Charles takes a step towards Claire. “I think that when the first baby died she was barely more than skin and bone, and Absalom Blackaby saw it when he buried her—saw it and knew only too clearly what it meant. I think that was what he really threatened to reveal to the world, if Shelley did not agree to his demands. And I think that was the true reason Shelley sent Elena away. He had failed to protect his own daughters, but there was one little girl he could still save.”
Claire puts her hand to her face, her eyes wide with terrified comprehension. “No—it was not just one—it was not just Elena. I did not think—not at the time—but years later, when I was begging Byron to let Allegra visit me—he said he did not trust her in the same house as Mary. He said he could not permit her to come to us only to perish of—of—neglect and—and—starvation. Shelley must have confided in him—Shelley must have told him—must have feared what might happen—”
Charles reaches for her hand, knowing what such a realisation must mean to her, but she pushes him away. “Do you not see?” she cries. Her voice is raw with pain. “If what you say is true, it was her fault my darling was left to die in that freezing, disease-infested convent. Byron might have let Allegra come to me, if it had not been for her—she would have lived—she would be here now—I would not be alone—”
“You cannot be sure of that,” says Charles softly. “You cannot torture yourself with the past.”
“I have done nothing but torture myself with the past since the day I heard that she was dead.”
And as she weeps now in his arms, her body shaking with a lifetime of loss, Charles wonders if it had been the same for Shelley. Was he, too, haunted by what he might have done differently—by the deaths he might have prevented, had he acted another way, or made another choice. And having watched the past repeat itself so tragically not just once but twice, did he see everything, ever after, through the same dark prism?
“That letter you showed me,” he says slowly, as her sobs subside, “did Shelley not say you had put off a visit to Allegra because he feared leaving Mary alone—that he dreaded some fatal end?”
Claire shakes her head sadly, her handkerchief at her eyes. “Mary was inconsolable after William died—she had always suffered from melancholia, but it was never worse than after his death. She said she wished she too had died that day—that she would never recover from his loss. For months she withdrew from us, into herself—impossible to comfort, impossible to solace. She would write, and she would sit, for hours, gazing out of the window. I would see her watching me when I was in the garden, like some sort of phantasm, some image of myself in a clouded mirror.”
Charles nods, remembering how he had thought of the two of them as anti-types—dark and light, hot and cool, eager and reticent.
“It was not the first time I had heard her talk of suicide, but I never believed it as I did then.”
“And that is what Shelley feared?” says Charles. “That is what the letter he sent you referred to?”
She looks at him with a puzzled frown. “I have always assumed so—”
“And when was this?”
“In 1820. The late summer of 1820.”
Charles calculates quickly; Percy would have been—what? Nine months old? Perhaps even less. “The letter said, too, did it not, that you had been present when Clara died—and when William died?”
She nods. “I was there, yes—but—”
“Why should Shelley have mentioned that? Why raise it again then?”
She looks at him blankly. “I do not understand—what are you saying—”
“Miss Clairmont, I do not think Shelley feared his wife would kill herself. Why did he talk of William’s death in that letter to you—what happened to that little boy?”
Her eyes fill with tears. “It had not seemed so serious, not in the beginning. A stomach disorder, such as he had suffered many times before, but the doctor said there was no reason he should not make a full recovery. I remember how happy Shelley was that night, when he took me with him to hear the music in the Piazza di Spagna.”
“And how long was it before the child’s condition worsened?”
“A few days. Perhaps four. Then suddenly there was a dreadful relapse—terrible heart-rending convulsions that seemed to tear his tiny body in pieces. Shelley sat up with him for three days and nights, not sleeping, exhausting himself—willing his sweet Willmouse not to die. But it was no use. He said later he felt as if he had been hunted down by calamity—as if the whole household was somehow doomed. We were all overwhelmed by it—all of us. I loved that little boy as much as I did my own darling.”
“And how did he look,” asks Charles quietly, “at the end?”
The tears are falling now, lingering heavy tears she does not wipe away. “He had hardly eaten anything for more than a week. He was barely recognisable from the child he had been.”
“Just as Clara was—just as I believe the first baby also was.”
Claire begins to shake her head. “No, not William—surely not William—”
“You must see it, Miss Clairmont, as Shelley would have done, sitting up all those nights with his son—alone, in the dark, as the child worsened. He must have asked himself if that relapse—that sudden and unexpected decline—was once again his fault, because he had chosen to spend time happily with you, rather than miserably with his wife—”
She is sobbing desperately now, and he goes to her and helps her back to her seat. “You think I am blaming you—but I am not. I am not saying William died because of what you and Shelley did, but I believe Shelley thought so—I think he believed his wife guilty—he believed Mary had allowed his beloved son to die to punish him, a third time, for loving you and neglecting her. Might that not be the real explanation of his refusal to leave his son’s side, those last few days? He stayed because he feared what might happen if he left the boy alone with his own mother. And when he begged you later to postpone your visit to Allegra, it was because he was terrified the same thing might happen again, to his only remaining child. Both his daughters had died, then his precious William. Percy was all he had left.”
