A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  And how could I not know it—how could you not know it. You were with us when my William fell ill, when my daughters died—you will remember her raging at me, saying the misery I had caused her rendered her milk tainted, and poisoned the babes even as they took suck at her breast. But all this, I need not tell. You have understood, for longer even than I, the fateful consequences of that perilous state of mind that has again overwhelmed her, and that black melancholia she considers her mother’s most terrible legacy, which no doctor has ever relieved. Did I not beg you to put off a visit to your own beloved child for fear of leaving her alone, lest she should be driven by despair to some fatal end? And as I write those words I recall again that day, that dreadful December day in Skinner Street after I learned of Harriet’s death. I was haunted then by memories of her, and the ghosts of those old remembrances seemed to make some reproach to which I had no reply. Mary, of all people, knew of those feelings—knew of those terrible associations, and the recollection of that room now is shadowed forever by the picture that comes always to my mind. Her face as she sat there, in the corner chair, listening quietly as always, as I told Godwin again and again of my opposition, on philosophical grounds, to matrimony, and my wish to accord what respect I still could to Harriet’s memory, and delay our marriage by a year. And then she rose, and came towards me, mouse-like in appearance as she always contrived, but a tiger’s ferocity looking from her eyes. Of course you are free to do as you like, she said, placing one hand on my shoulder and the other on her belly, and I am free to act as I like, and I have to tell you, that if you do not marry me I will not live—I will destroy myself and my child with me.

  And the same look I saw then, I see now. Just as I saw it when Clara died and she laid all the blame of it at my door. Day after day, in violent hysterics and words of poisonous retribution, saying that she would never forgive me for caring more for you and your child, than I did for her and ours. It was for me, she said, to put right the terrible wrong I had done her, it was for me to replace the child she had lost. Whatever that scoundrel of a servant has since alleged—whatever lies have been told, or Byron believed—that is the real and only reason we adopted Elena in Naples. I found that sweet babe and brought her to the house because Mary begged me to. Such a tiny child she was, my Elena, with her bright green eyes, and curls of golden yellow hair. How could any woman look on that child—hold it in her arms—and feel no motherly affection? How could she prove so deaf to its cries, so blind to its needs, as to refuse to give it nourishment? But by then the deed was done, and all the papers lodged in our names. And when Mary insisted we depart the city at once, I could see no way but to leave the child behind. In all that has happened—all that I regret and would wish undone—of this alone my heart cannot acquit me. And when the letter from the orphanage came telling me Elena was dead, I felt as if the destruction that consumes me were as an atmosphere that wraps and infects everything I touch. I can never speak openly of why I acted as I did, and the world, in consequence, damns me for a liar and a brute. Mary has always insisted that it was our own maid who spread the rumour—that it was all Elise’s doing—and I cannot prove it to be otherwise. But the suspicion will not lie quiet that she, in some way, was the source. How else could the Hoppners have come to hear of it? Why else should they have thought Elena was your child—yours and mine? Why else would they claim that I had given you violent medicines to procure an abortion, and only brought that poor babe to the house when those vile methods did not work? That, of all those hideous accusations, is the worst. You know, better than anyone, that I could never commit the unutterable crime of destroying any living creature, far less an innocent infant. And never—O never—could I harm a child of yours. A child of mine.

  I have clung too long to the feigned hope that we might come to a new understanding, Mary and I. That we might make amends together for those dark and dreadful deaths, and free ourselves from the curse of repeating the past. I had thought the woman who had for parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft would applaud me in my ambition to forge a new connection based on the principles those very parents had expounded. Mary had always told me so—she had fled with me in the beginning promising so. Would that I had known, before we left London together for France that first time, that for all those high protestations she would become to me so jealous a chained foe. Would that I had not been blinded by her lineage and her name to what was hidden in her heart. But it is her curse, and my own, that a person possessing such excellent powers as hers, should be so incapable of applying those capacities to domestic life.

