A Man of Genius (27 page)

35

C
ould Charles be telling the truth? Why on earth would he lie? Caroline ‘in service'? Surely she couldn't have been a governess or a companion – and, if not those, then what? How could this news be assimilated?

Her mother had seemed the epitome of a lady, living to be served. And she
had
been served. They were never rich but money came from somewhere to keep them in reasonable comfort, with Martha as housekeeper doubling as nursemaid, a succession of cooks and scullery maids. Caroline had spent her time enjoying an elegant hypochondria, reading and occasionally sketching, sometimes gossiping. And of course she must have worked on her fantasy, her creation of Gilbert.

None of this moderately expensive and idle life fitted easily with the history of a servant, even a generously superannuated one.

From where had she obtained the details with which she'd peppered her talk, the learning, the cataloguing, the sights?

That Gilbert the lover was formed from books and a fertile woman's mind Ann was becoming sure, but his qualifications as a connoisseur and scholar seemed harder to create.

But were they really?

She herself had had so little schooling, some lessons in languages and music, then much reading from the trash of circulating libraries, some few superior lectures in Fen Ditton. Yet she could converse with those who'd read and knew much more. The appearance of learning
was not difficult to gain. A few volumes of
Elegant Extracts
, some serious journals, even the better articles in the
Lady's Magazine
, and a good memory would have given Caroline all she needed to impress a child. Her memory was certainly good. There were lapses and gaps – now, looking back, Ann saw more discrepancies – yet the outlines hadn't wavered. Quotations recurred, and the circumstances of their saying.

She couldn't yet laugh, but perhaps, just perhaps, she could smile at such fabrication, just for her – well, for her and the author.

She tried not to indulge the question, but she just had to ask: where on earth would a cosmopolitan Dane of Aksel Stamer's sort have met such a woman – if he had? Would this man have visited and been entertained in a country house in a distant county of England? Or was he too a ‘servant'?

That was unlikely. He of all people lacked the demeanour.

The scholarship could have been Aksel Stamer's, she realised with a start. He knew languages, he knew the natural and the cultured world. But yet, yet . . . it was so very difficult to see the two together.

For sure he'd not been the great lover.

The name, the poetic name St Clair, was not his. But Caroline had never made it clear that this was Gilbert's either, or that she, Ann, had a right to a father's name – though Caroline had passed as widow. When she'd become a reader, then a writer of gothic tales, Ann began to suspect the name was not hers by right of birth and family, but simply chosen by her mother for its euphony. Chosen for them both. And since she'd not, at least in Ann's lifetime, married anyone else, there'd been no need to own up to this little fabrication.

Was it possible that Caroline had helped herself to a romantic-sounding gentry name beyond her claim?

Whatever Caroline had been – or wherever she'd worked – she could have taken a few days to go up to London, perhaps many days for it was a long, expensive journey from Shropshire. And there she might have met . . . But again, the ages stuck in Ann's throat. What a strange act for a respectable middle-aged woman, a daughter of the Church.

But perhaps Caroline had not been respectable, then or before – or later. Odd, considering the church upbringing. Ann gave credence to the rector – no, more likely curate – in Herefordshire, for Sarah had confirmed the clerical detail. Such background was suitably modest and explained some of the education she must have had – and her abandonment when she disgraced herself. Caroline had hinted at grand relatives in the north, but that could be discounted – they probably came with the name she chose.

There'd been a large family of sisters. Sarah mentioned them. That might explain why Caroline was fitted for some kind of upper service should she fail to marry. With so many daughters and little income, there could have been no dowry as incentive to any man. So as a girl she might have gone into the household of someone known to her family nearby, even in another county. It was possible. Then, after years of respectability, this virgin had in London – or somewhere far from Shropshire – jumped at the chance of being neither respectable nor a virgin, jettisoning her character in a single, maybe more than that, act of love.

The yearning struck Ann forcibly. Gilbert's speeches, though born of someone else's imagination, had been chosen, rearranged and memorised. Caroline had wanted them spoken by a man and to be true. Aksel Stamer, though lanky now and weatherbeaten, would not have been unhandsome.

And, yet, still she could not combine the two. Again she asked: was Caroline younger than she'd thought, was Aksel Stamer older?

