of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who later became an eminent philosopher (but who, at this period, was interested chiefly in mathematics and astronomy) and of the Hon. Horace Gordon Glenney. The latter was a handsome, dark-skinned youth with an almost Jewish cast of countenance and a pronounced Scottish accent; slightly older than Donelly, but immensely less sophisti­cated; the second son of a Scottish laird from one of the wilder regions of that country. Lichtenberg, Glenney and Donelly had one thing in common—a lively interest in the opposite sex. Göttingen was full of healthy young farm girls, ‘bouncing creatures from the valleys of the Harz or the Solling’, wrote Lichtenberg, ‘who have never seen a sum larger than a thaler, and to whom the braided hat of the nobleman is an object of awe, and the requests of such a hat, royal commands’. Göttingen was a town of high academic reputation, unlike Halle, Jena and Giessen, which were full of louts whose chief interest was in duelling. But, like most other towns in Germany, it was a highly ordered, highly regimented place, where the peasants were used to obeying the will of their masters. (It was also, of course, a part of England, since George III was Duke of Hanover as well as King of Great Britain; this was no doubt the reason that Esmond’s parents chose it.) Esmond and Horace Glenney were delighted to discover that these delicious creatures did not have to be seduced, like the girls on their estate at home; Glenney mentions in one of his letters that Lichtenberg twitted him with accusation that he aimed at taking every maidenhead in Hanover, in preparation for a lifetime of abstention when he should return to his own puritanical country.