Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  ‘It was no doubt a dog, Miss Clairmont. Or, at least, it would be best to think so.’ He smiles at her, not unkindly now, and takes her arm. On their left, by the side wall, a grizzled man is sitting sheltering from the rain in a small lean-to. He has a bottle of brandy on a makeshift table, and propped up against the door are the tools of his trade. A mattock, and an old notched spade. The sexton.

  The man touches his hand to his filthy cap. ‘Mr Maddox, sir. Allus a pleasure.’ But his eyes have slipped past the thief-taker to Claire, and beyond her to Shelley. His eyes narrow, and small wonder: the poet’s lip is swollen now, and there’s a smear of dog-shit on his cheek.

  Maddox interposes quickly – the sooner this is done and they are gone the better. He motions the girl forward. ‘This poor young woman woke this morning to find her baby dead. She has not the money for a funeral.’

  ‘Is that so?’ says the man, pensively. ‘It’s a wonder she ’as the money to pay for you then. You don’t come cheap. Or so I’m told.’

  Maddox flushes, then is furious with himself for doing so. ‘I do this as a favour, Blackaby. For a young couple distraught by the loss of their child.’

  ‘I see,’ says Blackaby. ‘Best give it me, then.’

  He holds out his gnarled hands for the baby, and the girl’s eyes widen as what is about to happen finally comes home to her. She casts an agonized look at Maddox, who can do nothing but nod. ‘It is the only way, Mrs – Shelley.’

  He stumbles at the name, and wishes at once he’d had the foresight to think of another, but the man seems not to have noticed. Blackaby grips the bundle and takes it into the back of his hut. A few moments later he comes back out and leers up at Maddox from under his grey brows with a gleam in his eye. ‘Let’s say a sov, then. If you’re agreeable.’

  ‘But we don’t have—’ cries the girl, before Maddox can stop her.

  ‘Your fees seem to have risen of late,’ he observes darkly.

  ‘Well, it’s a good service I offer, Mr Maddox, as you know. Not many other places round ’ere you could dispose so easily of a little problem like this, and know it won’t come back to haunt yer.’

  He winks at the girl and she stifles a cry and stumbles away. Maddox takes his pocket-book from his coat and counts out the money, while the man squints at Shelley, who is standing with his back to them, gazing down into an open grave.

  ‘He’s a rum one, that,’ Blackaby says, nodding towards him. ‘Most can’t bear to look. And that’s a bad one. Water’s eaten away the coffin at the bottom, so the whole pit’s swimmin’ in rottin’ flesh. Even ’ad to stand away meself in the end, the smell got so bad.’

  Maddox hurriedly concludes his business. ‘When will it be done?’

  Blackaby shifts his chew of tobacco to the other cheek. ‘The one for that pit’s arrivin’ later today. St Giles work’ouse are sendin’ it, so there’s not much likelihood of meddlin’ relatives. Pox case, they said. Should be room to slip this one in the box with ’im, nice and tidy and none the wiser.’

  Maddox looks away, glad only that the girl did not hear this – that Mary Godwin will not hear this. ‘Very well,’ he says quickly. ‘Good day to you.’

  He goes back to the gate, where Claire Clairmont is leaning against the iron railings, weeping openly. ‘I heard it,’ she gulps, ‘in the night – I heard it.’

  Maddox takes a deep breath. ‘What did you hear?’ he says quietly.

  ‘The baby – she was making strange noises – little choking cries – I did not think – not then – how could I?’

  ‘Did you hear anything else? A footstep perhaps, or a floorboard?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘And you did not go to her – wake her mother?’

  Again she shakes her head, the tears running down her face.

  ‘You could have prevented it,’ he says eventually, ‘and yet you did nothing. Is the enmity between you really so deep that you heard your sister’s baby in distress, and yet made no effort to help her?’

  She turns away, reaching out blindly to the railings, one hand to her mouth. ‘No, no.’

  ‘I hope, Miss Clairmont, that you never suffer the loss of a child. That you are never haunted by the pain of knowing that your baby’s death might have been averted, had someone cared enough to intervene.’

