Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  ‘It is exactly as Percy has explained, Madre,’ says Lady Shelley, turning now from the window. ‘We have been given an absolute and categorical assurance that no records of that dreadful winter remain. The pages in question are missing, and a thorough search of the house has produced nothing. Doubtless the old fellow destroyed them years ago and is in no state now to reveal what they contained.’

  The woman on the bed looks from her son to his wife, but does not speak, though perhaps her thin fingers grip a little tighter about the counterpane.

  ‘So you have nothing to fear,’ continues the younger woman, seeing the gesture, and mistaking, I suspect, what it means. She goes briskly to the bed and sits down beside it, then takes her mother-in-law’s hand in her own. ‘There will be no revelations about Harriet. Either about how she met her death, or all the sordid circumstances that attended it. We are safe; you are safe.’

  Mary Shelley looks at her, then past her to the portrait hanging on the wall. Sir Percy, meanwhile, seems distinctly uncomfortable, and fidgets uneasily with his pipe. His wife casts a glance of irritation in his direction, then turns again to her mother-in-law.

  ‘Dear Jane,’ the older woman says eventually, her voice thick as if she has not spoken in many days. ‘Always so concerned for me, always so energetic to protect my interests.’

  Lady Shelley smiles indulgently, and pats the hand that lies inert in her own.

  ‘And yet,’ Mrs Shelley continues, slowly but deliberately, as if each word were a burden to her, but must still be spoken, ‘I could wish you had thought to consult me before embarking on such an undertaking. I should have advised against revealing so much to anyone, or putting ourselves at the mercy of a man of that low sort.’

  ‘Well, I did say as much to Jane—’ begins Sir Percy.

  ‘And you know,’ his mother continues, cutting across him, ‘as well as I, that Claire cannot be trusted. It has always been dangerous to afford her so susceptible an audience as this young man must have been. I fear I can imagine only too easily what lies she will have told him of our childhood, and of Switzerland, and all that came after.’

  Jane Shelley opens her mouth to speak, but Mary forestalls her, shaking her head, but awkwardly, as though the movement gave her pain. ‘That, my dear Jane, I have endured before. My concern, now, is what else she may have said to this young man – what she may have shown him.’

  ‘I thought the Clairmont woman was in Bath that winter,’ says Lady Shelley, clearly nonplussed. ‘What could she possibly know about Harriet?’

  Mary Shelley takes her hand from her daughter-in-law’s grasp and places it momentarily against her forehead.

  ‘Are you unwell, Madre?’ says Lady Shelley, anxiously.

  ‘No, my dear,’ she says at last. ‘A momentary faintness, that is all. I am inured to it now.’

  She looks at the two of them, and when she speaks again, it seems that she has forgotten the train of the conversation. ‘Do you know – did your informant say – if any other records have been discovered in that house concerning Shelley – concerning myself?’

  The baronet and his wife exchange a glance. ‘I was not aware,’ Lady Shelley begins, ‘that you had had any other dealings with that Maddox fellow.’

  Mary Shelley flushes slightly. ‘“Dealings” is altogether too grand a word. It was – a minor matter relating to the time Shelley spent in Wales before he and I met.’

  Sir Percy frowns. ‘You mean that queer incident in Tremadoc in ’thirteen?’

  Her tone is light now, dismissive: ‘Nothing came of it. Indeed, I doubt so trivial a matter even merited the effort of its documentation. And, as you say, had any such papers come to light, no doubt you would have been told.’

  There is a knock then, and the butler appears. ‘Mr Charles Maddox is at the door, madam.’

  ‘Thank you, Emerson,’ says Lady Shelley, getting rather inelegantly to her feet. ‘You may show him up to the drawing room.’

  ‘What will you say to him?’ asks Mary Shelley, looking up at the younger woman’s sturdy form bending over her.

  ‘You do not need to worry yourself about that, Madre. We have no more use for that arrogant young upstart. I will listen to what he has to tell me, thank him for his efforts, and inform him that we have decided not to pursue the matter of Miss Clairmont’s papers after all. He has been more than amply paid for his time. Let that be an end to it.’

