A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  There is a gust of wind then, and a branch outside the window scratches plaintively against the glass like a suppliant wraith. “It was forty years ago this very day. I have been sitting here these last hours, by the fire, listening to the wind in the trees and remembering, and when the knock came to the door and I saw you standing there I thought, for a wild moment, that time had been retraced. That you came with news of her. That she was still out there, waiting to be found. Waiting to be rescued.”

  Her face buckles with pain, and Charles feels an answering clasp to his own heart, remembering what it was like to look up and see a golden-haired child hesitating in a doorway, a child so like his own lost sister that it seemed as if his own impossible prayer has been answered, and he had been given another chance—another chance to redeem the past.

  There are tears in her eyes now. “I know I should never have allowed them to go—the weather was poor that day and like to worsen—and I knew she was not strong enough to walk so far, but he said he would carry her pig-a-back—that he had often taken his sisters on such expeditions, bearing them so in his arms when they became too tired to follow him. And she was so excited at the prospect of their little excursion together that at last I agreed. She had so few opportunities of that kind—so few of the pleasures other children take for granted. I remember standing at the window as I watched them go, he with that fine coat of his all torn about the buttons, and she in her favourite dress, with her best blue sash tied in a bow. And I stood there again that evening, waiting and watching as the night and the storm came on, and when I saw him stagger out of the darkness like a dead man, my heart began to beat so violently in my breast that I could scarcely breathe. He was holding her sash clutched against his chest, and he was covered in slime, his hair black with mud, and his eyes starting from his skull like a monster from some terrifying dream.”

  Charles can feel his own heart racing as the image conjures itself before his eyes—an image hallucinatingly like that infamous creature formed by Frankenstein’s unhallowed arts from the offal of the slaughter-house. A monster that murdered the lovely and the helpless, and strangled the innocent as they slept. Now more than ever Charles wonders: Was the imagining of that monster the deliberate resurrection of unbearable memories, or an unconscious externalisation of everything in himself that its creator most feared?

  “I rushed outside,” she continues, “but my husband was there before me, seizing him by the throat and demanding to know where she was. I truly think Robert would have choked the life from him had I not intervened, and when he loosed his grip he fell to the ground in the dirt, clutching his neck and gasping for breath, the marks of bruises about his throat. He said they had gone all the way down to the river—that there had been a little boat moored at the bank and she had begged him—pleaded with him—to take her out in it—to row her about a little as he had so often rowed his sisters. And it had started so joyfully—she in the prow smiling like a princess and he singing at the top of his voice and scaring the cattle come down to drink. Only then an oar became suddenly entangled in an overhanging tree and he had to wrestle to free it—the boat began to rock—he told her to be still, but she became frightened and tried to crawl towards him—she stood—the oar wrenched all at once free, and as the boat tipped she slipped over the side. He said she uttered not the smallest cry, that her body made not the slightest movement on the face of the water. It was as if she had never been there at all.”

  She looks up at Charles, and then away. “He told us he searched—that he did everything he could—he tried to wade in but it was too deep and he could not swim. He said she must have become caught in the weed and been unable to free herself. He said that with her arm—her infirmity—she would not have been able—”

  Her voice falters; she has a little book in her lap which she touches now as if it is a talisman, as if it might give her the strength she needs to finish what she has set herself to say. “My husband dragged him down to the river then and there—all those miles in the dark and the pouring rain—but they could not find her. There was no sign. Not then, and not afterwards. We were never able to bring her body home. Never able to lay her to rest. Two days later that friend of his came here. He said he was distraught at what had happened—crazed with grief and remorse—unable to sleep, unable to eat, threatening to destroy himself by poison, or by pistol-shot. He begged us, if we could find it in our hearts, not to blight such a promising young man’s life by reporting him to the magistrate. I remember crying out that our lives were blighted—that we would never see our daughter again—never see her married—never see her a mother—but my husband silenced me with a face of granite, and demanded money. A very great deal of money. The man floundered a moment, then stammered that there was a cousin who might be able to help—a cousin with money to command. That if we could wait a few days he would send to London.”

  The room is still, but it is not the stillness of peace. Then Charles gets up and pokes the coals, and as he returns to his seat and the shadows begin to dispel in the sudden leap of firelight, he notices there are two portraits by the window he had not seen before.

  “May I?”

  She glances up, then nods.

  The first is set in an oval frame carved intricately with flowers and butterflies, and the little mice and rabbits so beloved of young girls. She is half turned towards him, her fair hair curled in ringlets, and her dark blue eyes lit with such an expression of pure enchanted joy that Charles can hardly bear to look at her. But then, as the fire gathers strength, he can see the picture more clearly—see not only the name engraved beneath it, but what the little girl is wearing about her neck. A string of bright blue beads.

  It cannot be a coincidence. It must be the same. The same beads his uncle saw in Hans Place all those years ago, wound about the neck of Shelley’s little daughter. He must have found them in the water that terrible night, and kept them until he had a daughter of his own. A daughter he gave two gifts, the day she was born. A string of blue beads, and the name of the girl who once had worn them. That the past might be redeemed by repeating it.

