Charles understands perfectly. Indeed, he’s rather more sympathetic than they might assume, and not just because he’s always considered blackmail one of the most loathsome of crimes. All unknowingly, Sir Percy has struck a painful chord: Charles too is facing the last decline of someone he loves, and has found no doctor who can slow the fall.
“So,” he says eventually, “you want me to be your spy.”
He had not meant it to sound so brutal, and Lady Shelley bridles, but her husband lays his hand on her arm.
“You can put it that way if you choose, Maddox. Way we see it is you’d be protecting me frail old mater from someone who’s plagued the life out of her for years.”
It may not be poetic, but it seems heartfelt. Charles looks at them both and makes a decision.
“Very well. I will see what can be done. But I make no promises. I think you are already informed of my fees?”
Sir Percy nods.
“In that case I will report back to you in a few days.”
They get to their feet, and Sir Percy shakes his hand. His skin is warm and slightly clammy to the touch, though the room is hardly overheated. Lady Shelley rings the bell, then goes to a small writing-desk in the corner of the room and takes out a slip of paper.
“This is the person,” she says, as she comes towards Charles.
A surname, and an address. A few moments later the butler appears, but as Charles gets to the door a thought occurs to him and he turns.
“One last thing, Sir Percy. Why did you choose me? There are many other detectives you might have consulted. Was it a recommendation?”
Sir Percy coughs. “My wife was going through some of the mater’s papers the other day and came upon a reference to your great-uncle. Seems he helped the grand-pater with a minor legal matter some years ago. And when we heard that you’d taken over his business, we made the usual enquiries and so forth, and decided you would be as good as anyone.”
It’s hardly a ringing endorsement, but that’s not the reason Charles asked the question.
“When you say your grandfather, Sir Percy, was that on your mother’s side, or your father’s?”
Is there, perhaps, a moment’s hesitation?
“Grand-papa Godwin,” answers Lady Shelley, stepping forward.
“I see,” replies Charles, noting again how she appropriates her husband’s relations, and insinuates an intimacy with people she cannot conceivably have met. “And yet it was the Shelley name I believe my uncle recognised.”
Sir Percy is standing now with his back to the window, a shadow cast before his face.
“Did he now, by Jove,” he says with a slightly artificial jauntiness. “And what did the old fellow have to say?”
Charles shakes his head. “I have not been able to speak to him of it. My great-uncle suffered a severe attack the day you called, and has not spoken since. I am assuming the two events were not connected. Unless, of course, you can tell me otherwise?”
There’s an awkward silence, then Lady Shelley comes towards Charles and accompanies him to the door. “Well, if you do find any papers relating to Grand-papa, you must bring them to show us,” she says animatedly. “We are—as you now know—avid collectors of all that concerns the Dear Departed.”
Charles gives no reply, but takes his leave once more. He follows the butler downstairs and out into the cold and windy square.
The bruised clouds are purple with unfallen rain, and the first icy drops are already starting to fall. Charles turns up his collar and quickens his pace. A small part of his brain is mulling how exactly he is going to do what he has just agreed to attempt, but most of it is contemplating that controversially ordinary man upstairs, and concluding with a private grin that those scientists who claim characteristics can be passed from one generation to the next need look no farther than Chester Square to find the exception that proves the rule. For if talent, or intellect, or genius can really be bequeathed, what a prodigy this man should have been, whose mother, father, grand-mother, and grandfather were among the greatest literary minds of the last two hundred years.
Back in the drawing-room, meanwhile, the Shelleys are watching him as he makes his way along the square and disappears out of sight towards Eccleston Street.
“Well?” says Sir Percy, turning at last to his wife, all jauntiness gone. “Don’t strike me he knows anything, whatever you might have thought.”
“We cannot afford to be complacent,” Lady Shelley replies sharply, still looking down at the square. “Not with so much at stake.”
A few yards away a beggar who has lost both hands has taken shelter under one of the elm trees and is sitting on the pavement cutting out figures with a pair of scissors held in his feet. A concertina of paper dolls is on the blanket in front of him, weighed down in the wind by ha’penny coins. Lady Shelley frowns and bangs on the window, gesturing peremptorily to the gate-keeper to come and move him off.
