A Fatal Likeness (18 page)

There followed the most wondrous six weeks I have ever experienced. The excitement of being away from England—of being with Shelley, and in love. Our first sight of the Alps, their icy summits darting white pinnacles into the clear blue sky. Not even our miserable lack of money could diminish my happiness, and yet even then I knew—at sixteen I knew—that it was not appropriate—not
healthy—
for her to pursue Shelley as she did. It was not right that she should challenge him to bathe with her naked in a pool by the open roadside. It was not fitting that she should ask to share our bed, even if there was indeed—as she claimed—an infestation of rats. When Shelley and I were alone, we two, all was well; when she was there, chaos and wretchedness were always the consequence. But Shelley was, from the first, utterly blameless in this. You may say that he was older—that he should have insisted she conduct herself more prudently—but you never knew him, Mr Maddox. You do not understand that in so many things he was still a child himself—he loved nothing better than to sail paper boats on the Serpentine, or roll billiard balls about on the carpet with our son William. Children were always his chosen playmates and confidants—indeed he used to say, every true follower of Plato must be a lover of children, for they are our masters and instructors in philosophy. He loved children, almost as much as he loathed oppression in any form, and thus it was that he once attempted to kidnap his sisters from their school, claiming they were being ill treated. And his attentiveness to Miss Clairmont sprang from that same purity of sentiment. She was
always,
in his eyes, that same child he first met at my father’s house. The same plump, vivacious, rather demanding
child.
Sadly in need of the love and attention her mother never gave her, and deserving, therefore, of all his kindness. Whatever she supposes now—whatever she designed
then—
his own mind was never sullied by it. My marriage, Mr Maddox, from first to last, was a thing of passion. A thing of love, that had no end but death. And when he set out, at the end, on that journey that was to snatch him forever from my arms, the last letter he wrote was not to her, but to me—to his ‘best and ever dearest Mary.’

I seek not to needlessly blacken Miss Clairmont’s name in saying such things, nor raise my own character by cheapening hers. Nor would I attempt to gloss over my own failings as a wife—whatever invective she has cast upon me, I richly deserve. Indeed I cannot recall a single moment of the last months of my husband’s life without a feeling of revulsion. All I could think of that last terrible summer was how to get my son away from that barren and accursed place, and when I returned to Shelley’s papers to prepare my edition of his work, it shook me to my very soul. After so long an interval to read my love’s words again—it was as if I was compelled to taste every last drop of a fathomless well of bitter waters—to know the anguish he was in and to be forced to acknowledge that I myself had occasioned that pain by my rages, my coldness, my ceaseless demands. That, no doubt, is the story Miss Clairmont tells, but it is not the only truth of that terrible time. For no outsider, however closely placed, can know the real state of affairs between two people bound together in so near a tie. You are young, Mr Maddox, and are not yet prey to the past. I hope you are never compelled to discover that love—love given and received—can be the greatest agony, as well as the most terrible joy. Despite all we endured together—despite the loss, one by one, of three sweet children—Shelley remained, to the last, true only to me.

It is all too often the fate of men of genius to run too far ahead of their own times, and Shelley was no exception. His ethereal soul was not suited to this rude cold world. If his head ever erred, his heart did not. I can fearlessly avow that his character would stand in finer and brighter light than that of any of his contemporaries. That is why I have striven so hard and so long to protect him, and to prevent the publication of any history of his life that I myself know to be false, and would succeed only in tainting his remembrance. Whatever you have read—whether penned by that mischief-maker Thomas Medwin, or by
any other hand—
no account has ever been given at all approaching reality in its details, as regards either himself or those of us who shared his life. I wished once to write such an account myself, but my father-in-law threatened to withdraw even that meagre allowance he condescended to make me, should such a volume ever appear. And now he is dead I am too old, and too ill, to take up my pen. All those years with Shelley, my idea of heaven was a life without Miss Clairmont—she haunted me then in the flesh, and she haunts me now, in absence, like a punishment divinely ordained for some dreadful sin I have committed all unknowing, and for which, even now, I am still atoning. For the one fear that darkens my last days is that the task which is now beyond my strength will be assumed, when I am gone, by her—she who will claim
she
knew him best, she who will usurp, in the eyes of the world, the position that
I
alone held in his heart. And so I beg you, with the humility of a widow, and the desperation of a woman who knows her days will be not long, to exercise with her whatever influence you may have. There will be others, no doubt, in the years to come, less intelligent and more unscrupulous than you, who will endeavour to obtain those papers she hoards for their own ends. By then, what power I still possess will be long consigned to dust. That same dust that already consumes my husband, and all but one of my own sweet babes. Better far that she should allow the dead to sleep in peace—and commit what still remains behind to silence and forgetting.