  ‘And you think,’ says Sir Percy, ‘he’ll let it go as pat as that?’

  She smiles complacently. ‘What other choice does he have? Come, Percy, let us leave dear Madre to rest.’

  The room is silent after they have gone, and the woman in the bed does not move. But it is not the immobility of repose. Her face is drawn with anxiety now, and the hand once again tugs at the counterpane. After a moment she turns, with some difficulty, to the small travelling-desk that has been placed carefully within reach on the bed, with a rigidity discernible now, on her left side, that calls to mind the stiffness Maddox also suffers. Her travelling-desk is smaller and more graceful than Claire’s trunk, but this rosewood box has clearly seen the same long years of journeying, the same restless moving from place to place. And as she lifts the lid we can see a large bundle of letters, tied with satin and neatly stacked, here and there a petal pressed between them. And next to them a copy of Keats's poems, so badly water-stained the title is barely legible, that they discovered in Shelley’s pocket when his rotten and half-eaten body was thrown back by the sea. Mary Shelley gazes a moment at the book, then reaches to the bundle of letters, and places it carefully on her lap. They are all, the letters, written in the same hand. All but one. And that lies folded at the bottom of the box, without ribbon, and without remembrance.

  She was, they tell us, famous for her reserve, so practised at concealing her emotions that even those closest to her condemned her freezing coldness, and perhaps that accounts for the oddly blank expression we see now on her face, as she reads the letter she has hidden from all the world. Or perhaps Leigh Hunt was right, and she was indeed ‘a torrent of fire under a Hecla snow’. All we can know for sure is that she reaches now for the bell-rope, and when the bright and freckle-faced maid arrives a few moments later she is dispatched downstairs for paper and ink.

  ‘And be sure, Alice, not to trouble Lady Shelley, or my son.’

  * * *

  Charles, meanwhile, has followed the butler up the stairs to the blue drawing room, where all is as it was before. The knick-knacks, the case of books, the candle still steadily burning. Charles goes over to the portrait again, struck, this time, by the choice of epigraph beneath it. No praise for the sublime Genius of the Poet, such as he would surely have expected Lady Shelley to select, but a reference that is at best ambivalent to envy and calumny and hate and pain, and an unrest that was at once a torture and delight, but can touch the Poet now no more. Was it, Charles wonders, his widow who chose these words?

  ‘Good morning, Mr Maddox.’

  It is Lady Shelley. Wearing – surely – the same plain grey dress. As well as a look of some self-satisfaction on her rather masculine face. She takes a seat, but does not motion him to do the same.

  ‘Well, what have you to say?’

  Treating him like any other hired hand is – of course – trivial in itself, but the discourtesy rankles and Charles finds himself replying with equal impoliteness: ‘What have you to say, Lady Shelley?’

  She is clearly not used to being spoken to in such a manner, and recoils in distaste. ‘I do not take your meaning.’

  ‘You omitted to tell me, when we met, that the person who was allegedly persecuting you is a lady—’

  ‘Hardly a lady, and hardly allegedly.’

  Charles ignores the interruption. ‘—and if not your relation, most certainly your husband’s.’

  She stiffens. ‘There is absolutely no blood between them. She is no relation of his, or of Madre’s.’

  ‘I believe most reasonable people would take my
side of that particular question, Lady Shelley. But we shall let that go by, for the moment. Whatever the truth of it, Miss Clairmont has clearly been very poorly treated – by Lord Byron, by Mrs Shelley, and by Shelley himself, while he lived.’

  There are deep spots of colour now, on her cheeks, and a look of mocking scorn on her face. ‘Oh, I see – I see it all now. You have been taken in, just like everyone else. The woman should have been on the stage, so artfully does she play herself. Claire the martyr, Claire the poor put-upon, Claire the brave innocent betrayed by the world. And I thought you an intelligent man.’

  Charles bridles. ‘I am not so easily deceived, Lady Shelley.’

  ‘Ha!’ She snorts. ‘You are a man, are you not? And therefore as much prey to her devious wiles as every other sorry member of your sex.’

  Such a disdainful dismissal of the entire gender does not augur well for the serenity of the Shelley marriage, but Charles had guessed that much already, even before Claire’s waspish observations.

