A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  “And you know all of this to be true—you were there, yourself—”

  “No,” she retorts, picking now at the fringes of her shawl, “I was not. I will not mince matters, Mr Maddox, and in any case you are doubtless very well aware that I was, at that time, expecting a child. I remained in Bath all that winter, because I did not wish my mother and Godwin to discover the truth.”

  “Then how can you be sure—”

  “Really, Mr Maddox,” she snaps. “Do you not think that if there had been the slightest evidence of murder, the Westbrooks would have pressed for immediate prosecution? No, despite all their foul insinuations even they were forced to acknowledge that Harriet had left a letter confessing that she took her life by her own hand—her own choice. And in any case what would Shelley have stood to gain by such a crime? He had no need to rid himself of his wife; he had already done so years before.”

  Charles sighs. So this is the sad truth of ‘all that dire affair’: Harriet Shelley died alone, and of despair. Shelley seduced her, married her, and then he cast her off. Leaving her with two children and the prospect of living out her years reliant on her family’s charity; half a lifetime in a shadow existence, neither maid nor married, widow nor wife. No wonder her father was so desperate to gain guardianship of her children, and no wonder Sir Percy and his wife are now equally desperate to keep her fate forgotten, and unknown.

  Claire looks across at him, and there is something brittle about her mouth that suddenly jars. The accusations Shelley endured may have been unfounded, even malicious, but at their heart was the shocking suicide of a mere girl, married at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, and dead at scarcely twenty-one. But the only expression on Claire’s face now is one of exasperated resentment. Has she, Charles wonders, become so preoccupied by pity for her own past that she has no compassion left for anyone else, not even those who have been dealt a harder hand than hers?

  “I may not have been in London,” she continues, “but I do know that Eliza Westbrook was—” She pauses. “—a very forceful woman, and I am not at all surprised that she attempted to persuade your uncle to support her despicable allegations against Shelley, and lend credence to her claims. She would, no doubt, have seen him as a most useful ally. That, I am sure, is your explanation.”

  Charles thinks back to what remains of Maddox’s words, and has to concede that her interpretation does indeed fit the facts, as far as he can discern them. His uncle could have been approached by Miss Westbrook, and investigated the circumstances of Harriet’s drowning on her behalf, only to conclude, in the end, that despite Shelley’s despicable behaviour, the man was not guilty of any crime. Did the passage not end, and explicitly, ‘I was wrong’?

  Claire, meanwhile, has folded her hands in her lap. “I do not pretend to understand the logic behind your questions, Mr Maddox, but you have only one of them remaining.”

  Charles watches her a moment. She is staring into the fire, her hands twisting the fringes of her shawl. If he were a poker player (which he is not) the question he is about to ask would be his wild card. One whose value he cannot guess until after he has played it.

  “What happened that day,” he says slowly, “the day of horrors you talked of? The day that terrified you so much you dreaded to speak of it again?”

  She gasps. “As if you do not know—” Then she puts a hand to her lips, and seems to press them trembling closed.

  “May I remind you, Miss Clairmont,” he says, seeing the flush now across her cheeks, “that you promised to tell me the truth. That our agreement was made on that basis. There was something, wasn’t there—you hint as much—something Shelley had done—something his wife knew—”

  She flashes a look at him now.

  “—something that has prevented her all these years from writing her own account of his life—”

  “His wife,” she whispers fiercely, her eyes glittering with tears, “has betrayed him. When I think of what Shelley endured at her hands—”

  “Then what is it that impedes her—what had he done—”

  “He had done nothing!” She’s looking at him in sudden defiance, her colour high. “Nothing, I tell you. No-one knew Shelley better than I, and I swear to you that no man had a higher moral sense than he—no man a finer understanding of the distinction between right and wrong.”

  “Even though you wrote yourself that he was tortured by a belief that he had committed some appalling crime? That he had a sick fear of what lurked unseen in his own soul?”

  She lifts her chin, eyes blazing. “Even so. You should not believe everything you have read, Mr Maddox, even in your own uncle’s files.”

