There is a silence. She is breathing hard now, to retain control.
‘So,’ says Maddox, ‘she is with child.’
She nods, and puts her hand again to her eyes.
‘And you?’
‘I struck her, Mr Maddox. I raised my hand and I struck her. I have always deplored violence, always seen it as the worst manifestation of man’s bestial nature, but at that moment, as she stood there, smiling that complacent self-adoring smile, her hand caressing the child she will bear Shelley – the child I should have had – it was as if a demon had overtaken me. I lost consciousness for a moment, I think, for the next thing I remember was Shelley lifting me to my feet and kneeling in alarm at her side. It was only then that I saw she had fallen. She was in pain – there was blood – but I felt no remorse, felt only that she deserved her pain, for the hurt she had given me.’
Again the silence, again the sound only of the clock on the mantelpiece.
‘They sent for the doctor,’ she says at last. ‘But I had gone before he arrived. I had nowhere else to go, so I came here.’
Maddox goes to the table and pours her a glass of brandy, then returns to the window. As he gave her the glass he felt the cold in her thin fingers. ‘I should retire,’ he says eventually. ‘I have an appointment early tomorrow.’
Yet despite his words he does not move, but remains staring down at the street, and the houses, and the silver river.
‘I have often wondered,’ she begins hesitantly, ‘that first day when I came here – to this house – how it was that you knew my name.’
He does not turn, but senses her approach, senses her nearing warmth in the chilly room. ‘You resemble someone I once knew. She had not your colouring, but your height – your face – your features. I thought, just for a moment—’
‘And her name was Mary?’
He nods. ‘Is Mary.’
‘I am sorry. The way you spoke of her, I thought she must be—’
‘Dead? No.’ He shakes his head. ‘She lives and is happy. If she is dead, it is merely to me.’
She places a hand gently on his arm, and when he turns at last to look at her it is as if her words have conjured the ghost he has so long striven to forget. Her hair is as dark as ink in the blue light and this last difference gone she is uncannily, unbearably, like the woman he once loved. Something of this she must have seen – something in his eyes must have changed – for she lifts her face towards him and brings her mouth to touch his skin.
‘You do not mean this,’ he says in despair, as her cheek brushes his. ‘You will regret it – you do it for the wrong reasons. It would make me no better than him—’
‘You have not betrayed me – you have not told me lies.’
He seizes her shoulders now. ‘And is this not a lie? The worst lie of all?’
But it is too late – she can feel his body deny his words. And as she draws his head towards her and her lips part, he hears her whisper, ‘She is gone but I am here. If you wish it, I will be your Mary. I will be the love you lost.’
*
It is long since he has taken a woman to his bed; longer still since that act was anything but a business transaction, concluded to the satisfaction of both parties, but this coupling is like no other he has ever had.
He tells himself, afterwards, that she has had no lover but one, and that everything that unnerves him can surely be traced to that. For he is unnerved, and profoundly. She is no virgin, but he senses all the same that he is breaching a locked wall, that this is for her an initiation, an opening of places cold and closed. And yet she is no prude neither: his own desire spent, there is a striving for satisfaction – a willingness to ask for what she wants, both in words and in gestures, that he has found in no other woman, and will never find again. And when, at the end, she turns her back to him silently in the dark, and he realizes what it is she expects him to do – to take – the hot blood comes to his face and he buries his face in her hair, murmuring, ‘No, not that, not that.’
Hours later he opens his eyes to a shaft of milky sunlight, and a clock that tells him it is past nine and he is late. He sits up abruptly to find that the bed is empty, and she is gone. Downstairs in the dining room breakfast is laid with one place, and when he enquires of the maid he is told, ‘Miss Godwin has eaten, sir. And gone out.’
