A Man of Genius

by Janet Todd

  How on earth had Madame Renée borne it? After all her imaginative living, her absurd lying, had Caroline found some love in this unprepossessing Frenchwoman who had cared for her in her last disintegrating days, so wanted with her at least to tell the truth? As a result, did Ann feel a glimmer of affection for Caroline? She interrogated herself, then felt relieved that she did not.

  But she was thankful to Madame Renée that she hadn’t tried earlier to find the absent daughter, for the caring must have been arduous, however much help they had. Presumably the income Caroline had always received – Ann had believed it a legacy from Gilbert – had continued.

  But possibly, until close to the end, Madame Renée was not apprised of any daughter.

  Perhaps after subsiding into partial truth Caroline had reverted to being a maiden childless lady, destroying at once both unreal father and real daughter.

  But then she’d recollected, and Madame Renée had done the rest.

  Interesting to her that, with no further proof, she’d so quickly accepted the Frenchwoman’s remark. Had she suspected something earlier? Underneath layers of acceptance, of exasperation at all this reverencing and adoring, yearning and God knew what other emotions, surely she had wondered about this man who spoke only through Caroline? No tangible thing of him remained. She was never shown a letter written by him and of course the miniature, the prized miniature – she blushed for her gullibility – had never been clearly seen. How strange her mother had not simply found an image for her mantelpiece, even an unflattering one, and called it Gilbert. Unattached miniature portraits were easily bought – why did she not rest desire in any man of halfway decent, and clear, features?

  Perhaps invention needed to swing free. Gilbert lived in words, and not just any words – in those serialised romantic novels and stories young Ann so soon rejected from the Lady’s Magazine and which Caroline declared she never read. He was an old-fashioned construction, a hybrid, a woman’s imagining of a respectful gentleman who never was or possibly could be. Then her creation had soared through her ordinary life and tinged it with a romance, an impossible love without ending.

  It had no need, had no place, for anyone else, certainly not for a daughter. The protagonist was always young and would never need a great girl hanging on her girdle. By my soul, this Gilbert had said, I can neither eat, drink nor sleep for I can love no other woman but you.

  31

  She would not lacerate herself by seeking out Madame Renée and asking more questions. She would not stay to bury her mother. She had abandoned one dead body: she could leave another. If Caroline had left any money she would not want it, though Madame Renée might have feared she would. It was right that it go to the person who’d cared for her.

  Aksel Stamer had put a substantial amount in the pouch and had apparently paid the lodgings ahead of time. He’d assumed she might have to stay a while in Paris for her dying mother, then a week or so to ensure her papers were in order and her travel plans fixed. With this money she could make some amends to Madame Renée.

  She called the young maid again and asked for writing paper and a packet. She then took one of the high notes and placed it in the packet, accompanied with a note. She avoided a temptation to suggest a headstone marked ‘Caroline and Gilbert, imaginary lovers’ but simply informed Madame Renée that she would like her mother’s remains interred in Mont-Louis outside the Paris wall.

  The next day she had the young maid – her name was Marie, she’d made a point of learning it – move her belongings into the smaller room. She began preparing for departure in the way Aksel Stamer had instructed her.

  In the evening, still feeling weak, she walked with hesitant steps through Paris. The autumn air had now a definite chill. Had they observed her closely, people might have judged her a little tipsy. The clothes bought when she and Aksel Stamer first came to Paris fitted ill, she’d become all angles and bones.

  She should have used her waiting time to visit the Louvre, to see the ransacked treasures of Europe not all returned since Napoleon’s fall, but she lacked the energy. Instead she sat in the Luxembourg Gardens watching clouds. Had Aksel Stamer really left the city? Would he perhaps come by and find her sitting there?

  He had gone just when she most needed his stern presence. Her fever had left her but she was still in the glass jar. Who else could break it open and let her out?

  As hard as she tried not to think of them, she couldn’t erase Caroline and Gilbert. She shook her head, focused on a yellowing tree and shuffled her feet on the ground to shift the images.

  But they wouldn’t go. Her mind fixed randomly on items – the thin sliced ham in Vauxhall Gardens. Where had that come from? Had Caroline read of it or had she visited with someone else? Was she there to pick up passing trade? The thought evaporated, as too far-fetched. Caroline, so fastidious about herself, was never a whore. And yet no identity was certain now. Not only the sliced ham but the fine wine, the special shells. What of them? With whom did she eat whitebait? Surely not alone. The Royal Hospital at Greenwich had been too grand for Gilbert’s taste, said Caroline, too royal.

  It was and always had been only Caroline’s voice. Did she invent the words as well as read them or hear them from another man given Gilbert’s name because of some unspeakable betrayal?

  It was all flooding back to her, creeping over the edge of her glass jar. The gold, silver and crystal pendant from Cox’s, the silver swan. Had any item ever been touched? Did any exist? The pendant had not been in the box of trinkets and she had never seen it. But in her mind the images of a silver swan, a shell and sliced ham went round and round dragging their names behind them.

