A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  “I’m sorry?”

  She raises one eyebrow, the flicker of a smile returning to her lips, “ ‘Everything, or nothing.’ And you, a traveller in Italy, ask me that? I would have thought you might have picked up a little of the language, having spent so much time there.”

  Charles turns to pour himself more coffee. “I travelled with two companions. One spoke Italian so well I never had any need to learn it.”

  Miss Clairmont smiles wryly. “I had a similar experience myself, many years ago. Only in that case I was the one to be taken along to make a third, merely as interpreter. Or so I was told. Sometimes it seems to me that my whole life has been spent in the thankless and unacknowledged service of others. One of those same two people once had the insolence to tell me that I bring down all my sorrows on my own head, by following too much the devices and desires of my own heart—I, who have always been forced to do everything my heart abhors!”

  A note of querulous self-pity has now crept into her voice, and deep lines have appeared on either side of her mouth, dragging her face down into petulance and middle age. And now Charles is wondering whether those sudden shifts in mood, which he dismissed at first as mere caprice, might indicate something more profound, and possibly disturbing, about this woman. Her manners are entrancing, without question, but the character that lies beneath them is beginning to seem far more complex. Not just unpredictable, but even—perhaps—perilous.

  He clears his throat. “The life of a governess is, I’m sure, always a hard one. Especially for one so young, and so far from home.”

  She sighs, and he sees, with some shame, that there are tears in her eyes.

  “That I was resigned to, though I confess it was a long and bitter struggle to reconcile myself to the life I was forced to live. No, it has not been work that has exhausted me. Not work, but love.”

  She gets up suddenly and moves to the window, where she stands with her back to him, gazing out over the withered garden, and into the past.

  “When my mother was ill she and I lived together in a room scarcely bigger than this. There was space only for one bed, so I slept on the sopha, every night for more than a year. And still I had to labour every daylight hour to keep us from starving. In all that time, I had no respite. Others who might have helped—who should have helped—merely turned their backs, saying such a life would be hell itself. And so it was. So it was.”

  There is grief in her voice now, and a deep, unbearable, long-silent resentment.

  “Six days in seven I endured two hours in a creeping stinking omnibus to teach Italian to a spoiled, stupid girl, and all I had to return to was the remnants of a filthy meal, and a mother who scarcely knew me. Who would go out when I was gone and wander the streets half dressed, not knowing who she was or where, and handing money I had slaved for to chance-met strangers and passers-by.” She hangs that proud head of hers now, and leans heavily against the window.

  Charles takes a step forward, torn between pity and a terrible recognition. “What did the doctors say? Could they not help you?”

  She raises her head a little, but does not turn. “They claimed she was suffering from nervous fever. An ‘excess of function in her nerve centres,’ or some such words. By the end she could scarcely keep still—day and night she would writhe and mutter and pull at her clothes. She had no rest—and gave me none. You cannot possibly comprehend what that is like.”

  “I do,” he says quietly. “More than you know. My great-uncle is suffering from a very similar malaise. We are doing what we can to care for him, but that seems all too pitifully little. But we are hopeful. We are hopeful.”

  Miss Clairmont turns, and he can see compassion in those luminous eyes. “I am sorry, Mr Mab. Truly. I fear it is a malady that does not retrace its steps.”

  Charles swallows, and nods.

  “If you will forgive me,” she says. “I have letters I must write.”

  Charles bows and moves aside to let her past, and as she draws level with him she puts her hand on his arm. He feels the warmth of her skin for the briefest second, and then she is gone.

  Charles knows better than to try to investigate the trunk in the broad light of day, and by the time he leaves that afternoon for Buckingham Street the light is growing dim, and the sky has turned the sickly yellow-grey of imminent thunder. The fire has burned low in the drawing-room, and the wind whips in the chimney as Charles settles down at his uncle’s side with a glass of brandy. Abel is asleep on the other side of the fire, and Maddox sitting quietly, his hands twitching now and again, and his head moving slightly erratically as he looks about the room. Charles takes one of his cool dry hands into his own. The left hand, the lifeless hand.

  “How are you, Uncle?”

  He says it in no expectation of a reply, but sees, with surprise, that the old man seems to respond. Or perhaps it is just a coincidence. He edges closer, and on the other side of the room Abel sniffles suddenly in his doze, then settles back once more against his cushions.