  Charles turns to Mrs Smith. “Ianthe Mary; it is a beautiful name. And she is a beautiful child.”

  She nods. “The artist has captured her to the life, but he has flattered her, all the same. You cannot see it in that picture, but she suffered a cruel accident when she was hardly more than a baby. Her arm and shoulder were withered ever after, and she could only walk with her own strange little jerking gait. Other children shunned her and mocked her, as children do who know no better, and do not understand their own heartlessness.”

  Charles looks at the picture again, this picture so seemingly insignificant, but which holds the key to so many dark mysteries. So this is the secret that lay buried deep in Shelley’s past and cast its shadow over all the rest of his life. This is why Harriet Shelley died with words of death and guilt and a young girl drowned, hidden among her clothes. This is what Hogg meant when he talked so obscurely of a need for repentance—Hogg who must, surely, have been the friend who came here after Ianthe died, just as Medwin must have been the cousin in London who gave them the money. And this is what left Shelley terrified and shaking, that night of ghost-raising in Geneva, when he heard Coleridge’s poem of the deformed witch Christabel and talked, half mad, of a tale of his own that would rouse those who heard it to terror. A tale of a young girl, in the like way misshapen, whose face still haunted his waking days, and would not let him rest. Not then, nor till the hour of his own death. Was it a vision of this dead girl that Shelley saw rising from the waves from the terrace at Lerici, those last few fevered weeks? Was it Ianthe he saw smiling and clasping her hands in joy, and did he see absolution in that joy—a promise that she was finally at peace, and he at last forgiven?

  And as Charles thinks of those last weeks, and of hope dying slowly into a desire for death, his eye is drawn, half unthinking, to the second portrait hanging next to the girl’s. A portrait of the same size, bu
t more austerely framed. The portrait of a young man. Charles looks at it for a moment in horrified disbelief then turns, his blood running cold, to the woman.

  “But surely this is—?”

  “Not the man you suppose it to be. It is my son. Henry.”

  Charles looks again at the painting. Despite her words, he can still scarcely believe it—the likeness is more than close—it is uncanny. The same striking blue-violet eyes, the same pale skin, the same wildly curling hair. And now, at last, seeing this, Charles knows everything. Not just what it was that Shelley had done, but how—and how ruthlessly—he was punished.

  “You said your son was away when Ianthe died?” he asks, with forced calmness.

  “Henry was in London. He came as soon as he got our letter. He was furious with my husband for not going at once to the magistrate—he said we should never have accepted the money—never bought this house with such tainted coin. He swore he would never rest until he had found the man who had killed his sister, and taken his revenge. He did not see why he should be content, and we so miserable.”

  “He was working in London?”

  “At that time, yes. He was a writer, for the newspapers.”

  Charles wanders, as if casually, to the window. “Work such as that must be relatively easy to come by. Even in out-of-the-way places. Even in a county as remote, perhaps, as Cumberland.”

  She flushes. “I am sure you are right.”

  “Or the north of Wales.”

  “Possibly. I could not say.”

  “And did your son ever have cause to journey farther afield? To Europe, perhaps?”

  She hesitates. “He did travel at least once to Italy. To the neighbourhood of Lerici. Do you know it?”

  Charles nods. “Only by reputation. But I believe the air on the coast there is said to have a magical quality. People see visions—dream dreams—may sometimes even believe they have glimpsed what the Germans call a doppelgänger. An image of themselves as like as to the reflection in a glass.”

  She looks away and folds her hands. “I know nothing of such things. But perhaps there is something in what you say. There was a change in Henry, that summer. I could tell, from his letters. He seemed happier than he had for many years. It was as if he was finally at peace.”

  At peace, thinks Charles, because he had confronted the man he believed had killed his sister; at peace because that man had paid at last the price, and his task was done.

  Charles turns again to the portrait. The portrait that is Shelley, and yet not Shelley. A likeness both of the poet, and of his persecutor. The man who tried to kill him first in Cumberland, and then in Wales. The man whose face Shelley caught sight of at the window, that dark night, and saw in terror that it was his own. The man he glimpsed thereafter so many times—on the London streets, in the Italian squares—that he began to believe himself deranged. The man whose last appearance, walking calmly towards him on a sunlit terrace, was to precipitate a final reckless plunge towards death and forgetting.

  The blurred image Charles has been pursuing fuses finally into focus. What was it the assailant threatened at Tremadoc? That he would murder Shelley’s wife and ravish his sister. And there is reason now, and not childish caprice, in Shelley’s later obsession with kidnapping his sisters from their school—he must have seen Henry Smith in London, and feared the girls were in terrible danger. The rape of a sister, the death of a wife; the first threat never came to pass, but what of the second? Charles remembers now, with a terrible foreboding, the name of the man Harriet was said to have taken as a lover before she died. The man seen about her lodgings who was so like her long-absent husband that everyone assumed it was indeed him. The name she was living under when she went to her death. Had Smith deliberately sought out Shelley’s wife when she was at her most vulnerable, her most forsaken? Did he get Harriet with child and then callously abandon her, leaving her so desperate at this second desertion that she fulfilled his threat of vengeance by her own hand? Or did he truly love her and return one night to find that she was dead? She and his own unborn baby together. Another death to lay at Shelley’s door. Another cause that cried aloud for vengeance.