  Lady Shelley draws herself up in her chair. ‘That woman loves nothing better than to cast herself as a forlorn victim, abandoned and deceived. You are a fool if you believe a single word that falls from her lips. You know nothing of her – nothing whatsoever.’

  ‘I am a good judge of character, Lady Shelley.’

  ‘If you believe that, you will be even more pathetically vulnerable to her ploys. Let me see,’ she says, folding her hands firmly on her lap. ‘I am guessing, of course, but I imagine that, despite your obvious enthusiasm for your new acquaintance, you have already been taken unawares, on more than one occasion, by an unexpected, not to say capricious, change of mind.’

  ‘Well, that’s hardly—’

  ‘Moreover, I surmise that there has been at least one instance when you have found yourself – rather to your surprise – giving her comfort of a physical, not to say intimate nature. Can you contradict me?’

  Charles’s cheeks now are the ones to burn. He turns away, ill at ease.

  Lady Shelley, meanwhile, smiles a thin, superior little smile. ‘I last saw Miss Clairmont more than a year ago at our place in Sussex. Her niece had been staying with us – at her request, I may say – and had become engaged during that visit to a very presentable young man. It was quite the whirlwind romance – they had each been disappointed in love, and found a natural, not to say touching, comfort in one another. All was going along very nicely until the morning Miss Clairmont was expected, when poor Madre burst into my room gasping, “Don’t go, dear – don’t leave me alone with her. She has been the bane of my life since I was two years old.” I had been preparing at that moment to go up to town, expressly to avoid any danger of encountering that woman, but seeing Madre so distressed there was no longer any question of my departure. And it is just as well I stayed, for Miss Clairmont took violently against the engagement from the first moment she heard of it – she had not been in the house half an hour when her poor niece came rushing up to my room, and flung herself sobbing at my feet, crying, “Save me! Save me from my aunt – she is kneeling on the floor of the drawing room cursing me!” I was not going to permit that sort of behaviour in my house, so I locked dear Madre in her room at once for her own safety, and went down to Miss Clairmont myself. I found her, I am sorry to say, in a state of complete frenzy – sobbing and shrieking and throwing off the most horrid accusations against us all, accusing her niece of ingratitude, and Madre and myself of inducing her niece to treat her parents like the dirt under her feet. And various other vile things not fit to be repeated. I decided there and then that I had no choice but to say – and in Miss Clairmont’s hearing – that I was sending for the doctor to administer a drug to her. That worked the trick, may I tell you. She became quieter at once and ordered the carriage that very minute. We have never – any of us – seen her again, though I am told she does not scruple to abuse us behind our backs, even if she can no longer do so to our faces.’

  She slips a sideways glance at Charles, who is still turned away.

  ‘It is merely one example,’ she continues, ‘albeit an extreme one, of what my Lord Byron used to refer to as her “Bedlam behaviour”. We have all seen it, over the years. The Clairmont blood brings nothing but misery, and that woman is a curse and a plague to all about her. And as much of a charlatan, may I say, as that mother of hers. Who was, I can tell you for a fact, not even married to her father, whoever he was.’

  But this last is one step too far. Charles swings round to her, his face furious. ‘Have you heard the old saying, Lady Shelley, about those who live in glasshouses and how inadvisable it is for such persons to start casting stones?’

  She is not triumphant now: the rage he sees in her eyes is more than a match for his own. Had the door not opened at that moment there is no telling what either might have said. Sir Percy glances from one to the other, and sees that his wife’s solid bosom is heaving with indignation. ‘Thought I ought to look in. I could hear the rumpus from the morning room. Jane?’

  ‘It seems,’ Lady Shelley says with difficulty, ‘that Mr Maddox is tempted to believe the lies and fabrications,’ this with a venomous glare at Charles, ‘of Miss Clairmont. He seems, indeed, ready to credit that we are the persecutors in all this – we and our dear Madre.’

  Sir Percy takes a step or two further into the room. ‘Have to say, Maddox, that that would be most unwise. Tricky customer, that one. Could lead you a long way down a very wrong road. Very wrong road.’