Whoever it was, with whomever she'd done the deed – in a Shropshire mansion, a parsonage in Hereford or a London inn – she would, once impregnated, have lost her place and what could she do then? For a moment Ann toyed once more with the idea of Caroline going down the ranks and roaming the streets in the common way of fallen girls. But it didn't fit. Barring this act, Caroline had lived in imagination, not in the world. And always there was the question: from where had that allowance come? She could have offered nothing that could command such income. Evidently it was not from her own family.

And now she came to view herself in this new context.

If Caroline in service and not young had disgraced herself, she would surely have been urged to get rid of her shame by putting the child in a baby farm where it would most likely die and spare the expense of any further upkeep.

So why did she, Ann, exist?

The question raised the curious possibility that Caroline had chosen to keep the baby. Keep it instead of sending it to probable death in a London backstreet, howling its way to heaven. But not heaven – for she was sure Caroline had arranged no christening.

She had kept the child, she had kept Ann. Caroline had been no mother except in this instance. But this one instance was large. She had given her child life and then preserved it.

36

B
elow her window Ann heard London's muted bustle: hawkers, carriers and carriages on the cobbles. The world continued on as ever, ignoring her concerns.

She'd been remiss. But not for want of thinking. She wouldn't try to make contact with Robert's parents. She had no idea whether they were alive or dead or whether they or someone else had been the source of his modest funds in London. If indeed she'd been suspected in Venice – and Aksel Stamer's expression as he read a newssheet in those early days through Italy had made her imagine it might be the case – then the suspicion would have travelled across Europe into County Cork with report of an Irishman's death.

Best leave well alone.

She must however seek out his friends, those who'd admired him and fostered his self-regard. Since she returned she'd been dodging places where they might be, reversing her haunting of streets and taverns in which, so many years before, she'd hoped Robert James would be found. She'd no wish to talk and explain, but she owed a duty to these men who'd loved him less destructively than she had done.

His friends continued mostly in London but they had, as a group, scattered without their leader. This much she quickly discovered. Frightened away by baying crowds of Princess Caroline's supporters, who suspected all Italians of being informants paid by the Crown to discredit their heroine, Signor Orlando had fled the city; he'd been heading towards a despised but still alluring Venice while she'd been travelling her erratic route away. John Taylor, who'd let the Italian
live with him for many months in his lodgings near St Sepulchre, had moved out and on. Now he stayed in a new-built house near Islington Green. Frederick Curran, always the most elusive of the friends despite his bulk, was no longer to be found at Gray's Inn or in the Queen's Arms or any of his usual haunts. He had, it was whispered, become involved in something dangerous connected with Ireland. Perhaps he'd written an unwelcome truth or used his mighty arm to smash the wrong head. She would find him along with the other Irishmen who'd known Robert. Then she would forget them all. Just like that.

But first she should speak to Richard Perry.

She thought of him wryly as the Beloved Disciple but he was more. She knew that now. He was too modest about his own abilities. She'd read an article he'd written in a review for Mr Hughes, making a mass of complex scientific material available to those with little time and less perseverance. But in Robert's shadow he'd counted himself of slight worth.

He would have the biggest shock.

When she met him by arrangement she could see that already he imagined what might have happened. He was visibly shaken at the outset of the meeting. And yet he clung to the hope that perhaps she alone had become homesick and tired of foreign parts, leaving Robert to write his glorious words where the sun always shone.

This was possible for he'd never thought Ann quite admired him as much as was his due.

Faced with this simple admiration, the improbable hope, she found it difficult to look as grave as she should. She'd dreaded seeing these men; yet now she almost relished the idea of telling them of Robert's death. After all, he'd not written to them as far as she knew – he couldn't have valued them so very much.

They sat together taking tea by St Paul's Churchyard near where she'd first met Robert James at Mr Hughes's dinner. She was acutely aware of the connection.

‘Poor, poor Robert,' he said.

He questioned her for a while. She could see he wasn't satisfied with the answers or was unsure quite what she meant by some. He looked askance at her as she fielded both his grief and his curiosity. She admitted Robert's decline but not the manner of his death.

‘He could not accept the indefinite because in his mind everything became definite. He had such boldness he saw right into mysteries.'

