“Claire … are you listening?”
She stopped reading and raised her eyes. She looked so beautiful, with the shadow from her straw bonnet brim speckling her rose-petal face, and her lovely bare arms at repose in her lap, that I almost did not have the heart to speak. But I steeled myself.
“Claire, you are going to have a baby, are you not?”
The rose-petal pink changed to a deep red. But, being Claire, she did not flinch. She lowered her eyes and spoke softly. “Yes. You see, my dear sister, a poet is the only kind of lover to have these days.”
The memory of this girlish declaration, made in such high expectation of happiness, filled my heart. I leant towards her. “Claire, dear, what does George say he will do?”
Silence. She began to twist her bonnet-strings around her finger. Her eyes moved rapidly beneath her dipped eyelids. She was rehearsing her words, calculating how to exploit my sympathy rather than incur my condemnation.
“He says I am to pretend to be the child’s aunt.”
“The child’s aunt!” I repeated stupidly. “Why?”
“Do you not know that George has a wife living, exactly as Shelley has?” Her large eyes gazed at me soulfully. “He does not think his marriage will survive the scandal.”
“And why does he wish his marriage to survive? Does he love his wife?”
She twisted the strings more. “Love is only one reason for wishing to retain a marriage.”
My expectations of George plunged further. Shelley, impoverished though he was, had been prepared to leave his wife because he loved me. But Claire’s words proved that she was aware of George’s indifference to her. She had been witness to the fearlessness with which Shelley had faced our outraged parents in the drawing-room, swearing to marry me even though he had not at that time known I had conceived his child. What a contrast she must now see between my lover and hers!
“He will support the child, though?” I asked her. “Even if he will not admit paternity?”
“I do not know what he will do,” said Claire, distress creeping into her voice. “At first he said I must keep the child with me, and he will give me money for it. But then he said he will send for the child when it is old enough to go to school, passing it off as his ward, or some such thing.”
“What does Shelley say?” I asked, with little hope. “Can he not persuade George to conduct himself like a gentleman in this matter?”
Shrinking under my questions, she began to cry softly. “Nobody can persuade George to do anything,” she whispered. “He is his own master.”
Her control gone, she put her hands over her face. I left my chair and took her in my arms. She began to sob, her tears soaking my dress. Elise picked up William and advanced across the garden, her face full of concern. I waved her away, instructing her in French to take William off down to the lake.
“George may abandon you,” I told Claire, “but Shelley will not. You shall have your confinement in England, and we shall keep the child with us. You may be its aunt in public if George wishes, but in private you may be its mother as much as you like.”
She clung to me. She could not speak, but her tears subsided. After I had soothed her for a while, she dried her eyes, trying to smile, and took up her book again.
I walked about the garden until the warmth of the colours and the sunshine had evaporated the agitation in my own heart. In an uncertain world, with an uncertain future, I comforted myself with a pleasing thought. Different though their distresses might be, I could at least do my best by each of my sisters.
ABYSS
Fanny’s gold watch was so pretty that Claire implored George to buy her one too. But George’s heart had turned to stone; by the time he left for his house in Venice, Claire had neither her watch nor her dignity.
Her sense of self-preservation, however, remained intact.
“I shall be a governess, as you have so often suggested, Mary,” she told me as we packed up our belongings at the end of that eventful summer. “I shall support my child myself.”
I was unconvinced. “Who would employ a governess who has a child, and is without references?”
“For the price of a gold ring I can pass myself off as a widow,” said Claire. “I shall tell them my husband was a soldier and died of cholera in India. My French is fluent, and I know music, and singing, and drawing. Someone in Europe, not England, will take pity on me.”
We returned to England with Elise, who had grown very attached to William, as had he to her. She would soon have another charge, of course. Shelley had decided that Elise, William, Claire and I should be installed in lodgings in the city of Bath, where we would not be recognized and where Claire’s baby could be secretly born. Even Mama and Papa were not to be told of the child’s existence.
