The maid it was who found her. The maid who needed only one glance at the young woman on the bed to know that something was dreadfully amiss. She was lying, fully clothed, above the counterpane, in one hand her sister’s last gift, and in the other a single sheet of crumpled paper. I know all this, because I saw it. Before the doctor came, and the constable, and the idly and offensively curious, I thrust the maid from the room and slammed the door behind her. Then I went to the bedside and placed my hand against the pale forehead, and saw with a heart that faltered that on her eyelashes there still lingered tears. And then I took the paper from her cold and rigid fingers and read the words she had left for us to find.
I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as
Fanny Imlay
My duty – my professional duty – was clear. This note must remain, and the constable must see it. But I had a higher duty, or so I thought then. Not to her family, who, I feared, would be only too ready to commence their forgetting, but to the young woman herself. I knew what scandal and gossip would be whipped up by the very mention of her name, and what vile speculation would dog her to her grave, if it were bruited abroad that one connected so closely with the Godwin family had died here by her own hand, desolate and alone. Hearing footsteps on the stair I knew I had no time, and I made a decision I have never since regretted, not for one moment: I took the letter and tore the name away, then stepped quickly to the hearth and consigned the scrap of paper to the fire.
It was little enough, by way of a service, and not as decisive as I had hoped, for I discovered later that she had her mother’s initials sewn into her stays, and I fear that the prying of a callous posterity will uncover the secret I was striving so desperately to keep. But for then, and I hope for some little time yet, it was enough – enough to keep her poor wounded name from the speculations of the newspapers, and cast the kindness of concealment about her last hours. And even if I had failed her living, I had the power to protect her dead. Swansea is a small town, and word of such an untoward incident promulgates only too quickly, but I was relentless. No effort was spared, no payment unmade, and by nightfall on the third day I had ensured that the inquest verdict was given merely as an unexplained death, and there would be none of those references to insanity or self-destruction as would have seen her corpse treated with indignity and disrespect.
My tasks of that first day completed, and a letter sent to Godwin to inform him, in the sparest terms, of his step-daughter’s fate, I was sitting down at last to a cold and unsavoury dinner when the inn door flung open and I saw to my horror a face I recognized. He looked as ghastly as a man half dead, his face white, his coat stained with mud, and his cheeks blotched, as I now noted, with tears.
Shelley.
He was beginning to stammer some incoherent words to the terrified landlady, when he cast his eyes towards me and started backwards as if in terror. ‘Maddox!’ he cried, his voice failing. ‘You come upon me like an Orestes – have I escaped the clutches of the relentless villain who pursues my every step only to find myself trapped once more, and beyond all expectation, in your stern and pitiless glare?’
‘If it is that same fellow to which you refer—’ I began, when he interrupted me, a fire in his eyes.
‘How vile you are to doubt me!’ he cried, setting the wizened locals at the hearth pointing and whispering. ‘I saw him – that creature – only yesterday. He was there – there I tell you – staring at me as I boarded the coach for Bristol – I went looking for her there – she wrote to me from there—’
And it was only at that instant, I think, that he realized I was not, after all, some dark excrescence of his own troubled mind – that I was real, and my presence was no coincidence, but compelled by the same dire misfortune that had brought him hither.
‘But tell me not,’ he gasped, ‘that she – that you—’
I saw his look of terrible pain, I saw the flicker of a last and desperate hope, but my heart was frozen iron in my breast. And so I told him everything that had happened, everything I had done, every last and dreadful detail. Without mercy, without kindness, without sparing.
Anyone else would have pitied him then. Had I not known what this man had done, I too might have pitied him. But I did not. I held the knife, I knew the wound, and I twisted the blade with all the savagery in my power.