M.W.S

Charles lowers the pages slowly, and stares out of the ’bus window. They are passing along Oxford Street, and a small crowd has gathered around a man with a dancing bear on a chain. The animal has a spiked collar about its neck, and two small girls are making it lift its feet by poking it in turns with pointed sticks as a gnarled old man plays a barrel-organ, and a boy with no shoes collects ha’pennies in a cap. As the ’bus draws level there is a moment when Charles stares directly into the animal’s hollow and lifeless eyes. And then they jolt forwards and Charles turns away, uncomfortably aware that some might say his own position is not so very different. Propelled first this way and then that, believing one woman, then the other, and convinced now that neither of them can be trusted.

He has not even met Mary Shelley, and yet he knows she is lying. For there is one fact he possesses, that she cannot possibly suspect. It was not three sweet children the Shelleys lost, but
four.
But of the baby they adopted and abandoned in Naples there is no mention here. Elena, it seems, has long been consigned not just to dust, but to oblivion, and will find no place in any version of the poet’s life that either his wife or daughter-in-law will permit to appear. But if Charles questions Mary Shelley’s veracity, he does not for a moment question her intelligence. Claire may have talked in the language of chess, but this woman is a strategist worthy of the game. Hers is so polished, so adroit a performance he suspects it has been played many times before, and not least with all those would-be biographers who have been so zealous over the years for the naked and unforgiving truth. All those other men whose intelligence has no doubt been flattered, and honour praised. For is not chess a game, in the end, of sacrifice? Of knowing how much to forfeit for a greater end? In divulging her son’s inept deception, Mary Shelley has told Charles only what he suspected long before; it was a pawn she surrendered, nothing more. There must be a far more important piece in play here, if he could but discover it.

Charles sits back, thinking about deceit. He was once, as a little boy, an avid collector, not just of objects but of words—odd derivations, curious coinages, collective nouns. Names for groups of animals fascinated him especially, and he was always entranced to add a new one to the list in his little notebook. The more bizarre they were, the more he coveted them, whether ostentations of peacocks, murmurations of starlings, or murders (prophetic, this one) of crows. But one such name he could not fathom. He remembers, now, going one morning to his father in his study and asking why it should be a ‘deceit’ of lapwings? What had such pretty birds done to be so condemned? His father had taken off his spectacles off with a sigh, and turned laboriously to the small boy tugging at his coat. It is an erroneous etymology, he explained, sternly instructive. The word was not originally
deceit—
it had become corrupted, over the centuries, from
desert.
But why, Charles persisted, excited to have claimed so much of his father’s attention, why
that
name? Because parent lapwings will abandon their nest to lead predators astray—protecting their young in the very act of appearing to forsake them. And is that not, thinks Charles now, exactly the ‘deceit’ Mary Shelley has just committed? Confronted by a potential enemy, she diverges in the opposite direction—away from whatever secret she is fiercely safeguarding, and into the impenetrable thickets of her past relationship with Claire. Only Charles has a hunch it is not her young Mary is protecting—not this time. Because why else would she insist that Charles reply through her maid? Whatever it is she is concealing now, it does not concern her son—indeed Percy must be completely ignorant of it, because otherwise there would have been no need for such a ploy. There is nothing in this letter, at least on the face of it, that necessitates that Charles reply at all, and yet she was so concerned that any response should be placed into her own hands alone that she sent the maid running after him to say so. Charles looks at the pages again. There is something here—something planted in plain sight like a snare in the grass. Something that if he knew her secret he might feel obliged to contradict, or contend. Like Claire, this woman fears what Charles might know; the question now is whether it is the same secret that both women share. Is there, in fact, some collusion of concealment between these two step-sisters? Could there be a pact of silence that endures even now, despite their bitter enmity, and all their years of dark distrust?

