A Man of Genius (29 page)

For, if it had been Robert James, and Robert through her, that Aksel Stamer had shadowed in Italy, not herself, then there was no reason to continue with the ludicrous suspicion that this man was her father. He'd always been too young for the role but, following the mechanical swan and other small inanities, she'd jumped over incongruities once she'd settled on the idea.

She closed her eyes. She'd lost another parent. She was glad there was no one near to laugh at her.

Knowing this, she tried hard, not at once and completely, to accept what was staring her in the face: that Aksel Stamer might be the older brother of the dead Danish lady.

No more searching, she told herself – again. Let life just happen. For goodness sake, let it just happen.

38

T
he key must be held by his old friends. She still hadn't found Frederick Curran, the man who'd known him the longest. Richard Perry she thought was probably naive when it came to his idol and he'd already given his version of his secret time with Robert tucked away in hiding in Esbjerg, no woman interrupting the cosy intimacy. John Humphries had told her all he'd gleaned, and it had been truly shocking. But still John Taylor knew more than she did. She'd have to brave him again, despite his unfriendly reception.

When she'd known him with Robert he'd been drunk half the time – wine helped him create the blurred effect that heightened the beauty of his English landscapes. It had made him jovial and generous, eager to spend his money on liquor, tobacco and good food and open his lodgings to an Italian stranger. Now he was sober, a lawyer, and a changed man, a family man. She wouldn't go to his house again, for Lydia's presence would prevent her asking difficult questions: she'd make sure her husband remained reticent.

Instead, Ann would go to the law firm of which Lydia had boasted. She wouldn't simply march up the steps and knock with the great brass handle but rather wait outside to waylay him as he came out. Years before she'd done much the same when she'd trailed Robert after a quarrel, as she noted wryly. She'd probably be no more welcome to John Taylor if she accosted him in this way rather than in his drawing room, but at least she could ask her questions directly and at once. If he refused to answer, she could still seek out young Henry Davies. He'd been quiet but always observant. She doubted he'd know more than the others but she had to try every avenue.

She was right about John Taylor. The sober man disliked chance meetings. Unluckily the day she'd chosen was both dismal and obscure, with a gentle snow thickening the fog. She'd have seemed an unwelcome spectre looming from the mist, reminding him of an old, best forgotten time. He proved as unforthcoming in the street as he'd been at home.

‘Look, Miss St Clair' – he reverted to formality in this new art-free, wine-free life – ‘I knew Robert James less than Richard Perry and Fred Curran. He was a great and a good man and I am sorry, sincerely sorry, he is dead.'

He was pulling on his grey gloves while looking down at his white hands; then with his gloved fingers he stroked his clean-shaven chin. Snow was settling on the brim of his black felt hat. He stared at her, then continued, ‘I cannot help you dig up a past he did not see fit to share with you.' He hesitated a moment. A softer expression passed across his face. ‘It is perhaps not fair that the most brilliant mind should go first.' His look hardened again. ‘Good day to you.'

And with that scant courtesy the conversation was over. It was snowing more heavily now and he was quickly subsumed into the white fog.

She wouldn't see him again. The disintegrating of Robert's circle which his defection stressed was a sad blow. She'd intended to go on to Henry Davies, but she wasn't so sure she could take more rebuffs with equanimity, even to satisfy such burning curiosity.

Yet a few days later she did pursue him. She discovered him in the Castle and Falcon, one of the taverns where Robert and his circle used to meet. When she spied him and even more when she accosted him – she'd been directed to a dark corner of the room or she wouldn't have found him – she understood something of John Taylor's transformation. It was perhaps not all due to Lydia and her need for marriage and money. For Henry Davies was so far gone into drink and drugs that there was no getting sense from him. But, when she told him her news, he understood at last. Then he wept like a baby.

Only sleep could console him. She left him with his head on the
bare wooden table beside an untouched plate of parsnips and salt cod, his tears soaking into some spilt froth and ale.

She was disheartened. She would try to discover Frederick Curran and then move down other paths.