  “I am sorry I have been away so much recently, Uncle. I have been on a case.”

  Again that tiny movement.

  “Indeed I believe you worked once for the same family. Many years ago. The name of Godwin?”

  And now he is sure. There is something in the old man’s face that is an answer to his words. Charles moves forward in his seat.

  “You remember the case?”

  A jerk of the head and Maddox’s eyes swivel past Charles’ face. Charles looks round but there is no-one there—no-one, and nothing, except the little side table that bears the remains of his great-uncle’s lunch, and his case-book for 1816. Abel must have brought it up to look at it. Charles reaches quickly for the book and places it gently on Maddox’s lap.

  “Were you looking at this, Uncle? Is that what you meant?”

  The old man eyes him narrowly, then looks down at the book.

  “Is there something about this that you remember?”

  Again Maddox is staring at him, but as one gnarled hand reaches slowly for the book, a coal slips with a rush of sparks onto the hearth, and Charles has to race to stop the rug from catching light. And when he turns back, the old man has lurched up with a strange stifled cry, his eyes stark open, his feet tangling in the bedding as he tries to rise from the chair.

  “Now what’s to do here, Mr Charles?” exclaims Abel, starting from his sleep, his face drawn in alarm.

  “He was trying to tell me something, Abel—something about the case.”

  Abel looks at him askance, clearly unconvinced, but conditioned by a lifetime in service to hold his tongue. Maddox meanwhile is belying anything Charles might now contend by sagging sideways in his nephew’s arms, his head lolling to one side and a ribbon of spittle hanging from his mouth.

  “Or mebbe it was just the thunder that was frettin’ him,” Abel suggests as the two of them steady Maddox slowly back in his seat, and Charles lifts the pillows so he can sit upright. “That storm’s not afar off now.”

  Maddox stares at the two of them suspiciously, then cowers back in his chair, his hands before his face as if warding off a blow. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Maddox’s decline in the last few months had been his own awareness of it—fitful, yes, but all too frequent. The strange sleep that has since descended on him has, if nothing else, saved him from that, but if the veil is now to be lifted, might that not prove more killing than the kindness of quietude?

  But all the same it is progress, of a kind. As Charles keeps repeating to himself when he sits with his own dinner and watches as Maddox manages far more food—and brandy—than Abel says he has taken in the best part of a week. All things considered, Charles’ heart is as light as it has been for days as he stands in the hall making ready for the journey back across town.

  “Are you sure about this, Mr Charles?” worries Abel, as they look out at a night sky electric with flashes of silent lightning. “It’s no weather for wandering about outside when ye’ve a warm bed here.” />
  “I won’t be wandering, Abel. I’m going straight up to the Strand to hail a hansom. All you need concern yourself about is my uncle. I can look after myself well enough. It will seem odd if I do not return on such an inclement night, and besides, there’s something I need to do. Something that may mean I will not have to stay there at all for very much longer.”

  “Well if you’re sure, Mr Charles.” Abel is clearly unconvinced. “At least let me go up and have Molly fetch ’ee down a great-coat. The boss has a good heavy one he winnae miss.”

  “Very well,” says Charles with a smile. “I suppose that wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  But five minutes pass with no sign of the coat, and a drumbeat of heavy raindrops is starting to patter the pavement. Charles grows irritated, and goes to the bottom of the stairs and calls up.

  “Is there a problem, Abel?”

  A moment later Stornaway appears on the landing looking flustered. “My apologies, Mr Charles. Heaven knows where that Molly has got to—Billy says she was sick this mornin’, but she made yer uncle’s dinner right enough.”

  Charles heads for the door. “It really doesn’t matter. I can do just as well without it. Send for me if you need me, but otherwise I will be back tomorrow afternoon.”

  The rain is pounding the street now, and Charles races up to the Strand through a wash of flooded gutters and wheel ruts. His feet are soaked in mud and running dung long before he gets to the top, but otherwise his luck is with him and he finds a cab within a few minutes. He calls out the address to the driver and settles down into the damp leather seat, watching the rain glittering in the jets of gas outside those few shops still open. And if the West End is empty of people, St John’s Wood is even more so, and there are no lamps in the windows at Carlo Cottage when Charles swings down from the cab and rushes up the steps to his new—and second—front door. Charles stands in the hall, waiting for his breathing to ease, and listening for sounds of wakefulness above. But there is nothing. A crackle of forked lightning pulses blue across the walls and the thunder breaks hard overhead, but still there is no sign or movement upstairs.