  She is gasping now, sinking slowly on her knees in the mud and filth of the street.

  Maddox watches her for a moment, then beckons to Fraser to take her back to the carriage. And when he turns he sees Shelley, still motionless at the grave that will swallow his dead child. Suppressing his own repugnance, Maddox makes his way among the broken and uneven slabs to where the young man is standing, the rain dropping slow and heavy on his face, and hair, and clothes. ‘We must go. It would not do to be discovered here.’

  Shelley does not reply, does not even seem to hear. Maddox glances down, despite himself, and has to cover his mouth at once against the stench. The mud in the bottom of the pit is black with putrefaction; shards of sodden wood and half-recognizable bones jut from the slime, and beneath a thin film of sludge, a hand hangs listlessly within its withered skin. Then for the briefest of moments the rain eases and the water stills, and there, where the poet’s face should be reflected on the surface, there is a white and grinning skull-face, the eye sockets seething with maggots.

  Shelley starts back with an animal cry and Maddox grasps him by the shoulder. ‘It is nothing, an illusion of the light. Come – we must be gone.’

  And slowly, eventually, the young man turns to Maddox a face aghast and allows himself to be led away, stumbling now and half falling, his hand clutched at his side. And behind them, as they go, the sexton watches them from his lair, muttering something indecipherable under his breath.

  * * *

  Maddox expects to hear from Mary Godwin within hours – at the very least the next day – for surely she can no longer pretend, even to herself, that she can remain safely with Shelley. But as two and then three slow weeks slip by, his incomprehension turns to anger, then to indignation at being so used, and a resolve to forget her – to leave her to reap the terrible consequences of her choice. A fine resolution, but one that works only in theory and cannot withstand her actual presence. It is a Friday, and Maddox is on the point of leaving – on the point of going downstairs to his waiting carriage and a dinner engagement with the home secretary – when Fraser opens the office door and shows her in. She stands on the threshold, hesitating, and he gives a slight bow. It feels stiff, and no doubt looks so, because when he raises his eyes again he sees none of her usual self-assurance.

  ‘Miss Godwin.’

  ‘Mr Maddox.’

  She comes a tentative step further into the room. ‘I am aware that my manners have been deficient. That I should have thanked you – by letter if not in person – for what you did to help us. Think not, please, that because your assistance was unacknowledged, it was also unappreciated. Speaking for myself, I felt your kindness deeply.’

  ‘And Shelley?’

  ‘I am sure he too—’

  ‘I did not mean that, Miss Godwin. You know I did not.’

  ‘You are asking, I take it, as to my intentions regarding Shelley. They are – unchanged.’

  He moves towards her. ‘How can you say so, now that you know the danger you are in? You said, when we last spoke, that I was right – that you should have listened to me, that you would never have lost your child—’

  ‘You have not seen him,’ she says softly. ‘He is tormented by what has happened – he swears he never intended to harm the baby, that he has no recollection of that night—’

  ‘And what happens when you have another child? What happens when you wake in the night and find his hands at another newborn baby’s throat?’

  She turns away to the window. ‘I think about the little thing every day. It is foolish, I suppose, yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts I always come back to the same sad place – that I was a mother and
am so no longer. I dreamed once that it came to life again – that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. And then I awoke and there was no baby.’

  Her voice is enough to break a harder heart than Maddox’s, but even he notices that the baby is no longer ‘she’ but ‘it’. And that she was never given a name.

  ‘So you intend to remain with him? After everything he has done?’

  ‘What other choice do I have? And even were that not so, I love him so tenderly – my life hangs so in the beam of his eye, my whole soul is so wrapped up in him, I would do anything for him, even – even—’

  She is now sobbing bitterly, openly, a woman who does nothing private in plain sight, and holds herself in check from all the world. He goes towards her and stands at her shoulder, speaking so low his words brush her skin like breathing.

  ‘I asked you this once before, and received no answer. So I will ask you again. Who is this man Hogg, and what business takes him to your lodgings at all hours, day and night?’

