Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  One other thing they appear to share – and Charles reads the passage with the jolt of one who always thought himself unique – is what we would now call a photographic memory. It has always been, for Charles, quite extraordinarily useful, but as so often for Shelley, a great gift seems to have been as much a bane as a blessing. Medwin claims Shelley was able to call up places, words, and figures at will – and what poet would not envy him that? – but that same image-making aptitude brought with it nightmare dreams and waking visions that bore all the appearance of reality and left him unsure of the truth of his own past. Indeed, there is much in Medwin’s memoir that cannot adequately be explained in any other way. Like that strange recurring vision of a winter landscape, a scene that excited such fearful emotions that Shelley ran from it panic-stricken, to the refuge of friends:

  I have beheld scenes, with the intimate and unaccountable connexion of which with the obscure parts of my own nature, I have been irresistibly impressed . . . The most remarkable event of this nature which ever occurred to me happened five years ago at Oxford. I was walking with a friend, in the neighbourhood of that city, engaged in earnest and interesting conversation. We suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and the view, which its high banks and hedges had concealed, presented itself. The view consisted of a windmill, standing in one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone walls; the irregular and broken ground, between the wall and the road on which we stood; a long low hill behind the windmill, and a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that season when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash . . . The effect which it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long—

  Here I was obliged to leave off overcome by thrilling horror—

  ‘Mr Maddox!’

  Charles looks up with a start.

  It’s Nancy, standing deferentially in the doorway, ‘I came to ask,’ she says, ‘if you’d mind ’elping Mr Stornaway and the lad fetch your uncle into the dining room.’

  Charles notes that ‘Mr’ and approves, even if a cynic would no doubt condemn it as merely self-serving civility. He gets to his feet, hearing Billy now, on the landing, whistling a Christmas song, and finds himself suddenly wishing there were chestnuts in the house, or holly they might hang. Which is all the more surprising when I tell you that he has always hated Christmas in the past – after his sister was taken it became the darkest and most desolate time of the year, his father silent and Charles watching helplessly as his mother retreated in terror from a season celebrating the joy of a coming child, her pain at the loss of one never waning with time.

  ‘And I hope you don’t mind me sayin’—’ The girl’s voice breaks in on his memory. She hesitates, wiping her hands a mite nervously on her apron.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That girl – Molly – it ain’t my place, I know, but I couldn’t ’elp noticin’. You do know, don’t yer, that she—’

  ‘Thank you,’ he interrupts, a mite tersely, ‘but I have it in hand. There is no need for you to concern yourself about that.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’ She is eyeing him rather doubtfully.

  ‘Perfectly,’ he replies firmly. ‘Now, did you not say I am required elsewhere?’

  *

  Half an hour later they are sitting, he, Abel and Maddox, around a table that can seat twelve with ease, and has seen peers and prime ministers in its time, and even once, so rumour has it, a head that bore a crown. The man who hosted those far-off ceremonials is scarcely recognizable now, but all the same Charles is struck by the difference in Maddox today. The old man’s eyes seem more alert, his hand less rigid. He’s even managing to feed himself, albeit rather messily, and with a constant undertone of occasionally intelligible mutterings. Charles wonders if it is merely the change of scene that has worked such an alteration and whether, if that’s the case, they should make more of an effort to move him about the house; whether, indeed, he should look into the purchase of a wheeled chair and take him outside in the open air for the first time in months. But for now they repair once more to the drawing room, where Nancy stokes the fire and pours the port before closing the door softly behind her and leaving the three men alone.

  Abel is soon snoring and his uncle nodding, and it’s not long before Charles, too, sits back and closes his eyes, lulled by the crackling of the fire and the spreading warmth of wine. The only other Christmas he spent in this house was the last before they lost Elizabeth. He can remember her now in this very room, round-eyed with rapture at the candles and the yew tree Maddox had brought in specially. It was the first Christmas tree she had ever seen, and Charles can still remember the look on her little face at the toys and bags of sweets and dried fruits Maddox had hung among its branches. She would be eighteen now, but however hard he tries, Charles can never bring her forward in time and imagine the young woman she would have become; she is frozen for ever on the day she was taken, in her bright flowered dress, her small face smudged with tears. Charles is thinking of her now – seeing her now – so absorbed in the past that when he hears her name spoken he cannot tell if it is real, or merely an echo of his own long yearning.

  ‘Elizabeth.’

  He opens his eyes to see a tiny girl hesitating in the doorway, her doll swinging from one hand. She is so like, so hauntingly similar, that Charles wonders for a wild moment if his boyhood prayer has been answered and he has been given his impossible second chance. It is the impression of an instant only: his mind – his intellect – tells him this is not Elizabeth, but that does not stop his heart turning over as she comes racing towards Maddox and holds up her arms to be kissed.