‘I saw her,’ he stammered at length. ‘Two days ago. She wrote to me asking me to meet her off the London coach. She said – she promised – that she was on her way to Dublin. That her aunts had relented – that she looked forward to happiness at last. But her voice was quivering as she said the words—’ His voice broke then, and he buried his head in his hands, weeping uncontrollably that he had not known, that she had never said, not expressly, and that the whole world was not wide enough to contain his misery. Not now.
I was on the point of berating him yet further – of telling him what heedless hurt he caused to all the women unfortunate enough to encounter him, all those other young women he induced to love him, be he aware of it or not – when he suddenly gave out a piercing cry and fell to the ground, his body racked by fearful spasms. The landlady was upon us in an instant, terrified at the sight, but I had seen those fits of his before; I knew they always supervened at some moment of sudden shock or high-wrought feeling, and never led to the fatal consequences the landlady clearly apprehended. I likewise suspected – though I have voiced the thought only once, and to no avail – that Shelley was not above simulating such attacks, as a means to divert attention from whatever culpability might otherwise have attached itself, at those moments, to him. I instructed the landlady, therefore, that he should merely be put to bed in one of the rooms upstairs and the doctor sent for in due course, should the symptoms not abate.
I myself was too exhausted to attempt anything further that night, and charged the landlady not to wake me unless in case of emergency, or should a message come from the coroner. Imagine my irritation, then, when there was a loud knock at my chamber before first light. I arose wearily and opened the door, and found the maid holding a note in what I knew to be Shelley’s hand.
I can do no more for her. All that could be done, you have done; and I have received this last hour, a letter from Godwin urging my return to Bath. He begs me not to disturb the silent dead – to comply with her own last wish for obscurity, and avoid at all costs any risk that his wife and remaining children might be exposed to the horror of the public papers. Should I remain for the obsequies, that risk must only be augmented, and I will, therefore, depart this very morning – this very hour – and return to my Mary, knowing that even if her family will not be present to see poor Fanny committed to the earth, that you, at least, will undertake that sad duty in our stead.
P. B. S.
I write out these words from memory; the note itself I cast into the fire in disgust, within a moment of reading it.
Of that interment, I wish not to speak. The rain driving in off the sea, the black-suited clergyman racing through the service that he might return to the comfort of his own fat fireside, and the bodies, three of them, sewn into their rough sacks, heaved one by one into the tainted pit of a pauper’s grave. I did not even know which one was hers.
A vile journey I endured home, with none of the comforts of my own private carriage, the public coach crowded, and the heavy wheels jarring and jolting on the dirty road. Fraser, I knew, had already returned to London, so I spent all that long expanse of hours cast in my own thoughts, and debating whether I could, in conscience, continue with Godwin’s commission, given the base opinion I now entertained of he who had hired me. I understood his terror of the press, I had sympathy with his wish to avoid fur
ther needless scandal, but I could not – and do not – forgive him for having abandoned that poor child to be buried alone and nameless, and with no one who loved her by. I have discovered since that he and his wife contrived to conduct themselves so calmly – so coldly indeed – in the face of this tragedy that not one person in their household had the smallest apprehension of the truth; I have discovered likewise that they continue, even now, to give out all manner of spurious accounts to explain the young woman’s supposed absence, and even after so many weeks have passed one of her step-brothers still has not the slightest notion of her death.