  Charles moves quickly and silently to the dining-room, where he kneels down by the piano-stool and lifts the brocade away. He tries the lid of the trunk, but it is—as he expected—locked. No matter. He reaches into his pocket and extracts a ring of keys he keeps for moments such as this, confident that he will have one to fit such a commonplace piece of luggage. But ten minutes later and all dozen keys tried, he is forced to accept that—like everything else, it seems, in this house—the trunk may not be quite as ordinary as he initially supposed. He turns it in his hands, examining the lid, the hinges. He’s been lucky once already tonight, and his luck holds again now: Sometime in the past, on one of its many journeys, this trunk has been dented or damaged by water, because the wood is warped at the back and the lid doesn’t fit quite true. And when Charles bends down to look more closely he can see the edge of a sheaf of paper inside. And it just so happens he has the tool for that too: a small pair of snipe-nose pliers that are a relic of that short period he spent training to be a doctor and which he kept, unlike much else from that time, because he thought they might prove useful. As they have in the past, and as they do now. He steadies himself against the trunk with one hand and slowly inserts the pliers with the other. Holding them horizontal at first, and then twisting them a slow half turn once the pointed ends are inside the trunk. It’s a delicate job he has now, but he’s always had steady hands, and he closes the pliers carefully about the edge of the sheets and starts to edge them out, inch by cautious inch. There’s a moment when they catch on something and he hears the sound of tearing, but what he eventually pulls free are six or seven sheets of smooth handwritten paper. There is no title, no heading, and the pages are clearly only part of a much longer piece, but none of that matters. Because Charles only has to read a dozen lines to see the one word he’s been seeking all this time.

  Shelley.

  He looks up, startled, as a rush of lightning catches him floodlit in his guilt and the thunder breaks again over his head, but when an even deeper darkness descends, and still no-one stands accusing in the doorway to indict him, he gets up and makes his way quietly upstairs to his room, where he lights the little lamp by his bed and begins to read.

  FOUR

  Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear

  … SHOULD THINK, AND IN any case I cared not. All that mattered was to see him, whether by arrangement, or by sleight. He came not to the first rendezvous I appointed, and I wish now that I could have persuaded my weak heart against seeking refuge, like some panting helpless hare, in the lair of a lynx that was intent only on devouring it. He wrote later that the whole affaire was my own doing—that he defied any man to play the Stoic to an eighteen-year-old girl who came prancing to his bed at all hours of the night—that I pursued him, after that first encounter in London, and scrambled myself eight hundred miles across Europe with no other aim but to repeat it. And I cannot deny it. I wish only that I could have divined, like the Cumaean Sibyl, that the price of my few brief moments of happy passion was to be a lifetime of loss, and penitence, and sorrow. How could I have known, that night in Geneva, as I looked down from my room and saw his coach rolling slowly to the door, that my dark Fate had by then been sealed, and the seed already planted that would bear such beautiful, and yet such terrible fruit.

  Receiving no answer to my note, I made sure to be on the terrace in the morning, where I sat, as if absorbed in my book, watching all the while the movement of the boats on the lake. The water sparkled jewel-like in the sun and it seemed—then—a happy portent that the air was clear, and the white peak of Mont Blanc could be seen rising majestic above the purple mountains and the winnowing clouds. The air was fragrant with spring flowers, and the vineyards on the farther shore vivid with the young green of new leaves. So sweet a day! It was an hour or more before I caught sight of the vessel I sought. No other man could match his strength of profile, his proud and erect carriage, and even so far away I could not but recognise him. Polidori was attempting to bring them about, splashing ineffectually as the boat swung in the shallows, and showing himself thereby, at least to my eye, no better an oarsman than he was to prove a doctor. Though at that moment I blessed his ineptitude, for it gave me the few minutes I required to ensure that by the time they were nearing land, we—Shelley and Mary and I—were all walking, as if by happy accident, on the shore.