For Curran, an Irish printer's boy who worked for Mr Hughes proved useful. When they were all together she'd never much wondered what the men round Robert, including big Frederick Curran, lived on in London – who except John Taylor picked up the bills in the taverns when there was a rushed if lurching exit for the door as the candles were snuffed out? Curran was said to be writing something on political economy that no one knew about, but he couldn't have been earning a living in this way. He'd always been the most eager to argue politics, the least impressed when his friend Robert soared upwards out of the grubby world. Now she learned he'd been receiving income from an Irish bank, Roche's in County Cork. It had recently failed.

She smiled, remembering how he castigated Venice for caring only about money. Perhaps Robert's allowance had come from the same source.

The collapse had hit Frederick Curran hard. He'd gone back to Dublin, then Cork, where it was reported he'd fallen foul of the government through inflammatory talk of masters and greedy bankers feeding off victims and workers. Some said he'd used his bulk against a smaller functionary, but accounts were vague and may have been based on the look of him. Now his whereabouts were unknown, said the printer's boy with a wink.

Once she'd taunted Fred Curran when he spoke of Ireland: that he was homesick for it. He had said seriously, ‘I and Robert both.'

So she'd tried all the main friends in London and no one, not even Richard Perry, had pursued her further to find out about Robert's final days. Didn't they care? Robert hadn't wasted thoughts on them; perhaps in the end, despite their admiration, almost adulation, they'd waste no more of their puny ones on him.

Aksel, Aksel. She once called his Christian name out loud in her room, then chuckled to herself. It was as well he'd not come back: she might have addressed him as ‘Father' and flown to his arms.

Yet there was a haunting. No kin perhaps, but something. So much remained obscure.

Why had he taken such pains to flee Venice with her? He warned her she was in extreme peril. He was right of course, Robert's very blood on her clothes.

But she had read no news-sheet declaring her a wanted person, an outlaw from justice. Aksel had kept to himself the one she'd seen. To spare her feelings, of course. But still.

Aksel Stamer: the man who inhabited the mystery at the centre of both her plots and who, in spite of all she could do to disentangle the two from each other and him from them, stayed resolutely in place, the only living being among so many ghosts.

He had something to do with Robert James and a beloved woman – that was becoming clear. And if not the lost father, the substitute Gilbert, something to do with her and her murky origins? Perhaps.

She was sure that Sarah and Charles knew more than they'd told her, even after Charles's startling revelation.

But how to ask them the questions that might just elicit the desired answers, the true, the uncomfortable answers? They were so guarded, so fearful of hurting a person they both saw as a lone, defenceless woman.

Besides, there were by now so many characters in the plots it was difficult to put the right questions without revealing her own thoughts – and she'd been wrong so often that these were the last ones she could trust, or wished to communicate.

She'd tried Moore & Stratton in the Strand but they were no help at all. They'd been the agents for some families in the west of England, in Shropshire and Herefordshire, but the old partner who'd handled these accounts originally was long dead; the money to be
paid out now came through Coutts Bank and was sent to them for forwarding. Coutts were as tight as closed oysters with information.

She did, however, manage to track down the young man, Mr William Holt, who'd sent the letter enclosing the note from Madame Renée. He admitted to relaying it from a client in Paris. He ventured the information that an allowance was still paid to this elderly English lady from a small and he feared diminishing Trust through Coutts. He would say no more; he'd felt important divulging news to this pleasantly eager lady, but there would be the devil to pay if one of the senior partners found out. So he bid her good day – without waiting for her to decide whether or not to inform him that the recipient of this declining Trust was now a French lady of stern face but tender heart.

There was really no alternative to her cousins. She would try Charles first. But he was rarely at the Phoenix Street house when she called, and they were never alone. Perhaps he ensured that this was the case. He must have thought he'd done her a favour and had by that act fulfilled what he considered his duty.

It was while turning off Gray's Inn Road to head towards Somers Town with a bag of hothouse apricots for Sarah's children that a ghastly thought struck her. She almost dropped her package, seeing in the instant the ripe fruit smash and smear the ground, trip passersby . . . But she held on.

The thought was that nobody was telling her the truth and that Sarah was not her cousin.

They didn't look alike, and the resemblance Sarah had found between her and little Harry and Charlotte was part of the compliment mothers pay to single women to attach them to their children.

