‘And then we found her lying senseless one morning in her bedroom. There was so much panic and confusion it is hard to remember clearly, but it seemed to me she must have been standing on a chair by the bookshelves, and fallen from there onto the marble floor. Though why she should have done such a thing – any one of us would have fetched her down a book had she asked for it. I thought, even then, that was almost as if she had wished it on herself.’
She gazes down onto the busy street. ‘The house was so remote we could not get the doctor for hours. Had Shelley not been there, and acted so decisively, I think she would have died. But the effort – all that time at her side – took a most terrible toll. A few nights later we were all woken by the most terrifying screaming. We found him in Mary’s room, staggering about in a half-trance, babbling wildly that he had seen a figure standing over the bed with its hands about her throat. And when the stranger lifted his mantle to show himself, Shelley saw his own face staring back at him in the darkness.’
Charles starts, remembering that he has read a version of this same incident in Medwin’s memoir. Only he did not know then what he knows now. It had appeared, then, to be merely one more example of a whole sequence of paranoid delusions stretching back to Shelley’s boyhood, but now there may be a meaning in this apparent madness. Did Shelley wish to free himself so desperately from his wife that his sleeping self dreamed of killing her? And surely it is no coincidence that he acted out that phantasy in echo of the murder she had accused him of, all those years before? That by repeating the past it might be exorcized, even if it could never, ever be redeemed?
Claire sighs, her words breaking into his thoughts. ‘It was all so strange, that time at Lerici. Everything seemed unnaturally vivid, unnaturally intense – it was as if the rules of the common world no longer held sway. Only a few days previously one of our friends saw Shelley passing twice by her window even though we all knew him to be miles away at the time. And then, that night in Mary’s room, Shelley told me that while I was away in Florence he had seen a man coming towards him one morning on the terrace—’
Charles frowns. ‘Did he still believe he was being persecuted by some nameless pursuer – even so many years later and so far away?’
‘You do not understand. The man he saw on the terrace was his own mirror image. And when Shelley challenged him the man just laughed and demanded to know how much longer he meant to be content.’
Charles can scarcely imagine the state of mind that must have generated such a horrifying vision, and for the first time he begins to feel some small sympathy for this man. It was not only the marriage Shelley made that haunted him. What was it he had done, all those years before, that he was still torturing himself so?
‘After that he began to withdraw from me. He would no longer talk of the life we had imagined together, and spent long hours alone, on the boat or walking on the shore. I did not know, then, that he had tried to obtain prussic acid. Enough for a lethal dose.’
‘Do you think he meant to kill himself?’
‘I think he had begun to feel he would never be free of her in any other way – that it was the only means by which he would find rest.’
She leans her cheek against the cold windowpane and Charles can see the tears rolling again down her face. ‘I believe now that he went out on that boat looking for death, and that he embraced it when it came. When he left us he was in such brilliant spirits – exhilarated with the sea, and the bright sky, and the prospect of the journey. They told us, later, the day he set out to return, that he must have known the Don Juan was over-rigged as the storm came on – that they could have run for safety to harbour, but they did not. The captain of another boat risked his own crew to bring his vessel alongside and take them on board, but he heard Shelley crying, “No, no!” And when the man called to them that they must take in sail or perish, he saw Shelley seize his companion’s arm to prevent him. They were none of them seen alive again.’
There is silence in the room, a silence broken only by a sudden noise from the street – the laughter of children playing in the snow.
Claire hangs her head, and Charles puts his hand gently to her shoulder, imagining what it must have been like to wait, day after day, in that isolated house, in that terrible weather, desperate for news, watching for every sail. Only to find more than a week later that the mutilated bodies had been flung ashore, identifiable only by what clothes they wore, and what little they carried.
A moment later she has moved away from him, and is gathering her shawl and her reticule. ‘I came here thinking that you still intended to help me; I did not expect you to force me to live again through every dark hour I have ever known.’
