A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  “There is also a note here—” Sir Henry clears his throat circumspectly. “—questioning whether this Shelley might be of the sodomitical persuasion. Seems an unusually large proportion of his acquaintance describe him as ‘feminine.’ ‘A girl in boy’s clothes’ one is said to have remarked.”

  He closes the file and sits back in his chair, which creaks discreetly.

  There is a pause before Maddox, too, sits back in his chair.

  “Given what you have said,” says Maddox slowly, “might it be fair to assume that if Mr Shelley believes he is being pursued by a nameless persecutor, he may not, in this particular case, be prey to fanciful illusion, but has merely detected the presence of one of your own informants?”

  “An interesting theory. I presume your use of the present indicative was deliberate?”

  Maddox nods. “He believes this pursuit continues even now—indeed claims to have seen the man he fears at least twice since returning to London only two weeks ago.”

  “In that case I would suggest you are dealing with a case of pronounced and persistent paranoea. We have not actively pursued him since he departed Lynmouth, and my agents played no part whatsoever in the incident in Wales.”

  Maddox looks up. “What can you tell me of that?”

  “Much of what you have been told is true, though the interpretation put upon it hardly objective. There were some locally who claimed the whole episode was a hallucination, others said it was more likely a hoax put about by Shelley himself to afford him an excuse to withdraw from what was always a most ill-advised scheme. Our own view is that the incident was more likely to have been staged by Leeson and his associates to drive the Shelleys from the district. One shot, at least, Shelley himself fired, that much is certain; it is far less clear if he was fired upon first. Or, indeed, at all.”

  He turns to the coffee-pot and refills his cup. “You are aware that something similar was said to have occurred in Cumberland some months before? It seems that there, too, Shelley contrived to infuriate a remarkably large number of people in a remarkably small amount of time, and woke one night to a knock on the door and a fist in his eye. He was forced to leave the neighbourhood. I presume you perceive the pattern?”

  Maddox nods; how could he not?

  “His Lordship instructed me to give you whatever assistance might be within my power,” says Sir Henry, gathering up his papers and sending, thereby, a clear signal that the interview is at an end. “I shall conclude, therefore, with a piece of advice. Be wary, and careful. Wary of a man who seems to bring ill fortune to all those who encounter him; and careful of your pocket-book: He has debts halfway across England, and seems to feel no compunction, moral or otherwise, at defrauding even those small shop-keepers and tradesmen who can ill afford the loss.”

  Maddox has already drawn rather the same conclusions, but accepts the counsel with a good grace. Ten minutes later he is on the street once more, walking slowly and thoughtfully back up towards the Strand. It’s rarely he receives such a decisive indication that a client bodes nothing but ill, and yet he cannot rid himself of the image of the girl—not just that face which is the mirror of one he once loved, but the intelligence and the courage that make this new Mary so like the one he lost.

  It should not be necessary to remind a man of his experience that this resemblance may be traitorous—that even if the qualities he perceives are true, there may be others that he cannot possibly yet discern, and which may undermine what he wants so much to see. It should not be necessary, but it seems it is, and there is no-one to do it.

  The following morning we find him in his carriage, sitting back against the cushions as it toils up the Gray’s Inn Lane, with an expression on his face that suggests a night of little sleep, and much uncertainty. Fraser has to check the address twice at Pancras, so unlikely does it seem that the son of a baronet should be lodging so meanly, and they are kept waiting a good five minutes in the drizzle before there is any sign of life at 5 Church Terrace. And the person who does eventually open the door is, to say the least, unprepossessing.

  “Want that Shelley, do yer?” she says, her pink hands on her fat hips. “Second floor. An’ if you’ve come offerin’ ’im somewhere else to stay don’t let me stop yer. Folks are already startin’ to talk—two women ’e’s got up there and all sorts of noises at all times of the night, if you take my meanin’.”

  Her puffy face manages to exhibit almost equal quantities of prurience and prudery; it is not a pleasant combination. Fraser follows Maddox up to the top of the house, and there, again, they wait. All sorts of noises indeed, for sound and fury rage now behind the door. Then, as they listen, a woman’s high-pitched wail is abruptly cut off, and there is a clattering thud as something strikes the near wall.

  Maddox nods to Fraser to knock again, more insistently this time. “You there—open up!”