She rises from her chair and walks away, as stiffly as an old woman. It is long, very long, before she faces him again.
“Let us be clear,” she says, in a voice as brittle as February frost. “Let there be no misunderstanding. You are telling me that William’s death was not an accident.”
Charles takes a deep breath. Part of his mind is telling him that the boy’s last illness was only too horribly like little Clara’s. Some apparently mundane disorder of the stomach that suddenly worsened, a swift and drastic loss of weight, and at the last, deadly convulsions. Each time the same pattern. And Charles knows—as Shelley, too, must have known—that a stomach disorder is the easiest possible sickness to induce in a child, and convulsions may be the consequence not only of fever, but of an adult’s choking hand. But there is nothing Charles can do to prove it.
“It is possible the illness was exactly what it appeared to be,” he answers carefully. “That no human intervention either caused it, or could have saved him.”
“But you do think both those little girls were—harmed—deprived of food—that Mary must have known it but did nothing—”
“Yes, Miss Clairmont, I do. I know it is hard to believe any woman could so ill-treat her own defenceless infants, but I trained for a while as a doctor, and even in those few months I saw women reduced to a state of abject misery after childbirth—women otherwise gentle and tenderhearted—”
“Mary was never that,” she objects.
“—who became erratic, even violent after their delivery. I have read since that some turn their fury on their husbands, others on their own babies. If she were already pre-disposed by an inherited weakness, such an illness might well have driven her to commit these dreadful acts, hardly knowing, perhaps, what it was she did.”
He is trying to make it easier for her, but she is shaking her head now, not in sadne
ss but in grim and fierce refutation. “You do not know her; I have known her intimately from when she was a child. Mary has a tenacity—a ferocity of resolve—such as I have rarely seen even in the most ruthless of men. Her own father acknowledged as much. Godwin, if anyone, knew of what she was capable. Knew it, and feared it. Do you not recall in that selfsame letter what Shelley said of the injury to her arm when she was still a girl?”
Charles nods slowly. “And some veiled reference to Godwin and your mother fearing some greater evil.”
“I did not know what that was—not at the time. My mother did not tell me until a few weeks before she died. She said the physician who came to the house thought Mary might have caused the injury herself. That she exaggerated its severity—indeed may have prevented the wound from healing by scratching it again and again with her fingernails. There were marks the doctor could not otherwise explain. My mother believed she did it to secure to herself, once more, the whole of Godwin’s time and attention. They had been excessively attached to one another after her mother died, and she fiercely resented being supplanted. Especially by a woman like my mother.” There is a settled bitterness in her face now, the scar of an ancient unhealed resentment.
“I could never comprehend, then, why Godwin sent her away so often when she was supposed to be such a favourite—why he would so carefully burn every letter she sent him when they were all those months apart. Once, when she had returned from such an absence, there was a fire in the bookshop downstairs that no-one could explain. Mary had been in the house less than ten days.”
They are silent. Charles is thinking about what Maddox told him. Of a woman who spoke to her lover in the voice of a ten-year-old child, and promised to be ‘a good Pecksie and not vex him any more’; of a woman who claimed to be ‘quite well again’ when of sickness there had been no outward sign. The same woman who had once basked in her father’s undivided love, and then seen that love stolen from her by another she despised. A woman who may have been willing, even as a mere girl, to inflict an unsightly wound on her own body in a desperate effort to regain that love she craved. Could such a woman make her own babies sick to secure her lover to her side, and punish him for daring to neglect her? Charles has not heard, of course, of Münchausen syndrome, and it will be another century before this mental disorder is named, and even longer before it is fully understood that there are women who will harm not only themselves but their own children, to compel the attention, the affection, or the sympathy they believe they are owed. But Charles does not need to name it to recognise in Mary Shelley the possibility of the same terrible and overwhelming affliction of the mind.
“That letter you showed me,” he says eventually, “did it not say she was pregnant again in those last few months? What happened to the child?”
“She miscarried,” Claire replies quietly, turning away once more. “At the house in Lerici. It was not eight weeks since I had lost my own darling. They did not tell me of her death for days, fearing how I would react, and they were surprised, I think, that I seemed to rally so well. But they did not know what I knew. Shelley was going to leave her, Mr Maddox, and be with me. As he had always wished to.”
Charles moves softly towards her, and stands at her shoulder. She seems scarcely to know he is there.
“Lerici was such a beautiful place—beautiful and haunting. The landscape so wild, and the house right on the edge of the sea, with the waves crashing against the rocks, and the water swelling sometimes right up to the steps. Mary hated it from the start—she claimed to have a presentiment of coming evil—but I loved it, and Shelley loved it. At least at first. He began writing again—furiously—prolifically—a wonderful poem he called The Triumph of Life. And he had a vision—a vision that troubled him at first, but which he came to see as a pledge of forgiveness—a promise that all would be well for the two of us, he and I. He was out on the terrace one night when he started suddenly as if in pain and pointed out to sea crying, ‘There it is again!—there!’ He said afterwards that a little naked child had risen from the water. He swore it was looking towards him, smiling, its hands clasped together as if in joy.”
