A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  That, in short, was to be my undertaking.

  I had already, as I have related, forsworn any further contact with a man I considered to be both a felon and a blackguard, and I had no intention of becoming embroiled once again in circumstances that could only lead, I knew, to further misery and regret. I rejoined at once, therefore, that this was not at all my customary class of investigation, and I would seek out another man in my line of work who would be better placed to assist them; whereupon Mrs Godwin began to talk in the most graphic terms of her step-daughter’s distress at the dreadful possibility of abandonment by a man into whose protection she had so recklessly thrown herself.

  “And there’s her little William to consider,” she said, taking out her handkerchief. “Such a darling little boy, not nine months old, and the brightest, most sweet-natured, trusting wee creature. If only you could see him, Mr Maddox, I am sure you would relent.”

  And so—with the greatest misgivings—I did.

  Mr Godwin then spoke for the first time, supplying me with various practical details, and giving me thus the distinct impression that the less seemly facts were far beneath his lofty notice, and that he left such unpleasantness for his wife to manage. His daughter and Mrs Godwin’s were both, he said, at that moment resident in Bath, while Shelley had been seen in London more than once, in consequence he believed of a charge undertaken on behalf of the Lord Byron, to deliver a manuscript to his publishers which His Lordship had entrusted to Shelley in Switzerland. It was possible, he continued, that Shelley had visited his wife in the course of one of these expeditions, but Godwin was unaware whether Mrs Shelley was still residing at her father’s house.

  Mrs Godwin became most voluble at this point, venturing the loud opinion that Harriet Shelley was not, in fact, a ‘lady.’ She was a tavern-keeper’s daughter, who was no match for the son of a baronet for all her fancy ways, and she had, moreover and as everyone knew, tricked him into that marriage out of pity, and that anyone with the slightest knowledge of the affair knew for a fact that he had never loved Harriet nor she him. Godwin became understandably uneasy at this uncouth outburst, but while carefully qualifying the coarser aspects of his wife’s assertions, claimed he could only, in truth, confirm that Mrs Shelley was a very foolish, if a very beautiful girl, and he himself had witnessed her on more than one occasion making unconsidered statements on subjects about which she evidently knew next to nothing.

  “I cannot deny,” he continued, shaking his long bony head, “that my daughter Mary is by far the more apt helpmeet for a man of such undoubted abilities, despite the unfortunate, not to say untoward manner in which the connection between them came about. The partner of such a man should be one of a philosophical and intellectual cast of mind; Mrs Shelley, self-evidently, is neither.”

  Miss Fanny became somewhat distraite upon hearing Mrs Shelley spoken of in such terms. She began to weep rather piteously, insisting that Harriet was a sweet girl—that she spoke very nicely, and dressed very neatly, and never had an unkind word for anyone. That the only harm she had done Shelley was to have loved him, and to have been too young and innocent to know what such a love could mean. I wondered at that, at the time—wondered at what a girl like her could know of love, and at the flush on her cheeks as she spoke the poet’s name. It was the intuition of a moment only, but I ask myself now what might have been prevented, had I acted upon it. But how could I, a stranger unknown to her, offer the comfort and counsel that is a mother’s part? The lady that Fate had decreed should play that maternal role seemed entirely unaware of what I had perceived, retorting only, and rather unkindly, that “Harriet always could wrap poor silly Fanny round her little finger”; an observation that served only to distress the girl the more. Mrs Godwin then pursed her lips together and announced that it would be better if Fanny retired to her own chamber, before leading her smartly from the room, as if for all the world she were a child of eight, not a young woman of some two and twenty years. I, meanwhile, had seen enough. I made ready at once to depart, saying I would as requested do whatever was in my power to ascertain the current whereabouts of the absent Mrs Shelley.

  Godwin had given me an address in Marchmont-street, and I arranged at once to have the premises observed against Shelley’s return. I had seen him, several times, with my own eyes, but the description I gave to the man I set to watch clearly had the air, to him, of the most ludicrous caricature. But when the same man returned some days later he told me he had indeed seen one who matched exactly the person I described: his hair wild, his eyes hectic, his back stooped; flushed and giggling like a girl, and clad in a rag-bag of untidy clothes that would have looked more fitting on a boy of twelve. My man had followed the poet to a chop-house where he met with a group of friends, but Shelley supped only on pieces of bread dipped in a bowl of milk, along with what appeared to be a pocketful of baker’s currants, many of which he proceeded to propel surreptitiously at other unsuspecting customers. At one moment during the repast one of his companions must have made some remark that aroused his interest, for my man described how all at once Shelley threw his hands in the air, shrieked aloud, and cast himself violently back in his chair. The latter then over-toppled under his weight, leaving the poet prostrate on the floor, where he lay shouting and stamping his feet for some minutes, until his hapless friends made it their business to right him.