  The woman is on her feet. “I think you should go now. You have, I take it, found what you sought.”

  “When I came here I had only questions. But now I have answers, I do not know what I should do with them.”

  “I have lived with what happened these forty years. Nothing you can do now will change the past.”

  It’s clear this strange encounter is at an end, and Charles follows her back to the front door. She shakes his hand and he is about to leave when something makes him turn back. The empty, quiet house. Those two solitary portraits. All those walls otherwise bare.

  “Where is your son now, Mrs Smith? Does he have a family of his own?”

  She would never have told him, had he not asked.

  “He died, Mr Maddox. That summer in Italy. He was on his way home when his ship went down in a storm. They found his trunk, weeks later, washed up on the sand. There was hardly anything in it—a few clothes, some papers. And this little book.”

  She hands it to him. A piece of faded blue ribbon marks the page. Cut, surely, from the sash his sister was wearing the day she died.

  A gentle start convulsed Ianthe’s frame:

  Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;

  Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained:

  She looked around in wonder and beheld

  Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,

  Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,

  And the bright beaming stars

  That through the casement shone.

  Charles turns the little volume over. It is so worn with handling the lettering is disappearing into the dry leather. But it makes no difference. Because Charles has read these lines before, and he knows the name of the man who wrote them.

  EPILOGUE

  75 Gloucester Road

  Hyde Park Gardens

  5 February

  Mr Maddox,

  After so long a silence, after I have deliberated so deeply what I should do, and what I should say, I find that the decision is no longer my own to make. I have heard today that Mary is dead. I will never, now, discover whether all you told me had its grounding in truth, or whether we have both been prey to the fatal allure of likeness. Have we seen patterns and treacherous precedents where none were in truth to be found? Had I known she was ill I would have been sure to see her, and I bitterly resent that Percy did not see fit to give me such tidings himself, leaving me to discover the news through an intermediary. What I would not give, now, to know what she said at the last. Did she confess her darkest deeds, or regret her terrible lies? I am told the end was peaceful—that she had lain for days in her bed, unable to speak a word, and the end came at last in a succession of fits and the slow creep of a profound stupor. The physician who attended her spoke of a tumour of the brain of long standing, which he believes has accounted for many of her ills and symptoms in the last years, and yet it was a letter, I am told, that precipitated her last attack. A letter brought to her by her maid more than a month ago, that caused her such distress she fell at once into a series of fits, and was never able thereafter to speak, or to move. What it was she read that affected her so, no-one could determine, since the letter itself could not afterwards be found.

  I have written myself to Percy, berating him for his treatment of me, and telling him I am myself dying. And because that is so—because I will not now live long—I have decided that I will give to you that memoir over which I have expended such pains and which would, were it known, make so prodigious a change in the eyes of the world—the vain, cold, dull-witted world. You will receive it tomorrow, and you must resolve, then, what you will do. If you choose, you may keep it safe until I am gone, and publish it thereafter, that the truth may at last be known; or you may do the great thing and consign it to the flames, page by long slow page, watching the fir
e eat away to ashes the last witness to our entwined and extraordinary lives.

  I ask nothing, counsel nothing. It is for you, now, to decide.

  Claire Clairmont

  AUTHOR’S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This section contains details of the plot, so readers are advised to leave it till the end.

  I did a great deal of research in preparing for this novel, and owe a particular debt of gratitude to Richard Holmes’ masterly biographical study Shelley: The Pursuit, as well as to Miranda Seymour’s fine biography of Mary Shelley. I also drew on the journals and letters of the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont, the Hogg, Medwin, and Thomas Love Peacock memoirs of the poet, Polidori’s account of the summer of 1816, and on various modern studies such as Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, The Godwins and the Shelleys by William St Clair, Ernest Lovell’s biography of Thomas Medwin, Kenneth Neill Cameron’s Romantic Rebels: Essays on Shelley and His Circle, Daisy Hay’s recent work Young Romantics, and the book accompanying the Bodleian Library exhibition, Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family.

  My book is, of course, a novel, but I have made it a point of honour not to make free with known events or timings (with one small exception I mention later), even if that might have made the construction of my plot rather easier. Where there are gaps, I have allowed myself to fill them, and I set these out below. But I was surprised, as I wrote, at how little I needed to invent outright, and I think my readers will also be surprised by how much of my story is based on facts and contemporary accounts, even if I have exercised a degree of artistic licence in presenting them, and extrapolated from what we know, to what might have happened, or could have been said.

  Those who know Shelley’s poetry well will also have recognised that each of my chapter titles echoes one of his poems, and that the opening lines of that chapter contain words and phrases taken from that poem. I also weave in some of my characters’ own words on occasion, taken from their correspondence, writings, and journals, and once or twice one person’s words are attributed to another, where I think that is reasonable. All the letters and documents I include in the novel are my own invention (though they draw on real materials in places); the exceptions are the two suicide notes, which are exact reproductions of what Fanny Imlay and Harriet Shelley left behind. You can see a facsimile of the latter on the Shelley’s Ghost website.