I looked at him, scarce crediting his words. ‘How did you discover this?’ I demanded. ‘You know as well as I that I conducted the most thorough and comprehensive investigation as to the whereabouts of Mrs Shelley, and no such information ever came to my hearing. She may have called herself Smith, but she did so merely in an attempt to conceal her real name – and no doubt to protect you from scandal, much thanks she seems now to have merited thereby.’
She it was who stepped forward then, and what I heard in her voice froze my soul. ‘My father was given these facts by a man who had been in your service. He said you had sought to suppress it, but that we deserved to know the truth. The whole abhorrent truth.’
‘Todd?’ I said, hardly believing the evidence of my own senses. ‘Jacob Todd came to you with this?’
‘He said, likewise, that it was common knowledge that she had drowned herself the day she left Hans-place – that the corpse was so badly decomposed that it could not possibly have been in the water but a few days.’
‘That, Miss Godwin, I can refute from my own experience, for I saw the body with my own eyes. Indeed, I spoke to Mrs Shelley myself a full month after the date to which you refer. The same night, in fact, that she penned her last letter – her last letter, sir,’ this to Shelley, who had the good grace to hang his head, ‘to you.
‘I do not doubt,’ I continued, ‘that were I to enquire more closely into the rest of Todd’s assertions I should find them no more reliable than the first. What evidence has he given you for the existence of this Smith, this Irishman, this captain in the Indian Army?’
They glanced at one another then, and I saw fear pass between their eyes.
‘I see,’ I said, nodding. ‘It is as I expected. The man has obtained money from you – or the promise of it – by relaying information which is at best unsubstantiated gossip, and at worst slanderous lies. And you have all believed him because this was what you wished to believe. For a philosopher, Mr Godwin, you show a scant regard indeed for the truth.’
My blow hit home, I could see that at once. And having the advantage, I pressed it. ‘As for you, sir,’ I said, turning again to Shelley and seeing the look of terror in his eyes. I knew what he had done and I should never have connived in the concealment of it. But it was too late now. What evidence I had once had was lost, and they would all of them deny it. All that remained to me was to make his own fear his punishment, and that I did, and without remorse. ‘You, sir, bear the greatest blame in this sad affair. As you have in others, no less iniquitous. Was it not enough to have abandoned her in the first instance, on the point of bringing an infant of yours into this world, but you had to compound that cruelty by getting her once again with child? A child begotten in dishonour and the most shameful secrecy?’
‘No – no!’ cried Miss Godwin, starting forward.
‘Was it not enough, Mr Shelley,’ I continued, unyielding, ‘to have abused her thus in person, but that you should harangue her by letter into the bargain, and harass her to a dreadful and untimely death?’
Shelley gaped at me, stammered some unintelligible words, then turned and staggered to the wall, one hand at his side, panting and retching.
‘How dare you accuse Shelley so abominably?’ Miss Godwin exclaimed. ‘That woman was always harping on suicide, long before they were even married. It was a – a monomania with her. You may ask anyone – they all heard her talk of it. She tried to kill herself more than once when she was still at school, and spoke of self-murder perfectly serenely even before complete strangers.’
‘Did it not occur to you,’ I replied, endeavouring to keep my temper, ‘that such talk was nothing but a sign of profound self-doubt? A doubt her husband, if anyone—’
‘No,’ she countered obdurately. ‘If it was a sign of anything it was of a mental weakness – a fatal insufficiency that was always going to lead to the same dire end. Indeed, beyond the mere shock of such an event having befallen a being once so nearly connected with Shelley, there is little to regret. Sooner or later she was bound to put an end to a life that was a torment to her, and which rendered her, let us be frank, nothing but a burden to all those unfortunate enough to be associated with her.’
It was my turn, now, for silence; my turn to realize that I had been acting on assumptions based on a wholly inadequate understanding, and drawing conclusions from evidence that was not only partial, but treacherous.
‘Did you enjoy, Miss Godwin,’ I began slowly, ‘your stay in Bath? You must have had a good deal to see, a good deal to write of in your correspondence—’
It was her turn, now, to flush. Her chin lifted and I saw defiance in her eyes. Defiance, and something else too, that I dared not define, dared not probe. Something that recalled to me, suddenly, and with a cold rush of sickness, what her father had said of her utter implacability in any matter upon which she had set her heart – her all but invincibility whenever something she coveted was at stake.