‘What will you do?’ asks Charles, as she moves towards the door. ‘Do you still intend to publish your memoir?’
‘I do not know. I need time to think. To consider what you have told me, and to decide.’
She holds his gaze a moment longer, then opens the door and sweeps out onto the landing and down the stairs to the hall. Where she barely escapes a collision with Billy, who is racing up the steps, frantic and breathless, but Charles’s reprimand dies when he sees the boy’s face. He is white to the roots of his hair, all his usual cockiness gone.
‘Mr Charles – you have to come. We need to send for the doctor – we don’t know how long she’s been down there—’
‘What in God’s name are you talking about, Billy?’
‘It’s Molly, Mr Charles – she’s just lyin’ there moanin’, not movin’—’
Charles does not stay to hear the rest. Pushing Billy out of the way he careers down the stairs to the basement kitchen where Nancy is kneeling with Molly’s head cradled in her lap, and there is a thick dark stain spreading slowly across the dull stone floor.
‘I was at the market,’ cries Nancy at once, as if afraid he will accuse her. ‘She looked pale when I left but she seemed all right, a bit distracted but I had no idea – she didn’t seem in pain—’
Charles rushes to Nancy’s side, and it’s only now, as the two of them start to loosen Molly’s skirts, that he realizes where the blood is coming from. And it is a realization by which everything is changed. Not just for today, but always, and for ever.
Nancy looks up at him and sees the horror on his face. ‘But you said you knew – that day I started to tell yer, you said you knew—’
‘I didn’t – I swear I didn’t know.’
Nancy’s eyes narrow, and there is a hardness in her face now. ‘How could yer – how could yer bloody well not know?’
‘What must I do?’ he says desperately, even though he is the one with medical training, she no more than a girl, no more than a common whore.
‘Send the boy for the doctor. At once.’
Charles looks up. It is Claire, standing in the doorway, Billy hovering ghost-faced behind her. ‘You must tell him,’ she says, turning to the boy, ‘that the girl has lost a lot of blood, and is insensible.’
‘Right you are,’ says Billy, clearly relieved to be told what to do – and to be gone.
‘Go to Boswell – he’s nearest,’ cries Charles, as the boy disappears up the stairs, ‘and there’s another man in Maiden Lane.’
‘We must do what we can to stanch the bleeding,’ says Claire, coming quickly towards them, taking off her shawl and hat, ‘and try to revive her. Do you have salts?’
‘No,’ stammers Charles, ‘but there is brandy in the cupboard.’
‘Then that will have to do. And if there is a hip bath, we will need it. And ice – whatever ice you have.’
Nancy runs for the brandy and Charles drags the old tin bath from the scullery to the kitchen, but when he gently lifts Molly into it there is a sudden gush down her legs and she moans softly in his arms. Her skin is clammy to the touch, and the bath now an inch deep in blood and fluid, and something else that Charles does not allow himself to see.
‘Pack the ice about her,’ says Claire, folding up her sleeves and tying an apron
about her waist.
‘Are you sure?’ begins Nancy, the pewter bowl clutched tight to her breast. ‘She seems so cold already. She’s tremblin’ so.’
‘I have seen it done before – we cannot afford to waver – it may even now be too late.’
Nancy hesitates, then up-ends the bowl and drops the chunks of cloudy grey ice into the bath.
‘Is this all you have?’ says Claire, anxiously, looking first at Charles and then at Nancy.
‘Well, we don’t go in much for fancy cookin’ ’ere – we never buys much.’
‘We must hope it is enough,’ says Claire, seizing the brandy flask. ‘And hope likewise that the doctor is not long delayed.’
She tips the flask against Molly’s lips and a few moments later the girl moans again and opens her eyes. But vital as it is to rouse her, it seems now a cruelty to have done so, for she wakes only to terror, and to pain. Claire tries to soothe her, telling her that the doctor is coming, that she has no need to be frightened, but instinct is stronger than words and the girl begins to struggle, pushing Claire’s hands away and uttering tiny wailing noises like an animal ensnared. And when she lifts her eyes to Charles and he sees that her greatest fear is not for her own life but the one she is losing, his own eyes sting with tears and he cannot face her.
