Charles frowns. “The whole truth? You will speak without reserve of all that happened between the three of you?”
“I have nothing to fear. It is time an account were given that will speak honestly not only of him, but of those of us who shared his life.”
Mary Shelley, too, insisted no such account had ever been given, but she, by contrast, has done all in her power to prevent it. And given what Charles now knows of her baby daughter’s death, he can understand why. Even if Mary has found a way to live with that, even if she has long since excused that terrible deed as unwitting and unintended—she knows the rude cold world she dreads so much will not be so forgiving. But if her reserve is comprehensible, Claire’s new candour makes no sense. Why should this woman, who seems to have loved Shelley no whit the less, be so willing to destroy his reputation now?
He goes to the window and looks down into the street. Nancy is making her way up to the Strand through the snow, the market-basket over her arm. He turns back to the room. “You will speak openly even of those events you say you have striven to forget? Of Fanny’s death—and of Harriet’s?”
She flushes. “I cannot speak of what I did not witness.”
“But there were other events, were there not, that you did witness? Where your testimony would serve only to harm the man you say you loved?”
“I did love him; I love him still.”
“In that case I am only the more confounded.”
She rises from her chair and walks away. “I have no idea to what you refer.”
“I think you do, Miss Clairmont. I am speaking of the Shelleys’ first daughter. And how that baby died.”
She glances at him quickly, warily. “She died from convulsions, brought on by a fever. It is all too often so with infants born before their time.”
“That is true, and I know that was the story you all told. But it is not what you believed then, is it, Miss Clairmont? You thought Shelley was to blame. You thought he had risen in the night, in his sleep, and put his hands about his own daughter’s neck.”
She turns towards him. “And if I thought that,” she says slowly, “it is because Mary said so. Because your uncle confirmed it—”
“And that is what he, too, believed. But it was not so. Shelley thought himself guilty, but he was wronged. My uncle only discovered the truth years later—when it was too late. But whatever you supposed then—whatever you have written since—it was not so.”
It should have been overwhelming—it should have been a revelation to change her whole life—but she merely glances sideways at him and returns, in a rustle of scented silk, to the chair.
“You tell me nothing, Mr Maddox, that I have not known these thirty years.”
Charles gapes at her. “But how in God’s name—?”
She raises an eyebrow and folds her hands upon her lap. “By the same means, I imagine, as your uncle came to know it. That vile man Absalom Blackaby.”
“The sexton at Tom-All-Alone’s? How could he possibly—”
“Find us? Know who we were? I am sure that, for a detective, a mere moment’s thought will be sufficient to resolve that mystery. Your uncle should have been more careful in letting slip Shelley’s name. It is, after all, hardly a common one, and when his case came before Chancery it was the talk of London. It was then that that horrible man tracked Shelley down—it was then that he embarked upon his loathsome scheme of extortion.”
Charles can barely absorb so much new information. “Extortion? But if the baby died a natural death, how could Blackaby possibly turn that to his advantage?”
“Because by then Shelley was petitioning for the custody of Harriet’s children. How could he hope to win the case if the slightest whisper came to the judge’s ear about what had happened to Mary’s baby? That he and the woman he proposed as step-mother to those children had allowed their own baby to die, and left it to be buried in a workhouse grave?”
Charles flushes, remembering that word had indeed come to the judge’s ear, and it was not only the site of the baby’s grave he had discovered by it.
“Shelley was tormented by that man Blackaby for years,” Claire says bitterly. “Even after we had left England.”
“He told you of this?”
“Not at first. I discovered it later by chance, when I found a copy of a note he had written to his banker, asking that ten pounds should be paid to a person who would present himself with a note signed ‘A.B.’ ”
“And Mary—did she know?”
“He made me promise not to tell her.”
Charles can scarcely believe it. “But if he never told her about Blackaby, surely she must have continued to believe him guilty of his daughter’s death? What husband would allow his wife to persist in such an appalling ignorance?”
“I believe he dared not speak of it, because he dreaded to hear the answer she might give.”
Charles frowns. “I do not take your meaning.”
“If you have indeed spoken to that man Fraser, you will know that Mary claimed she saw Shelley that night, standing over the cradle.”
He sees the quick flush across her cheeks and sees she fears what else he has discovered; but her own long-past shame is not what matters to him now.
“I have not forgotten it, Miss Clairmont, but I do not see that it makes any difference. Shelley suffered from bouts of sleep-walking, did he not, and especially when he was anxious or under strain? Surely it is possible he was indeed at the cradle that night, even if he never actually harmed the child?”
But she is already shaking her head. “I said this to your uncle then, and I will say it now, to you. Shelley awoke that morning in his own bed. In all the years I lived under his roof I never once knew that to be so when he had risen in his sleep in the night. After such episodes we would always find him wandering distractedly in the next room, in the next street, even halfway across the town—”
“But if that is true, you are accusing her—”
“Yes,” she says quietly. “I am accusing her of lying. I do not think she saw him that night at all.”