As the ’bus bumps over the cobblestones towards Regent Street, Charles turns again to the letter, and reads it once more. Slowly, sentence by sentence, subjecting every phrase to a casuistical scrutiny. And it’s then, of course, that he notices it. Something that exposes a failing far closer to home than the secrets of the tangled Shelley past. For there, on the first page, Mary talks of his uncle’s records as
lost.
Charles hadn’t spotted it the first time, but now the word howls at him. How could this woman possibly know the papers are missing? Charles has been scrupulous never to say so—not to the Shelleys, and not to Claire. No, thinks Charles, his jaw setting in a grim line, he knows exactly how Mary Shelley came by this knowledge, and by the time he gets to Buckingham Street his mind is spilling with a blistering rage.

“
Billy,
” he bellows, crashing the door open so hard it shudders on its hinges. “Get your sorry arse up here
at once.
”

There is silence for a moment, then the boy appears slowly round the corner of the kitchen stairs.

“Mr Charles?”

But Charles already has him by the throat and against the wall.

“How dare you, you treacherous little shit—how much did they pay you? A few shillings? After we took you in and gave you a job—”

“Whatcher talking about?” stammers Billy, his face purple, “I ain’t done nuffin’—”

“Don’t
lie
to me,” yells Charles, ramming him back hard, “I know what you did—you told them, didn’t you, about the pages missing from that book—it was you who threw it on the fire—they paid you to destroy it—they paid you to have it burned—”

“What the ’ell would I know about some bloody book? I can’t even bloody
read—
”

“You were
there—
that day I deciphered the words—you’d have known what it looked like—”

“I don’t know what yer bloody talkin’ about,” wails the boy, “Yer
’urtin’
me!”

But as Charles’ tightens his grip he feels a hand now on his own shoulder, shaking him, trying to pull him away.

“It werenae the boy, Mr Charles. It werenae Billy.”

It’s Stornaway, his eyes watery in his withered face.

“What the hell are you talking about, Abel?”

“It werenae the boy, Mr Charles, it were
me.
I’m right sorry for it. All I can say is I didnae know.”

Charles reluctantly loosens his hold and the boy squirms away and out of arm’s reach. There’s a livid red mark on his neck, and he’s breathing with difficulty.

“See
—told yer—
yer always accusin’ me and it ain’t never my fault—like the other day—”

“I suggest you
shut up,
Billy,” says Charles quietly, still staring at the old man. “And I suggest
you,
Abel, tell me the truth.”

“It were one of those days ye were away, Mr Charles. That gentleman called again—”

“Sir Percy Shelley?”

The old man swallows, then nods. “The one as left the card. He came ’ere lookin’ for ’ee and I said as ye were away. And then he said had ye had any luck wi’ findin’ the records and I—well—”

“Yes?”

Abel swallows again. “I told him what we found. That the pages were missin’. I’m sorry. I though as ’e was yer client, ye wouldnae mind. I thought”—he shakes his head sadly—“as I might be helpin’.”

Charles stares at him, shamed now, and remembering that he had told Abel nothing of his suspicions of the Shelleys—given him no instructions as to silence, and therefore can hardly blame him now. He takes a shaky breath—and a step in the old man’s direction. “What exactly did you tell him, Abel?”

“Just that the pages in the ’16 file had been taken out a long time back. That we’d looked for ’em but couldnae find ’em anywhere.”

“Nothing about the words I uncovered?”