A Fatal Likeness (14 page)

“It’s not about money—I don’t want their money. I want them to believe that I am so heartsick of the past that I want nothing more to do with it. I know from bitter experience that they will not trust
me,
but if
you
tell them that, they will believe it. And by the time they discover the truth it will be too late.”

Charles frowns. “Too late?”

She smiles at him, an artful, knowing smile. “Surely you have understood by now? I have no intention of selling them a single page—a single line. All I ask you to obtain for me is time—the time I need to complete my book, so that the full truth of our lives may finally be told. The time I need to ensure that there will be nothing whatsoever they can do to prevent its publication.”

“You intend to
publish
what you have written? Is that wise—will it not expose you to—”

“—scandal and ignominy?” she finishes archly. “I have weathered many a worse storm, Mr Maddox. For the last thirty years I have hidden myself away—shunned the light like some wretched creature of the underworld—and the price I have paid has been to see those two women appoint themselves sole guardians of the truth about Shelley’s life. But now that scoundrel Medwin has written of me in his memoir, and ripped away the protecting veil I had wrapped about my name. I have nothing left to lose. I do not want my memory to be sunk in oblivion as my life has been. I have trodden this life with neither a guide nor companion, and before I leave it forever I want to write the story I have never ventured to tell.”

She is weeping now, and Charles resists an impulse to move to comfort her—tells himself consciously to resist it, and cannot understand how he finds himself on his knees before her chair, his arms about her shoulders, and her body racking his with wrenching sobs. The scent of her is so strong now that it threatens to overwhelm him, and when he turns his face he can feel the softness of her hair against his lips. She must be—
is—
old enough to be his mother, but that doesn’t seem to matter—doesn’t stop him feeling the stir of response in his own body. He gets hastily to his feet, his cheeks scarlet, and sees first bewilderment, then comprehension in her eyes.

“Forgive me,” she says again, looking down, only this time there is no playfulness in her voice, merely regret. “Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” he replies, his voice rough. Something has changed between them—something fragile as yet, but as unmistakable as that dark scent of hers, which he can smell now on his own skin.

She, for her part, watches his averted and self-conscious face, then rises and goes over to the piano-stool, where she takes a small key from a pocket in her dress, then pulls aside the brocade and opens the trunk. Charles glances up as the lid creaks open and is amazed at what he sees—he should have guessed by now how much material she might have accumulated, but he is astonished, all the same, at the sheer quantity of papers inside the trunk. Some neatly bound in faded ribbons, others cast in loose and careless. It seems chaotic, but there must be some order to it, for it takes Claire only a moment to find what she is looking for.

“I know,” she says, turning to him, a paper in her hand, “that what I have told you strains belief. I have asked you to take a great deal on my word alone, and you are wondering, even now, if that word can be trusted.”

He starts to reply, but she prevents him. “That was not a test, Mr Maddox, merely an observation. I had not intended to show you this—I had not intended to show you anything, after you took it upon yourself to take by stealth what you could not obtain by any honest means. But I have changed my mind.”

She looks down now, at the letter she is holding, and her fingers close tight about it, as if clinging to the past. “Shelley wrote this to me three months before he died. I did not know, then, what misery was about to befall me. Or that with his death there would be nothing left for me but dying.”

“But surely,” says Charles, “surely you still had your child—”

She raises her face slowly to his, her features suddenly haggard, her eyes gaunt with a living grief. “You do not know? But then, how could you. By the time this letter reached me, my darling was dead.”

SIX

The Recollection

La Signora Clairmont

presso al Professore Bojti

Piazza dei Pitti

Firenze

Pisa, Monday morning 3rd April 1822

My best and loveliest girl,

I write on an evening as beautiful and as bright as your fair face, my love. Do you remember, last summer, when I wrote of the view from this very chamber—of the setting sun, and the sleeping swallows, and the bats flitting fast in the twilight purple air? Oh that such a time might be reclaimed, if only for a moment, for it has been a day of tempests without doors, and violence within. But now the rain and wind have passed, and a momentary peace restored, so I have taken up my pen and surrounded myself, as with a magic circle, by thoughts of you. We have lived so long, you and I, our thrilling silent life—our life of outward coolness and inner fire—that you will wonder, I dare say, at such a beginning. So much care we have observed, when we have taken up our pens, and so many stratagems employed in disguise, that it is with a kind of wild exhilaration that I write nakedly now, with no such subterfuge. You will scold me for my recklessness—I who have always counselled you to hold your heart in check, and curb the impulses of your passionate nature. But it is so. After what has passed this day I must relieve my heart in words.