It is a long day in Whitechapel, followed by a bad-tempered meeting with a bad-tempered client, who cannot understand why his case is taking so long. Maddox has to explain several times that he has six good men pursuing different lines of investigation, but that the murder of a banker throws up so many possible suspects it takes time and patience to eliminate them all. He returns to Buckingham Street hungry, tired and out of humour, already wondering what he is to say – what he is to do.
As he takes off his hat and coat in the hall, he sees Fraser coming up the kitchen stairs. There is a scratch on his cheek that wasn’t there that morning.
‘Good God, how came you by that? Were you not interviewing Mr Orchard today? I should hardly have thought him likely to resort to blows.’
Fraser makes a face. ‘That Shelley came here. Two, three hours ago. Accused us of harbouring his – that woman and demanded to see her. Started having one of those fits of his – thrashing about, kicking, screaming. It fair distressed the maids, but not me. I was wise to it, all right. Told him I’d send up for her if he comported himself with the decency as befitted the premises. That sobered him up – enough at least to get him off the floor and onto a chair. But by then she must have heard the noise because she came running down the stairs and climbed on to his lap.’
Maddox stares at him, wondered if he has misheard. ‘His lap?’
‘I know, guv, I thought it odd meself. She always seemed such a chilly one – so clever and aloof, but to listen to her then you’d have thought she were ten years old. Talking all high-pitched and silly like to a baby. Begging him not to be angry with her because “your Pecksie will never vex you so again. She is a good girl, and is quite well now.” And a lot more such fatuous stuff besides. It were like eavesdropping on the nursery.’
Maddox turns away, his heart frozen in his chest. Every time he thinks he has understood her, she eludes him; every time he allows himself to believe her, she confounds him.
‘Did you know she was ill, guv?’
‘No,’ he says distractedly. ‘I had no conception. Where is Miss Godwin now?’
‘No idea, guv. Packed her things and left. With him.’ And good riddance, as his face plainly shows, though how much of that relief is down to personal irritation, and how much to a growing uneasiness on his master’s account, you would be hard put to fathom.
‘Thank you, Fraser. Ask Phyllis to bring up my dinner, would you?’
His words sound composed enough, but his heart is beating hard as he climbs the stairs to the room she occupied. There is hardly a sign, now, that she was ever there. The window is open, and the muslin curtain catching in the evening breeze. The bed is tidy, the furniture placed exactly as it was before she came. The only trace of her presence, in fact, is the ashes in the grate, which have not yet been raked away by the parlour-maid. Maddox goes to the fireplace and crouches down. The draught from the window has proved too strong for the fire and most of the paper thrown here has not burned through. He takes the poker and lifts the edge of the remains. Pages torn from a journal, it seems. Some from the past three months, some from the past few days. He knows he should not do it – knows no good can come of it – but he reaches out, and lifts the blistered paper in a shower of ash, and takes it to the desk. And then, for a long time, he sits, gazing into the distance, his mind the only thing about him moving.
* * *
Torquay, 22nd June
Sir,
I received your letter, but I chose not, then, to reply. And I write now not to offer excuses, for there are none. Nor do I offer explanations, for you would not understand. My Shelley and I are reconciled – reconciled more irrevocably than a
ny wedding rite could ever bind us. The business is finished. She has gone to Lynmouth for her lying-in, and I hope that we may never more be troubled by her. The issue, if it lives, will be adopted by some people thereabouts, that she might be freed to earn her own living, and forge a life for herself, separately from ours.
They walked out, that last day, she and he, for a last conversation, and the next morning he took her to the coach. He was gone a long time, and I was, for a time, in fear – I even went out to seek him in the rain – but he came back to me at last, and I know now that all my fears were groundless, and he will always return. After what we have suffered – after that insupportable loss for which he still repents – he is bound to me for ever.
And so we begin again with our regeneration. And it will be, indeed, a regeneration, for there is to be a child. A child to be born at the turn of the year. I know how it will be when you hear this – I know you will wonder, and you will question. But I will not answer. There is nothing I could say that would not give you unmingled pain.