  She began to wonder about everything. What of her own memories? Was everything she remembered real? That amazing irruption into her dull childhood: the visit to Mrs Wright’s waxworks? That must have happened for the humiliation remained intense – humiliation was always real. They’d laughed at her for thinking the waxwork seated on a settee a live person. She remembered, too, the slaps and boxes on the ear from Caroline, the reproach of stupidity when she failed to shine at music after a few lessons, her idiocy, her ugliness when no one dressed her limp hair, her hanging lip when she’d had a cold, her simple bodily presence as she grew – awkwardly – into a woman. Yes, all of that was real enough.

  Already as a child she’d noticed some discrepancies in the story her mother told. To meet his death, in one account her father had been translated into a soldier. When she’d doubted it, she’d been slapped for insolence again – she remembered the feel of that though Caroline’s blows were never hard unless she was in a passion.

  ‘Maybe he simply choked to death on a small cake with his coffee,’ she’d said. Another slap followed. A feeble one but yet, as others followed, in the end she cried. Then they stopped.

  Ann had meant the question sincerely, for she had herself nearly choked on scalding milk and dry bread one morning.

  But other memories began to totter. Thoughts and words and images were sliding and slipping, growing nasty and self-mocking, as she sat on the bench apparently doing nothing, a youngish woman approaching middle age alone. With tears running down her cheeks.

  She took out her handkerchief and wiped her face. She must pull herself together and at least control her demeanour. No wonder people, on seeing her, had quickly looked away: a mad foreign person in the park in the thin evening sunlight. It was not done.

  So why stay here? Surely it would be best to go home. The papers would be in order. They had only to be picked up. That was it. It was time to go home.

  But where was home? London, she supposed. But not Holborn or St Paul’s Churchyard or Paternoster-Row. Maybe Sarah’s little house in Somers Town where she could not stay, but which would take her in for a dinner as families do, a dish of tea, some chat between childish interruptions and maternal fussing. It was not and would not be her home, but it was like a home.

  For once she would travel alone. It could not be difficult. She h
ad her instructions and she’d made so many of the arrangements when she’d journeyed with Robert, at least the sensible ones, for he’d always taken expensive passage and argued ideas not fares with people only interested in fleecing them. She could get to London without any more drama.

  She would not be quite alone, however. The shade of Aksel Stamer, that kind, stony-faced man, stayed with her. She knew she was letting him inhabit places where he’d no secure business to be. But she was still weak from illness, that had to be some excuse.

  Perhaps the suspicion, hope rather, would in the end be baseless. But for now she was aware she was replacing Gilbert with Aksel Stamer. But he was acts and gestures, hardly words at all.

  She let him circle inside her head. What was he and what was he about? Why had he thought a Paris swan like a clockwork bird? Had he seen Caroline’s silver swan at Cox’s?

  He seemed to have enough money to commandeer service, send servants to get passes and ease their journey when needed: could his money have been the source of Caroline’s income all those years?

  Why, then, had he lost touch? Why not come to see them long before now?

  And why had he left so abruptly after travelling so far?

  When faced with seeing Caroline towards her end, could he have lost courage, fearing to assume the care of yet another burdensome woman? After all, he’d been forced to drag one across Europe. He could simply have had enough of women hanging on him and want the freedom of the man alone.

  His going could be as significant as his coming all the way to Paris, all the way to the very house.

  Had she herself been dismissed? Was she supposed not to see him again? She feared that might have been his meaning. Perhaps he was glad to be rid of her.

  But why had he bothered with her in the first place? How had he found her in Venice?

  Of course, of course. He’d been at Palazzo Grimani at the poste restante. She knew that by now. He’d stood close to her and could have heard what she and the clerk said. She always called herself Signora James, but on this occasion to receive her letter she’d clearly given her name as Miss Ann St Clair. That was why he knew her.

  After that he’d put himself where she was. In Padua where he didn’t seem the usual tourist.

  That he was Stamer not St Clair was a problem, but at least an initial was shared, and she knew he passed under more than one name, like Robert James. He’d begun as Jakobsen.

  She didn’t look like him, but not quite unalike, especially now they were both burnt by the sun. He had remarked it, she remembered. She had flat English features, that compression of eyes, nose and mouth; Aksel Stamer had something of the look – though in truth not much. But then children did not always resemble parents. Except that she had Caroline’s hands . . .

  And the age? He would have to have been so young when . . . she could not quite say it. He was older than she was but not by enough. He would have been twenty years younger than Caroline. It was too much for a man. But it was not impossible. Make his age greater, Caroline’s less.

  She was growing weary of her thoughts. Her mad circling thoughts. She berated herself.

  She got up, still a little unsteady, then walked slowly back to the inn, wondering as she went along whether she had become infected with her own plots after all. Her girls found noble fathers in every decent older man they met, while harbouring fears or strange desires for villains along the way. Fathers revealed themselves in words, in letters found in old carved chests deep below ground.

  But these were novel tales and the girls were seventeen. She was twice their age. And the letter, the significant letter, had said nothing. Was she finding a father in anyone a little kind? Was it really all an effort to eliminate that very real man in her life, that Robert James?