  ‘Tell him,’ urges Lady Shelley grimly. ‘Tell him about your sister. Tell him what happened to Clara.’

  Sir Percy shakes his head. ‘Not sure we really want – I mean, private family business and all that.’

  ‘Tell him, Percy.’

  He takes his pipe from his waistcoat pocket. As much to have something to do as anything else, it seems, for he makes no attempt to light it. ‘Back in ’eighteen when the mater and pater were on the Continent, this Clairmont woman took it into her head there was some problem with that child of hers. Some gossip she’d been told about Byron claiming he was going to make her his mistress when she was old enough. Complete rot, clearly, his own daughter and so forth, but the Clairmont woman worked herself into a state of first-class hysterics and left the pater no choice but to go trooping off with her halfway across Italy. Seems his lordship agreed to let her see the child, but only if the pater and mater were in attendance. Only trouble was, pater had omitted to mention he’d left the mater back in Bagni di Lucca. Filthy hot summer, five-day journey, baby sick and small boy in tow – dreadful prospect for a woman alone. Got there eventually to find the pater completely taken up with the Clairmont woman and her brat. Baby, meanwhile, was getting no better and local quack worse than useless. Mater eventually insisted they take it to a reputable fellow in Venice, but by the time they got there, doctor couldn’t be found, despite Pater’s best efforts. Fits, dysentery. Quite hopeless. Died at the inn, in Mater’s arms.’

  Silence descends. Sir Percy’s clipped monotonous delivery only heightens the utter horror that must have overwhelmed Mary Shelley that long last day, with no help at hand for hours ahead. Charles knows now, and only too well, what betrayal it was that poisoned the Shelley marriage, and why Mary blamed her husband for her baby’s death. And not just her husband but her step-sister, whom she must have seen as equally culpable, equally selfish. Charles promised he would be Claire’s champion – would do all in his power to assist her with these people – but he has never disliked or distrusted her more than he does at this moment.

  He takes a deep breath. If it is to be done, ’twere best it were done quickly. ‘I will be brief, Sir Percy. I imagine we would both prefer that this matter is concluded as swiftly as possible.’

  He sees Lady Shelley bristle at the ‘both’ that so pointedly excludes her, but she says nothing.

  ‘During the time I was resident at St John’s Wood I was able to ascertain that Miss Clairmont does, as you suspected, possess a considerable quantity of Shelley p
apers. But, given her relation to your mother, that can hardly come as any great surprise.’

  Sir Percy’s flush deepens, and he swallows uneasily. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It might have been helpful, when I was last here, if you had seen fit to inform me who exactly she is. But no matter. The facts are these. Miss Clairmont discovered me one night examining those papers, and accused me at once of being in your employ. There followed what I suppose you might term a frank exchange of views, but by the end of it we had come to an understanding.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘She asked me to tell you that she is willing to sell the papers.’ Which is, of course, strictly true, as far as it goes, but given the rather sanctimonious statements he has just made, he’s taking at best a rather oblique position here as regards the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  Sir Percy turns away, so that Charles can no longer see his face, ‘All of ’em?’

  ‘Everything she has,’ replies Charles. ‘She says she wishes to be free of the past.’

  Sir Percy nods. His back is inexpressive.

  ‘But there was one condition. She asked me to negotiate with you on her behalf.’

  Sir Percy’s head lifts. ‘And you agreed?’

  ‘I did.’

  Lady Shelley lumbers to her feet. ‘I think we have heard all we need to hear. We will consider Miss Clairmont’s proposal, and inform you in due course of our decision. In the meantime I expect you to return whatever monies advanced to you that have not yet been spent, less an appropriate fee for the time expended. Good day to you.’

  It is with an obscure intuition of defeat that Charles follows the butler back down the stairs. Double agency has always been a dangerous game, and he has the distinct impression the Shelleys have been playing with a completely different end in view, and one they seem – he is not sure how – to have achieved. It’s a conviction that lasts halfway across the square, and it’s only when he reaches Eccleston Street and pauses to cross the road that he realizes he’s being followed. By a girl. Her hand clasped to her head to keep her cap in place, and her apron billowing about her in the wind as she runs towards him calling his name.