  “Then tell me, Miss Clairmont—tell me what I should believe—tell me what it is you know.”

  He watches, scarcely breathing, willing her to continue, willing her to say more. But she does not. And when at last she speaks again her face is very pale. “You have had your three questions, Mr Maddox, and I have answered you. If there is no other way to do justice to the dead than by re-living the agonies of the past, then I will do it. But it will be done in my own way, and at a time of my choosing, and certainly not at your behest.”

  She gets up quickly and goes to the window, then stands there, holding the shawl about her, staring into the drear and listless day.

  Charles wonders if she has dismissed him—if this strange audience has now concluded—but then there is a knock on the door and the maid enters with the coffee. She sets the tray down on the table by the fire, then leaves the room, though not—it must be said—without a curious sidelong glance at her mistress. A moment later Claire turns from the window, and Charles wonders if it is tears he can see on her cheeks. She moves in silence to the table and busies herself about the saucers and the spoons, but by the time she approaches him, the hand that holds the cup is steady, and as she bends to give it to him a skein of her hair slips over her shoulder and brushes against his cheek. Then she returns to her chair, and takes a sip of her coffee, before setting the cup carefully down and smoothing the silk of her dress.

  “I have fulfilled my part of our bargain. Now it is your turn.”

  Charles sits back slowly in his seat. “What is it you want me to do?”

  She smiles thinly. “The Shelleys have told you, no doubt, that they wish you merely to discover what papers I possess, but I fear you will find your role as spy slipping only too easily into that of thief. For that woman will stop at nothing to protect the fragile artifice she has been constructing all these years. Indeed one might almost believe her to be the daughter, and poor Percy merely the son-in-law, so closely does she cosset her dear Madre.”

  She pauses then, but Charles has wit enough not to be drawn—not this time—and in any case her words are slightly too histrionic, slightly too rehearsed. He sits back a little farther, wary that even such a tiny movement might betray the direction of his thought.

  “I fear poor Percy comes a very poor third in that marriage,” she continues. “If marriage you can call it. From what I can gather, Lady Shelley spends so much time beset by mysterious illnesses that she scarcely has time—or inclination—to perform her wifely duties. Is it any wonder she has produced no heir? Not that that is any great loss. She may lord it over the rest of us as if she were born in ermine, but I have it on good authority that her parents’ marriage will not bear too close a scrutiny. May not—indeed—even merit the term marriage at all.”

  Charles shifts uncomfortably in his chair. This is beginning to sound like the curdled invective of the sour old spinster he had once—mistakenly—assumed her to be. Something of which sentiment she must have sensed, for the very next moment she has executed one of those volte-faces that he has seen so many times now, but which still catch him unprepared.

  “You must forgive me, Mr Maddox,” she says with a light laugh. “All these years of living for myself alone have made me, no doubt, nothing but an eccentric and resentful old maid.”

  He flushes, as if she had overheard his
mind. “Surely not—”

  “There is no need to flatter me,” she interrupts. “Not any more. I have always been rather a good hater, and now I have food enough to feed that faculty for the rest of my life. I cannot forgive that woman for what she has done to me, but it is what she has done to Shelley that is truly unpardonable. In the few short weeks I have been in London, it has come to my knowledge—I will not trouble you how—that Jane Shelley has not only been destroying papers, but has also colluded in the creation of outright forgeries—forgeries designed to eradicate facts she considers ‘inconvenient,’ and ensure that hers is the only version of Shelley’s life the future will ever see.”

  Charles stares at her. “And Shelley’s widow is conniving at these forgeries?”

  “Mary?” she says with disdain. “Mary’s own fame is all that matters to her now—her own spotless and perfect reputation. Not content with poisoning the last months of Shelley’s life with her coldness and reserve, Mary now forsakes even his memory. She was brought up, Mr Maddox, to believe herself the world’s darling—the lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell—and from the first day I met her she has been intent on retaining that position, at whatever cost to those around her. At whatever cost to Shelley. At whatever cost to me. Mary has been the ruination of my every happiness. All the mistakes of my life—the most terrible mistakes—were made because of her.”