And as she looks at him steadily, holding his gaze, willing him to believe her, Charles imagines himself for a moment in Mary’s place, that morning long ago when she found her daughter dead. She was not married, she already had a rival for her lover’s affections, and now she did not even have his child. She must have been terrified Shelley would consider himself no longer bound to her—that he would abandon her, as he already had his wife. But this woman had for parents not some portly tavern-keeper and his spouse, but two of the most outstanding intellects of the age; this woman had been taught from a child to believe herself the world’s darling—the beautiful lure of every eye. Poor little Harriet Westbrook might be casually set aside but not her—not Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. It was inconceivable—she could not permit it—she would not permit it. Was it at that moment, as she gazed down at the cradle at her daughter’s cold and rigid form, that it came to her that a dead child might be even more useful to her than a living one? Did she realise suddenly that if Shelley believed he was responsible for that death he would be bound to her forever by a bond he would never dare break—an unbearable guilt he could never redeem?
“But to make him believe he had killed his own child,” says Charles slowly. “Could she really have committed an act so—”
“Horrific? Monstrous? An act as monstrous, perhaps, as the crime perpetrated by that abhorrent creature in Frankenstein? The inhuman wretch that strangles a little child in the darkness, leaving the print of the murderer’s finger on its neck?”
“But you claim that he wrote that tale, not her—”
“And remember when he wrote it, Mr Maddox! It was the summer of 1816. Before we returned to London. Before that man Blackaby told Shelley the truth. When Shelley wrote that book he still thought himself guilty of his own daughter’s death—it was his own horror he was re-living. I remember, even now, my shiver of dread when first I read what the monster tells it
s creator on the icy Northern wastes. You and I are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. It was those words—those exact words—that Mary said to him the day she discovered I was carrying his child—after he had torn her away as she rained blows down upon me, where I lay on the floor fainting in my own blood.”
Claire looks down at her hands; her lips are white, but Charles does not see it. His eyes are on the floor as he begins to pace up and down the room, re-forming the sequence, re-casting the chain of events. “Very well, Miss Clairmont. Let us assume for the moment that you are right—let us suppose Mary did indeed lie about seeing Shelley that night—a lie that is not merely believed by Shelley, but corroborated by one of the finest thief takers in the land. And as the days pass and her deception holds, she finds that falsehood has accomplished everything she hoped for—Hogg is banished, and Shelley returns to her side, to comfort her in the depths of her inconsolable grief. Grief he believes he has caused. And then she finds herself once again pregnant and Shelley’s love for that little boy makes her believe herself, at last, secure. Yet when his wife dies and he is free to marry her, she is horrified to find that he hesitates—he seeks to postpone—and the only way she can compel him to fulfil his promise is by threatening to destroy both herself and the new baby she is by then carrying, the new daughter that will replace the one she lost. And why does Shelley try to evade the marriage? Not because he knows she has lied, because by then Blackaby has not yet tracked him down. No.” He turns to Claire. “He seeks to postpone because even the black depth of his guilt has not been enough to destroy his love for you. And from that moment on she knows her lie is flawed, because even if she can prevent him from leaving her, she cannot eradicate those feelings—feelings so strong that he can never wholly sever his connection with you, never accept being long from your side—feelings so strong, indeed, that they endure even your liaison with Byron, and the child that is its consequence.”
Claire lifts her chin in defiance. “Allegra was an exquisitely beautiful little girl. Shelley adored her—and William adored her. When I gave him a sweetmeat he would crawl over and place half his share in my own darling’s mouth. Then Mary would insist he give some to his sister too, and the poor boy would cry and cry until Clara was taken away and Allegra restored to his side. It was then that Mary started to say my darling should be sent to her father—that it would be for her own good—that he could provide a better future for her than I. Allegra must go—I do not want her remaining here—if no-one can be found to take her, we will have to go ourselves—on and on, day after day after day. By the time we left England Shelley’s health had completely broken down.”
Charles can well believe it, though even his imagination shrinks from the full horror of what it must have been to live in such a household, as the venomous rivalry of one generation began to replicate itself only too unerringly in the next. And as for Mary, Claire’s very presence—Claire with her daughter more beautiful than her own—must have seemed a retribution designed by fate purposely to torment her. Is this what she revealed in those letters she later wrote to her dashing young friend Gatteschi—letters she claimed would have destroyed her forever if ever they saw light? Is this what she meant when she said her whole life had been an endless atonement for some dreadful crime she had committed all unknowing? Only she had not committed it unknowing. Mary had always known what it was she had done. Both to Harriet, and to her own husband. Not merely letter after dreadful letter that helped drive a vulnerable young woman to a terrible suicide, but a lie that she could never take back—a lie she could never after unsay. And her punishment? Claire. Never to have had the life she yearned for without Claire.
Charles goes thoughtfully to the table and pours himself more coffee. “And when did you and Shelley renew your affaire?”
Once more there is that defiant lift of the chin. “Mary had only herself to blame. She did nothing but carp and criticise, nothing but complain. With me he could be happy; with me he could be himself.”