  I had wondered, when first I met Shelley, if there might be a history of lunacy in the family; indeed I had advised once before that William Lawrence be consulted—that Shelley was clearly in need of the expert medical attendance that a practitioner such as he could offer—but I met with no success. And when I raised the subject with the Godwins I encountered only suspicion and denial. I am no expert in such matters I confess, but I have, albeit rarely, seen instances of such behaviour in others and I have never known it lead to a wholesome or a healthful life. I acknowledge that many such individuals exercise a peculiar and enduring charm—that many can appear, for large tracts of time, to be no different, in all important respects, from the mass of their fellow men, but this is only the most painful and treacherous illusion. Such people are always, in the end, a bane and a curse to those about them. The fact that they themselves cannot perceive it renders the damage they do only the more deadly.

  But to return to the business. My man followed Shelley back to his lodgings, but he ventured nowhere farther, either to his wife or elsewhere, and took the coach from London the next morning.

  In the course of the succeeding week I had enquiries made as to the whereabouts of Mrs Shelley. It appeared, at first, that she was indeed still resident at her father’s house in Chapel-street, but living there in a state of the most retired seclusion and never seen abroad, though the nursemaid was often to be observed out walking with the two children. But in the days that followed we discovered that she had, in fact, departed the Westbrook house some weeks before, and no-one knew of her present whereabouts. It was then, and most unexpectedly, that I received my second summons to Skinner-street. A summons written in alarm and sent in agitation, and one occasioned not, this time, by selfishness and greed, but by what would prove to be only the first of a sequence of unspeakable catastrophes.

  In this case, if not in the other, I do not accuse myself. I do not know what more I could have done, beyond advocating that kindness and care as seemed to have been so sadly wanting, but I doubt my words would have been heeded. Long experience has taught me that my fellow beings are never blinder than to the consequences of their own conduct, and never more obdurate than in accepting the need for a change therein.

  The facts, in short, were these. That very morning, after several days of deep melancholy—a melancholy only deepened, it appeared, by letters received from Bath—Fanny Imlay had disappeared from the house. I found the whole establishment in uproar—maids dispatched hither and thither in ineffectual enquiries, and the youngest Godwin child, a rather fearful-looking boy of some thirteen years, crying aloud for his sister and traili
ng about the house, unregarded, it seemed, by anyone in it. Godwin himself I found hunched over his writing-desk, taciturn and morose. As well he might be. What does it say of any father, that all three of the young women consigned to his care had now gone to such extraordinary lengths to escape from it? Though the blame, in my opinion, should not be his alone. I shudder to imagine the life Fanny led in that household, under Godwin’s careless tutelage and his wife’s bad-tempered demands. Five children there had been living there, and none of them sharing the same two parents; Fanny, poor girl, the only one with neither mother nor father present, and the one most in need of the support and affection only a true parent can give.

  If Godwin had become more silent in the face of such a calamity, his wife appeared even more strident, if such a thing were possible. Poor silly Fanny, she repeated incessantly, was always falling into fits of dejection at the slightest provocation.

  “You mark my words, William,” she said to her husband. “It will just be another attempt to put herself forward and have people notice her. That girl never did know how to conduct herself properly—but what do you expect with an adventurer like Imlay for a father. And an American into the bargain. It will all be just another billow in a ladle, just you see. I’ll wager even now she is thinking better of it and is on her way home with her tail between her legs. And she’ll have a piece of my mind when she gets here, make no mistake about that!”

  This vulgar tirade seemed at length to rouse the philosopher from his broodings, and he reminded his wife, with a certain terseness, that she might have done better to keep the secret of Fanny’s parentage from her, or at the very least informed her of it in a rather more delicate manner. I was forced to conclude from this that even if the circumstances of the young woman’s birth were widely known outside the family, Fanny herself had not known until recently of her own illegitimacy. I could see how sorely this might have affected her, and began to feel a degree of concern far in excess of what Mrs Godwin clearly believed either necessary or appropriate. And this concern was only augmented when Godwin took me aside to inform me that Fanny had, only a few days previously, been sadly disappointed in a long-held ambition to join her mother’s maiden sisters at their school in Dublin, and assume a career there as a teacher. Mrs Godwin then interjected loudly that that was all Mary’s fault not Fanny’s, and how could you blame them. However reluctant I was to find myself in agreement with Mrs Godwin on any point of note, I had to concur that it was in all likelihood the public scandal occasioned by Mary Godwin’s elopement that had caused the ladies in question to decide against offering such a position to a young woman living in the same household, albeit their own niece. But the fact that Fanny was in no way to blame for this change in her prospects cannot have afforded her much consolation in the loss of them, left without any possibility of making a life for herself independent of her family. Godwin begged me then for my counsel, and I gave it as my opinion that in the absence of other likely friends or relations, there seemed only two places that the unhappy young woman might have fled: to her half sister and stepsister in Bath, or to the aforementioned aunts in Dublin, and I thought it likely that Dublin would be her preference of the two. My advice, therefore, was that I should send one of my most trusted men to Bath, but I would go myself to Swansea, that being by far her likeliest port of departure for Ireland. I wrote out a description of Miss Imlay, and asked Mrs Godwin to ascertain the likely contents of her travelling-case. How much more grave my concerns became when that lady returned downstairs to report that Fanny had taken with her only a small reticule, and the clothes she was wearing.