*
I returned at last, dirty and hungry, to my own house. Perhaps it was the sad fate of poor Fanny Imlay, or the fruit of too much solitary introspection, but I found myself, that night, overwhelmed by a sudden foreboding. I told myself my fears were irrational, but I could not rid myself of them, knowing as I did that no one had suffered more at Shelley’s hands than his wife, and that she, even more than Fanny, had seen her young life blighted for ever by his brutish selfishness. Late as it was, therefore, I summoned Jacob Todd, the man I had set to ingratiate himself with one of the serving-maids at the Westbrook house in Chapel-street, in the hope we might come thereby by news of Mrs Shelley, and yet in all that time he had discovered nothing. Todd confessed, at length, that he had recently seen Mrs Shelley’s sister leave the house for several hours together, but had not followed her, being – I suspected, though he denied it – too engrossed by the object of his feigned affections, to attend to the task he had been engaged to pursue. I berated him then, and cruelly, accusing him of a careless and indefensible breach that might have consequences far beyond any he was competent to conceive. Once I had sent him from the room and dismissed him from my service, I instructed Fraser to watch the movements of Miss Eliza Westbrook. I had been told by my informants that she and Harriet enjoyed a remarkable intimacy, given that there were some thirteen years between them, and I knew the elder sister had, indeed, lived for some months with the Shelleys when first they married. That this state of affairs had degenerated into bitter recriminations, even before the poet’s desertion of his wife, did not surprise me; that Miss Westbrook was among the most zealous in her family to punish the reprobate, and disgrace him publicly, surprised me even less. But all that concerned me for the moment was that Eliza, if anyone, would know where her sister had fled.
In the week that followed I received, almost daily, supplications from Godwin to augment the account I had sent him from Swansea with whatever further information I had now at my disposal; supplications I steadfastly refused to gratify with even the briefest of replies. I cared not for his feelings, judging he possessed very few; I did care, and very much, about Mrs Shelley, where she might be, and what circumstances had driven her to such a reckless course of action. I feared the worst, and those fears were brought to a greater and more painful intensity when Fraser brought me word that the Westbrooks had hired a young man, one William Alder by name, to drag the ponds in the area of Hyde-park nearest the house. My distress on hearing of this was extreme, but Fraser soon established that nothing had been found. It was some time before I was to receive further news, and I attempted to engross my mind with other pressing cases recently neglected, until one morning in November I was woken by Fraser pounding on my door an hour before breakfast and calling to me, hot-faced and out of breath, that Miss Westbrook had dressed the children herself before the rest of the household was awake, and taken them to an address near Hans-place, Brompton.
‘And I know as why she chose it,’ he said, in his deep, slow tones, as we waited for the carriage to be brought round. ‘That fellow Alder has lodgings in the same house. Seems likely he might have found a room for her there. And that husband of hers has been there too.’
‘Are you certain?’ I enquired, my attention aroused.
‘The landlady’s daughter described him to the life. Said she’d seen him two or three times since the young woman moved in, the latest only last week.’
I glanced at him, wondering, not for the first time, at the facility he displayed in obtaining information from women; the fair sex seemed to find him unaccountably appealing, despite his shaven head, broken nose, and less than engaging manner. I had employed him for quite other reasons, and in that role he had never failed: many a man had had cause to regret lying to me, after enduring the undivided attentions of George Fraser. He had a talent for persuasion of the physical kind, and I never scrupled to employ that talent in a just cause, but it appeared I had underestimated other, more intangible capacities, which have since proved almost as valuable on occasion.
‘You must be mistaken,’ I began. ‘I have had a lad watching the Marchmont-street lodgings from the first, and he insists that Shelley has not returned to town.’
‘That’s as may be, guv,’ he replied slowly, transparently sceptical. ‘But I don’t see as how anyone could mistake Shelley. Never seen such an odd-looking cove, and that’s a fact.’
I could not disagree, and indeed it chimed oddly with an experience I had had of my own, some three or four months earlier, of which Fraser could not be aware, when I had thought I glimpsed Shelley walking ahead of me in the Strand, even though I knew to my certain knowledge he was not then in England.
The carriage arriving at that moment, we spoke of this no more, and less than half an hour later the coachman set us down outside the lodging-house, where I made myself known to the lady proprietor of the establishment and asked if I might go up to Mrs Shelley’s rooms. She could not be unaware of the richness of my equipage, and she was now eyeing my attire with an interest that was evident to me, despite her attempts to disguise it. It cannot have been often that she welcomed gentlemen so handsomely accoutred.
‘Mrs Shelley, sir?’ she said, looking – or feigning – ignorance. ‘We have no lady by that name here.’