  She is shaking her head now. ‘How can I refuse him?’ she says miserably. ‘It is what he believes – what he wants – that we should – that Hogg and I – that he and Claire—’

  Some part of him had expected this; some part of him knew it was the only feasible explanation, but it is wholly different to hear it spoken in such neutral tones by this girl not yet eighteen, who has just lost her child.

  ‘I can scarcely imagine any man capable of such an abomination, that he should sit contentedly by and watch you in the arms – the bed – of another man while he—’ He turns and strides to the far corner of the room, unable to contain his fury.

  ‘You do not understand,’ Mary whispers, the tears rolling slowly down her face. ‘When first we met I would listen to him talking of the freedom and happiness of all mankind and my own passion would rise to meet his. And for man to be free, love must be free – Shelley says we should not shackle ourselves to one person for life, that the failure of his marriage is proof of the terrible error of such a dogma, that we, the four of us, might show a new way to live – might defy convention and find a new mode of existence in which all is shared, in which there is no jealousy, no recrimination—’

  ‘And is that what has happened?’ he cries, twisting back to face her. ‘You forget that I have seen you, you and Shelley and your sister. Can you place your hand upon your heart and tell me that you are not jealous, not resentful, not bitter to the very dregs of your soul?’

  ‘Of course I am!’ She sobs. ‘I see the way she touches him – toys with him – and I want to tear her apart with my own hands. When she is wretched I rejoice, when she goes out with him, hour after hour, I wait at home, brooding, with poison in my heart. When he goes to Sussex to hear the reading of his grandfather’s will, she goes with him. When a cradle is to be bought for my baby, she goes with him. She refuses absolutely to return to Skinner Street, and there is nowhere else. It is almost impossible to bear.’

  ‘And Hogg?’

  ‘He disgusts me. I tried – Shelley begged me and I tried. He said Beaumont and Fletcher had one mistress and why should we not do the same? Surely his genius was a match for theirs. And so I wrote to him.’ She flushes. ‘You would call it flirtatious – unworthy – and I cannot defend myself from such a charge. I wanted to keep him at bay – to do as Shelley wished and yet postpone as long as possible the moment when I would be expected – when he would ask – I spoke of my pregnancy – that my affections would surely increase with time—’

  She sighs heavily and wipes her eyes. ‘I think on those words now and I am sickened. For I did not know then that Shelley once proposed exactly the same to that little fool Harriet – that she should take Hogg for her lover. And now – now he dares suggest it to me.’

  Her breast is heaving with suppressed anger, and Maddox watches her thoughtfully, wondering how much of her distress is to be found rooted there – in insult, rather than injury. And whether it is a coincidence that, having discovered this, she is now here.

  ‘And your sister? Have she and Shelley—?’

  ‘He swears to me that they have not. That he awaits my decision as to Hogg. But I can prevaricate no longer. I am not with child. I have no child.’

  ‘But that does not mean you have to agree! He may talk of you as his treasure and his prize but you are flesh and blood, not a possession, however exquisite, to be passed around his friends! A woman like you – with your talents, your intelligence – in God’s name do not allow yourself to be so trapped – so used!’

  ‘Oh, Mr Maddox,’ she says softly. ‘Nothing in that house may be done in God’s name. Not even that.’

  ‘Then for Heaven’s sake leave it!’

  ‘And leave them together?’ Mary cries. ‘After all I have suffered, all I have lost, surrender to her? And even were that possible, where should I go? My father will not speak to me, my friends have disowned me, I have no money. There is not a house in London that would receive me.’

  ‘Then come here.’

  The words are out before he knows he has said them. They stare at each other, aware a boundary has been passed, a barrier broken.

  ‘It is,’ he stammers eventually, ‘a big enough residence. You might be here a fortnight and I should not even know it. And there are the servants – there would be no suggestion of impropriety.’

  She smiles weakly. ‘As if I, of all women, were in a position to care about my reputation.’