  ‘Where have you been, little one?’ says Maddox, softly, an old hand reaching gently to her golden curls. ‘We have all been looking for you.’

  She smiles and puts a finger in her mouth, twinkling and mischievous. There’s a little smear of treacle across her cheek, and Maddox smiles in his turn. ‘It looks to me as if Cook has been spoiling you again,’ he says, pretending to be stern. Charles knows now it was his uncle’s voice he heard, and he watches in pain as the old man takes the little girl on his lap, a little girl who is not the one he takes her for, but has, all unknowing, done the one thing none of the people in this house have yet managed to do and unlocked the darkness enveloping his mind.

  There’s a movement now in the doorway and Charles sees Nancy, her hand on the knob and her face drawn with anxiety. ‘Betsy – what did I tell yer about not troublin’ the gen’lemen?’

  But Charles has already held a finger to his lips, and as the silence falls they watch the little girl curl against the old man’s arm and his gentle movement to and fro as he rocks the two of them sweetly asleep.

  * * *

  When Charles comes down the following morning Betsy is sitting on the floor in the drawing room, playing with her doll and chattering away happily to Maddox – who is managing, slowly, to make some sort of reply. Charles smiles at him and gets, for the first time in weeks, something like a smile in return. Abel arrives now, with the breakfast tray and the newspaper, and Charles leaves the three of them together and goes downstairs. There’s no one in the kitchen so he has his roll and coffee alone, reminding himself that he has still not spoken to Molly, then goes back up the stairs to the front door and a heavy fall of snow. He spots a green Atlas omnibus lumbering heavily along the Strand just as he gets to the top of the street, and a breathless rush through people and freezing puddles gets him to the ’bus stop just in time, though it leaves him with cold muddy splashes right up to his knees. Charles ventures south of the river only marginally more often than the modern London cabbie, and it’s a good long time since he’s had any need to visit Walworth. Here and there little rows of cottages give some clue to the village it once was, but almost all the green has gone and the later dwellings push thickly together in slum congestion. But it was Maddox who bought Fraser his hou
se, and Charles knows he would never have consigned his old assistant to anything other than a comfortable retirement. So when he finds the address he is not surprised to discover that the little house in Victory Place is a model of its kind. Not quite as large as his erstwhile master’s, but solid, three-storeyed, and backing onto Locks Fields. A generous gift from a generous man.

  When Charles knocks at the door it’s opened by a tiny maid in a large white cap who seems terrified at the mere sight of him and scampers off back into the house before he has even opened his mouth. Charles waits, watching two boys playing ball in the street and doing his best to avoid the attentions of a little grey dog, which can clearly smell cat on his trousers. He can’t recall ever meeting Mrs Fraser, and remembers only how astonished everyone was when Fraser announced that he planned to get married. He’d always been something of a success with the ladies, and had seemed perfectly comfortable with his bachelor existence until one last street fight had left him half dead and half blind, and the woman Maddox brought in to nurse him was quickly offered a rather more all-embracing role. In every sense. And she it must be who comes to the door now. Younger than Charles would have guessed, a little grey, but with a broad smile and alert, kindly brown eyes.

  Charles offers her his card but she waves it away with a smile, ‘I would have known you anywhere – you look just like him. Do you want to see George? He claims he’s reading but he’s doing no such thing – been dozing over that fire for the past two hours to my certain knowledge. Come in – it will do him good to see you.’

  Charles is rather disconcerted by the cordiality of his reception: he’s professionally inured to engendering suspicion and distrust, and this is hardly a social call. But he can hardly explain that on the doorstep. He follows the round and bustling form of Mrs Fraser down the hall and into the snug sitting room at the back, a room furnished in a very female taste, with an abundance of frilled cushions, sentimental prints, ornamental lamps and china curios. All this knick-knackery should remind him of the Shelley house, but there is a warmth here, both literal and metaphorical, that quashes the comparison before it even forms. Fraser is indeed exactly where his wife described him, his newspaper slipping slowly from his lap, his shaven head thrown back against the chair and his mouth open in a gentle snore. The only discordant note – the only thing Charles had not remembered – is the black eye-patch.

  Mrs Fraser goes over to him and touches him lightly on the arm. ‘Someone to see you, George. It’s young Mr Maddox.’

  She smiles at Charles as George Fraser snorts himself awake, and rubs his nose with the back of his arm. ‘I’ll have Lily make tea,’ she says brightly, and leaves the two of them alone.