I thought this excessive, and told Shelley so.
“I am acting upon George’s instructions,” he explained.
I was scornful. “George’s instructions! He may have the power to make Claire do whatever he wants, but what power does he have over you?”
“He is my friend,” he said in a “you would not understand” voice.
I knew he hated my mockery. But my spirit was free, even if his was enslaved. “Do not allow your admiration for your friend to cloud your judgement of what is clearly right and what is just as clearly wrong,” I said.
“Do not lecture me,” he replied.
Fanny was delighted with her present, which Claire and I gave her when she had tea with us in our London inn, before we set off for Bath. The colour rose in her pinched face as she drew the watch out of its wrapping.
“Oh, Mary! Claire! How kind you are!” she exclaimed, holding the pretty thing up to the light.
Claire held out her cheek for a kiss, averting her gaze from the expression she knew quite well would be on my face. “How could we forget our dear sister?” she exclaimed.
While we waited for the tea to be brought, Fanny’s habitual anxious look returned. She did not pin the watch to her gown, but wrapped it carefully and put it in her bag. I strove to engage her in conversation. “What news of our aunts?” I asked.
Fanny had been living for some months with our mother’s two unmarried sisters, an arrangement which had so far proved a welcome relief, for both Fanny and Mama, from the cloud of bitterness which hung over Papa’s household.
She bowed her head. “I am to leave their house,” she said, “though it causes me much distress.”
Claire sat back in her chair, preparing to be bored by the complaints of “Miss Melancholy”, as Shelley cruelly nicknamed Fanny.
“My dear Fanny,” I said, alarmed, “what has happened?”
“Our aunts have decided to remove to Ireland,” said Fanny, her eyes filling with tears.
“Do not you wish to go with them?”
“They do not wish me to join them.”
An uneasy silence fell. We all knew that the spinsters’ rejection of Fanny could only be explained by her attachment to the scandal caused by Claire and myself.
“Will you go home, then?” I asked. “To Papa’s?”
“No!” She wiped her eyes, sniffing. “Do not forget, Mary, Papa is your father but he is not mine. And Claire, Mama is your mother but she is not mine. They have shown me duty, but not love. Without you, Mary, life there is unbearable.”
The maid set the tea tray on the table. Fanny tried to compose herself, her thin shoulders rising and falling with the effort. When the servant had gone, Claire leant forward and spoke to Fanny. “Would you like to join our household in Bath, Fanny? It will be cramped, and of course it is immoral, but you are very welcome!”
Fanny stared at her coldly. “You never liked me, did you?”
Claire withdrew, and picked up the teapot. “A pretty way to thank me! Do you take milk, Fanny? I do not remember, if I ever knew.”
Fanny turned to me. “What can I do, Mary? Where can I go?”
I had no answer. The uncomfortable fact was that although Fanny was fr
osty, disapproving and difficult to live with, the state in which she now found herself was in part due to the behaviour of Claire and myself. Guilt engulfed me, especially since I alone knew that Fanny was sensible of her faults, kind at heart and desperately in need of love. Most distressing of all, she and our aunts were my only link with my poor dead mama.
“Go home,” I advised her. “And I will ask Shelley if there is anything he can do. Perhaps a friend of his knows someone who needs a companion, or a governess…”
Fanny pressed my hand, too overcome to speak.
It was an uncomfortable tea party. When Fanny had gone I voiced my concern about her future, but Claire dismissed it. “Come, Mary, have another cup of tea with me and let us enjoy it. Fanny’s face would turn milk sour.” She sipped the fresh tea. “Much better!”
“But –”
“Mary, enough! Fanny will go home and wait on Mama, and die an old maid like your aunts. Now drink that tea before it is cold.”
“Have you no compassion?” I asked, exasperated.
“Yes, I have compassion,” she replied. “But I bestow it only where I consider it worthy to do so. I refuse to feel guilty about an evil scandalmonger who deserves to be miserable.”
