A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  I would wish that this is all I had to ask you, but I must touch now on a far more delicate subject. I found your great-uncle to be a man of both judgement and discretion, and I am about to pay you the compliment of assuming that you share his personal qualities, as well as his professional principles. I must speak now, and with that understanding between us, of Miss Clairmont and my husband, much as I would wish to avoid so repugnant a matter. But having spent as much time in her company as I am told you have, I would have you know the truth. No doubt she has given you a most persuasive account of her own history, and has painted me as a monstrous and unfeeling wife, forgetful, now, even of what is due to my husband’s memory. Do not mistake me—I care not what she says of me, for my own reputation matters very little. But I do care what she says—or might publish—of Shelley. I know there have been allegations, more than once, that Miss Clairmont was his mistress, but I tell you, Mr Maddox, as I have told others before you, that it is all a wicked lie. My husband never had an improper connection with her, and I find it unbearably painful that he should still—after all these years—stand thus slandered. I cannot say for a certainty whence such accusations have sprung, but you have met my stepsister, and talked with her, and I am sure you will have perceived that vein of phantasy and mélodrame that is so peculiarly her own. I recognise it, because I too have struggled to see beyond the belligerent and often hysterical woman Miss Clairmont is now, to the timid and trusting girl she was when first we met. A girl who has been striving all her life for love, and never found it. I have ever tried to do my duty by her, but even when we were children together I often wondered if there were not some deficiency—some fatal lack that led her to ape me in all I did. All I had, she wanted. My clothes, the way I arranged my hair, even—and to my horror—my Shelley. I dreamed—after his declaration of love, after our decision to elope—of freedom and escape, and found to my dismay she was bound to me even more inextricably than before. I do not know, even now, how she persuaded him to take her with us—for we needed no interpreter, and wanted no companion. All I know is that I came down the stairs that summer dawn and found her there, her trunk packed, her cloak about her, and the strangest of strange expressions on her face, threatening to wake the whole house there and then if I did not agree to her coming.

  There followed the most wondrous six weeks I have ever experienced. The excitement of being away from England—of being with Shelley, and in love. Our first sight of the Alps, their icy summits darting white pinnacles into the clear blue sky. Not even our miserable lack of money could diminish my happiness, and yet even then I knew—at sixteen I knew—that it was not appropriate—not healthy—for her to pursue Shelley as she did. It was not right that she should challenge him to bathe with her naked in a pool by the open roadside. It was not fitting that she should ask to share our bed, even if there was indeed—as she claimed—an infestation of rats. When Shelley and I were alone, we two, all was well; when she was there, chaos and wretchedness were always the consequence. But Shelley was, from the first, utterly blameless in this. You may say that he was older—that he should have insisted she conduct herself more prudently—but you never knew him, Mr Maddox. You do not understand that in so many things he was still a child himself—he loved nothing better than to sail paper boats on the Serpentine, or roll billiard balls about on the carpet with our son William. Children were always his chosen playmates and confidants—indeed he used to say, every true follower of Plato must be a lover of children, for they are our masters and instructors in philosophy. He loved children, almost as much as he loathed oppression in any form, and thus it was that he once attempted to kidnap his sisters from their school, claiming they were being ill treated. And his attentiveness to Miss Clairmont sprang from that same purity of sentiment. She was always, in his eyes, that same child he first met at my father’s house. The same plump, vivacious, rather demanding child. Sadly in need of the love and attention her mother never gave her, and deserving, therefore, of all his kindness. Whatever she supposes now—whatever she designed then—his own mind was never sullied by it. My marriage, Mr Maddox, from first to last, was a thing of passion. A thing of love, that had no end but death. And when he set out, at the end, on that journey that was to snatch him forever from my arms, the last letter he wrote was not to her, but to me—to his ‘best and ever dearest Mary.’