  So many have asked about that moment—that first encounter between the two finest Poets of the age—and I have read accounts of it that have made me smile, secretly, in the privacy of my heart. I confess now that the reality was but a poor match for the expectation; it was, in truth, a meeting characterised by awkwardness on all sides. Mary had not been told, then, of my secret, and knowing that he was deceiving her rendered Shelley distracted and ill-at-ease, and despite all his loud disdain for rank and money, he was quite overawed to find those detested qualities incarnated in such vigorous and celebrated flesh. And Byron did indeed draw every eye, standing there, up to his knees in the water, his deformed foot thereby concealed—as he was ever eager to do—and a red scarf tied turban-wise about his hair. I could see guests gathering on the hotel terrace and whispering behind their hands, and I guessed what they were saying—people of that sort love nothing more than to titillate themselves with gossip about subjects they profess to deplore, and Byron did not only live, as he boasted, a hundred-years’ life in the space of twenty-five, but supplied meat enough for a century’s scandal in half as many months.

  Poor Shelley, by contrast, always loathed all such impertinent public scrutiny. He writhed so inwardly under it that no doubt his ignorant observers considered him more than a little peculiar—it was not merely his strange clothes and wild hair that set them muttering, but the shrieks of demoniacal laughter he gave out whenever Byron said anything in the least entertaining—or, indeed, anything at all. As for His Lordship, I could see from the lift of hi
s lip that he found it difficult to reconcile the dazzling works he had read, with an author who appeared little more than an ungainly youth. For my part, I said little, being content merely to wait and to watch, for Shelley’s encounter with Byron was not the only such first meeting I wished to observe: My lord had never till then been introduced to the celebrated ‘Mrs Shelley’; not, of course, that she had any right to be called so—not then. There she stood, with those bright eyes of hers, and that famous hair falling in gauzy wavings about her shoulders and lifting in the wind off the lake. I had predicted he would fall in love with her—everyone else did, and why should he be any different, he who knew how to value a lineage such as hers? I had told him in London that it would not concern me—that I would merely redouble my efforts to stand well in her esteem, but I had not meant it. I did not wish to share him—not at all if truth be told, and certainly not with her, the stepsister who has been no sister to me. I had paid the price of a folie à trois, I was determined I would never be drawn into the yet more furious maelstrom of a folie à quatre. But to judge of their first handshake, I deemed I had little to fear. Byron did not appear to think Mary so very extraordinary, and indeed I have been told since, by others, that my Albé never thought her anything but vulgar, and, moreover (though how he knew this I cannot say) a great and infamous liar. I sigh as I write his name, for I called him Albé then, in gentle play on the initials LB. It is my fate, and my curse, that when I think of him now those letters stand only for ‘loathsome brute.’

  My first aim in contriving this meeting between the four of us had been to secure an invitation to dine, and thereby foster what would appear to others to be an acquaintance born of chance, however studiously I had in fact contrived it. But in this first step I only half succeeded, for within a few minutes Byron rather pointedly offered a place at his table to Shelley alone, then made a hasty bow to myself and Mary before stamping off back towards the boat.

  His rooms at the Angleterre were, of course, far more luxurious than ours, and while we women were banished to a meagre dinner in our far-off eyrie, His Lordship regaled his guests with roast pork and turbot, and several bottles of fine claret. I say ‘guests’ because Polidori too attended, and seemingly made a vile and malicious insinuation about Shelley’s keeping two wives—a remark Shelley unluckily let slip to me some days thereafter, and whence my violent dislike of the man commenced. But by then, all was in train. We would all of us breakfast together as soon as Byron rose—which was never much before noon—and in the afternoons he and Shelley would post about the lake in their little rented boat, Shelley at the oars, and Byron singing what he claimed were Albanian songs, though they sounded like no music I have ever played, and involved such strange cacophonous guttural noises that families in nearby parties dispersed before them like so many frightened chickens. Which may, of course, have been exactly his intention. Mary and I, meanwhile, read Latin and Italian in the heat of the day, and walked about in the garden with little William as the sun began to set, looking at the rabbits and the insects and the beady-eyed lizards warming themselves on the hot stone wall. It could not last, of course—we were attracting too much unsavoury attention, and our rooms were, in any case, far too expensive, so we all agreed, the five of us (for Polidori would intrude), that it would be politic to remove to quarters more secluded. Though nothing we did, it seemed, could stop the prying eyes. We discovered later that the wretched little hotel proprietor was renting telescopes to his guests, so they could spy on us from the terrace, and work themselves into a frenzied indignation thinking they had spied female underclothes displayed for all to see, when it was, in truth, nothing but Byron’s blameless tablecloths, left out in the sun to dry.