‘Tell me what I can do,’ he pleads, grasping Claire by the hand. ‘There must be something I can do.’
‘Are you sure there is no more ice?’ she says, looking down where the bath is already running in thin slush.
‘Snow,’ says Charles, getting to his feet. ‘I can bring snow.’
For the next hour Charles toils tirelessly up and down the stairs to the street, filling bucket after bucket, which they heap about Molly’s shaking terrified body, watching – hoping – that this time the white will creep slower red, this time the dark pulse will slow its flow. But though the girl grows weaker, and her struggles subside, nothing seems to stem the bleeding, and each time Charles takes her wrist in his hand the beat is always feebler, the heart fainter. Then, at last, when they have almost lost hope, the doctor comes – toiling ponderously down the stairs with Billy at his heels – and Nancy runs to him with tears of exhausted relief. And even as she watches him make his long, long examination, and even though she must be able to see his features falling slowly into a grim resignation, still she clings to Claire as if all is resolved, as if all can now be made right.
But it is not so.
The doctor eventually straightens up and takes a cloth to wipe his hands. Then he comes to Charles where he is standing shivering by the stove, his shirt soaked, his trousers splashed to the knees with mud and snow.
‘You, I take it, are the father?’
Charles has been fighting the word – resisting the reality of it – the unendurable remorse.
‘Yes,’ he says in the end, his voice rasping. ‘I am the father.’
‘I will not prevaricate with you, sir. It is clear enough that this is not your wife, but what you do in your own household, and with your own servants, is not my affair. The young woman has suffered what we in the medical profession call a graviditas extrauterina. The foetus has commenced its development, not in the womb, but elsewhere, perhaps in the tuba fallopiana, and in consequence—’
‘I know,’ interrupts Charles, his mind rigid like a river under ice. ‘I know what that means.’
‘Indeed? Well, in that case you will know, likewise, that once the patient has suffered a haemorrhage of the kind we are witnessing here, there is nothing a practitioner such as myself can do. Had it been a normal miscarriage, what you have done might have saved her, but in this case it will avail her nothing. The bleeding emanates from an internal rupture, which I can do nothing to treat. All I can recommend is that you have her cleaned up and put to bed. In my experience,’ he says, glancing round and dropping his voice still further, ‘that will be easier for the women to bear. At the end.’
Charles nods, his throat too raw for words, and watches as the man goes back up the stairs. Then he turns back and makes his way slowly to where the two women are standing. And it is only then, as he kneels by the bath and reaches out to touch Molly’s dazed despairing face, that he realizes he has blood on his hands.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ianthe
It is February. A drear grey day of misted rain and slumped dispirited trees. Spiders’ webs bag like galleon sails on the brown and brittle hedgerows and the air is dead of song. We are on the old road from the capital to Oxford, watching as the London stagecoach labours through the churning mud towards the escarpment on which we stand. It is one of the last stops on the journey and one of the highest points in the Chiltern hills, so it’s no surprise to see the coachman stop at the foot of the slope and ask whatever able-bodied passengers he has to walk up and spare the horses. One by one they emerge into the dank air from the crowded and ill-smelling carriage. A man in clerical weeds, small metal spectacles perched upon his nose and a limp white stock about his neck; a sturdy lawyer in a frock coat, hampered by a parcel of slippery briefs escaping from their string; and a young woman, travelling, it appears, alone. But as she comes slowly towards us we can see she is not, in fact, unaccompanied; there, under her shawl, an infant is folded to her heart, and every now and again she stops to cast a tender glance down at the child in its fitful slumbers, its small fist gripped tight against her dress. And now, finally, one last passenger emerges. It is no infirmity that has slowed his appearance; indeed, he seems nimbler than any of them, and weighed down hardly at all. Not by any great physical burden at least, though as he strides towards us, his blue eyes fixed on the ground before his feet, it would appear he has burdens of another kind. It would appear, too, that there is something about the young woman that unsettles him, for when she slips suddenly in the mud he does not quicken his pace to help – easy though that would have been – but leaves the portly lawyer to slither clumsily across to assist her.
