Angelmonster

by Veronica Bennett

  “May I come with you?”

  Turning back, she began to tease out little black curls around her temples. Her face was as smooth and expressionless as a doll’s. “Oh, Mary … you walk so slowly these days!” She tied her bonnet-strings and picked up her gloves. “And now I’ve hurt your feelings!”

  “No, you have not.” I smiled, to show her I was not offended. “Will you talk to me awhile, though, before you go?”

  She sat down on the bed, looking at me carefully. “Are you unhappy?”

  “No,” I assured her. “But it is lonely, waiting in this comfortless place, day after day, for the child to be born.”

  “And of course I always want to talk!” she trilled. “How well you know me!”

  I did know her well. Or perhaps, as the friend and conspirator of her childhood, I knew only Jane. How well would I come to know this bolder, more calculating girl who had rechristened herself Claire?

  “Come, sit down,” she said with her artless air, patting the bed.

  It sagged a little beneath my weight. “The child grows fast,” I said ruefully.

  “It will be a boy,” predicted Claire. “And Harriet will have another girl. You, not she, will be the mother of Shelley’s son.”

  “I would like that,” I told her.

  “It will be so,” said Claire, taking my hand. She looked at me with unexpected affection. “After the child is born, my dear Mary, you shall have a new gown. A beautiful one, more beautiful than the one you ruined by soaking it in water. Do you remember that night? What fun we had!”

  “It seems long ago.”

  “A great deal has happened since. But you and I are still those two merry people, are we not?” She gripped my hand tighter. “We have not grown so old and important that we cannot enjoy ourselves, have we?”

  “No, indeed.”

  Smiling meaningfully, she took my other hand. “And we shall be merry again, Mary, I promise you. Merrier than we have ever been, and wealthier, and admired by all. We have escaped from Papa’s interminable dinner parties! Do you think that means we may never again have any sport with gentlemen, and laugh ourselves sick when they have gone?”

  I withdrew my hands. “I do not understand you.”

  At that moment we heard the door slam downstairs. Shelley, having taken the stairs three at a time, plunged into Claire’s room. He looked sweaty and red-faced; he had been drinking or running, or both.

  “I have a son!” he declared triumphantly. “Harriet’s child is a boy, born two hours ago!” He was halfway out of the room again. “I have come back to change my coat. I must go to my father-in-law’s house immediately. Surely the birth of a grandson will encourage him to dig deep in his pocket!”

  DAUGHTER

  Claire was wrong on two counts. Not only was Harriet’s baby a boy, but mine was a girl. She was born in the middle of a cold February night, and bundled so tightly that I could hardly see her little face when she was placed in my arms. I loosened the shawls, and she opened her eyes upon me for the first time.

  Oh God, must I remember that moment? No one can know such love until they see their own child. It surged around me like sea water, obliterating all other feeling. I had drowned in love for Shelley; now I was drowning in love for our daughter.

  But I was a daughter too. And after that surge of love came another of equal power – the recollection that my own mother had experienced this emotion on the day of my birth, seventeen years ago. I now knew how happy I had made her before she died. The secret, silent guilt that I had murdered her had weighed upon me for years. What could I do to atone?

  Fancy plays curious tricks when the brain and body are exhausted. As I lay there, transfixed by the sight of my baby turning her head, searching for the breast, wanting to suck, wanting to live, the guilt of years began to trickle away. I told myself that fate, destiny, fortune – Shelley would not have allowed me to include God in such a list – had sent this beautiful baby girl as a messenger between my mother’s spirit and mine.

  Mama, I offer you my child. Her life for your death. And I will bring her up as you would have brought me up. Strong, free, worthy of your love. Worthy of her grandfather’s love.

  Shelley held the baby and kissed her, declaring her the most beautiful child he had ever beheld. Then he kissed me and thanked me for my labours, and together we looked at our child.

  “Your father will not resist the power of his first grandchild,” he declared. “Look how she grips my finger! I am confident we shall see him here within the day.”