  I seek not to needlessly blacken Miss Clairmont’s name in saying such things, nor raise my own character by cheapening hers. Nor would I attempt to gloss over my own failings as a wife—whatever invective she has cast upon me, I richly deserve. Indeed I cannot recall a single moment of the last months of my husband’s life without a feeling of revulsion. All I could think of that last terrible summer was how to get my son away from that barren and accursed place, and when I returned to Shelley’s papers to prepare my edition of his work, it shook me to my very soul. After so long an interval to read my love’s words again—it was as if I was compelled to taste every last drop of a fathomless well of bitter waters—to know the anguish he was in and to be forced to acknowledge that I myself had occasioned that pain by my rages, my coldness, my ceaseless demands. That, no doubt, is the story Miss Clairmont tells, but it is not the only truth of that terrible time. For no outsider, however closely placed, can know the real state of affairs between two people bound together in so near a tie. You are young, Mr Maddox, and are not yet prey to the past. I hope you are never compelled to discover that love—love given and received—can be the greatest agony, as well as the most terrible joy. Despite all we endured together—despite the loss, one by one, of three sweet children—Shelley remained, to the last, true only to me.

  It is all too often the fate of men of genius to run too far ahead of their own times, and Shelley was no exception. His ethereal soul was not suited to this rude cold world. If his head ever erred, his heart did not. I can fearlessly avow that his character would stand in finer and brighter light than that of any of his contemporaries. That is why I have striven so hard and so long to protect him, and to prevent the publication of any history of his life that I myself know to be false, and would succeed only in tainting his remembrance. Whatever you have read—whether penned by that mischief-maker Thomas Medwin, or by any other hand—no account has ever been given at all approaching reality in its details, as regards either himself or those of us who shared his life. I wished once to write such an account myself, but my father-in-law threatened to withdraw even that meagre allowance he condescended to make me, should such a volume ever appear. And now he is dead I am too old, and too ill, to take up my pen. All those years with Shelley, my idea of heaven was a life without Miss Clairmont—she haunted me then in the flesh, and she haunts me now, in absence, like a punishment divinely ordained for some dreadful sin I have committed all unknowing, and for which, even now, I am still atoning. For the one fear that darkens my last days is that the task which is now beyond my strength will be assumed, when I am gone, by her—she who will claim she knew him best, she who will usurp, in the eyes of the world, the position that I alone held in his heart. And so I beg you, with the humility of a widow, and the desperation of a woman who knows her days will be not long, to exercise with her whatever influence you may have. There will be others, no doubt, in the years to come, less intelligent and more unscrupulous than you, who will endeavour to obtain those papers she hoards for their own ends. By then, what power I still possess will be long consigned to dust. That same dust that already consumes my husband, and all but one of my own sweet babes. Better far that she should allow the dead to sleep in peace—and commit what still remains behind to silence and forgetting.

  M.W.S.

  Charles lowers the pages slowly, and stares out of the ’bus window. They are passing along Oxford Street, and a small crowd has gathered around a man with a dancing bear on a chain. The animal has a spiked collar about its neck, and two small girls are making it lift its feet by poking it in turns with pointed sticks as a gnarled old man plays a barrel-orga
n, and a boy with no shoes collects ha’pennies in a cap. As the ’bus draws level there is a moment when Charles stares directly into the animal’s hollow and lifeless eyes. And then they jolt forwards and Charles turns away, uncomfortably aware that some might say his own position is not so very different. Propelled first this way and then that, believing one woman, then the other, and convinced now that neither of them can be trusted.

  He has not even met Mary Shelley, and yet he knows she is lying. For there is one fact he possesses, that she cannot possibly suspect. It was not three sweet children the Shelleys lost, but four. But of the baby they adopted and abandoned in Naples there is no mention here. Elena, it seems, has long been consigned not just to dust, but to oblivion, and will find no place in any version of the poet’s life that either his wife or daughter-in-law will permit to appear. But if Charles questions Mary Shelley’s veracity, he does not for a moment question her intelligence. Claire may have talked in the language of chess, but this woman is a strategist worthy of the game. Hers is so polished, so adroit a performance he suspects it has been played many times before, and not least with all those other would-be biographers who have been so zealous over the years for the naked and unforgiving truth. All those other men whose intelligence has no doubt been flattered, and honour praised. For is not chess a game, in the end, of sacrifice? Of knowing how much to forfeit for a greater end? In divulging her son’s inept deception, Mary Shelley has told Charles only what he suspected long before; it was a pawn she surrendered, nothing more. There must be a far more important piece in play here, if he could but discover it.