“I do not doubt it,” says Charles. “But imagine the unbearable downwards spiral that now entraps her—the more she protests, the more she drives him away, and yet she cannot stop herself—cannot break the deadly circle. And then, after all she believes she had suffered, Shelley summons her on a journey of more than a hundred miles across Italy for what she deems your convenience. With her daughter already seriously ill. It must have been the last straw.”
Her eyes narrow. “I see you have heard the Shelleys’ version of that event. But I was there, and I tell you little Clara was not so very sick when they first reached Este. Shelley and I had had three blissful weeks alone with my darling—the house was so beautiful, the air almost luminous, and the garden full of flowers—and then when Mary arrived it was as if winter had come again. We endured day after day of her furious accusations and all the while that little girl was becoming more and more unwell. It was horrible—horrible—as if we were condemned never to escape the past—I knew it was to tempt Providence to call her so—”
Charles frowns. “I do not understand—”
“They called the baby Clara. It was the name they had given to their first daughter. Only she had never lived to be christened.”
Charles stares at her, unable to credit the evidence of his own senses. “They called their second daughter by the same name as the baby Mary accused her husband of killing?”
“Shelley insisted. It was that same superstition he had always had about names—that the past might be redeemed by repeating it. But he was wrong. It was not true, was it. Not for Clara.”
“No,” says Charles, his mind alight with a sudden realisation. “Shelley was not wrong—the past was repeated.”
She shakes her head sadly. “Repeated, yes, but not redeemed.”
“You misunderstand me: The past was repeated because Mary Shelley made it so. Think for a moment—when the first baby died she was struggling with events she could not command—a situation she thought slipping from her grasp. But did not the death of her child restore to her a measure of control, even if only for a time? And did she not regain that pre-eminence by ensuring Shelley believed himself responsible? And was it not exactly the same with the second little girl? Her own position is under threat, she fears Shelley is turning again to you, but the death of the child restores him once more to her side. And once again it is because she insists he is guilty—guilty this time of neglect and reckless delay, because he was concerned only for you, and ignored the needs of his own dying daughter.”
Claire comes towards him now, tears in her eyes. “Mary always blamed me for what happened. But I swear to you I begged her on my knees to stop in Padua and allow the doctor I was consulting there to treat Clara as well. There was no need to go on to Venice that day—we had already been travelling since three o’clock in the morning, and we were all overcome with the heat and the strain. With a child already so haggard—it was taking such a terrible risk. But Mary would not listen. She forced Shelley to take her.”
Charles looks at her. How many times has it happened before; a whole case—weeks of work—turns and opens on a nuance, a glance. Or a single word. Everything he had thought—everything he’d deduced—has just reversed and inverted. Like a photograph changing places with its negative. Dark to light, light to dark. Like Escher’s famous woodcut that is at one and the same time black birds flying by day, and white birds flying by night. The image remains the same; it all depends on how you perceive it.
“The baby was haggard?” he says slowly.
“The child was so weak and gaunt I should hardly have known her. Those four days in Este it was as if she was wasting away before our very eyes. Even as an infant she had never fed well—Mary was always saying that her milk would not come or the child would not take suck—that her spirits sank at the very thought of putting her to her breast.”
Charles thinks again about what Maddox told him of Mary Shelley’s first dead child—about her skin so yellow, and h
er body wrapped so tightly that all that could be seen was her face. Did Mary’s deceit begin not with the death of her daughter, and the lie she told of it, but before that—almost from the moment that baby was born? Were the blankets she bound about the child designed to conceal the real truth—that this girl, too, had been starved? Was that what had really driven Shelley so distracted in the days before she died? He, after all, had been a father before—if the child was not being adequately fed, surely he of all people would have seen the signs. Perhaps he told himself afterwards that it had not been Mary’s fault—that it was her first child, and the infant already sickly and not expected to live. Perhaps he thought his own guilt so overwhelming that hers vanished into insignificance. And then, years later and all unlooked-for, he opens the door one morning to find Absalom Blackaby standing there before him. A man who saw the baby naked, and unswaddled; a man who would have seen—just as Shelley had—the rib cage protruding through the sallow skin, the stomach hollowed with days of hunger. And later when his second daughter dies, and Shelley has to bury another tiny corpse that resembles only too horrifyingly the first, does it come to him, then, that this cannot be mere coincidence—cannot only be ill luck?
And now Charles remembers, with an icy rush of horror, that there is another baby girl entangled in all of this. Another who fits the same terrible pattern. Little Elena, the baby Mary Shelley begged for, but then refused to feed. Little Elena who was so quickly abandoned in the Naples orphanage in 1819. Charles had thought that an appalling dereliction on Shelley’s part—an indefensible selfishness—but what if he’s wrong? What if Shelley did not abandon her at all, but rescued her? What if he took Elena to the orphanage because he thought it was somewhere she would be safe? Did he fear, after the deaths of not one but two emaciated little girls, what his wife might do, if left alone with a third? If Charles had not felt it before he feels it now, that electric teeming of the blood as the elements of a case fall suddenly and without warning into place, and the answer—the explanation—emerges with a perfect irresistible clarity from the mire of past confusion.
A Fatal Likeness Page 32