It has, indeed, been a trying and a painful journey for Charles. Not just the cold and the damp, cramped seats, but the presence, all these hours, of that mother and child, hearing in the rattling silence her whispered words of gentleness, and watching, as if condemned to witness, her looks of love and pity and the baby’s tiny answering mews. He will not allow himself to think – will not permit himself to imagine – that a child might have looked like that in Molly’s arms, that he might have reached for such a child and held it in his hands, gazing down at a face all unlike his own, but which would have been, all the same, his warm and living likeness.
He trudges on now after his fellow passengers, trying to bring himself back to the task before him. For the best part of a month he has done nothing – been nowhere – has sat, in fact, with Maddox day after day, in the same room, in the same chair. And while those passing weeks have seen his great-uncle become slowly more mobile, slowly more voluble, Charles has sunk lower and lower into silence and stillness. And after days in which she berated him for his blind and wilful selfishness, it was Nancy, in the end, who arranged the burial, Nancy who had the doctor paid, and Nancy who packed up Molly’s meagre possessions and removed them; where, Charles does not know. And it was Nancy who contravened rules of half a century’s standing and went through the papers in the office – went through them and found among them Horace Turnbull’s letter. And it was Abel, then, who persuaded Charles, for courtesy if nothing more, that he must do as he had agreed and meet the Curators, and Maddox who later – slowly, falteringly – set out for him how he might go about the task they require of him. And so it is that Charles is on this coach now, taking no pleasure in the journey, and anticipating none at the end of it. Hoping only for some long task, and tedious, that will fill his mind and exhaust his body, for that more than anything, is what he craves.
He reaches the top of the incline now and stops a moment, gathering his breath. It is a small, self-respecting village with a church, a trodden spread of green, a line of tidy brick cottages, and a low-ceilin
ged inn; Charles can already hear the sounds of shouting and the clatter of hoofs as the ostlers and stable boys make ready for the change of horses. The other passengers are making their way towards the golden light streaming from the door and the promise of heat and food, but such things matter not to Charles. He turns a little and looks about him. Up ahead, perhaps a mile, beyond the high banks and the hedges, there is a windmill. A windmill standing among sodden fields and enclosed within a low stone wall, where a scatter of scant and stunted ash trees rise against the darkening winter clouds. Charles stands there, wondering why this landscape should seem so familiar since he has never, to his knowledge, travelled this road before. And then it comes to him. That strange piece in Medwin’s life of Shelley that talked of just such a scene – a scene with a windmill and a low evening sky, a scene encountered on a walk out from Oxford, a scene the poet remembered with such an overwhelming thrilling horror that he fled for refuge to the comfort of friends.
It’s weeks since Charles has thought of Shelley – weeks since that name has evoked anything but an unbearable sense of self-disgust. He has not seen Claire, nor heard from her, since that last day, and not placed a hand to the papers that had once so consumed him, since the moment he realized there was something else that should have had first claim on his attention – something else everyone in the house had seen, but none had dared to speak of. Except Nancy, of course: she had tried to tell him, but he had not listened. He can barely remember now that shiver of excitement when he thought he had unravelled the mystery of Mary Shelley, barely recall the exhilaration of discovery, of deciphering. But the detective is not quite dead in him yet, as we shall see, for he hesitates now, then turns and walks, his pace gradually quickening, to the door of the inn, where he dips his head against the low beam and disappears inside.
A quarter of an hour goes by, and the coachman is blowing his horn to alert his passengers to the stage’s imminent departure, but when they appear one by one from the door Charles is not among them. The night is fast falling when he emerges a few minutes later, his collar turned against the cold, and heads along the line of cottages to a large house standing alone.
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