  She had talked of hatred, and there is no other word for what Charles sees now on her face. A hatred that has wound its roots tight about her heart and seems, at this moment, to be an almost physical pain. He thinks back to her account of that summer in Geneva, and the tension between the stepsisters, palpable even under its veneer of politeness, even if the cause of it was never openly revealed. Has there always been such antipathy between Mary and Claire, all the long and lonely years they have lived apart?

  “One thing I have learned,” she says softly, as if in answer to his question, “and learned the hardest way, is that love and enmity may exist side by side—may become, in time, almost indistinguishable. That one may be bound to another person by ties too deep and fierce for tenderness—ties the breaking of which will rend your heart more than any common notion we have of love.”

  It is a truth that Charles, too, has learned. Indeed all he has ever known of love is pain. The loss of a sister, the absence of a mother, the coldness of a distant father, the awful decline of the great-uncle who became that father’s substitute: All the relationships life gave him have failed him so totally, small wonder that he resists adding voluntarily to their number.

  There is a silence.

  “I still do not know,” Charles says eventually, “how I can assist you. What I am to do.”

  She looks up. “You are to tell them the truth—or that part of it I choose they should know. Go to Chester Square and tell Sir Percy and his vulgar little wife that I have exposed their infamous scheme for the imposture it is. Tell them that I despise them from the very depths of my being, but that I am ill, and I am tired, and I want such peace as the world can still afford. So I am prepared to consider selling them my papers. All of them. Provided that the negotiations may be conducted solely through you.”

  She looks at him but he shakes his head, finding himself saying exactly what he said in Lady Shelley’s drawing-room, though for rather different reasons. “But I have no experience in such things—you need a lawyer—with so much money at stake—”

  “It’s not about money—I don’t want their money. I want them to believe that I am so heartsick of the past that I want nothing more to do with it. I know from bitter experience that they will not trust me, but if you tell them that, they will believe it. And by the time they discover the truth it will be too late.”

  Charles frowns. “Too late?”

  She smiles at him, an artful, knowing smile. “Surely you have understood by now? I have no intention of selling them a single page—a single line. All I ask you to obtain for me is time—the time I need to complete my book, so that the full truth of our lives may finally be told. The time I need to ensure that there will be nothing whatsoever they can do to prevent its publication.”

  “You intend to publish what you have written? Is that wise—will it not expose you to—”

  “—scandal and ignominy?” she finishes archly. “I have weathered many a worse storm, Mr Maddox. For the last thirty years I have hidden myself away—shunned the light like some wretched creature of the underworld—and the price I have paid has been to see those two women appoint themselves sole guardians of the truth about Shelley’s life. But now that scoundrel Medwin has written of me in his memoir, and ripped away the protecting veil I had wrapped about my name. I have nothing left to lose. I do not want my memory to be sunk in oblivion as my life has been. I have trodden this life with neither guide nor companion, and before I leave it forever I want to write the story I have never ventured to tell.”

  She is weeping now, and Charles resists an impulse to move to comfort her—tells himself consciously to resist it, so he cannot understand how he finds himself on his knees before her chair, his arms about her shoulders, and her body racking his with wrenching sobs. The scent of her is so strong now that it threatens to overwhelm him, and when he turns his face he can feel the softness of her hair against his lips. She must be—is—old enough to be his mother, but that doesn’t seem to matter—doesn’t stop him feeling the stir of response in his own body. He gets hastily to his feet, his cheeks scarlet, and sees first bewilderment, then comprehension in her eyes.

  “Forgive me,” she says again, looking down, only this time there is no playfulness in her voice, merely regret. “Forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive,” he replies, his voice rough. Something has changed between them—something fragile as yet, but as unmistakable as that dark scent of hers, which he can smell now on his own skin.

  She, for her part, watches his averted and self-conscious face, then rises and goes over to the piano-stool, where she takes a small key from a pocket in her dress, then pulls aside the brocade and opens the trunk. Charles glances up as the lid creaks open and is amazed at what he sees—he should have guessed by now how much material she might have accumulated, but he is astonished, all the same, at the sheer quantity of papers inside the trunk. Some neatly bound in faded ribbons, others cast in loose and careless. It seems chaotic, but there must be some order to it, for it takes Claire only a moment to find what she is looking for.

