Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

He shakes his head, still staring down the street. ‘None. It is incomprehensible. That woman is not my sister.’

  ‘I do not take your meaning.’

  Shelley turns back to face him. ‘Miss Eliza Westbrook was present in the house at the time. But she is my sister-in-law, not my sister. And besides,’ he screws up his mouth in disgust, ‘I cannot imagine any man wishing to ravish her. I could scarce bear to see her caress my daughter without a sensation of revulsion. As for submitting to such a caress myself—’ He turns away again, and leans one hand against the window, tearing his thumbnail with his teeth.

  ‘I believe,’ continues Maddox, ‘that there was a subsequent attack, the selfsame night? Were you again alone?’

  Shelley flashes him a look. ‘You may judge of the effect of the first attack on a house full of females. Miss Westbrook had a fit of the hysterics, and one of the maids refused to stay another moment in the building. It was past one before I judged it safe to send the rest of them back to bed. I sat up alone thereafter with a servant – a man I knew to be loyal. He had been with us in Lynmouth, and only very lately joined us again in Wales.’

  Indeed, thinks Maddox. The same servant, surely, who suffered a six-months prison sentence rather than betray his hot-headed master. How very interesting. ‘Pray go on,’ he says aloud.

  ‘Somewhere near four o’clock I sent this man to ascertain the time, and the villain chose that very moment to strike again. I saw him standing at the window and rushed upon him. I fired and he returned my shot – my gun did not go off, but his bullet passed so close it burned through my nightshirt. By the time the servant heard the noise and came to my assistance he had gone.’

  ‘So the servant did not see his face?’

  Shelley flushes. ‘I believe it was the glimpse of a moment only. He had no fixed impression thereafter.’

  ‘And your own impression? Was that fixed?’

  He hesitates. ‘I did attempt a sketch of his face . . .’

  ‘May I see it?’

  Shelley looks at him a moment, then goes to the desk and sifts about in the clutter for a few minutes before dragging a sheet from under a pile of journals. One book falls open as he does so, revealing a page written crossways and lengthways in spiky, illegible scrawl, a rough sketch of a small rowing boat among trees, and a pair of large and slanting eyes. Seeing Maddox’s gaze upon the drawings, Shelley shuts the book with a snap and hands him a single sheet of paper.

  Had Maddox seen this drawing without knowing its origins he might have thought it a child’s imagining of a make-believe monster. The body strangely swollen and elongated, the single arm stick-like, the face a mask of grinning Hallowe’en horror. ‘Your assailant wore a disguise?’

  Shelley frowns. ‘No. Why should you think so? That is how he appeared.’

  Maddox places the paper carefully on the table. ‘Describe him to me.’

  ‘Is that really necessary?’

  ‘Miss Godwin wishes for my assistance; I can provide that only if I have yours.’

  Shelley heaves a theatrical sigh. ‘Very well. If I must. The night was dark and my thoughts, understandably, confused, but he appeared to be taller than the common, his hair dark, and his stature slender. That is all.’

  Much like to you, indeed, thinks Maddox, wondering suddenly what the servant really saw. And what really lay behind that picture, so perplexing and so strange. ‘Let me be clear, then,’ he says. ‘In the course of the night your assailant fired upon you twice, while you shot your own guns three times, but succeeded in discharging a bullet on only one of those occasions. I might say, at this juncture, that should you require advice on the proper handling and keeping of a pistol I would recommend you consult Fraser here. You are clearly a novice in such matters; he is a crack shot – better even, may I say, than myself.’

  He sees Shelley open his mouth to speak, then close it again. Fraser, for his part, is trying – not very hard it must be said – to suppress a smile.

  ‘And the weather,’ continues Maddox. ‘Was the night clear?’

  Shelley shakes his head. ‘It rained in torrents, and the wind howled like a dæmon.’

  Another pause.

  ‘It would appear,’ says Maddox, finally, ‘that the conclusion I drew from my first conversation with Miss Godwin remains the most likely explanation. This attack was personal in nature, and sprang not from your activities at Tremadoc, nor your neighbours’ resentment of them, however well justified, but from some other cause, of much longer date.’