‘He couldn't always convey them to others,' she ventured.

‘He could to those with whom he had affinities.' He waited a moment, then added, ‘Once he did to all the world. A stranger, a foreign bookseller, came to me soon after you and he had left. He asked after him while holding a copy
of Attila
as if it were a precious jewel. You see, he was widely admired even beyond these shores.'

‘Did you think I was in the way?'

‘Yes, we all were at times.'

She neither coloured nor responded. After a pause, she said, ‘It was an unhealthy place. Italy, Venice, all the north Italian towns. It was cheap living there but there was a reason for that.' She smiled. She was being adroit.

Richard Perry was silent, looking fixedly at her.

‘It was a place of agues, plague from the east, and fevers, damp and always harbouring disease, you know, the season of malaria,' she pursued.

Suddenly Richard Perry pushed away the tea things and leaned across the table. He caught her arm. He whispered hoarsely in her ear as if telling a secret, ‘His work, his new work, you must have saved it?'

‘I'm afraid not,' she said. ‘All had to be destroyed. You know in the case of a death from . . .' She trailed off, failing to say the word ‘fever' or hint at fumigation, hoping that silence filled in the rest.

No need to lie. Just make others believe something through not saying too much. It was simple.

When he registered her words Richard Perry looked so aghast she wondered about sugaring them, but the terrible image of those sodden papers was haunting. Her pause made him think her too moved to go on.

One of the younger Irishmen who'd sometimes joined their group now came up to them. She'd forgotten his name. He was told the news and they all three sat together, the men in shocked silence.

There were tears in Richard Perry's eyes. ‘I shall stay up all this night in vigil. If he cannot have a proper funeral here, I will pay him my own individual tribute.'

‘It is such an appalling loss to the world,' said the young Irishman. ‘I too will join you in this.'

She roused herself. ‘Indeed, yes,' she said. ‘But yet his work, even
Attila –
his vision, it was so much more in conception than it could ever have been on paper that perhaps it is as well . . .' She hesitated, wondering why she was hazarding herself again on such slippery ground.

Through his tears Richard Perry directed a sharp look at her. ‘But the very fragments would have declared his genius anew. Those fragments were infinitely precious. Don't you understand that the iridescent words would themselves have pointed to the vision beyond?'

He was using Robert's phrases. She recognised them. This was his immortality. So much better in an admiring mouth than on cold paper. As she thought this, tears almost came to her eyes as well. She held them back and kept silent.

After a pause, she said, ‘Ah yes, but we remember them, do we not?'

The three of them sat a moment longer contemplating in their very different ways what had gone out of the world.

Irrationally she felt she must help these men, whose minds she could scar by hinting at that hanging. That she restrained herself from divulging the details made her feel responsible for what they would go on believing. ‘Truly I don't think he could ever have found adequate words with which to express his enormous understanding of things.'

‘We were dazzled,' said the young man helpfully.

‘Of course,' said Ann. ‘He saw through different, stronger eyes.'

Richard Perry was not appeased. ‘But we needed him,' he almost wailed. ‘He should not have left us.'

‘He wouldn't have wanted to be old,' said Ann. ‘He escaped the degeneration he feared.'

‘He feared nothing,' said Richard Perry. ‘Nothing!'

Another silence followed.

‘He must have loved the art,' remarked the young man, who she rather thought was called Fitz something – Fitzwilliam? He hadn't let himself arrive at such a pitch of grief and disappointment as Richard Perry. ‘Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Giotto, such ability as he would have to describe and appreciate the paradise they made.'

‘Oh, yes,' she said, ‘he loved the paintings.'

Her fingers closed round Robert's Swiss gold watch in her reticule. She had intended it for Frederick Curran, his old Trinity College friend, but it was better given to Richard Perry, the man who'd loved him most.

She produced it now and watched his face change colour. It was as if till this moment he'd not absolutely understood that Robert James was dead. ‘I know he would have wanted you to have this.'

‘Did he say so?'

‘He did not have time. But I know.'

It was enough. She need not do more. Robert's friends weren't much interested in her. They never had been. Why should they be?

Not even Richard Perry, who'd told her of his great horror and salvation through Robert. It was for his friend and saviour he'd spoken, not for her.