  Footsteps this time, and low urgent voices, then, finally, the door inches open. It’s Mary Godwin. Her white cheeks are flushed, and behind her, in the room, there is the sound of weeping.

  “Mr Maddox,” she says, “I am afraid you have had a wasted journey. Mr Shelley is unwell—Claire is unwell—we cannot receive you today.”

  “I could not help noticing—the noise—”

  She waves a hand. “Oh that was nothing. Merely Claire having one of her silly nightmares. She will be quite well soon enough if left to herself. I am sorry that you—”

  She was holding the door to, but now it flings suddenly open. “Maddocks? Maddocks? Does the villain pursue me even here?”

  The man—boy—before them now is quite possibly the oddest-looking creature Maddox has ever seen. Taller than he expected, but stooping and round-shouldered, his chest hollow, his lips as soft as a girl’s, and his hair sticking from his head in a tangle of rough dirty spikes.

  Maddox hears Fraser stifle a laugh, and there is indeed something ludicrous about this boy—ludicrous but beautiful too, even if it’s impossible to light on a single feature that merits the word. Aside, perhaps, from his eyes, which stare back at them now with a violet-blue intensity.

  “Mr Shelley,” says Maddox with a slight bow. “I do not believe we have been introduced.”

  The boy stares at him a moment, then lets out a howl of wild hysterical laughter that screeches in Maddox’s ears like a fingernail on a plate. The boy throws back his head, and cries, “Maddocks! Maddocks! Maddocks!” until Mary Godwin places her hand on his arm in an attempt to calm him. It’s a practised gesture, and that fact alone is silently suggestive.

  “You are mistaken, my love,” she says with careful composure. “As you can see, this is quite another gentleman.”

  “Ha!” he cries, “so what brings him creeping about here under the alias of my enemy?”

  “I do not creep, sir,” says Maddox stiffly. “And my name is my own.”

  Miss Godwin turns to him. “The scheme at Tremadoc was set on foot by a man called William Maddocks. He was also the magistrate who investigated the attack on Mr Shelley. You can understand why he should have been startled by the mention of the name.”

  If it is meant as an apology it is meagre, to say the least. Shelley, meanwhile, scarcely seems to have heard. “Magistrate? Magistrate? William Maddocks could not adjudicate on the proper division of a bread roll. The enquiries he made were infamously inadequate—he meant from the start that the perpetrator of that atrocious assassination should escape, and slither back to the protection of his degenerate paymaster!”

  “That, my love,” the girl says quickly, forcing him round to look at her, “is what our visitor has come to discuss. Mr Charles Maddox will be able to discover the truth of it. He will give you the evidence you need to challenge this Leeson and put an end to his villainous persecution forever.”

  Maddox is about to protest but a look from her swiftly silences him.

  “Enquiries of this kind are Mr Maddox’s calling,” she continues firmly to Shelley. “It is why I went to see him. To ask him to help
us. That he might identify this man who pursues you—that we might put it behind us and begin again, together. I meant to have told you of this before but there has been so much—these last few days have been so very—”

  She stops, and Maddox notices again the sound of weeping in the room beyond. Softer now, but still there.

  “I think you were correct in your initial assumption, Miss Godwin,” he says. “The moment does not appear to be opportune. Perhaps it would be better if I were to call again another day—”

  “No!” she cries, her eyes widening. Then quickly, more calmly: “Now that you are here, and Shelley knows that you are ready to assist him, it will be the matter of a few minutes to give you the information you require.” She turns to Shelley, a plea in her eyes, and after a moment he puts a hand gently to her cheek. “Very well,” he whispers, kissing her fingers. “If you, my treasured Mary, believe a man such as this may succeed where my own extensive enquiries have failed, I will stoop to concur. Thus far I have always found, with Aristotle, that work of that kind Let us hope it will not hold true in this case.”

  Maddox eyes him thoughtfully. The young man clearly does not expect Maddox to understand Greek, which is patronising enough, but cited the phrase in his presence anyway, making him doubly discourteous. And the words themselves merely compound the insult, since regardless of what Aristotle might have opined, the exercise of a profession has never rendered Maddox feeble in either body or intellect. If this is how Shelley usually comports himself with strangers it is hardly surprising he excites such violent antagonism wherever he goes. The fact that he seems completely unaware of the consequences of such behaviour might tempt a philosopher to exonerate him, but it will scarcely soften those he offends, who will expect an apology, but never get one. Fraser, meanwhile—to whom this is, indeed, all Greek—nonetheless has a long nose for contempt in any language, and shows his own in every line of his face.