  Shelley frowns. ‘Upon what do you base such an absurd and ludicrous thesis?’

  Maddox smiles. ‘It is not so very absurd, Mr Shelley, and a moment’s calm reflection on your part will suffice to prove it. For this was not the first such incident to befall you, was it? Had there not been a remarkably similar episode some months before, in a completely different part of the country? Even if Miss Godwin does not appear to be aware of the fact.’

  ‘How dare you—’ the young man begins, but there is a noise then behind them and Maddox turns to see that there is another person now in the room, who has entered silently from the farther door. It is a girl. Dark-haired, blue-dressed, softly rounded. Her skin is ashen but Maddox can see at a glance that it is not her customary complexion. And were that not evidence enough, her eyes are rimmed with red, and there are marks of tears still on her cheeks. So this, thinks Maddox, is Mary Godwin’s step-sister.

  ‘Claire!’ says Shelley, going quickly to her. ‘Did I not tell you to go to bed?’

  She hangs her head and the tears come again. ‘I cannot sleep – it comes upon me every time when I close my eyes – the horror – Oh, Shelley!’

  She bursts now into shuddering sobs and the young man puts his arms about her, pulling her to his breast and kissing her hair.

  Maddox gets to his feet; something about the way Shelley is touching the girl strikes an unsettling note. He is holding her as one would hold a child, but she has the full figure of an alluring young woman: even were he a single man Shelley should not have his hands about her body so, and she should not be permitting it.

  ‘May I be of assistance?’ Maddox asks, taking a pace towards them and expecting Shelley to release her. Only he does not.

  ‘There is no need,’ says Shelley, stiffly, his arms even closer about the girl, and his head resting on hers. ‘Miss Clairmont was dismayed last night by a bad dream. We sat up late into the dark talking of magic, and I may – I confess – have indulged myself a little overmuch in my conjuring of the witching time of night. Miss Clairmont is very susceptible to such things.’

  So why then, thinks Maddox, did you persist? And where, in all this, was Miss Godwin?

  ‘I ran upstairs to bed,’ says the girl, half to herself. ‘I placed the candle on the chest and stood looking at the pillow that lay in the middle of the bed – I turned to the window and then back again to the bed. The pillow had gone – it was on the chair. I kept thinking – how could this be? Was it possible I had placed it there myself and not remembered? I came running downstairs again.’

  She twists her face up to Shelley, the tears still falling. ‘You came out of your room and described my expression in the most horrible way – but I did not feel what you thought I did – and then you looked at me – as if you knew your power over me – and then you said Mary was with child and I – I—’

  ‘Hush, my dear,’ says Shelley, hastily. ‘Or this gentleman will gain a very odd impression of how Shelley manages his affairs.’ His tone is deliberately light but Maddox sees his arms tighten about the girl. ‘After all, did we not find that skittish pillow exactly where you left it this morning?’ He lifts her chin to his and slips into the sing-song voice one might use with a baby: ‘Naughty Mr Pillow, you shall go no more a-roving.’

  She smiles through her tears, and Shelley tips his finger on her nose. Maddox, meanwhile, has noted that he is speaking of himself now in the third person, and wonders if it is an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to absolve him
self from the consequences of his own acts. How could any man, far less one of Shelley’s intelligence, really be ignorant of what he has done to this young woman who is supposedly under his protection? Sitting up alone with her in the dark, with the quiet tingling in their ears, whispering strange supernatural stories until he has worked her to such a pitch of breathless terror that she rushes for comfort to his embrace? Only to tell her at that very moment that another woman is carrying his child? In lone and silent hours, when night made a weird sound of its own stillness, to have so mixed awful talk and asking looks until strange tears united with breathless kisses. Not my words, those, but Shelley’s own, from a poem he will begin almost exactly twelve months from now. Maddox cannot, of course, know this, but it has not escaped his notice that Shelley did not merely instigate this dangerous game, but took every opportunity thereafter to intensify it. Ever drawing her to the brink, ever pulling away. What perverse purpose – or pleasure – could drive a man to such cruelty?