‘A lady of below middle height,’ intervened Fraser, who had the advantage of me as to her appearance. ‘Rather plump than trim as far as her figure goes. Quite a beauty once, I should say.’
‘Ah,’ said the landlady, with a look I could not at once decipher, ‘you must mean Mrs Smith. Do you bring word from her husband? She is hoping to see him every day.’
‘But did he not—’ began Fraser, but I replaced a restraining hand on his arm, and requested he return to the carriage and await me there; I did not wish that all the information at my disposal should so quickly be revealed.
‘I am, as you so cleverly surmised, a fr—’ But my tongue stumbled against the word, and I could not utter it. ‘A business connection of her husband’s. It has but recently come to my knowledge that his wife has been reduced to the painful circumstances in which she now finds herself, and I wish to do all in my power to assist her.’
That last, in any event, was the absolute truth.
‘Well,’ sniffed the woman, folding her arms, and looking up and down at my fine marcella waistcoat. ‘You can begin by assisting me with the money. A month’s rent she owes me, and that’s a fact.’
I smiled in what I hoped was a gracious manner, and proceeded to take my pocket-book from my coat and count out the coins, one by one. Her acquiescence, if not her confidence, thus purchased, she informed me that the young lady’s room was ‘at the top – the last you get to,’ and left me to find my own way up.
As I climbed the narrow stairs and smelt the damp seeping from the walls, I knew what I would in all likelihood find: a tiny room cramped under the eaves, with but a small window and the whole place no doubt reeking. And when I reached the last landing I could see at once that some, at least, of my assumptions were correct. I knocked sharply and heard a few moments later the sound of a bolt drawing back and a light but weary female voice saying, ‘If it’s about the rent—’ as the door swung open. ‘Oh,’ she said then, drawing back and frowning, ‘I took you for Mrs Thomas.’
I had wondered at Fraser’s remark that Mrs Shelley must ‘once’ have been a beauty, for I could not believe sh
e was much more than twenty, but I understood his observation now. The woman who stood before me looked at least a dozen years more, with none of the freshness and bloom of youth the calendar surely owed her. Her brown hair was lank, her eyes lustreless, and if her figure did indeed incline to enbonpoint, her face was gaunt and her skin dull.
‘Who are you?’ she said, holding the door close, and pulling her shawl about her. ‘What do you want?’
‘It is, indeed, about the rent, or at least in one respect,’ I replied, as I proceeded to inform her that I had just had the honour to assist her with that particular obligation.
The smile that greeted this information was enough to show me how lovely she must once have been. It illuminated her whole face, lifting the lines from her eyes, and setting the ghost of a flush on her thin cheeks.
‘Do you come from Shelley?’ she said, with a gasp. ‘Is he well – does he want to see the children?’
How I cursed the man then, in my soul; to have abandoned this young woman so callously, depriving her of the protection she had every right to expect, and leaving her suspended in a pitiable state that was neither marriage nor widowhood. ‘I regret,’ I began, ‘that I have no commission from him. But what I may do for you, you may rely upon.’ I handed her then my card and saw at once she knew the name.
‘Maddox,’ she said slowly. ‘I believe I have heard of you. Did you not assist Shelley in the matter of Tremadoc, a year or so past? I saw him so rarely at that time, and things were not well between us . . .’
Her voice trailed off then, and I saw her put her hand to her eyes. ‘I did attempt to be of assistance,’ I continued, affecting, out of delicacy, not to notice her gesture, ‘but I am afraid I found neither testimony nor evidence to corroborate your husband’s assertions.’
‘You might have had mine,’ she replied, a little tartly, ‘had you asked. I could have confirmed every word. I witnessed it all. The shots of the gun, the damage to the wainscoting, the cries of revenge. It was truly terrifying.’ She pulled her shawl once again about her. ‘No one knows the truth of that night but Shelley and I. Neither what happened, nor why.’
Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness Page 19