“Still think it could all be a terrific to-do about nothing,” mumbles Sir Percy. “The mater never gave a hint about any of it when I was growing up.”
“How could she have done so without destroying the past forever in your eyes? Without creating a monster in your mind that even her years of selfless devotion could not counter? It is no surprise to me that she has cast a veil of oblivion over those events, and spoken of them only in the bitter privacy of her private journal.”
“And there’s no mistake—you’re sure it’s Harriet she spoke of?”
“You,” says his wife with emphasis, “have not been through their papers. You have not read how that wretched girl really met her death. Can you imagine what would ensue if such a document were to become known—such a scandal bruited abroad? We may know that woman’s secret, but that will not prevent the vulgar world from casting her as an innocent and forsaken wife. After everything I have done to efface all trace of her!”
“But if you burned what you found—”
Her impatience now is flaming in her face. “But how do we know what else there might be? What records that old meddler Maddox might have kept? For one thing, I assure you, is abundantly clear, and that is that he had a hand in it. Everything that happened that whole dreadful winter—he was involved. Think what that might mean—what more he might know that even we do not yet suspect—what he might say, should he choose to do so.”
Sir Percy shakes his head. “From what I gathered, he’s in no condition to say much at all—”
“But there may still be papers, Percy—papers he wrote at the time that would be far more credible, and far more damaging, than the ramblings now of a mad old man.”
“And you don’t think it’s a risk, hiring this nephew of his? Seemed pretty sharp-witted to me.”
“In that case,” she retorts tartly, “he should be more than capable of resolving our other, more immediate problem. He is not to know that there is a second, and far more significant task we are using him to accomplish.”
She turns to the window and watches as the gate-keeper pulls the beggar roughly to his feet and manhandles him away. The paper dolls are scattering across the pavement in the wind.
“All the same, Jane,” her husband continues behind her, “might it not be best just to let matters lie? After all, if nothing’s come to light in all these years—”
“How many times must I say this?” she snaps. “We cannot rely on that state of affairs continuing. If the old man shows no sign of ever recovering there will come a moment when this young fellow will take it upon himself to go through his effects. And who knows then what he might unearth—what papers he may discover that the old man has hidden? Far better that we anticipate such an event, and act now to counter it.”
Sir Percy shakes his head again, his ruddy cheeks suddenly pale. “I’m still not happy about this, Jane—and as for what you suggested—strikes me as a pretty low way of carrying on. Rather infra dig, if you must know—”
She silences him with a glance and turns back once more to the window,
her round plain face suddenly hardened, hawkish. “If we may contrive to avoid such a course, so much the better. But I tell you this—I will not have all I have striven for overturned, or see the labour of so many years laid waste.” Her eyes narrow, and her voice drops so low she seems to be speaking only for her own hearing. “I will not permit the spectre of that woman to return to haunt us, or allow everything this family has achieved to be ruined in her name.”
TWO
The Question
BACK AT BUCKINGHAM STREET, Charles opens the door of the drawing-room and stands there, watching. He isn’t really expecting any change, but his heart sinks nonetheless when he sees Maddox’s head lolling to one side, and his body starting and flinching at the demons that beset him. The old man’s mind wanders still astray, his dreams darker than any wakened eyes behold. Charles hesitates in the doorway, fighting the urge to go straight back downstairs and ask Abel exactly what he thinks he’s doing leaving Maddox here alone, but then there’s a movement on the other side of the room and he realises that he is not, in fact, alone. Molly is with him. She’s been raking the hearth and making up the fire, but now she gets up from her knees and goes silently over to where Maddox is lying, wrapped in blankets in his favourite armchair. She pulls up another chair and sits down by his side, then takes one of his dry old hands in her own and reaches out gently to caress his rough grey hair. She does not speak—has never spoken since the day she was first employed in this house—but Charles watches mesmerised now as she starts to sing to Maddox in the low keening hum he has heard once or twice before. Moment by moment, as the sound lifts and ebbs, the old man’s restless body quietens to a peace, and the fretfulness slowly smoothes back from his face. It’s the first time Charles has ever felt like an intruder in this room. He watches a moment more, then closes the door quietly behind him and goes back down to the front door, and a sudden shaft of sunlight that glows the street golden against the inky indigo sky.