  Aksel Stamer had not encouraged any such imagining. He had given no hints as to why he was with her. Once or twice, especially towards the end of their journey, she thought she’d seen a furtive smile directed to her when she was not looking at him, but it might have been a trick of the light. These moments had been rare. Nothing like the resplendent gaze of Gilbert on his Caroline. And so little speech. Yet so kind.

  She must go back to England. Earn a living. Aksel Stamer’s gift, though generous, would be soon spent. She would return to the life that in retrospect did not seem so very dull.

  Aksel Stamer had arranged so much for her it was hard to start again making her own decisions. But she must decide whether to take the route to the coast through Beauvais or Amiens. When she’d passed that way before with Robert, she’d wanted to see the fruit trees, the cornfields, the vineyards, the buildings, the people. But now she’d surfeited on travelling and looking. She had no appetite for touring abbeys and palaces.

  London

  32

  London was what it had always been, big, dirty, bustling and fretful.

  She went to a cheapish inn she knew in Judd Street and took a room for a few days while she decided where to seek more permanent lodgings. Her furniture was still in store in Holborn and she would need to bring it out when she settled. For she must live and work, she supposed, though nothing was clear.

  One Caroline was dead but the other one was very much alive. While his daughter-in-law was wandering scandalously round the Continent, old mad George III had died and his disreputable son become George IV. So had not Caroline been Queen Consort these many months? To the new King’s horror she began a noisy progress towards his country.

  The ministers of the Crown rushed to France to drive her away. They offered money, bribes, anything to keep her out. But she was undeterred. She was Queen of England if her husband was King.

  The people were overjoyed. As ever, they loved the royal shenanigans. Caroline was far more entertaining than her fat spouse who was most of the time too drunk or embarrassed to show himself to his subjects. They wanted her in London: they wanted to be enrolled in the Order of St Caroline with Count Pergami and the rest of her flamboyant entourage.

  So back she’d come with the summer, as large as life and far more popular than she deserved. She stood for everything that everyone desired, against all they hated – and people had much to hate in these oppressive postwar years.

  She’d demanded to stay in the old Queen’s palace but ended in South Audley Street instead; shop windows exhibited effigies of her person in royal robes with crown and sceptre. She mortified the government as they tried and failed to prove her any worse than her outrageous spouse.

  How young Beatrice must be enjoying all this, Ann thought as she heard the news. Venice seemed so very far away; yet she could picture her pretty pupil receiving foreign gazettes through Giancarlo Scrittori, poring over them with much glee and little improvement to her ‘pure’ English. The Contessa would gently chide her, while her eye as ever would be fixed on her dreadful darling son. It could not have been easy for a girl to grow up with such a brother. Some entertainment was deserved.

  Ann was desperate to see Sarah, yet she didn’t go to her at once. A cleft would have opened up through all these agitated months and she was afraid she couldn’t account for herself, afraid perhaps of her cousin’s pity if she heard the half of it.

  Finally she did call at the little house in Somers Town. Sarah was away from home with the two older children. The nursery maid who’d been there when Ann had left was now looking after the younger ones. She was helped by a rather sulky girl, who stood close behind her as she opened the door. Unless Sarah had a baby with her, at least there appeared to be no new infants. Something to be relieved about.

  They were gone to the menagerie at Exeter Exchange, said the maid. It was William’s birthday and it was a treat for him. They’d left the little ones at home. She would tell her mistress that the lady had called.

  Ann was not recognised. Was she so changed?

  ‘No, please say nothing. I will call again very soon.’

  ‘But, Ma’am, I must say someone has visited.’

  Ann could see the maid had an inklin
g she knew her voice. It might be the strange abrupt cousin from so long ago, but she was not sure: the clothes, the hair, the figure were all wrong, only the way she talked had something familiar about it.

  ‘I will be here again very soon,’ Ann repeated. With that she left. The maid stared after her.

  When she returned a couple of days later she was shown in by the same maid whose name she really should have known. Jennie, it seemed. With a pang she remembered Madame Renée.

  Clearly the young woman had obeyed her instructions, for Sarah was amazed to see her cousin. So expressive was her wide white countenance that she couldn’t hide the dismay with which she contemplated the gaunt face and thin figure before her. But she uttered nothing except excited words of welcome.

  ‘Come in, come in, sit, eat, drink, be warm and comfortable with us. Tell us everything. Why did you not write more of yourself?’

  Ann should have been full of travellers’ tales, her tales, but she was still in the glass jar. She said almost nothing.

  She’d brought no exotic presents – it must seem odd to go so far and come back with so little for those who stayed behind. She’d only a silver box on which two stags touched mouths in a kind of kiss. She handed it to Sarah with no explanation. Her cousin exclaimed as one must do with gifts, but asked no questions.

  When silence followed the initial greetings, Sarah chatted on. She told her cousin little things about the children, how one twin was much quicker than the other but both were adorable, about Charles being promoted for his careful recording work at the India Office, about some little changes they were making about the house, even about the day out at Exeter Exchange they’d just taken for William’s birthday, the excitement and wonder of Charlotte at the bear and lion and tiger as well as a midget on stilts. With the tact for which Ann was so grateful, she never in all the time said, And where is Robert?