  Maddox has been in this man’s presence less than half an hour, but he cannot recall anyone who has disquieted him so much in so short a period; he’s questioned cut-throats in Newgate who have troubled him less. There is a movement now at the front door, and he looks across to see Mary Godwin undoing the latch and bending to pick up the coffee pot from the floor where she has momentarily placed it. There is ample time for Shelley to release Claire Clairmont before the two of them are seen, but he does not do so. If anything he holds her yet closer, and when Miss Godwin comes bustling into the room, Maddox sees the younger girl’s face turn towards her, and a look he cannot fathom pass between them. As for Mary, it appears the sight of the others lover-like gives her no pause, though there is the flicker of a frown as she places the coffee on the table, when she believes herself unobserved.

  ‘Is Claire still in that horrid mood?’ she asks briskly. ‘I do not wonder the silly miss has frighted herself, sitting up till the early hours gorging on ghost stories.’

  Maddox notes her tone – notes how she, too, reduces Claire Clairmont to the status of mere child. This girl who is more voluptuously womanly than many twice her age – or, for that matter, her own step-sister. Is Mary Godwin deceiving herself, or is this her way of defusing what Maddox can see only as an emotional tinderbox, vulnerable to the tiniest spark? However unappealing he may have found the landlady of this place, he feels a modicum of sympathy for her now: if this is how these people comport themselves before strangers, he cannot begin to imagine what goes on behind closed doors. If he were Mrs Butcher, with the reputation of her house to consider, he would have them gone before nightfall.

  ‘Now, will you take coffee?’ says Mary Godwin, turning brightly to Maddox, who gets promptly to his feet and takes up his hat.

  ‘I fear I must away. I have a meeting with another client.’

  ‘But you will take the case?’ she says, coming towards him and gripping his arm. ‘You will help us?’

  He was intending to write to her that very afternoon disdaining all further involvement, but now, looking down into her pale and anxious face, he finds himself saying yes, knowing even as he does so, that it is a mistake, and he will surely regret it. But how much, and how bitterly, he cannot possibly foresee. And as she stands there, so close he can hear her breathing, her hand warm upon his arm, he lifts his head and sees that the two of them are being watched. By Shelley and – now – by the other girl, who has turned within the circle of Shelley’s arms to gaze at Maddox. A gaze of such unbearable dark brilliance that, for the first time in all his years of interrogation and investigation, he is the first to look away. And so it is that he does not see the girl turn again to Shelley and her lips part in a wordless gasp – does not see his answering nod, or the change in the young man’s eyes as he looks once more towards Maddox, his face burning now with a strange and feverish exultation.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Cloud

  Two months pass. Months of lashing hail and skies that dissolve in rain, running the pavements so wet they might be strips of fallen sky. Ample time, then, for Fraser to travel to Tremadoc, and return with a report on what he discovered there. Ample time, too, for Maddox to investigate the murder of an old washerwoman, found in her own kitchen with her skull broken, and all for the sake of a few bundles of washing. Thomas Sharpe’s father came to Maddox three days after his son’s arrest, grey-faced and shaking, with all the money he possessed wrapped in a cloth, but the evidence was too strong, and his son’s past record too incriminating, to hope for anything but the worst. Despite belligerent protestations of innocence almost to the last, they brought Sharpe to the gallows subdued and terrified, and he died, as the Newgate Calendar recorded, ‘with the name of God in his mouth’. Brutal, but all too banal in the context of the contemporary justice system, and worth mentioning now only because the killing took place less than a mile from Shelley’s lodgings in Church Terrace, but each time Maddox has called there on his way back to the Strand there has been no answer, and by the first week in November the rooms are empty, and Mrs Butcher furiously out of pocket.

  ‘The bailiffs must have come a dozen times this last fortnight,’ she grumbles, ‘and each time he contrived not to be here, and she comes to the door looking like butter wouldn’t melt and claiming not to know where he’s skulking. Though he’d come creeping back ’ere quick as a cat on ‘eat every Sunday, the minute he knew they couldn’t touch him. Wish I’d laid hands on him meself while I still could – I don’t have a prohibition as to working of a Sunday, even if the gaffmen do.’