  Charles watches Fraser pick up his paper, fold it neatly, and place it on the little table beside him. ‘So, what brings you to these parts?’ Fraser says slowly, meeting Charles’s gaze at last. If his wife is welcoming, he is decidedly wary. He knows Walworth is not in Charles’s way anywhere, and there must be something he is wanting.

  ‘I’ve been working on a case. For Sir Percy Shelley.’

  He waits. There should be a flicker in the other man’s eyes at this, but he was trained well, and by one of the best.

  ‘It seems,’ Charles continues, circumspect in his turn, ‘that it’s related to an old case of my great-uncle’s. Back in ’sixteen. I think you were involved.’

  ‘Mebbe,’ says Fraser, turning to poke a fire that clearly does not need it. ‘Can’t say it comes immediately to mind.’

  Charles doesn’t believe a word of it, and he’s not about to take equivocation for an answer. He takes the pages he found from his coat and holds them out. ‘I know what happened, Fraser. I know what he did, and what you did. I’m not here about that. I’m here because I want to know what happened before – why Maddox became involved with those people in the first place. I want to know what I haven’t found – what’s in the pages from 1814 that my uncle has destroyed.’

  Fraser looks at him, then leans forward and takes the papers. He reads the first few lines, turns to the end and raises his eyes, at last, to Charles’s face. ‘Did he give these to you?’

  Charles shakes his head. ‘He’s too ill – he had some sort of attack a few weeks ago. He can’t really talk, can scarcely move. I found those papers behind the mirror.’

  Fraser nods, though whether that indicates he knew of the hiding-place Charles cannot be sure.

  ‘The Shelleys lied to me from the start,’ Charles continues. ‘I think they only hired me because they wanted to know what Maddox might say, what records he might still have. What I’ve found here is damaging enough, but I think there’s something else – something connected with Tremadoc?’

  Fraser looks at him steadily. ‘It started there, yes.’

  Charles seizes the pages and turns them, stabbing at one phrase, then another. ‘Look at this – no conduct, however base, was too vile for such a scoundrel – a man I considered both a felon and a blackguard – what evidence I had once had was lost, and they would all of them deny it. But you know, don’t you? You know what Shelley had done.’

  Fraser studies him for a long moment, then gestures towards the sopha. ‘I allus knew that this day might come. Though I thought as he’d be dead when it did, and safe from the consequences.’

  ‘There can be no consequences now, surely, not all these years later.’

  ‘Not as to the law, perhaps. But that’s not what he’d be afeared of. What he’d fear now is you. What you would think on him. On what he did.’

  Charles swallows. ‘I’ve come so far now – I just need to know the truth. After all, he may never – it may never—’

  Fraser nods slowly. ‘Why don’t you take that seat there? We’ll wait, shall we, for that tea? And then I’ll tell you what I know.’

  And as they sit, uneasy in the silence, looking towards the door, it is time for me, in my turn, to tell you what I know. What I know, what I suspect, and what I imagine.

  PART TWO

  1814

  CHAPTER TEN

  Autumn

  It is October. A chill rain is falling, and the warm sun is wan. Outside a huddle of small lodging-houses hard by the Pancras workhouse a young woman stands in a doorway and looks up into the shrouded sky, wondering if she will brave the day. She is, what, sixteen? Seventeen? But despite her youth there is something about her that suggests she is not used to living in such a down-at-heel district. Either that or she believes this is merely a passing difficulty and the world will right itself soon enough, and deliver her a local habitation more suited to her name. And what, might you ask, is that name? Watch patiently a moment more and you will see the dark woollen shawl about her head slip and a skein of bright red-gold hair escape wildly into the wind, and you will know at once who this is. It is little more than two weeks since she returned from the dazzle of the Alps, and a dream of love, to the grim London day-to-dayness of mud and making-do. And bitter recriminations: even now, the man who will eventually become her husband is sitting in their cramped room on the second floor composing yet another letter to his wife. A letter full of icy philosophy and hot self-justification. There are rumours too, as this girl well knows, that the bailiffs may have discovered their dwelling-place, but it is not that particular pursuit that concerns her now. She tucks her hair back into her shawl and makes her way down towards London. It’s a good step she has before her, especially on such a day, but she is used to walking. Did they not walk for four solid days south from Paris? Thirty long, slow miles a day through a landscape scathed by conflict, and in an atmosphere between the three of them that festered scarcely less. The memory sets a grim line now across her brow, and yet in a dozen years from now she will write of that journey as a golden time, the acting-out of a novel, a romance made real. I suspect this is only the first of many such contradictions we may observe, only one of many such self-deceits, but for the moment, at least, we will let it pass.