And as I sit here now, I remember that look of hers, and I cast my mind back to everything that passed between us, and I wonder. I wonder for the first time, if what I was told is true, or if I have been all these months deceived. I think of him, most especially, and I wonder if I have made the direst and most appalling mistake—
CHAPTER NINE
The Past
Charles puts the pages down. Slowly, as if the revelations contained in them have rendered the very paper unstable. He knows, now, why Maddox might have wanted this to lie buried all these changeful years; it is not just that he blamed himself, in part, for Harriet’s death. His judgement, his rectitude, his character are all cast into question by this account. That he should have removed evidence, concealed the identities of not one but two suicides, and suborned two inquests – even a professional reputation such as he enjoyed would have been shaken by such a disclosure. And Charles knows, too, the real reason why the Shelleys were so desperate to discover whether his uncle had kept any records of the Godwin case; why they have always been so insistent that the only version of Shelley’s past should be their own. There are facts here, ghastly whispers here, that would change everything, were they known; revelations with the power to shatter in pieces the image they have so carefully constructed of the ethereal and otherworldly poet, and his devoted and brilliant wife. For Harriet’s death was no simple suicide, even if no court in the land could ever have convicted her killer, and only ghosts may take revenge for it. She might have taken the final fatal step herself, but she was driven to it, pregnant by the man who had already once abandoned her, and hounded by bitter and vindictive letters from the woman who had taken her place. A woman who knew her weakness and ruthlessly exploited it, even if ‘no blow was struck, no poison administered, no weapon ever wielded’. It was not Shelley Maddox had accused of killing Harriet – not Shelley he thought had a midwinter heart, but his wife. Charles thinks back to the letter Mary Shelley wrote to him and remembers, with a lurch much like the one his uncle described, how she had dismissed a rival as prey to ‘some deficiency – some fatal lack’. Only it was Claire she had spoken of then, not Harriet. Is this, he thinks, how that woman orders and controls her world – by labelling anyone who dares oppose her as mentally deranged?
From the start, this case has duped him, an endlessly receding hall of mirrors in which nothing can be believed, and no deduction trusted. But now, at last, he knows. Or rather he knows what it is he does not know. The puzzle has always had a piece missing, but he sees now the shape of that space – he understands, finally, what he is looking for. It is all here, threaded through his uncle’s words, and Charles understands at last, why not one but two sets of pages have been cut from Maddox’s files, and why the other missing section has still not yet been found. Because Maddox did not meet Shelley in 1816, as Charles has always assumed and the two women led him to believe, but in 1814, when he undertook that still-mysterious ‘matter of Tremadoc’. Whatever it was, it left Maddox with such a loathing of Shelley he could scarcely speak his name
, and in possession of a secret that the women, even now, are terrified he might reveal. A secret that, if Charles pursues it, will surely damage the dead as much as it might injure the living. Something even Sir Percy does not guess at, for why else would his mother seek to shield him from it? Perhaps Charles was wrong and, like the deceitful lapwing, Mary Shelley is protecting her offspring after all.
Charles’s own lamp has burned low now, and the glowering clouds are darkening the December day before its time. The door edges open and Thunder pads in purposefully. A scatter of snowflakes is melting slowly on his prickled fur. Charles watches the cat leap gracefully onto the bed and pace about for a few moments before selecting a place on the pillow and folding himself neatly into a curl of black fur, tucking in his tail and closing his eyes. Charles gets up and stretches, and goes to ring the bell. He has no carriage at his disposal, and no team of men at his command, but all he needs, for the moment at least, is Abel Stornaway. Though as he puts his hand to the bell-rope it occurs to him that it might be kinder to go down the two flights of stairs, rather than expect the old man to heave his weary body up to the attic.
Abel looks up as Charles enters the drawing room and takes a seat by his great-uncle’s chair. Maddox is, as so often these days, suspended between sleep and waking, his eyelids fluttering at unseen dreams, but is it Charles’s imagination, or is his face less taut, his mouth less drawn? He touches Maddox’s hand and feels the fingers move in response, and turns, a question in his eyes, to Abel.
‘Aye,’ says the old man. ‘Ah’ve seen it me’sen. He seems a little closer these last few days. We may yet have him back, Mr Charles, we may yet.’
‘I read those papers,’ says Charles. ‘I need to talk to George Fraser.’
Abel nods slowly. ‘Do you want me to come wi’ ye?’
‘No,’ says Charles. ‘That won’t be necessary. Just write his address down for me. I’ll go first thing in the morning.’