  Maddox could only express his sympathy, and congratulate himself privately that he had taken Sir Henry’s advice and required monies in advance before sending Fraser to Wales. Which makes it unlikely that he has seen the last of the Church Terrace party, even if Mrs Butcher will be lucky to set eyes on any one of them again. And he is right: on the evening of 7th December the maid comes knocking at the drawing-room door to say there is a Miss Godwin wishing to see him.

  ‘I told her as you was eating, sir, and never usually sees anyone at this time of night but she said as she was sorry to disturb you but would you be seeing her if you have a minute.’

  Maddox puts down his knife and fork, wondering (not for the first time) if he should invest in a book of grammar for the staff below stairs. But how likely is it that any of them would read it? He smiles to himself, remembering how Samuel Richardson’s impossibly perfect Sir Charles Grandison provided a ‘Servants Library’ at his ancestral seat, with a case of books divided into divinity, housewifery and ‘innocent amusement’. In fact he’s still smiling when the maid shows in Miss Godwin, who pauses on the threshold, wondering at such a reception.

  ‘Something has amused you?’

  Maddox waves his hand. ‘I was thinking, hard as it may be to credit it, of Sir Charles Grandison.’

  ‘Indeed?’ she says, raising an eyebrow. ‘Hardly a novel – or novelist – to afford much by way of humour. Though I did find the “Names of the Principal Persons” affixed at the beginning extremely comical. Unintentionally so, of course.’

  Maddox laughs. ‘I take it you refer to the sub-division into “Men, Women and Italians”? I have never visited the country in question, but I cannot believe it populated by an alien species wholly unconnected with our own.’

  It is her turn to smile. ‘Nor have I, but I am sure you are right. The French are certainly recognizably human. Indeed, rather too much so.’

  He gestures to a seat by the fire and notices she takes it with some relief; her pregnancy now is much more pronounced. The light from the flames throws a warm glow over her face, but he can see that she is thinner than she was, and there are dark shadows under her eyes. ‘I believe you have had rather a trying time of late,’ he says, pouring her a glass of wine and handing it to her.

  She glances at him and then down at her glass. Her lips are trembling. ‘It has been – dreadful. We have still not discovered how Shelley’s creditors contrived to learn our address.
For near a month we could meet only for a few snatched hours each week, and for all the remainder I was walled up in those dingy lodgings, with no creature coming near me from one day to the next. I have been shunned, Mr Maddox, by those who called themselves my friends – by those who commended my mother’s principles and yet now condemn me for living by them. The only letters I receive are letters of rebuke.’

  Her eyes fill with tears and she looks away. Maddox rises from his seat in silence and refills his glass.

  ‘And now,’ she continues, her voice breaking, ‘she has had a son, and he is all jubilation, sending out to all and sundry, announcing the birth of an heir by his wife. A wife who wallows in comfort at her parents’ house while I am forced to make my own clothes, and go without eating two days in five. That woman absolutely refused to give Shelley money, even when he told her we had sold all we had and were very nearly perished with hunger.’

  Her bitterness is as raw as an open wound, and Maddox is impelled to pity her – impelled because from every other point of view he utterly condemns what they have done, and all the more so now he knows the wife Shelley abandoned was with child. And what forsaken wife this side of sainthood would readily offer money to support the woman who had supplanted her?

  ‘You were not wholly alone, though?’ he says, after a pause. ‘I gather Miss Clairmont is still with you?’

  Her fingers tighten on the glass. ‘There has been talk of her returning to Skinner Street, but she refuses to go. Even though it is quite clearly the best thing for her – as well as—’ She stops, aware perhaps that she is slipping into dangerous territory. ‘Claire continues to suffer from nightmares,’ she finishes sullenly. ‘It is inconsiderate of her to disturb my sleep so. In my condition.’

  ‘Then perhaps,’ says Maddox, cautiously, ‘you might consider remonstrating with Mr Shelley. He seemed to me to be taking a somewhat perverse delight in provoking such nocturnal disturbances—’