  “And that watch that Mary bought for her in Swisserland,” she said. “Make sure to mention that, Mr Maddox. Expensive, that was.”

  Not two hours later I had boarded the coach bound for Swansea, taking with me George Fraser, having chosen him for the task above my other assistants, given his previous acquaintance with the two young women then in Bath. It was a slow and miserable journey, the weather wet, and the horses over their fetlocks in mud. Having deposited Fraser at his destination, I arrived eventually at my own late in the afternoon of 9 October. A hard wind was blowing off the sea, and I wanted nothing more than a hot bath and an honest dinner, but disdaining both I made at once for the house of an acquaintance, a man in the employ of the port authorities. I have known and trusted him a dozen years or more, and many a time has he furnished me with vital information as to the arrivals and departures on the Irish packets. I have lost the reckoning of the criminals who have been thus apprehended, and the stolen property restored thereby. But this time, alas, we were both of us doomed to a terrible failure. There had been but one crossing that day, the wind being so foul, and there had been no young lady answering Miss Imlay’s description aboard. Having extracted a promise for vigilance and dispatch I repaired to a small ill-favoured inn, where I ordered such a repast as the sour and slatterny landlady could offer, and retired as soon as I might to my bed, exhausted, dispirited, and uneasy.

  I did not know, then, that Godwin had received a letter from Fanny that very day, a letter that talked so wildly of a departure from which she hoped never to return that it had him starting immediately after her. I did not know—and it will haunt me to my dying day—that scarcely an hour after I had left the noisy and stinking taproom at the Mackworth Arms there came a knock at the outer door and an enquiry, in low and trembling tones, whether there might be a room available for a respectable lady travelling unaccompanied. A small room only was required, and for that night alone. She would be gone, the young woman said, by morning.

  I wonder now, with pain, how she spent those last hours. How many times did she put the bottle of laudanum to her lips before she had the courage to take the fatal dose? How sadly did her thoughts return to the mother she barely knew, who had tried, she too, to put an end to a life that had become to her unbearable? I wonder likewise, if any circumstance might have prevented it. A kind word unlooked-for; a knock of concern at the door; a letter in a much-loved hand. But no help came. By the time a thin sun was rising over the bleak iron sea, I awoke to commotion and alarm in the corridor outside. I arose in a terrified haste, my heart misgiving me, and a terrible certainty weighing upon my heart like lead.

  The maid it was who found her. The maid who needed only one glance at the young woman on the bed to know that something was dreadfully amiss. She was lying, fully clothed, above the counterpane, in one hand her sister’s last gift, and in the other a single sheet of crumpled paper. I know all this, because I saw it. Before the doctor came, and the constable, and the idly and offensively curious, I thrust the maid from the room and slammed the door behind her. Then I went to the bedside and placed my hand against the pale forehead, and saw with a heart that faltered that on her eyelashes there still lingered tears. And then I took the paper from her cold and rigid fingers and read the words she had left for us to find.

  I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as

  Fanny Imlay

  My duty—my professional duty—was clear. This note must remain, and the constable must see it. But I had a higher duty, or so I thought then. Not to her family, who I feared would be only too ready to commence their forgetting, but to the young woman herself. I knew what scandal and gossip would be whipped up by the very mention of her name, and what vile speculation would dog her to her grave, if it were bruited abroad that one connected so closely with the Godwin family had died here by her own hand, desolate and alone. Hearing footsteps on the stair I knew I had no time, and I made a decision I have never since regretted, not for one moment: I took the letter and tore the name away, then stepped quickly to the hearth and consigned the scrap of paper to
the fire.

  It was little enough, by way of a service, and not as decisive as I had hoped, for I discovered later that she had her mother’s initials sewn into her stays, and I fear that the pryings of a callous posterity will uncover the secret I was striving then so desperately to keep. But for then, and I hope for some little time yet, it was enough—enough to keep her poor wounded name from the speculations of the newspapers, and cast the kindness of concealment about her last hours. And even if I had failed Fanny living, I had the power to protect her dead. Swansea is a small town, and word of such an untoward incident promulgates only too quickly, but I was relentless. No effort was spared, no payment unmade. By nightfall on the third day I had ensured that the inquest verdict was given merely as an unexplained death. There would be none of those references to insanity or self-destruction as would have seen her corpse treated with indignity and disrespect.

  My tasks of that first day completed, and a letter sent to Godwin to inform him, in the sparest terms, of his step-daughter’s fate, I was sitting down at last to a cold and unsavoury dinner when the inn door flung open and I saw to my horror a face I recognised. He looked as ghastly as a man half dead, his face white, his coat stained with mud, and his cheeks blotched, as I now noted, with tears.

  Shelley.

  He was beginning to stammer some incoherent words to the terrified landlady when he cast his eyes towards me and started backwards as if in terror. “Maddox!” he cried, his voice failing. “You come upon me like an Orestes—have I escaped the clutches of the relentless villain who pursues my every step, only to find myself trapped once more, and beyond all expectation, in your stern and pitiless glare?”