‘I should leave it till Thursday, Mr Charles. If I were ye.’
‘What in Heaven’s name are you talking about, Abel?’
‘Have ye taken no account of the date, Mr Charles? Tomorrow is the twenty-fift’.’
Charles opens his mouth to reply, then stops short with a smile. ‘Why, so it is. Not that it makes—’
But he’s interrupted then by the sound of knocking at the street door. A sharp knocking, not heavy but rapid and repeated.
Charles looks at Abel but the old man shrugs his ignorance, so he gets up and goes out onto the landing. Downstairs, at the door, he can see Billy talking to a woman – a woman with a shawl pulled up under her eyes in the swirling snow. Claire, is Charles’s first thought – a thought edged with guilt; but no, the shape is too slight, the clothes too poor. And then he hears words rising towards him and knows at once who it is.
‘Look will yer just go and ask ’im?’ she’s saying, her voice hoarse with the cold. ‘’Cause I ain’t about to take no for an answer from a pafetic little whippersnapper like you.’
‘Now look ’ere,’ Billy begins, but Charles is already at the step and pushing him aside. ‘Nancy,’ he says. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
She looks at him as if unsure where to start but then a gust of wind pulls the shawl from her fingers and in the moment before she jerks it back up again he sees the vicious black bruise that swells half her face, a bruise with ugly sharp edges and a line of blood where something has slit the skin.
‘What in God’s name happened to you?’
‘Arnie – that’s what ’appened to me. ’Ad one too many and took ’is belt to me. As per bleedin’ usual. But this time it weren’t just me – this time ’e raised ’is ’and to Betsy. ’E ain’t ever done that before and ’e won’t ever get the bleedin’ chance to do it again. I told ’im – not if I’ve got anythin’ to do wiv it.’
As she turns and hoists the child to her hip Charles realizes she has been there all along, clinging hidden among her mother’s skirts. Her thin little face is almost translucent with cold.
‘I packed me bag and left,’ Nancy continues. ‘Just like that. Only I don’t ’ave nowhere to go. Walked about for a coupla hours and then I thought o’ you. It’d only be for a few days – promise. And Betsy won’t be no trouble – she’s quiet and—’
Charles reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder, feeling the trembling tension in her thin frame, and understanding now, if not before, just how desperate she is. And how determined not to let him see it. To ask, yes, but not to plead.
‘Like I said, it’d only be a few days—’
‘You’re welcome to stay, Nancy. I’m sure you’ll want a place of your own as soon as you can find one. But there’s room here until you do.’
Billy turns to Charles, his eyes round with alarm. ‘Surely you’re not – I mean – the likes of ’er—’
Charles does not look at him. ‘It seems Miss Dyer has a more just appreciation of the way this house is run than you do, Billy. I’m the one who makes the decisions here. So will you please take her and the little girl down to the kitchen and ask Molly to put some milk on the stove to warm, and make up a spare bed in her room.’
The look of raw, gasping relief on Nancy’s face now is too painful to see, and he covers his own embarrassment by refusing to meet her eyes and turning instead to Billy. ‘And when you’ve done that, you can go up to the butcher’s on the Strand and fetch a goose, assuming he has any left at this late hour. And call at Nattali & Bond in Bedford Street and see if they have the book I requested.’
It’ll be a cold and heavy task, up the hill and with the pavements icy, but Billy could do with the chastening.
When the three of them have gone downstairs he closes the door and starts back up to where Abel has all this time been watching.
‘That were a generous thing you did then, Mr Charles. Not sure as what the boss wouldae said, in yer place, but it took a kind heart to do it, and that’s a fact.’
‘Well, if Billy should be proved right and we wake to find the house ransacked and all our valuables gone, I shall blame you,’ replies Charles.
‘Me?’ says the old man, his eyes widening.
Charles smiles. ‘It was you who reminded me what day it is. How could I turn a mother and child away on Christmas Eve?’
By noon the following morning the house is redolent with roasting goose, the dining room has been opened for the first time since Charles came to live here, and when he goes down to the kitchen he finds Nancy hard at work shining the silver. She’s wearing the same sober blue dress she wore to St John’s Wood, and he wonders if both the clothes and the polishing are designed to remind him how useful she can be. But, to be fair, it’s probably the only dress she has that’s fit to be seen in a household like this one. He does have a moment’s anxiety, seeing her with his uncle’s best canteen laid out on the table before her, but her smile first disarms and then shames him.
