He sees Shelley open his mouth to speak, and 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 daemon.”
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. It 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 stepsister.
“Claire!” exclaims Shelley, going swiftly 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 extremely 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 my head round 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 singsong voice one might use with a baby: “Naughty Mr Pillow, you shall go no more a-roving.”
She smiles now, 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 himself 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 passes 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 stepsister. Is Mary Godwin deceiving herself, or is this her way of defusing what Maddox can only see 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 w
ith a strange and feverish exultation.
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 in heat 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 took 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, Miss Godwin, but I cannot believe it populated by an alien species wholly unconnected with our own.”
It is her turn to smile. “Nor have I, Mr Maddox, but I am sure you are right. The French are certainly recognisably 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 remarks, 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 my stepsister 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—”
“Claire is the one who delights in provocation,” interrupts Miss Godwin. “Those horrors of hers are pure invention, designed to absorb my Shelley’s every waking moment. They were out together again when I left. She is now claiming she cannot leave him because he is afraid to walk alone, lest Leeson should attack him in the street.”
Which may explain, thinks Maddox, why Mary Godwin has chosen, after all this time, to brave the cold and the dark, and come here alone. And why she has started to use the word my in reference to a man who does not appear at all constrained by such exclusivities.
“Is this new fear of Mr Shelley’s the consequence of a further sighting, or some other incident subsequent to our last meeting?”
“I wished to inform you immediately after it happened, but Shelley would not permit me.”
Maddox frowns. He had asked the question thinking it rhetorical; now it seems he may be mistaken. He takes a seat opposite her. “Perhaps you might elaborate?”
“It was October. The twelfth I believe. We returned to Church Terrace that evening to find a letter had been delivered for Shelley. By hand, not by post. It was couched in veiled terms, but its import was only too clear—it was a threat upon his life. Upon all our lives.”
“Do you have this letter?”
She shakes her head. “No. Shelley burned it at once—he said he feared it would distress me. I begged him to allow me to send it to you—I said you might be able to advise us, but he would not hear of it. He began to babble in the wildest and most unconnected way—talking one minute of his daughter Ianthe and the next of a cousin I do not believe he has seen for years. None of it made any sense. But he has always been subject to nervous attacks in the face of the slightest distress or strain, and, fearing a new recurrence, I withdrew.”
“I see,” says Maddox, all his
old disquiet returning. “Pray continue.”
“The morning following he seemed much quieter in his mind. So we determined to go—as we had planned—to see Mr Kean give his Prince of Denmark. It was not, I fear, a happy choice of play—Shelley became increasingly agitated, and insisted finally that we left at the end of the second act.”
She shifts in her chair, her anxiety visible in her fretfulness. “Imagine our alarm, then, when we returned home to discover that a man had called in our absence. Shelley at once grew white in the face and cried out, ‘We must leave London! We must go at once—we cannot stay another night in this accursed hovel!’ I am afraid Mrs Butcher was much offended by this and said we might go as soon as we liked, as far as she was concerned, and Claire having by then become completely hysterical and threatening to disturb the entire house, we elected to repair to a hotel for what remained of the night, and deliberate there what best to do.”
“You had the money for such an expense?”
She flushes. “It was Shelley’s idea. It was not my decision. We returned to Church Terrace the next morning. It was a—difficult day. We were all unsettled—all disturbed. Shelley began talking rather distractedly of a plan he had conceived to rescue his sisters from their school, and later he and Claire had a fearsome quarrel.”
Maddox observes as she places her glass carefully on the table beside her. Her hands are shaking.
“Was the letter signed?”
“I do not think so.”
“And has this man shown himself since?”
She hesitates. “No—”
“Or written again?”
“Not that I am aware.”
“I see.”
He gets up and pokes the fire, watching the red-grey embers settle and sigh, then takes a log from the basket and throws it onto the glowing ashes. All the while the girl says nothing.
A Fatal Likeness Page 26