Charles frowns. “It was a child of his own he saw?”
“I do not think so. A few days later I departed for Florence to collect my possessions. We planned to tell Mary of our intentions as soon as I returned. I left him happy, composed—settled in his own mind. When I entered that house again two weeks later, everything had changed. He was ashen with exhaustion, wrung out to his last atom of energy by Mary’s unceasing demands. She was one moment in hysterics, the next in a state of near collapse requiring waiting on hand and foot.” She shakes her head. “It was intolerable to be in that house—to be forced to listen to the endless recriminations, the dreadful repeated violence. Two days after my return the whole household was roused by her shrieks—she was beside herself, screaming that she was losing the baby and blaming Shelley, but in the end it all came to nothing. A friend who was staying with us said to me later that he thought she had made the whole thing up—he remarked rather tartly how strange it was that she had managed to recover so quickly.”
And how revealing, thinks Charles, that this phantom miscarriage should have happened so soon after her rival’s return.
“And then we found her lying senseless one morning in her bedroom. There was so much panic and confusion it is hard to remember clearly, but it seemed to me she must have been standing on a chair by the bookshelves, and fallen from there onto the marble floor. Though why she should have done such a thing—any one of us would have fetched her down a book had she asked for it. I thought, even then, that was almost as if she had wished it on herself.” She gazes down onto the busy street. “The house was so remote we could not get the doctor for hours. Had Shelley not been there, and acted so decisively, I think Mary would have died. But the effort—all that time at her side—took a most terrible toll. A few nights later we were all woken by the most terrifying screaming. We found him in Mary’s room, staggering about in a half trance, babbling wildly that he had seen a figure standing over the bed with its hands about her throat. And when the stranger lifted his mantle to show himself, Shelley saw his own face staring back at him in the darkness.”
Charles starts, remembering that he has read a version of this same incident in Medwin’s memoir. Only he did not know then what he knows now. It had appeared, then, to be merely one more example of a whole sequence of paranoid delusions stretching back to Shelley’s boyhood, but now there may be a meaning in this apparent madness. Did Shelley wish to free himself so desperately from his wife that his sleeping self dreamed of killing her? And surely it is no coincidence that he acted out that phantasy in echo of the murder she had accused him of, all those years before. That by repeating the past it might be exorcised, even if it could never, ever be redeemed.
Claire’s words break into his thoughts. “It was all so strange, that time at Lerici. Everything seemed unnaturally vivid, unnaturally intense—it was as if the rules of the common world no longer held sway. Only a few days previously one of our friends saw Shelley passing twice by her window even though we all knew him to be miles away at the time. And then, that night in Mary’s room, Shelley told me that while I was away in Florence he had seen a man coming towards him one morning on the terrace—”
“Did he still believe he was being persecuted by some nameless pursuer—even so many years later, and so far away?”
“You do not understand—the man he saw on the terrace was his own mirror image. And when Shelley challenged him, the man just laughed and demanded to know how much longer he meant to be content.”
Charles can scarcely imagine the state of mind that must have generated so horrifying a vision, and for the first time he begins to feel some small sympathy for this man. It was not only the marriage Shelley made that haunted him. What was it he had done, all those years before, that he was still torturing himself so?
“After that he began to withdraw from me. He
would no longer talk of the life we had imagined together. He spent long hours alone, on the boat or walking on the shore. I did not know, then, that he had tried to obtain prussic acid. Enough for a lethal dose.”
“Do you think he meant to kill himself?”
“I think he had begun to feel he would never be free of Mary any other way—that it was the only means by which he would find rest.”
She leans her cheek against the cold windowpane and Charles can see the tears rolling again down her face. “I believe now that he went out on that boat looking for death, and that he embraced it when it came. When he left us he was in such brilliant spirits—exhilarated with the sea, and the bright sky, and the prospect of the journey. They told us, later, the day he set out to return, that he must have known the Don Juan was over-rigged as the storm came on—that they could have run for safety to harbour, but they did not. The captain of another boat risked his own crew to bring his vessel alongside and take them on board, but he heard Shelley crying, ‘No, no!’ And when the man called to them that they must take in sail or perish, he saw Shelley seize his companion’s arm to prevent him. They were none of them seen alive again.”
There is silence in the room, a silence broken only by a sudden noise from the street—the laughter of children playing in the snow.
Claire hangs her head, and Charles puts his hand gently to her shoulder, imagining what it must have been like to wait, day after day, in that isolated house, in that terrible weather, desperate for news, watching for every sail. Only to find, more than a week later, that the mutilated bodies had been flung ashore, identifiable only by what clothes they wore, and what little they carried.
A moment later she has moved away from him, and is gathering her shawl and her reticule. “I came here thinking that you still intended to help me; I did not expect you to force me to live again through every dark hour I have ever known.”
A Fatal Likeness Page 33