  But in truth the blame is mine—all mine. When first we met I saw only her high soul, and the wildness and sublimity of her feelings. I saw only the brilliant daughter of brilliant parents, I saw only passion in her gestures and looks, and boasted, even, of her capacity for indignation and hatred, seeing only—then—the most flattering proof of the strength of her attachment. It was intoxicating to be loved so, after the meek submissive embraces of my poor little Harriet—mesmerising to have such a girl hang on my every word, and throw herself with complete abandon into my arms. I remember the moment Mary declared herself mine—how she roused a fervour in my blood that still could not match the fever in her own. How against all reason—all prudence—she drew me down to her as she lay upon the very turf of her mother’s grave—the heat of the day, the smell of the summer grass, the heaving of her heart, and the seize of her lips as they strained into mine. And not a hundred yards away, idling in the sunlight and shade of that ancient willow, you, my dearest Claire. At the very moment of ardour I heard your voice. Singing.

  Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet.

  Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!

  And later—after the Rubicon had been passed and the way back barred—how could I bear to hear what you tried so hard to tell me? How could I see your warnings as anything but what she insisted they were—lies and wicked fabrications sprung only from a black and vindictive envy? She did confess to have suffered ‘girlish troubles,’ but attributed all to a step-mother’s resentment, and a father’s carelessness. What loving father, she said, would have sent so young a girl away from home for so long? Surely only one who had been influenced by a sullen second wife to disregard the lovelier and more gifted child of the first. She did not tell me, then, that it was always she who initiated those furious quarrels that discomposed the entire house. She did not tell me, then, that the doctor summoned to examine her came not to see the skin disorder of her arm, but because your mother and Godwin apprehended a far more dreadful evil. No, your words, and yours alone, can account for all this.

  What a different journey we might have trod, you and I, had I seen you that first time I called at Skinner Street, when Godwin told me both his daughter and step-daughter were away from home, but he would, in due course, allow himself the ‘not inconsiderable pleasure’ of introducing me to all the young ladies of the family. You will smile sadly and shake your head at my mimicry, Claire, but my rash promise to solace his declining years has haunted me from the day I made it. I have mortgaged my own future and my boy’s and still I cannot slake his insatiable demands. Still he writes for money—always, always for more money.

  You, my dearest girl, have always understood me—have poured balm on my weary aged soul, have sustained me in all my illness, and encouraged me in all my work. Why else—even in the high throes of a hectic passion—would I have insisted you come with us when we fled to France? When I told Mary what I proposed she seemed at first to accept my decision, only to call me back a moment later and declare—with that suddenly frozen face I have so miserably come to know—that you could make yourself useful as our interpreter, and that she would tell you so. You will say I was naïve—that I should have perceived at once what lay behind those words—but I believed her when she talked of love as free, of the passion between us as a thing of purity, far above the dreary exclusiveness of modern morals. It took but the travel of a single
day to tear the scales from off my eyes, and show me that her understanding of our relation condemned you to cold oblivion just as surely as the narrowest and most oppressive contract of marriage. And for all the love Mary professed to my face, and in my arms, there was rancour even then in her heart. I did not wish to see it—might never have known it had you not found her, pen in hand, at work on that story. A story she had written of you; a story she entitled Hate. A story I consigned to the flames the day we set foot back in England.

  These last months here we have become to one another an ever-present torment. Mary feels no more compunction in torturing me, than she does in torturing herself, as if we have indeed become one flesh, bound in an accursed and everlasting union of the living and the desired-dead. I have been ashamed before our friends—by her manners, her sulkiness, her shrill and carping tongue. I have seen the green distortion of jealousy in her face whenever your name is spoken, and heard the things she has said of you when she thinks I am not by. Leave her, you will say, leave her and come to me. But what might she accuse me of, in the vehemence of her revenge, if ever I forsake her as I did my poor Harriet? And when I think now of that pitiful child who did not a thing amiss but love me—when I think of what I was induced to say—the letters I was forced to write after I left her—the words dictated to me—accusing her of mean and despicable selfishness when she was so close to her confinement. I recall it now and the blood runs icy in my veins. Well might Harriet have cried that I had become a vampyre; that I behaved to her little better than a beast.