My side torments me and my exhausted mind agitates the prison it inhabits. I have scarce been able to see, these two days and more, and my eyes and appetite are still weak. But not so my resolution. I determined this morning to wait no longer—to tell her at once of my decision, and of my promise. It has been six weeks and more since we have shared a chamber, and she has always, as you know, been averse to early rising, but I was surprised this morning, all the same, to find her still abed at noon. But a moment’s observation told me all the tale. I have seen her in the like condition too many times not to know the meaning of that wanness in her face, that lankness in her hair. She saw me then, and raised herself in the bed, calling me a beast and a brute, and all manner of vile names, for forcing her once more to endure the unutterable pain of bringing a child into the world, only to have it die, once again, in her arms. She could not forgive me, she said in wild fury, for three children dead—there could be no natural, no happy conclusion to this new pregnancy and she would curse this for a hateful day as long as she lived. She turned her face, then, to the wall, saying that we had lived eight years together and if all the events of those years were blotted out and erased, only then might she have a chance for happiness. I went to the bed then and knelt down beside her, saying I had never wished her woe, and would do all in my power to ease her pain, and that if she wished it, I would take up my old idea of an expedition to the East, where I might enter into an entirely new sphere of life. That I knew not how far this was practicable, given the state of my finances, but that I could talk again with Medwin and see what he might be able to lend me, and what might therefore be done. But I scarce finished my sentence when she turned to me with a laugh that chilled my very soul. Do you think to take
her
with you? she cried. Do you think to abandon me here, pregnant with
your
child, as you once abandoned that little fool Harriet? Do you hope
I
will destroy myself as she did, and you will be free once more from a wife you have tired of? No, she said, her features distorted by loathing, you will not rid yourself of me so easily. You and I are bound together forever. You know it, and you know the reason for it—it is a bond that you can never sever.

And how could I
not
know it—how could
you
not know it. You were with us when my William fell ill, when my daughters died—you will remember her raging at me, saying the misery I had caused her rendered her milk tainted, and poisoned the babes even as they took suck at her breast. But all this, you know. You have understood, for longer even than I, the fateful consequences of that perilous state of mind that has again overwhelmed her, and that black melancholia she considers her mother’s most terrible legacy, which no doctor has ever relieved. Did I not beg you to put off a visit to your own beloved child for fear of leaving her alone, lest she should be driven by despair to some fatal end? And as I write those words I recall again that day, that dreadful December day in Skinner Street after I learned of Harriet’s death. I was haunted then by memories of her, and the ghosts of those old remembrances seemed to make some reproach to which I had no reply. Mary, of all people, knew of those feelings—knew of those terrible associations, and the recollection of that room now is shadowed forever by the picture that comes always to my mind. Her face as she sat there, in the corner chair, listening quietly as always, as I told Godwin again and again of my opposition, on philosophical grounds, to matrimony, and my wish to accord what respect I still could to Harriet’s memory, and delay our marriage by a year. And then she rose, and came towards me, mouse-like in appearance as she always contrived, but a tiger’s ferocity looking from her eyes. Of course you are free to do as you like, Mary said, placing one hand on my shoulder and the other on her belly, and I am free to act as
I
like, and I have to tell you, that if you do not marry me I will not live—I will destroy myself
and my child with me.

And the same look I saw then, I see now. Just as I saw it when Clara died and she laid all the blame of it at my door. Day after day, in violent hysterics and words of poisonous retribution, saying that she would never forgive me for caring more for you and your child, than I did for her and ours. It was for me, she said, to put right the terrible wrong I had done her, it was for me to replace the child she had lost. Whatever that scoundrel of a servant has since alleged—whatever lies have been told, or Byron believed—that is the real and only reason we adopted Elena in Naples. I found that sweet babe and brought her to the house because Mary begged me to. Such a tiny child she was, my Elena, with her bright green eyes, and curls of golden yellow hair. How could any woman look on that child—hold it in her arms—and feel no motherly affection? How could she prove so deaf to its cries, so blind to its needs, as to refuse to give it nourishment? But by then the deed was done, and all the papers lodged in our names. And when Mary insisted we leave the city at once, I could see no way but to leave the child behind. In all that has happened—all that I regret and would wish undone—of this alone my heart cannot acquit me. And when the letter from the orphanage came telling me Elena was dead, I felt as if the destruction that consumes me were as an atmosphere that wraps and infects everything I touch. I can never speak openly of why I acted as I did, and the world, in consequence, damns me for a liar and a brute. Mary has always insisted that it was our own maid who spread the rumour—that it was all Elise’s doing—and I cannot prove it to be otherwise. But the suspicion will not lie quiet that she, in some way, was the source. How else could the Hoppners have come to hear of it? Why else should they have thought Elena was
your
child—yours and mine? Why else would they claim that I had given you violent medicines to procure an abortion, and only brought that poor babe to the house when those vile methods did not work? That, of all those hideous accusations, is the worst. You know, better than anyone, that I could never commit the unutterable crime of destroying any living creature, far less an innocent infant. And never—O never—could I harm a child of
yours.
A child of
mine.

I have clung too long to the feigned hope that we might come to a new understanding, Mary and I. That we might make amends together for those dark and dreadful deaths, and free ourselves from the curse of repeating the past. I had thought the woman who had for parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft would applaud me in my ambition to forge a new connection based on the principles those very parents had expounded. Mary had always told me so—she had fled with me in the beginning promising so. Would that I had known, before we left London together for France that first time, that for all those high protestations she would become to me so jealous a chained foe. Would that I had not been blinded by her lineage and her name to what was hidden in her heart. But it is her curse, and my own, that a person possessing such excellent powers as hers, should be so incapable of applying those capacities to domestic life.