  “I know,” she says, turning to him, a paper in her hand, “that what I have told you strains belief. I have asked you to take a great deal on my word alone, and you are wondering, even now, if that word can be trusted.”

  He starts to reply, but she prevents him. “That was not a test, Mr Maddox, merely an observation. I had not intended to show you this—I had not intended to show you anything, after you took it upon yourself to take by stealth what you could not obtain by any honest means. But I have changed my mind.” She looks down now, at the letter she is holding, and her fingers close tight about it, as if clinging to the past. “Shelley wrote this to me three months before he died. I did not know, then, what misery was about to befall me. Or that with his death there would be nothing left for me but dying.”

  “But surely,” says Charles, “surely you still had your child—”

  She raises her face slowly to his, her features suddenly haggard, her eyes gaunt with a living grief. “You do not know? But then, how could you. By the time this letter reached me, my darling was dead.”

  SIX

  The Recollection

  La Signora Clairmont

  presso al Professore Bojti

  Piazza dei Pitti

  Firenze

  Pisa, Monday morning 3rd April 1822

  My best and loveliest girl,

  I write on an evening as beautiful and as bright as your fair face, my love. Do you remember, last summer, when I wrote of the view from this very chamber—of the setting sun, and the sleeping swallows, and
the bats flitting fast in the twilight purple air? Oh that such a time might be reclaimed, if only for a moment, for it has been a day of tempests without doors, and violence within. But now the rain and wind have passed, and a momentary peace restored, so I have taken up my pen and surrounded myself, as with a magic circle, by thoughts of you. We have lived so long, you and I, our thrilling silent life—our life of outward coolness and inner fire—that you will wonder, I dare say, at such a beginning. So much care we have observed, when we have taken up our pens, and so many stratagems employed in disguise, that it is with a kind of wild exhilaration that I write nakedly now, with no such subterfuge. You will scold me for my recklessness—I who have always counselled you to hold your heart in check, and curb the impulses of your passionate nature. But it is so. After what has passed this day I must relieve my heart in words.

  My side torments me and my exhausted mind agitates the prison it inhabits. I have scarce been able to see, these two days and more, and my eyes and appetite are still weak. But not so my resolution. I determined this morning to wait no longer—to tell her at once of my decision, and of my promise. It has been six weeks and more since we have shared a chamber, and she has always, as you know, been averse to early rising, but I was surprised this morning, all the same, to find her still abed at noon. But a moment’s observation told me all the tale. I have seen her in the like condition too many times not to know the meaning of that wanness in her face, that lankness in her hair. She saw me then, and raised herself in the bed, calling me a beast and a brute, and all manner of vile names, for forcing her once more to endure the unutterable pain of bringing a child into the world, only to have it die, once again, in her arms. She could not forgive me, she said in wild fury, for three children dead—there could be no natural, no happy conclusion to this new pregnancy and she would curse this for a hateful day as long as she lived. She turned her face, then, to the wall, saying that we had lived eight years together and if all the events of those years were blotted out and erased, only then might she have a chance for happiness. I went to the bed then and knelt down beside her, saying I had never wished her woe, and would do all in my power to ease her pain, and that if she wished it, I would take up my old idea of an expedition to the East, where I might enter into an entirely new sphere of life. That I knew not how far this was practicable, given the state of my finances, but that I could talk again with Medwin and see what he might be able to lend me, and what might therefore be done. But I scarce finished my sentence when she turned to me with a laugh that chilled my very soul. Do you think to take her with you? she cried. Do you think to abandon me here, pregnant with your child, as you once abandoned that little fool Harriet? Do you hope I will destroy myself as she did, and you will be free once more from a wife you have tired of? No, she said, her features distorted by loathing, you will not rid yourself of me so easily. You and I are bound together forever. You know it, and you know the reason for it—it is a bond that you can never sever.