  The terror of regret has tainted my whole life, like the spectre of an unquiet dream come back to blacken the cheerful morn. Thoughts of the past pursue me like a treacherous likeness of myself—a hideous daemon that bodies forth all that is cruel and depraved and disgusting in the dark depth of my inmost soul. I wonder sometimes if it is not, after all, a real persecutor but my own self from which I flee—some hideous excrescence of my own mind. You tell me it is nothing but bad dreams—that no-one haunts me, no-one shadows my steps—but I tell you I have seen him, even here. Even in Italy I have seen him, ever on the far edge of my sight, never fully revealed, never fully perceived. It is as if in a mirror I catch the echo of my own face, my own mouth dulled as if underwater. My own eyes those of a man already dead.

  Forgive me, my love, for such a long and broken letter. I have never written thus before, and I will not do so again. But now, for these few moments, I can ease my heart by opening it to you. How much more it would relieve me to see you—to place my head on your soft bosom, and feel the gentle breathing of your heart. I know that you have your own pain—that you are anxious for your darling Allegra, and trust not Byron to have the care of her a father owes. But I fear you have no other choice but to trust to time and change on his part. Who knows what may happen in the space of a few short months? And what words may achieve, I will attempt. Anything that might diminish your pain, my darling Claire, I would do it. I cannot endure the thought of your lonely unheard tears—I would put up with any anguish if I might thereby ease a moment of yours. I know she does not agree with me on this—she thinks my care an interference, and nothing of our concern. But she is right in this respect, if none other: You cannot take the child. Byron would not allow it—and a rash attempt to remove her such as you have lately contemplated would have the direst consequences, and not the least for you, my dearest girl. I know you fear the convent is in an unwholesome district, subject every summer to malarious airs, but I can only beg you to remember that when I last saw Allegra there, she was in good health and fine spirits. Taller than when you saw her last, of that there can be no doubt, but in every other way recognisable at once as the babe you once held against your breast—her eyes the same deep violet blue, her hair as darkly lustrous, her little face just as lovely, her little chin just as determined. Still vivacious, still mischievous, still—O how beautifully—your child.

  Six have I had, of my own, and one alone is left to me. Two torn from my heart by the vile judgement of a tyrannical court, and three consigned forever to the cold earth’s iron embrace. And now there is to be another. A child I do not want—did not expect—indeed can hardly account for, so rarely have I shared her bed. Jane Williams took me aside some days ago and wondered aloud, in that way she has, that one might almost believe that rough and piratical fellow Edward Trelawny were Mary’s lover, so intimate they seem, but if the child be his she will not tell me so. It is mine, Mary says, mine begotten, and mine to sustain. The fruit of another accursed Spring. Like all those other Springs that have led not to renewal but only to death and grief.

  And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

  Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead.

  I must close, my dearest girl. I hear her step and I dare not be found at my pen—dare not give her any new excuse to raise her hand to me. Hold fast, my dear girl, and all may yet be well. She says she has had a presentiment that this pregnancy will come not to term, and though I swear by all I hold true that I do not wish for such an end, if her premonition proves correct, it will be the last summer I spend with Mary as my wife. I will find a way, dear girl. Make no plans for Vienna until we may speak together of this. All may yet be well. Know that I love you, and all may be well.

  Good-bye, my dearest love. Do not forget—be sure to burn this letter, and directly.