I do not ask you to forgive; I tell you only to forget—
M.W.G.
PART THREE
1850
CHAPTER TWELVE
Death
How much of this does Charles now know? Most of it, I suspect. Fraser, after all, witnessed much of it with his own eyes, and what he didn’t see, he was more than capable of guessing. So, as he walks slowly back through the calm sunset from Fraser’s door, the light pinking rose the crusting snow, Charles is melding the long past with what he, too, has seen with his own eyes. The last piece has fallen into place: Claire’s shame and Mary’s deception; Claire’s day of horrors and Mary’s relief that Maddox, like a winter lion, has in rage forgot all brush of time, her desperate desire that the dead should die and return not. And when Maddox talked, in those words now burned, of the appalling death of an innocent creature, it was not Harriet Shelley he meant, or even Fanny Imlay, but the poet’s own baby daughter. 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? Did Maddox’s words of warning return to haunt Mary, that last summer in Italy? Is that why she was suddenly so desperate to leave, at all costs, a house she called accursed – so frantic to take her last-remaining son away? Only it was not the house that was accursed, but the man within it. When she wrote to Charles of Shelley’s love for children – of his own childishness – that was her real deceit. Her real blind. And like all the world’s most dangerous lies, it was crafted more than half of truth. For Shelley’s was not the childishness of innocence and play, but of wanton, unthinking cruelty, and the utter inability to feel another’s pain.
And what of Maddox? Maddox who compromised everything he stood for, only to lose a child that could have been his. No wonder those pages were destroyed; no wonder he concealed the secret from everyone, even – or perhaps especially – from the great-nephew who has taken that lost son’s place. And no wonder Mary talked so deliberately, in her letter, of Charles as his uncle’s only heir – she was luring him, testing the safety of her secret, knowing that if he had discovered who little William’s father really was he would never have allowed those words to pass unchallenged.
When he opens the door in Buckingham Street, Charles can hear laughter from the drawing room, and he stands for a moment, wondering how long it is since this house echoed with the happiness of a child. He’s about to go upstairs when Nancy appears at the top of the kitchen steps. Her bruises are less angry now, and she is wearing a new dress. Plain and grey, but elegant in its mere simplicity. She sees him looking at it and smiles, then twirls around. ‘Like it? Couldn’t keep wearin’ that old blue one all the time.’
There’s another burst of giggles upstairs and Nancy glances up anxiously. ‘’Ope you don’t mind Betsy being up there. I make sure she don’t do any ’arm or break nothin’. And your uncle seems to ’ave taken to her. They’ve been chattin’ away nineteen to the dozen this afternoon.’
Charles smiles sadly. ‘Don’t worry, Nancy. Betsy is no trouble. Quite the opposite.’
He turns to go and she stops him. ‘There’s a visitor waitin’ for you – upstairs.’
Claire, he thinks. And then – But surely she does not know where to find him.
‘A gentleman, it is,’ says Nancy, watching him. ‘Said it were business, but ’e ’asn’t been ’ere before, so you won’t know the name.’
‘It’s rather late, surely?’ Charles says, with a frown.
Nancy shrugs. ‘’E said ’e wanted to wait. That ’e ain’t often in London so it ’ad to be today.’
A fire has been lit in the office, and there is a man standing over it, warming his hands. A man in clothes that evoke the Church without being, strictly speaking, clerical. He looks up at Charles’s approach and comes towards him, hand extended. ‘Mr Maddox, I presume? Turnbull, Horace Turnbull. I am an assistant to the Curators of the Bodleian Library.’
Charles endeavours to conceal his surprise and gestures to the chair. ‘How can I help you, Mr Turnbull?’
‘You are wondering, no doubt,’ says Turnbull, as he seats himself carefully so as not to crease his coat-tails, ‘what business the University of Oxford could possibly have with a private detective.’
Charles smiles. ‘Was it so obvious?’