‘Found all this moulderin’ away in that great coffin of a sideboard upstairs.’ She grins, taking up the polishing cloth. ‘Looked as if it could do with an outin’. Why ’ave such nice stuff and never use it?’
Seeing Molly’s eyes flicker warily upon her now Charles has a quick pang of remorse. In all the flurry of the last few hours he has not thought to tell her why Nancy is suddenly in the house; the girl may well be thinking she’s about to be discharged. She certainly looks flustered, her gestures clumsy, and her dark skin beaded with sweat as she wrestles the goose in its dish. Nancy, by contrast, is moving about the kitchen as if she’s lived there half her life, and Charles can easily see why Molly might think she is harbouring her successor, not only in her kitchen, but in her room. He backs off to the door, telling himself she’s too busy now – that he’ll find a moment, later, to explain.
Up in the office he unpacks the parcel Billy collected from the bookseller: The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Thomas Medwin. In two volumes. London, 1847. Charles is impatient, now, to press forward with the case, but hardl
y expects to find very much truth in this no doubt superficial and sycophantic account by the poet’s own cousin. But he couldn’t be more wrong. Not that the usefulness of these books has anything to do with the quality of the writing. There are whole tracts that do not mention Shelley at all, as well as great slabs of copy that have been unashamedly lifted from a series of articles in the New Monthly Magazine, written by a ‘Mr Hogg’, a name Charles certainly does not recognize. But bad as it is as a piece of literature, the memoir turns out to be rather better as a piece of evidence, for no biography Charles has ever read has painted such a perplexing, not to say unsettling, picture of its subject. So much so, in fact, that he soon starts to wonder if it’s deliberate – if there isn’t something else Medwin is trying to tell him under cover of all these disquieting details. Something Mrs Shelley, perhaps, persuaded him to omit. She, after all, wanted this memoir suppressed altogether, and she’s quoted here in the preface as insisting that it is not the time to tell the truth of her husband’s errors of action. And Medwin is not alone, it seems, in raising profound questions about Shelley’s life, and then refusing point-blank to provide any answers: the extracts from Hogg, too, query whether Shelley ever felt the need for ‘repentance’, yet offer no explanation why such repentance might have been necessary, or what the poet had done to require it. What is it, thinks Charles, that everyone who knew Shelley seems so zealous to hide, or to excuse?
If he had a more modern vocabulary at his disposal Charles would be thinking now of manic depression, or bipolar disorder, and who can say, at this distance of time, if that diagnosis might not have more than a grain of truth in it? Anyone reading a biography of Shelley now will be hard put not to conclude that he suffered from some sort of personality disorder – the symptoms are all there: awkward and erratic in social situations, compulsively obsessed with repetitive patterns and daily routines, and subject to fits of uncontrollable violence when faced with the slightest opposition or constraint; one moment narcissistic, the next morbidly disgusted by his own bodily functions. I am, of course, talking in terms Charles would never have used, but it is striking how consistently Shelley’s friends and associates described these aspects of his character, even if they lack all the nuances of modern psychiatric terminology. ‘Mad Shelley’, they called him at Eton, where he once impaled a fellow pupil’s hand to a desk with a fork. There was a demon in him, they said, a demon that hounded and pursued him, down the nights and down the days, through all the labyrinthine ways of his own tortured mind. A good part of this Charles is able to glean even from Medwin’s highly inaccurate account, but what he also discovers, rather to his surprise, is some fellow feeling for this strange, tortured child with his ungainly stooping stance and excruciating high-pitched voice. Taken for a youth of seventeen when he was at least ten years older, as gauche and untidy as a boy half his age, and fixated to a degree any modern reader will find disquieting with the company of very young girls (two of whom he tried, once, to purchase, though this Medwin either does not know or chooses not to say). One of these qualities Charles, of course, shares, having an equal disdain for the state of his own wardrobe, and he cannot but be impressed by the brilliance of this young man’s intellect, by the range and depth of his scientific interests – from the phenomenon of combustion, to the uses of chemistry, the powers of electricity, and the latent mysteries of nature. Charles calls himself a scientist – takes pride in such a term – but his room does not, even now, boast an electrical machine, an air-pump, and a solar microscope, as Shelley’s did when he was just eighteen, though even at that age Charles would never have used such apparatus so recklessly he left everything in the room burned or stained, or been so careless with his chemicals that he swallowed arsenic by mistake.
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