Up at the Strand the traffic has come to a standstill, and as Charles comes level with the road he can see at once why. Lumbering up from Holborn are three enormous pyramids, balanced somewhat precariously on a dray cart pulled by two labouring horses, and decorated from top to bottom with hieroglyphs, toothy crocodiles, and enigmatic elongated cats. Four young men in loincloths are posted at each corner, passing down handbills inviting the discerning London public to present themselves at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, there to peruse Mr Bonomi’s Panorama of the Nile, a show unparalleled for both its entertainment and its edification, during the course of which they will traverse more than a thousand miles by river to the second cataract, and visit the temple of Abu Simbel by torchlight. And all for the paltry sum of a single shilling. Charles smiles at the proprietor’s notion of ancient Egyptian garb (and not for the first time, since he saw this particular diorama a year ago when it opened and was actually rather impressed), then ducks behind the barrel-chested constable who is even now bearing down upon the Pharaoh’s coachman, with instructions to move along there, move along.
Once safely on the opposite side of the street, Charles edges behind the crowd of excited onlookers and attendant ragtag and snot-nose pickpockets, and slips up Bedford Street to Nattali & Bond, Purveyors of Second-hand Books. From whence he emerges, in due course, with a parcel containing a set of Shelley’s poetry. He’d wanted the Medwin memoir too, but Mr Bond had doubted many were printed, though he has promised (for a small inducement) to ask among his fellow booksellers and let Charles know if it can be found. The four volumes in Charles’ parcel have gold-embossed spines and smooth marbled cardboard covers, but only the first seems to have seen any wear. An impression confirmed when Charles gets the books home and discovers that the pages in the other three have not even been cut. It’s not a promising portent, and it’s with a rather heavy heart that he sits down with Volume I to begin Queen Mab. Only to put the book down again twenty minutes later, completely nonplussed. He has a vague memory that the poem was supposed to be a furious attack on everything from religion to meat eating, to the institution of marriage, and Charles had been looking forward to a spirited polemic. Only what he’s found instead is a seemingly endless introduction peopled by spirits of quite another kind. Quite how Death and Sleep and the Fairy Queen can possibly be relevant to the task in hand, Charles has absolutely no idea, which rather—in his opinion—defeats the whole object. And who is this ‘Ianthe’ Shelley talks of, with her dark blue eyes, who sleeps and may never waken? He picks the book up again, and turns, with some frustration, to the notes on the poem written by Mrs Shelley, which turn out to reveal rather more about her devotion to her husband’s memory than they do about the actual meaning of what he wrote. Charles sits back, wondering for a moment about that very literary marriage, and what Shelley would have thought if he had lived to see his wife’s fame out-star his own. Say ‘Shelley’ in 1850—or, indeed, in 2013—and what will come to mind will not be Queen Mab, or Adonais, or even the Ode to a Skylark, but Frankenstein. Then as now, it is Mary who is celebrated, Mary who is recognised. She may do due obeisance before her husband’s poetic genius, but it is her own hideous progeny that endures. Or rather the idea we image of it, for as Charles well knows—having sat through an excruciating burlesque version at the Adelphi Theatre only a year ago—it is the caricature dramatisations that have made the myth of the monster, not its creator’s chilly, cerebral prose.
Charles is about to turn back to where he left off in the volume when the door opens and Abel appears carrying a plate of mutton and potatoes. Charles has been so engrossed he’s completely forgotten about lunch.
“Summat interesting in the end, was it, Mr Charles?” says Stornaway, putting the hot plate down a little gingerly on the desk. “So there was nae threat to the pastry-forks after all?”