  Some hours later I awoke from a dreamless sleep to find Claire standing over me, the baby in her arms. “You have a visitor,” she said.

  I raised my head from the pillow. “Papa? Is it my Papa?”

  “It is not. It is Fanny,” she replied, placing the child proudly at my side. “She is impatient to see her niece. I have washed the baby and brushed her hair. Does she not look nice?”

  “She does indeed. Thank you, Claire.” I squeezed her hand. “Where is Shelley?”

  “He has gone to see Harriet and the children,” said Claire, arranging my pillows. “He will not be back before evening.”

  I did not allow this news to wound me. I had become accustomed to Shelley’s manipulation of his relatives. He would use the new baby as a way of extracting money, as he had used the birth of his son a few weeks earlier.

  Fanny and I had not met since before my flight to France the previous summer. When she entered the room, her face was full of apprehension. My heart swelled with affection. She had shown both kindness and bravery in coming to see me.

  “Come in, come in,” I urged her. “Put down that basket and kiss me.”

  She allowed Claire to take away the basket, brimful with spoils from my stepmother’s larder. Then Fanny took off her bonnet, deliberately slowly, it seemed to me, and sat beside the bed. She did not kiss me.

  “We are all relieved at home that you are safely delivered,” she announced primly. “Our brother Charles sends his affectionate regards.”

  “I thank him for them,” I replied, copying her sombre tone. “And what do Papa and Mama send, apart from a basket of food?”

  “Papa sits in the shop, writing, hour after hour. And Mama has been crying ever since we heard the news.”

  “They will not visit their granddaughter, then?”

  “No.” She paused, fidgeting with her bonnet-strings, looking down at her lap. Then she seemed to make a decision, and raised her head. “Mary, I do not believe they intend to acknowledge the child. Papa is resolute.”

  I held the baby tightly, my chin resting on the downy hair that Claire had brushed so carefully. “Thank you, Fanny.” Her moral sense was very strong; I knew she had struggled with her conscience. “You were right to tell me.”

  “I did not know what to do,” she confessed. “You and I share a mother. I am of this child’s blood.” She leant towards me, her hands clasped tightly, her lip quivering. “I feel our mother’s spirit in the room. Now, as we speak. Do you not feel it too?”

  Fanny had always been a nervous individual, prone to attacks of despair which had tried my stepmother’s patience sorely over the years. But I pitied her the joyless existence in the family home I had left. She was not my father’s child; neither was she my stepmother’s, and her own father was long dead. Apart from our mother’s two unmarried sisters, whom Fanny and I had scarcely met, her only true relatives in the world were my baby and myself.

  “I felt our mother’s presence last night, when I first held my child,” I confessed. “She loved us, Fanny. Whatever else happens to us in this world, we can adhere to that truth. She loved us very dearly.”

  Fanny put her head down. Sobs shook her thin shoulders. She wiped her nose on her glove. “Forgive me,” she kept saying. “Forgive me.”

  “There is no need,” I told her. “It is you who have suffered for your forgiveness of me. You are the only one who corresponded with us when we were away, and kept us informed abou
t the malicious gossip Harriet Shelley was spreading. It is that gossip, and Mama’s outrage, and Papa’s obstinacy, which has done such harm. You are blameless.”

  She was looking at me with gratitude. “Oh, Mary, I wish you could come home!” she said warmly. Then, after a pause, “You are aware, are you not, that all Papa wants you to do is…” She faltered. She could not say it.

  “Leave Shelley?” I suggested. “Of course! I shall deliver him back to his wife and children and appear on Papa’s doorstep with my baby in my arms, begging mercy. ‘Behold your prodigal daughter!’ I shall cry. ‘Take me in, and let me work in your shop!’”

  Even Fanny, a stranger to gaiety, allowed herself a small smile. “You are not going to do that, are you?” she ventured.

  The baby answered for me. She set up a loud wail, alarming her aunt and amusing her mother, and was not quiet again until I had put her to the breast. Fanny studied the tiny mouth working and the tiny fists waving. On her face was an expression of profound sympathy.