“Oh, Claire!” I was shocked. “How can you say that about Fanny?”
Her cup clattered in its saucer as she leant towards me, her eyes alive with indignation. “You are so simple sometimes! Do you still believe it was Harriet Shelley who spread that stupid rumour about Papa selling us for fifteen hundred pounds?”
“Oh, Claire!” I repeated stupidly. My brain did not seem to be working.
“And Fanny has done worse since. She pretends that the gossip starts with Harriet, or Mama, but the real source is Fanny herself, you may be sure. No wonder George does not want her to know about our baby!”
I could not drink my tea. I put the cup down and pushed it away. “Why have you not spoken of this to me before?” I asked.
“Because you seem to care about her, for some unfathomable reason.”
I will always regret what I did next. After a sleepless night, I wrote to Fanny, begging her to refute Claire’s accusations. By return of post came a letter that chilled my heart. Fanny’s indignation spilled from the tearstained pages. The writing was an almost illegible tangle. She accused me of abandoning her to the wolves, of pitching her into the abyss, of destroying her life.
“Wolves? Wolves?” said Shelley when I showed him the letter. “What wolves? What abyss? The woman is madder than I thought.”
“Shelley, recollect!” I begged. “She has suffered periods of terrible melancholy, almost derangement, in the past. And you of all people, who have known distraction, can you truly ignore her unhappiness?”
I wrung my hands. I paced the room. I could not think what to do.
“Spending a great deal of money on the gift of a gold watch did not work, I see,” said Shelley after a pause. “Perhaps sending her to an asylum would be cheaper, and have more effect.”
“Shelley!” I cried, aghast. “I expect such words from Claire, but I see you are as heartless as she is!”
This was an accusation I would never, under ordinary circumstances, level at Shelley. His possession of a heart was all too often in evidence. Everything he did was heartfelt, from his belief in freedom for all men to the composition of beautiful verse. I, who shared his nights, knew to what depths this unchecked flow of sensibility could take him. If he would not sympathize with Fanny’s distress, who in the world would?
The next day we travelled to Bath. A week later, I replied to Fanny’s letter. I proposed that I come to London and meet her. Not at my father’s house, of course, but at a private room in a hotel. We could dine together, and perhaps I could bring William, whom she had never seen.
But she never read the letter. The next day I received one from her which must have crossed mine in the post. In handwriting even worse than before she told me that she had left home and was going to a place from which she would never return.
“Let us hope she means the Antipodes!” said Claire brightly.
Shelley snatched the letter from my hand. His face had changed as I had read Fanny’s words aloud; he knew now that my fears were well founded. “It is marked Bristol,” he said. “For God’s sake, Mary, she must be found. I will go at once.”
He left the house without bidding us goodbye. Going to the window I saw him give gruff instructions to the man at the hiring stables on the corner. Coins changed hands, then Shelley mounted and galloped towards the Bristol road as if his life depended on it.
I pressed my lips together, fighting tears. He felt guilty at last. He had found his heart again. And my belief in my angel, which had been sorely tried, was restored to me tenfold.
Claire and I waited until the small hours, shivering in our ill-lit parlour after the fire had gone out. I refused to go to bed until I knew Fanny was safe, and Claire relished the drama of the situation. When we at last heard Shelley’s boots on the stairs, I stood up, my heart full of dread. But his expression told the news before he spoke.
“You did not find her!” I exclaimed.
“No.” He crossed the room and took my face in his hands. His eyes contained the look I had last seen when our baby daughter died. “Dearest…” He released my face and put his arms around me, seeking comfort for himself as much as bestowing it on me. “I fear it is the worst news.”
“Do not fear it!” advised Claire, picking up the candle-holder to light herself to bed. “She has probably returned to London by now, having led you all a merry dance.”