Once she'd delivered her messages, provided her comfort and displayed a welcome inadequacy, even common courtesy was hard to muster. ‘You should have dinner with us one day soon,' said Fitzwilliam, who, she saw with some amusement, had inherited Robert's white-lashed boy as servant. Richard Perry remained silent. It was one of those invitations which, when she'd been lonely and yearning for Robert, she'd have taken as so real she'd have been looking out to meet one of them every day, hoping for the promise to be fulfilled. She knew better now.

It was late in the next week when she encountered John Humphries near the Temple in Drew's print shop. She knew he often worked nearby. He no longer saw anything of Richard Perry, he told her, but someone had received her news from this source and relayed it to him. ‘I heard you were back, and alone,' he said.

She was struck again by how quickly Robert's admiring group had broken apart without him.

Like Richard Perry, John Humphries looked almost accusingly at her but she didn't let her countenance alter. She was doing well.

‘Yes, so sad,' she said. ‘But you must have so many memories, so much to hold on to, that he'll live vividly in your mind – as he does in mine.'

He looked surprised. ‘I've known him a long time if that's what you mean.'

‘Well, yes, I suppose I do. He valued his male friends very highly, I think.'

They turned out of the shop and walked down towards the Temple. A thin sleet was starting. She brushed the wet off her face. ‘They were always there for him and some went back to his very childhood, I think.'

‘I was not one of those,' he said. ‘I am not Irish.'

There was almost scorn in his voice. For him, to be Irish was shameful. But he'd made a temporary exception in admiring Robert.

‘No, of course. Mr Curran and his young friends. But I mean only that you have formed over the years, or he has formed, a sort of group supporting and valuing each other – and I admire it,' she added quickly. ‘It's not something that women so easily make.'

‘Oh, women,' he said and waved his hand dismissively, ‘they have no need. They're usually in a huddle with mothers and children, always doing something together, sewing, cooking, raising infants, gossiping. They're always in each other's pockets.'

‘But surely that's quite different. Your group is – ' should she have said ‘was'? – ‘by choice. You are there for what you have in common, not by mere kinship or purpose. Yet your groups are as strong and last as long.'

‘I suppose so,' he said, losing interest. He never liked me, she thought, but I didn't feel his hostility so fiercely in those early days. Then he added, ‘But women intrude as well.'

‘Did I do that?' She forced herself to smile. ‘I never had any intention of getting between him and any of his friends.'

‘Oh, he would never have let that happen, none of us would,' said John Humphries.

She waited. They were both staring unseeingly into a shop window displaying etchings of British naval battles and warships in full sail.

‘He had once a woman, before you, a woman from somewhere in the north, Norway, Sweden, somewhere like that. No, Denmark. She was in London staying with an aunt. They went back to her family together. She was too passionate, so needing of his attention, so demanding of it. She was no good for him. She couldn't understand his genius – as I hope you could.' He looked again at her more searchingly, then turned away.

She'd never heard him say so much when she was present.

‘She couldn't keep him, though he stayed long enough,' he added as an afterthought.

‘So he left her?'

‘Of course. He had to for his own sake. We all advised it.'

‘What happened to her?' she asked as gently as she could, her eyes switched back to the window.

‘Oh, she died. I don't know exactly when. He came back here alone but only after he'd travelled a while for some months, with Richard Perry, I think. He was a man of deep feeling.'

‘How sad. She was very young, I suppose?'

‘Oh yes, very young.'

He touched his hat to her and was about to move away, a little bored she supposed, and annoyed he'd been led to say so much. Then he turned back, and she never knew why. ‘He found her quite repugnant in the end. You managed him better. You are older. I expect you understood more.'

She thought of the muzzling and said nothing. In any case, more
striking images were accosting her brain. Denmark. Denmark. Who went there? It was not in an Englishman's tour of Europe.

She almost pulled at John Humphries's arm, meaning only to touch it lightly. ‘She was Danish, then?'

He looked blank. ‘Who?'

‘The young woman with Robert.'

‘Yes, I believe so, something like that. But possibly half-English. She spoke like a foreign woman. She probably understood little of
his Attila
or anything of his genius. How could she?'

He was moving away, eager to be rid of her and the irksome talk. But she wouldn't let him go.