  Charles sits back, thinking about deceit. He was once, as a little boy, an avid collector, not just of objects but of words—odd derivations, curious coinages, collective nouns. Names for groups of animals fascinated him especially, and he was always entranced to add a new one to the list in his little notebook. The more bizarre they were, the more he coveted them, whether ostentations of peacocks, murmurations of starlings, or murders (prophetic, this one) of crows. But one such name he could not fathom. He remembers, now, going one morning to his father in his study and asking why it should be a ‘deceit’ of lapwings? What had such pretty birds done to be so condemned? His father had taken off his spectacles with a sigh, and turned laboriously to the small boy tugging at his coat. It is an erroneous etymology, he explained, sternly instructive. The word was not originally deceit—it had become corrupted, over the centuries, from desert. But why, Charles persisted, excited to have claimed so much of his father’s attention, why that name? Because parent lapwings will abandon their nest to lead predators astray—protecting their young in the very act of appearing to forsake them. And is that not, thinks Charles now, exactly the ‘deceit’ Mary Shelley has just committed? Confronted by a potential enemy, she diverges in the opposite direction—away from whatever secret she is fiercely safeguarding, and into the impenetrable thickets of her past relationship with Claire. Only Charles has a hunch it is not her young Mary is protecting—not this time. Because why else would she insist that Charles reply through her maid? Whatever it is she is concealing now, it does not concern her son—indeed Percy must be completely ignorant of it, because otherwise there would have been no need for such a ploy. There is nothing in this letter, at least on the face of it, that necessitates that Charles reply at all, and yet she was so concerned that any response should be placed into her own hands alone that she sent the maid running after him to say so. Charles looks at the pages again. There is something here—something planted in plain sight like a snare in the grass. Something that if he knew her secret he might feel obliged to contradict, or contend. Like Claire, this woman fears what Charles might know; the question now is whether it is the same secret that both women share. Is there, in fact, some collusion of concealment between these two stepsisters? Could there be a pact of silence that endures even now, despite their bitter enmity, and all their years of dark distrust?

  As the ’bus bumps over the cobblestones towards Regent Street, Charles turns again to the letter, and reads it once more. Slowly, sentence by sentence, subjecting every phrase to a casuistical scrutiny. And it’s then, of course, that he notices it. Something that exposes a failing far closer to home than the secrets of the tangled Shelley past. For there, on the first page, Mary talks of his uncle’s records as lost. Charles hadn’t spotted it the first time, but now the word howls at him. How could this woman possibly know the papers are missing? Charles has been scrupulous never to say so—not to the Shelleys, and not to Claire. No, thinks Charles, his jaw setting in a grim line, he knows exactly how Mary Shelley came by this knowledge, and by the time he gets to Buckingham Street his mind is spilling with a blistering rage.

  “Billy,” he bellows, crashing the door open so hard it shudders on its hinges. “Get your sorry arse up here at once.”

  There is silence for a moment, then the boy appears slowly round the corner of the kitchen stairs.

  “Mr Charles?”

  But Charles already has him by the throat and against the wall.

  “How dare you, you treacherous little shit—how much did they pay you? A few shillings? After we took you in and gave you a job—”

  “Whatcher talking about?” stammers Billy, his face purple, “I ain’t done nuffin’—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” yells Charles, ramming him back hard, “I know what you did—you told them, didn’t you, about the pages missing from that book—it was you who threw it on the fire—they paid you to destroy it—they paid you to have it burned—”

  “What the ’ell would I know about some bloody book? I can’t even bloody read—”

  “You were there—that day I deciphered the words—you’d have known what it looked like—”

  “I don’t know what yer bloody talkin’ about,” wails the boy, “Yer ’urtin’ me!”

  But as Charles tightens his grip he feels a hand now on his own shoulder, shaking him, trying to pull him away.

  “It werenae the boy, Mr Charles. It werenae Billy.”

  It’s Stornaway, his eyes watery in his withered face.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Abel?”

  “It werenae the boy, Mr Charles, it were me. I’m right sorry for it. All I can say is I didnae know.”

  Charles reluctantly loosens his hold and the boy squirms away and out of arm’s reach. There’s a livid red mark on his neck, and he’s breathing with difficulty.