“No, Claire, she has not.” He released me and sank wearily into a chair. “My enquiries led me to an inn where Irish labourers drink. I heard there that a lady answering Fanny’s description had been seen boarding a coach for Swansea.”
“Swansea?” I had barely heard of this place. “Where is that?”
“It is in the south of Wales. It is the place where ferries depart for Ireland. I thought she might have tried to follow your aunts there, so I hired a carriage to take me to Swansea.”
Exhausted, he laid his head against the cushion, closing his eyes.
“What happened?” I whispered, pressing my hand to my rapidly-beating heart.
“I did not have to look for her in Swansea,” he said. “Her fate was written on a newspaper vendor’s hoarding.”
Claire sat down again quickly. She grasped my arm.
Shelley laid the Swansea newspaper on the table for us to read, and went into the bedroom.
Claire and I held the candle over the report. An unknown young woman, it said, had taken a room at an inn and been found dead there, after an overdose of laudanum. She had left a note, but there was no signature.
We clutched each other. “Oh, Mary!” whispered Claire. “It cannot be!”
It was. Fanny had hidden her identity from the Swansea authorities but she could not hide it from us. The young woman’s corset, according to the article, was embroidered with “MW”. With a rush of grief, I recognized the initials of our mother’s unmarried name. But there was further proof. Pinned to the dead woman’s gown was a new, exquisitely crafted Swiss gold watch.
When Shelley had gone to identify her body, he told me later, the authorities had offered the watch to him. But, still in debt for it though he was, he had refused.
“I told them to bury it with her,” he said. “It was the only beautiful thing she possessed.”
DEATH’S GIFT
Laudanum, a common sleeping-draught that Shelley took regularly, is dangerous in large quantities, as Fanny had been aware. Knowing that it contains opium, a narcotic which can cause hallucinations, I had been convinced for some time that it was at the root of the terror that so often gripped Shelley in the middle of the night, and that had so horrified us all as he knelt on the floor at the Villa Diodati. I wished he would not take it at all, however much he longed for peaceful sleep.
But two days after Fanny was buried, I myself resorted
to the very substance which killed her. When Shelley and I retired to bed that night, he put some drops of laudanum in warm water and told me to sip it.
I did so. Then I lay down miserably upon my pillow. It was a rainy October night. There was no light from the window, but as my eyes grew used to the darkness I could make out the shape of Shelley’s head with its curling hair, and the mound made by his shoulder as he lay on his side. And I could hear his breathing. Fast, steady, attentive.
“Fanny was in love with you,” I told him. “Exactly like Claire is still.”
He did not speak. My head felt heavy, but my brain raced with thoughts.
“Have you seduced Claire?” I asked.
Still he did not speak.
“Did you tell her it was your birthday?” I taunted. “And did she, poor wretch, believe you?”
“Go to sleep, Mary,” he said calmly.
I began to sob with guilt and grief. The bitterness imprisoned in my breast for many months escaped. Jealousy rose again, the same jealousy as I had confronted when Claire had been Jane and had climbed into our bed that night in Switzerland.
I felt his arms around me. He pulled me beside him and did not speak of Claire or Fanny. He soothed me, assuring me of his love. His heartbeat was very fast, but as we lay there, my own heart’s frenzy calmed and I began to feel sleepy. The darkness seemed to be falling in on itself.
Shelley pushed the damp strands of hair away from my cheeks. “In the morning you will recollect none of this.”
He was wrong, of course. I recollect it now, perfectly well. But I also understand that he said it to spare me remorse. If we could both pretend the words had not been spoken, there would be no need for forgiveness on either side.
Claire was excited at the prospect of motherhood. She fussed over the preparations for the arrival of her baby, directing Elise, who was an excellent needle-woman, in the production of more elaborate baby gowns and bed linen than either of my children had ever owned.
“How clever Elise is!” I exclaimed, fingering the finery which Claire had laid out on her bed for my inspection. “This child will be dressed like a prince!”
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