But in truth the blame is mine—all mine. When first we met I saw only her high soul, and the wildness and sublimity of her feelings. I saw only the brilliant daughter of brilliant parents, I saw only passion in her gestures and looks, and boasted, even, of her capacity for indignation and hatred, seeing only—then—the most flattering proof of the strength of her attachment. It was intoxicating to be loved so, after the meek submissive embraces of my poor little Harriet—mesmerising to have such a girl hang on my every word, and throw herself with complete abandon into my arms. I remember the moment Mary declared herself mine—how she roused a fervour in my blood that still could not match the fever in her own. How against all reason—all prudence—she drew me down to her as she lay upon the very turf of her mother’s grave—the heat of the day, the smell of the summer grass, the heaving of her heart, and the seize of her lips as they strained into mine. And not a hundred yards away, idling in the sunlight and shade of that ancient willow, you, my dearest Claire. At the very moment of ardour I heard your voice. Singing.

Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet.

Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!

And later—after the Rubicon had been passed and the way back barred—how could I bear to hear what you tried so hard to tell me? How could I see your warnings as anything but what
she
insisted they were—lies and wicked fabrications sprung only from a black and vindictive envy? She did confess to have suffered ‘girlish troubles,’ but attributed all to a step-mother’s resentment, and a father’s carelessness. What loving father, Mary said, would have sent so young a girl away from home for so long? Surely only one who had been influenced by a sullen second wife to disregard the lovelier and more gifted child of the first. She did not tell me, then, that it was always
she
who initiated those furious quarrels that discomposed the entire house. She did not tell me, then, that the doctor summoned to examine her came not to see the skin disorder of her arm, but because your mother and Godwin apprehended a far more dreadful evil. No, your words, and yours alone, can account for all this.

What a different journey we might have trod, you and I, had I seen
you
that first time I called at Skinner Street, when Godwin told me both his daughter and step-daughter were away from home, but he would, in due course, allow himself the ‘not inconsiderable pleasure’ of introducing me to all the young ladies of the family. You will smile sadly and shake your head at my mimicry, Claire, but my rash promise to solace his declining years has haunted me from the day I made it. I have mortgaged my own future and my boy’s and still I cannot slake his insatiable demands, still he writes for money—always, always for more money.

You, my dearest girl, have always understood me—have poured balm on my weary aged soul, have sustained me in all my illness, and encouraged me in all my work. Why else—even in the high throes of a hectic passion—would I have insisted you came with us when we fled to France? When I told Mary what I proposed she seemed at first to accept my decision, only to call me back a moment later and declare—with that suddenly frozen face I have so miserably come to know—that you could make yourself useful as our interpreter, and that she would tell you so. You will say I was naïve—that I should have perceived at once what lay behind those words—but I believed her when she talked of love as free, of the passion between us as a thing of purity, far above the dreary exclusiveness of modern morals. It took but the travel of a single day to tear the scales from off my eyes, and show me that
her
understanding of our relation condemned you to cold oblivion just as surely as the narrowest and most oppressive contract of marriage. And for all the love Mary professed to my face, and in my arms, there was rancour even then in her heart. I did not wish to see it—might never have known it had you not found her, pen in hand, at work on that story. A story she had written of you; a story she entitled
Hate.
A story I consigned to the flames the day we set foot back in England.

These last months here we have become to one another an ever-present torment. Mary feels no more compunction in torturing me, than she does in torturing herself, as if we have indeed become one flesh, bound in an accursed and everlasting union of the living and the desired-dead. I have been ashamed before our friends—by her manners, her sulkiness, her shrill and carping tongue. I have seen the green distortion of jealousy in her face whenever your name is spoken, and heard the things she has said of you when she thinks I am not by. Leave her, you will say, leave her and come to me. But what might she accuse me of, in the vehemence of her revenge, if ever I forsake her as I did my poor Harriet? And when I think now of that pitiful child who did not a thing amiss but love me—when I think of what I was induced to say—the letters I was forced to write after I left her—the words dictated to me—accusing her of mean and despicable selfishness when she was so close to her confinement. I recall it now and the blood runs icy in my veins. Well might Harriet have cried that I had become a vampyre; that I behaved to her little better than a beast.

The terror of regret has tainted my whole life, like the spectre of an unquiet dream come back to blacken the cheerful morn. Thoughts of the past pursue me like a treacherous likeness of myself—a hideous
daemon
that bodies forth all that is cruel and depraved and disgusting in the dark depth of my inmost soul. I wonder sometimes if it is not, after all, a real persecutor but my own self from which I flee—some hideous excrescence of my own mind. You tell me it is nothing but bad dreams—that no-one haunts me, no-one shadows my steps—but I tell you I have seen him, even here. Even in Italy I have seen him, ever on the far edge of my sight, never fully revealed, never fully perceived. It is as if in a mirror I catch the echo of my own face, my own eyes dulled as if underwater. My own eyes those of a man already dead.