  “Will you come in?” says Miss Godwin, flushing a little. “I will ask Mrs Butcher for coffee if that is agreeable.”

  She shows them into a small sitting-room so squalid it brings a wry smile to Maddox’s face; Shelley may boast the blood of a baronetcy, but Maddox is the one doing the stooping here. He had expected to see the third figure in this odd ménage, but of her there is now no sign. Having made her offer of refreshment Miss Godwin seems to be regretting it, but the lodgings clearly afford her no means of making coffee herself, so she whispers a few earnest words to Shelley, and makes her way quickly down the stairs.

  Maddox is intrigued to see how the boy will fare on his own, and proceeds to wander about the room, observing the books, the pamphlets, the writing-desk with its untidy sprawl of papers, all the while waiting an invitation to be seated. Shelley, meanwhile, is scuffing the threadbare carpet with his shoe and glowering at Fraser as if he, too, were little more than animated filth.

  “Well,” says Maddox eventually, taking both a chair and the initiative. “Perhaps you might describe to me what happened at Tremadoc. It is still, I take it, your contention that the man who pursues you now does so at the behest of the Honourable Robert Leeson?”

  “Honourable!” cries Shelley, his eyes flashing. “Such an appellation does barbarity to the word! I despise such illegitimate distinctions, and everything they stand for. Aristocracy is vile, and such mealy-mouthed purse-proud half measures more than twice as contemptible. There is no justification—moral, philosophical, or political—for a system that permits the few to riot in luxury, while the many famish for want of bread.”

  “We might debate such a point as lengthily as Aquinas did the corporeality of angels, and to almost as little purpose,” replies Maddox evenly. “My time being limited, I should rather devote it to the matter in hand. I have some understanding of the events that may have led to the attack on your household; more such information I can readily come by should I require it. But you alone can tell me the nature and sequence of events.”

  Perhaps it is the reference to the Summa Theologica that proves to Shelley that he has under-estimated this man. Or perhaps it is the note of authority in Maddox’s voice. Whatever it is, when he speaks again his tone is calmer, and his eyes less wild.

  “Very well. We retired that night sometime after ten. I had received so many odious and despicable threats the preceding days that I had taken to sleeping with two loaded pistols at my side. We had scarce been abed half an hour—”

  “We?”

  “Harriet,” he flushes. “My wife. Then.”

  “And now?”

  Shelley’s eyes narrow. “She lives still. If that is your question.”

  A pause. “I see. Go on.”

  “I heard a noise downstairs. So I seized the guns and went down, only to see the insolent wretch attempting to escape through one of the windows giving onto the lawn. He turned, saw me, and had the impudence to fire upon me. Happily, it went wide.”

  “You saw his face?”

  “I saw only the flash of the pistol. I returned a shot of my own, but unluckily my gun mis-fired. He then set upon me with blows, and we fell to the ground—”

  “In the house?”

  “No. We were by then upon the lawn. After some moments of scrapping like savages on the ground I contrived to free myself sufficiently to fire upon him a second time, and—I believe—wounded him in the shoulder. Whereupon he hurled himself upon me again crying ‘By God I will be revenged!—I will murder your wife—I will ravish your sister—by God I will be revenged!’ By the time I had struggled to my feet, he had gone.”

  He puts his hand to his side. “The kick the scoundrel gave me has never fully healed.”

  There is a pause. “He spoke in English?” asks Maddox.

  Shelley frowns. “Of course. Why should he not?”

  “Because if he were indeed in Leeson’s employ, and hired thereabouts, I imagine his mother tongue might have been Welsh. Would you not agree?”

  Shelley turns away to the window, gnawing his thumb.

  “And you can offer no explanation for the words he used?” persists Maddox. “No reason why he should threaten your wife and sister?”

  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.”

  The poet 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 hotheaded 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 at him. I fired and he returned my shot—my gun did not go off, but his bullet passed so close it burned through my night-shirt. 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.�
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  “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 thrusts a single sheet of paper at him.

  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 scowls. “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 only provide that 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 lies 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.”