Turnbull inclines his head. ‘I anticipated some degree of surprise. To speak frankly, Mr Maddox – I assume I may speak frankly and in confidence? – it is a somewhat delicate matter. In consequence, and after much private discussion, my employers have decided that the most prudent course of action would be to consult someone unconnected with the university. Someone, in short, in London.’
He pauses, then clears his throat, ‘You may be aware,’ he resumes, ‘that the Bodleian houses an extensive collection of rare books and manuscripts, some of them many centuries old.’
Charles nods. ‘When I was a boy, my father took me once to see the Ashmole Bestiary. I was far too young to appreciate it then, of course, but I can still remember that drawing of a basilisk being killed by a weasel. I remember asking my father why we didn’t have basilisks in Berkshire.’
‘Ah!’ says Turnbull, his face brightening. ‘Then you know exactly to what I refer. It is, indeed, the manuscripts in the Ashmole Bequest that are in question. The Bestiary has always been rather a favourite of mine, though of course most of our visitors are more interested in the astrological and alchemical treatises.’
‘Has there been a theft? Have some of the books gone missing?’
Turnbull is already shaking his head. ‘No, no, nothing of that kind. We – that is, the Curators – have received a request from a foreign person, a nobleman of a very ancient lineage, who wishes to consult some of the manuscripts in the collection.’
‘And that poses a problem?’
‘Not a problem, exactly. There is no difficulty in allowing him to view the collection. The difficulty – if that is the word – stems from the interest he has expressed in making a donation towards its upkeep.’ He coughs. ‘A rather substantial donation.’
Charles nods slowly. ‘And you are concerned to know a little more about your mysterious benefactor, before you agree to become associated with him in such a public and irrevocable manner.’
‘Quite so, Mr Maddox,’ replies Turnbull, ‘Quite so. And “mysterious” is indeed the word. All that the Almanach de Gotha can tell, we have ascertained, but that is lamentably little. We thought of consulting the Foreign Office, but such a course might pose difficulties of its own; and then we thought of you. Well, not of you specifically, of course, but a man of your calling.’
‘I see,’ says Charles. ‘And how did you come upon my name?’
‘It was your uncle’s, in fact. He was recommended by a Fellow of All Souls, who had, I believe, used his services in the past. But I understood from the young woman who let me in that the elder Mr Maddox is no longer well enough to accept commissions.’
There i
s a brief silence.
‘So can I tell my employers that you are able to assist us?’
Charles hesitates: he has never undertaken any investigation even remotely like this one. But why should that deter him? And he would give a good deal to see the Ashmole collection again. ‘Yes, Mr Turnbull, I am.’
‘Excellent,’ his visitor replies, with obvious relief, as he gets to his feet. ‘I will write to you to arrange a meeting with the Curators in Oxford.’
It is Charles’s turn to offer his hand, but Turnbull is now looking past him, towards the doorway.
Betsy is peeking at the two of them round the door, her little face alight with mischief, and her long-suffering doll dandling from one hand. He flushes – it’s hardly the most professional impression to give to a new client – but, to his surprise, Turnbull squats down at once on his haunches and beckons to the little girl. ‘Your daughter is beautiful, Mr Maddox, quite beautiful. You are a lucky man.’
Charles is about to correct him, but something makes him hold back. ‘Betsy,’ he says, beckoning in his turn. ‘Come and say hello to Mr Turnbull.’
She hesitates, then comes rushing in and clasps her arms about Charles’s legs. And so it is that when he sees Turnbull out ten minutes later, he has a small child nestling in the crook of his arm. As he shuts the door he hears a step behind him and turns, expecting Nancy. But it is Molly he sees coming towards him. And now he realizes, with a flash of shame, that he has still not explained what this child and her mother are doing in the house. Molly reaches out her arms to the child, who clambers rather awkwardly about her neck.
‘Molly,’ says Charles. ‘It’s only for a few days. They won’t be here long.’
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