  He turns away, desperate to find some small task to perform, all too uncomfortably aware that he is the one who has laid himself open, now, to entrapment and misuse. But when she replies her voice seems very small, and very docile, and very far from devious. ‘I am grateful indeed for the offer. Should I have need of it, I will accept it.’

  And when he looks up, she is gone.

  * * *

  It is more than a month before he sees her again. A month taken up with a coining case in Whitechapel, and a murder investigation that has him from the house until late in the night. And it is, indeed, late when he returns home one night to find the maid hovering in the hallway.

  ‘What is it, Phyllis? Have my dinner brought up to the dining room, would you?’

  ‘There’s a visitor, sir.’

  ‘I cannot see anyone tonight – pray ask them to return in the morning.’

  ‘It’s that – that Miss Godwin,’ she says, with a sniff of disapproval. ‘She’s been waiting here these two hours and more. Has her bags with her too.’

  ‘Very well, Phyllis. Show her up to the blue room, would you, and I will see her afterwards in my office.’

  When he opens the office door there is no lamp burning, and he considers for a moment ringing the bell to have one lit, but then changes his mind. He goes to the window and opens it wide. The moon is full on the Thames, and under the London smell of horse dung and human filth there is the faintest hint of spring.

  ‘Shelley once said that his mind without me was as dead and cold as the midnight river when the moon is down.’

  He turns. She is in the doorway, all in white.

  ‘But he is,’ says Maddox, softly, ‘without you now.’

  ‘And the moon is up.’

  She comes to his side and looks down towards the water. ‘I remember the night we crossed from Dover to France. It was such a beautiful evening – little wind, and the sails flapping in the flagging breeze. Then the moon rose, and night came on, and with the darkness a slow, heavy swell and such a violent sea that the sailors almost despaired of us making Calais. Hour after hour passed, and we were still far distant when the moon sunk in the red and stormy horizon and the fast-flashing lightning became pale in the breaking day.’

  Maddox leans against the glass, his breath misting the pane. ‘You should write. You have a gift for it.’

  Mary smiles. ‘Perhaps. But my talent is but workaday set against Shelley’s.’

  ‘You might earn your own living by it, none the less.’

 
; And be free of him. The words unspoken resonate in the air.

  ‘What brings you here?’ he asks at last.

  ‘Hatred. Treachery. Violence. Oh, do not fear,’ she says quickly, seeing his face, ‘I am not harmed – I was not the victim. I was the perpetrator. That is why I had to leave. I did not know myself capable of such rage, such terrible cruelty.’

  She turns and walks back into the room, her features dissolving in the shadow. He will wonder, afterwards, whether this were not deliberate; whether she stood so far away that he might not see her face, not read what would have been visible in her eyes.

  ‘After I saw you last – what you said – you gave me the courage to remonstrate with him. To beg him to reconsider. And my loss – our loss, his inconsolable contrition – has changed him, truly it has. He told me I was everything, she nothing. That I alone can shield him from impurity and vice. That if he is absent from me long he shudders with horror at himself.’

  ‘Good God, what does that mean – what sort of man says such things?’

  ‘Please – let me finish. He promised that he would find a home for Claire, away from us. He has even persuaded her to advertise for a position. And he took me away to Salt Hill, just he and I alone. We had three blissful days among the green fields and the trees and the solitary lanes. I was,’ her voice breaks, ‘absurdly happy. Happier than I have been for many long bleak months. I even found it in myself to write affectionately to Hogg, now that he was to be no more to me than a friend.’

  She pauses, and he sees her raise a hand to her eyes.

  ‘And then, when we returned, it was to new lodgings and I thought, Surely now things will be different. How naïve I was – how idiotically hopeful. Because now they can hide it from me no longer – I can see it with my own eyes.’ She takes a shuddering breath and when she speaks again her voice is raw with rage: ‘They have been deceiving me, Mr Maddox, week after week, month after month. No doubt since the very day we first left London together. All the promises he made me were lies – vile, brazen lies. All those hours he spent with her – all those journeys they took together – have ended the same way. With him in her bed.’