  “If I could only be loved by a man like Shelley,” she said, “I would never leave him either. Truly, love is the only thing that can conquer all evil. Even death itself, as Jesus teaches us.”

  Fanny’s visit assumed great importance in the light of subsequent events. I remember it even now with affection, as the one point of light in the dark world that embraced me only two weeks after my daughter was born.

  Love can conquer evil, she had said. But what kind of love could possibly conquer the evil which befell us so suddenly, and snatched away our happiness? How, after the release from guilt which the baby’s birth had brought me, could I bear to be thrown into that prison again?

  One night I laid the child down in her cradle before I went to bed. Shelley was sleeping in the drawing-room. The baby lay on her back, her head to one side, her fist denting her cheek in peaceful sleep. Instinct woke me a few hours later, at the hour she usually needed feeding. She was not crying.

  I got out of bed and went to the cradle. She was still in the same position as when I had left her, so deeply asleep I was reluctant to wake her. It was when I slid my hands under her body to lift her that I felt my heart explode with shock. She was not asleep. The dent in her cheek made by her fist did not disappear when her hand was moved. She was quite, quite cold.

  Summoned by my screams, Shelley and Claire rushed into the room. I remember the sound of their raised voices, and Shelley clasping the baby to his breast, his face convulsed. I remember Claire’s insistence that we call a physician and an undertaker, despite my pleas to have the small cold body beside me for the rest of the night. I remember Shelley, in the end, agreeing with her, and strangers coming up the stairs. After that I remember only darkness and muddle.

  “Send for Fanny, send for Fanny!” someone’s voice urged.

  But Fanny did not come. I learnt afterwards that Claire had written to her, pleading with her to comfort her sister at such a time. But no reply was received, and although Claire watched for her day after day, Fanny did not appear.

  People, places and events distorted themselves in my feverish brain. I told myself that Fanny could not bear to enter the house where the baby with whom she had expressed such a profound connection had died. I begged my dead mother to forgive me for not being able to keep my baby from the same fate which had befallen her. I imagined them together in heaven, my child as she was when I had seen her lying in her cradle for the last time, my mother as she looked in the only portrait my father had of her. Stiffly-corseted, severe.

  I felt I had lost my mother, my sister and my daughter because I had not deserved to keep them. They had been taken away as a punishment far greater than my father’s hard-heartedness. But why, when I had never wished anyone harm?

  Driven by grief, my rebelliousness rose.

  “Let us go back to Europe! Please, Shelley!” I implored. “Claire is wild to go. She says she cannot stay in England a moment longer, with people gawping at her as if she were a bear on a chain.”

  Shelley’s eyes brightened. “Switzerland?”

  “The bear on a chain did not like Switzerland very much,” I replied. “And I thought you wanted to be near the sea.”

  “And you, my darling? What is your desire?”

  “I do not care where I go, as long as it is away from here,” I told him. “I will not stay to hear society’s cruel comments about the death of our precious child. Cannot you imagine the gossips, whispering behind their fans? ‘They have got what they deserve,’ they will say.”

  Shelley nodded mischievously. “‘And he still keeps that forlorn little wife and two children!’” he declared in a high, disapproving voice. “‘My dear, the man is a monster!’ You are right, Mary. We shall go abroad again.”

  GEORGE

  We did not go abroad immediately, though.

  To my joy, I discovered I was expecting another child very soon after our daughter’s death, and did not wish to have the baby in Switzerland. It would be wintertime anyway. We decided to wait till the following spring.

  This second child was a boy. Not, alas, Shelley’s first son, but a beautiful healthy baby nonetheless. Optimistically we called him William, my father’s name.