There’s no disguising the I-told-you-so gleam in his eye, and Charles has the good grace to return grin for grin. “You can breathe again, Abel, the cutlery proved to be entirely unscathed. It was something rather more complicated than that, as it turned out.”
He hadn’t realised how hungry he was and picks up the knife and fork and starts enthusiastically on the meat. Abel hovers in the door, transparently eager for elaboration. And as it happens, Charles had been on the point of summoning him.
“Do you remember a case involving a William Godwin, Abel? Some sort of legal matter?”
“Lawyer was he, Mr Charles?”
Charles makes a face; his recent experience of lawyers has not been a happy one, as perhaps you know.
“William Godwin, my dear Abel, was as far from a lawyer as one could possibly imagine. He was a philosopher, and a celebrated one. And a writer of novels in his spare time, if you can credit such a shift from the sublime to the banal. And he was also my new client’s grandfather, and it seems my uncle also worked for him, years ago.”
Abel’s spry old face now looks concerned. He’s always prided himself on his memory, but having witnessed the drawn-out disintegration of a far finer mind than he ever had, he’s now disproportionately disturbed by any failure in his own.
“A client of Mr Maddox? When was this, Mr Charles?”
Charles shrugs. “I’m not sure. Sir Percy didn’t say.”
“Well,” says Abel slowly, “I remember there was a period in ’16 when I were away from London for a time. It were when me old father died. And I were in Ireland on a case a year or so afore that. A smuggling ring, that one was.”
Charles smiles, seeing the remembrance of triumphs past in the old man’s eyes. “Would you mind going through the files for me, Abel, and seeing if you can find Godwin’s name?”
Abel smiles now in his turn. It’s not escaped his notice that there is a flush to his young master’s cheeks that has not been seen there for more than a week. “It’d be my pleasure, Mr Charles.”
When Charles takes his empty plate downstairs an hour later he finds Molly in the kitchen chopping vegetables for dinner. She looks up briefly when he comes in, then drops
her eyes again. Her skin is so velvet dark that he cannot see if she is blushing, and even though we know he has rather an acute alertness to unspoken signals, he sees that as a technique to be employed as part of his job, and rarely applies it to either himself or his own relationships. Maddox is, perhaps, the only exception, and his infirmity is now so overwhelming that it engulfs that minuscule space in his mind that Charles permits to trivial—for which read personal—preoccupations. As for this girl, he has a care for her, of a kind, but she has only shared his bed twice, and not at all in the days since his uncle’s latest illness. Charles cannot decide if he is relieved or regretful—either that it started, or that it seems, just as suddenly, to have ceased.
Molly seems intent on her onions and her swede, and after a moment Charles puts down the dirty plate and leaves the way he came. He does not see, therefore, that as soon as he has gone the knife drops from her grasp and she turns away to the window, where she stands, her arms wrapped tight about herself, watching the streaming rain.
Two hours later Charles, too, is watching the rain, though in his case from the far more precarious shelter of a large beech tree, a few yards from the address in St John’s Wood that Lady Shelley gave him. It’s a square white-fronted villa, two storeys high, with a small front garden and steps up to a creeper-covered porch on the raised ground floor. Such a house would set you back a good three million now (though this particular one has long been supplanted by a block of redbrick flats), but in 1850 this part of London had none of its twenty-first-century cachet, being seen as at best prettily—or pettily—suburban, and at worst the haunt of the shameless and the sinful. George Eliot will soon be one of the most infamous examples, choosing St John’s Wood to set up home with the still-married George Henry Lewes, and there are three self-styled ‘ladies’ keeping—or kept in—houses on this very street, where he who pays the rent is not the only man seen going discreetly in and out in the dark hours of the day. So it’s with a certain piquant interest that Charles has set himself up with his newspaper just opposite Carlo Cottage, thankful that the wind has dropped, at least. No-one has appeared so far, either at a window or at the door, and there is nothing to indicate the age or number of people in residence, though the slightly unkempt garden, and small signs of wear and tear that only become obvious under careful scrutiny, may have their own tale to tell.
A Fatal Likeness Page 3