  S

  SEVEN

  Mary

  THE FIRE IS DYING low now, the embers preying upon themselves. It is not a comfortable image, and Charles gets up and walks to the window for light and air, his mind sombre with mute rage. Claire gave him this letter—this letter never burned, much read, and stained here and there with tears—because she deemed it proof—proof of Shelley’s love for her. But to Charles the proof—the evidence—in this letter is not of love, but of death. A woman threatening suicide in terrible revenge. Three innocent children dying before their time, and a fourth discarded because she did not suit. And yes, of course, children died, no-one knows that better than Charles—in the first quarter of the nineteenth century almost a third of babies were dead before the age of five—but for the Shelleys to lose three of their children, one after the other, argues that something more disturbing than mere misfortune was at work. Even a mother’s constant care was not enough, it seems, to counter that grand self-centred disregard that characterised so much else about Shelley’s life. For despite all his shrill self-justification, this is a man who clearly believed that one dead infant could be readily replaced by another, however randomly chosen, and that maternal affection might transfer as casually as cast-off baby clothes. And where did Shelley find that little girl he brought home? Did he discover the child in that Naples orphanage, or did he perhaps see a baby left a moment in some crowded market-place, and decide it would have a better life brought up his own? Take it with him there and then, and give it to his desperate and grieving wife as a substitute for the child she claimed he killed, only to see that mother’s face curdle to a mask of scorn. A sudden surge of nausea almost overwhelms Charles as he remembers his own sister—another golden-haired and green-eyed child—who was snatched in the street and never again found. Left perhaps to die, like this little girl, because she failed to find favour, no more real to those who took her than a puppy, or a porcelain doll.

  You may think Charles is deducing a great deal here from very little, and extrapolating far too much from the pain of his own past, but you might change your mind if you knew (as Charles does not) that Shelley never made any attempt to see his first two children after the custody case, even though the ‘tyrannical court’ accorded him that right; that he once took up a child he found wandering, and it was only the merest chance the parents discovered her again; or if you had heard, as I have, a story still told, all these years later, by some Oxford city guides, of the day when Shelley switched two babies in the High Street and walked serenely on, hilarious at his own joke, not caring whether the exchange was ever noticed, or if the changelings were ever returned to
their rightful mothers’ arms.

  Charles can picture, now, and only too clearly, the bizarre and claustrophobic atmosphere in which this strange ménage played itself out—the looking-glass world Shelley built for himself, and then could not escape. One man, two women; and the women bound in their turn by a tie they could neither of them break. Well might Claire have called it a folie à trois. For there is something tinged with madness in all these echoes and half reflections, these endless repeating patterns, and the incessant giddying sense of having to constantly re-assess what is real, and what is feigned. The two women drawing him always in opposite directions—one dark, one fair; one passionate, one chill; one always eager, one forever aloof. And what is Charles to make of the man at the heart of the maze—this man who is at once pitiful and pernicious, at once tender and terrifying? Because for all his talk of love and freedom, the fact remains that Shelley abandoned a young and pregnant Harriet to take two teenage girls on a mad scramble across Europe which rendered the both of them social outcasts—one expecting an illegitimate child, and the other unlikely ever to make a conventional marriage. And yes, Shelley could have argued that brought up by Godwin as those girls had been, they would neither of them have cared about such conventions, but Charles suspects that whatever the philosopher may have preached about sexual liberation and the equality of the sexes, he would have recoiled in horror at his own daughter putting those precepts into practice in such a flagrant and irrevocable manner. Indeed is there not a hint of that in this very letter—there would have been no need for Shelley to argue the case for the postponement of his marriage to Mary after Harriet’s death if Godwin had not been strenuously pressing for just such a ceremony, and at once. And is not Shelley’s attempt to place all the blame for his ill-treatment of his first wife to the account of the second a little discreditable? Was he really so weak—so easily manipulated? Charles sighs, thinking of Claire, remembering the tears in her eyes as she handed him this letter—this letter she has kept all these years as a pledge of love. And it can indeed be read as such, but it can also be read as a shameful attempt to defend an eight years’ status quo that brought her nothing but pain, and stole from her whatever life and love she might still have found. The deeper Charles reaches into Shelley’s past the darker it becomes. Well might Maddox accuse him of bringing death and ruination to everyone about him, well might he conclude the poet’s was a midwinter heart.