  I never left him in a cradle. He slept in our bed with us, and I watched over him every minute of the day. As the days lengthened and warmed, and the baby thrived, our contentment was increased by the sale of several of Shelley’s poems for publication. His reputation was growing daily; favourable reviews abounded. Intellectuals of radical persuasion admired him, and their company fired his interest in politics. He increased his fame both as a poet and a campaigner for social justice by defending in his writing the causes of those oppressed by despotism or political corruption. My admiration grew too. I had fulfilled my girlish ambition to find a clever man.

  If only my father had extended forgiveness, my happiness would have been complete.

  Sitting in our cramped parlour, I tried to write. The notion of a story lay in the recesses of my brain, fashioned from our encounter with Herr Keffner. But I did not feel free either to indulge my imagination or improve my skill without my ever-supportive critic, my father.

  I read and reread the books my parents had written. Nowhere in them did I find condemnation of the idealistic love Shelley and I had found. There was only praise for its liberating influence.

  Why could my father not see that a man of Shelley’s gifts could not become a poet under ordinary circumstances? A poet was a prophet, a genius, a visionary. His admirers understood, as my father did not, that a creative spirit such as Shelley’s needed to live a different existence, an experimental existence in a household freed from society’s bonds. And Shelley loved me because I, too, was unshackled. Why, then, was I so cruelly punished by my papa, whose teachings had first unlocked those shackles?

  “Do not spoil your beauty with self-pity,” Shelley counselled me one evening, when I had been crying. “I will help you with your writing far better than he. And anyway, he is causing more unhappiness to himself than to you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He sighed. “I passed him in the street this very morning.”

  “And?”

  “He cut me. Quite dead.”

  “Oh, Shelley!”

  “But do you not see that he has wrought his own misery? Can you imagine what living in that house with your stepmother and Miss Melancholy must be like, now you and Claire are no longer there?”

  It was true. The house must have been very quiet without the shrieks and giggles with which Claire and I had disturbed Papa’s peace. And there must have been more room, too, without our gowns and shoes and bonnets and cloaks and all the paraphernalia of girlhood – bundled letters, scrapbooks and more pieces of abandoned embroidery than Mama would ever find.

  There was no doubt that from the day Shelley had walked into the shop and demanded a sovereign, nothing had been as it was. He had brought love and adventure, and given me the rare gift of knowing I was admired b
y a man who was himself admired by many. But he had taken things away too. Elusive things. Things which drifted around my head like half-remembered dreams: childhood conspiracies, sisterly loyalty, my father’s devoted respect for all his daughters.

  “Do you know Lord Byron?” Claire enquired of Shelley casually one morning.

  “Lord Byron?” exclaimed Shelley. His voice became fervent. “Who does not know Lord Byron? He is a great poet, a man noble in name and in genius. You have read his work, of course?”

  “Of course,” agreed Claire, unmoved by this extravagant praise. “So you have never met him, then?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know that he has connections with the theatre?” asked Claire. “How I long to meet someone who may procure me an entry to that wonderful world!”

  Claire’s appetite for wealth and notoriety had been whetted by the scandal Shelley and I had caused. As our notoriety grew, so did hers by association. She agreed that we should go abroad again in order to escape gossip, but she also revelled in the knowledge that people were talking about her.

  She longed, truly, to be famous. Her desire for attention had always been indulged at home, and sensational novels had fed her imagination. Because she could play the piano and sing a little, she had a notion of herself as a performer. She was merely awaiting the moment when her appearance on the London stage would make her the darling of the wealthy and the envy of the poor. She would be adored by men and disapproved of by their wives. She could see it all, and had frequently described it to me.

  “Indeed!” I exclaimed. Lord Byron’s scandalous way of living was as widely known and disapproved of as Shelley’s. “And did you know he is estranged from his wife and is living in sin with his sister-in-law?”

  “What gossips women are!” cried Shelley. “And what, pray, is ‘living in sin’, if it is not exactly what we are doing?”

  I stared at him. “Oh! But it does not feel sinful to us, does it?”

  He grinned. “I will tell you something about Lord Byron,” he said mischievously. “He has a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. If we make ourselves known to him, I see no reason for him not to welcome us there, do you?”