Why had Charles spoken to her? Had it been a kind of warning?

She arrived at the door clutching the apricots in a fluster of enquiry, only to find that Sarah's friend Jane Lymington was there with her little boy. She should have deposited her gift and left but decided not to. She knew she failed to justify her presence by
admiring the lad enough or even interacting with him when he lisped his pretty phrases. She'd be forgiven – it would be ascribed to her spinster state by pitying mothers.

She sat in silence as they discussed everything – surely they were not actually talking of the price of eggs?

Finally Mrs Lymington and her little boy left, with a polite but cursory goodbye to Ann. Sarah looked quizzically at her cousin, knowing her usual impatience with social visits.

‘You are beginning to know me too well.'

Sarah waited for her to go on.

‘I suppose,' said Ann, then stopped and began again. ‘I need to ask you a bit more about Gilbert.' She tried to swallow the word – how had it slipped from her mouth? She'd meant to say ‘My father'.

Sarah looked anxious.

Then Ann blurted out, ‘Are you really my cousin?' She held back tears. Somewhere surely there must be flesh and blood that belonged to her.

Sarah laughed with relief. ‘Of course, of course. Whatever put such a notion in your head? What have you been thinking?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps I have a craving to destroy everything in the past before I find it being destroyed for me.'

‘But it never will be, dearest Ann. Come, no morbid thoughts.'

And that was that again. She got no further.

She would give Sarah and Charles time to get used to her prying before trying them once more. She would fatten herself up in the way they approved and declare herself a cheery body who was walking with her two feet on the earth, someone who could take whatever was told to her without flinching. Then they would not need to be so cautious.

She took up with a few acquaintances and went walking with them in the parks. She even contacted her old schoolfriend, Susan Bonnet from Putney, the girl who'd shared her secret novel-reading from the circulating library. But the friendship could not be rekindled. Susan was now a professional married woman with all the usual empty
charm. If Ann scratched her skin and pushed into the flesh, would she reveal underneath the affectation that eager, awkward child? Of course not. As Mrs Jonas Loyn, née Susan Bonnet, she covered her old friend in layers of politeness, of compliment, of social flutter, and a new steely distaste. Ann saw there was no going back to grab at possibilities.

With Mary Davies it was easier. Colleagues, partners in work, carried fewer expectations, and writing was as reliable a topic as the weather over the tea-table or in the print shop. But it remained hard to come close to those who'd stayed quietly in their snug routine while she'd careered over rocky ground in the rickety cart of life. Superiority of ‘experience' impressed no one without it.

As time passed and she delivered to Dean & Munday
The Ladies of Zitelle; or, the Prisons of Venice
, then
Eleanora; or, the Black Tower
(with an interpolated homily on the absolute need for chastity in females whether old or young) and began on
The Mystery of the Dunes; or, the Dying Cavalier
, she amused herself with taking tea out with some of her fellow gothic authors when they came to town – for she'd discovered through Mr Munday that a good number of them were maiden ladies from little rural schools or discontented governesses hoping one day to write so fast they could snub their employers and flick the dust of dependence off their shoes.

‘All right,' said Sarah at last. ‘Charles has said to me that he told you about your mother some time ago. He should not have done so, it was not his place to tell. But he's a good man and he saw your worry. He thought he did it for the best.'

‘Of course he did. It was kind of him. But he knew what he knew from you. So, dear cousin, perhaps you will now tell me more, tell me at last everything you know. My mother is long dead.'

They were in Sarah's drawing room, a tea-table between them. The children were out or in the nursery having lessons, all except the slow twin – Mary? – who was sitting in a corner on a little stool fastened to a tray, trying to fold coloured paper into squares and diamonds. She was very quiet. It was unusual to have a child in the
drawing room rather than the parlour. Ann hoped she was all right but Sarah had said nothing, so her quietness was probably a response to a house of so many other children and their constant noise.

Sarah looked uncomfortable, as Ann expected. She also looked sad.

‘Don't you think, my cousin, there are things better not to know.'

‘I do. But we can't rest till we winkle them out all the same. You must be a very sensible person indeed to be intentionally ignorant. And you know I am not so sane.'