  “See—told yer—yer always accusin’ me and it ain’t never my fault—like the other day—”

  “I suggest you shut up, Billy,” says Charles quietly, still staring at the old man. “And I suggest you, Abel, tell me the truth.”

  “It were one of those days ye were away, Mr Charles. That gentleman called again—”

  “Sir Percy Shelley?”

  The old man swallows, then nods. “The one as left the card. He came ’ere lookin’ for ’ee and I said as ye were away. And then he said had ye had any luck wi’ findin’ the records and I—well—”

  “Yes?”

  Abel swallows again. “I told him what we found. That the pages were missin’. I’m sorry. I thought as ’e was yer client, ye wouldnae mind. I thought”—he shakes his head sadly—“as I might be helpin’.”

  Charles stares at him, shamed now, and remembering that he had told Abel nothing of his suspicions of the Shelleys—given him no instructions as to silence, and therefore can hardly blame him now. He takes a shaky breath—and a step in the old man’s direction. “What exactly did you tell him, Abel?”

  “Just that the pages in the ’16 file had been taken out a long time back. That we’d looked for ’em but couldnae find ’em anywhere.”

  “Nothing about the words I uncovered?”

  “No, Mr Charles. And I swear t’ye I didnae put the book on the fire. That were yer uncle, like as I told ’ee.”

  Charles nods. “Very well.” He turns to Billy. “I’m sure you have some task or other to do downstairs. See you get on w
ith it.”

  The boy leers a glance at him, then hobbles back down to the kitchen, rubbing his neck theatrically. Charles watches him go. Then he makes for the stairs, only to have Abel catch at his coat as he goes past.

  “It’s a’right, Mr Charles? I havenae done aught wrong?”

  Charles pauses a moment, then touches him lightly on the arm. “It’s all right, Abel. Now if you’ll forgive me I have work to do.”

  His pace quickens as he goes up the stairs, leaving the old man standing watching him, his face troubled, and pale.

  Charles’ heart is still beating rather too fast as he closes the attic door behind him and leans against it. Some remorse he has on Abel’s account, but as for Billy—Billy has got away with far more than he’s been punished for in this house, and Charles has no compunction in levelling up the scale, even if the boy didn’t happen to deserve his chastisement this time. He pulls off his coat and sits down heavily on the bed, the pages of Mary Shelley’s letter on the quilt in front of him. He reads it again, and then for a fourth time, but the real mystery hidden here still eludes him. As he folds it up and puts it back in his pocket he realises that in his fury at Billy he has hurt his injured hand, and goes over to the wash-stand to find a new dressing. Only the roll of bandage is not where he left it. He stands a moment looking round the attic, and it strikes him that should Maddox have thought to hide those missing pages in this room, he would have been spoiled for choice. He could have secreted them under the velvet lining in the box that displays Charles’ coins, or in the scabbard of the battered and jewel-less Persian scimitar. And there is, besides, a secret drawer only Charles knows of at the base of his case of chemical compounds. But of course the papers cannot actually be anywhere in this room—Maddox has not been up to this floor since Charles moved in, and if those pages do still exist they were removed and hidden long ago. Almost certainly before that tour of Italy whence Maddox returned, some months since, a changed and much older man. Charles wonders for the first time whether he should have asked Abel more about that trip—he knows hardly anything about it—either where they went, or why Maddox made such an enormous effort, at such an advanced age, to undertake his first and only venture beyond his native shores. For while it’s become clear to Charles that his great-uncle has been in a slow decline for far longer than anyone guessed, it’s equally clear that it was only after his return from Italy that he began to suffer the terrifying attacks of violence and madness that led Charles to move into the Buckingham Street house. A house he has now inhabited, incidentally, for several weeks without ever coming across any secret hiding-place—neither door inexplicably locked nor cupboard mysteriously sealed. The only part of the house, in fact, Charles has not treated as if it were his own has been the drawing-room, which is now more than ever his uncle’s personal province. Indeed, few of the other rooms were even being used before Charles moved in and hired Billy and the girl; as Maddox aged his territory retreated, and there are still bedchambers on the second floor that Molly has not yet wakened from their damp dust-sheeted slumber. Those rooms Charles knows Abel searched, but did he have the temerity to intrude upon his master’s private domain? And yet isn’t the drawing-room by far the most likely hiding-place?