Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  She looks at him for a moment, rocking the child from side to side, then nods and turns back towards the kitchen.

  Up in the office Charles takes a sheet of paper from the escritoire and pauses a moment before setting his pen to the page.

  I know the truth. About Harriet, and about William.

  I know how your daughter really died.

  I have not decided, yet, what I shall do.

  And then he seals the envelope, and pens the address.

  * * *

  The following morning Charles goes out as soon as the shops are open, crunching through a layer of new snow dusted diamond by the bright winter sun. His letter posted, he’s just turning back into Buckingham Street when he smells the aroma of roasting chestnuts. There’s a coster on the corner of Villiers Street, crying, ‘Chestnuts all ’ot, a penny a score,’ as he stamps his feet by his stall’s iron stove, the charcoal glowing crimson underneath. Remembering how he had longed for some on Christmas Day, Charles stops and buys a bag, warming his hands on them all the way to the house.

  Up in the drawing room Betsy is sitting on the floor by the fire playing with the cat. A slightly one-sided affair, admittedly, as Thunder is far too regal to deign to such kittenish antics, but he seems happy enough to lie on his back and wave the occasional lazy paw in the direction of the knotted string Betsy hangs over his head. Charles crouches down and offers the little girl a chestnut from his bag, and grins as she reaches out, then realizes that the lovely brown shiny things are hot and whips her hand away with a shy smile. The two of them blow big puffs on the bag until the nuts are cool enough to hold, then sit cross-legged together on the floor, munching happily and stroking the cat. And this it is that Maddox sees when he wakes, blinks and focuses slowly.

  ‘And what are you two doing? Making all sorts of mischief, I’ll wager.’

  Charles wonders for a moment if he is still adrift in the past – if it is Charles and his sister as children that he sees – but there is a clarity in the old man’s eyes that was not there before, and when the little girl goes to clamber onto the chair beside him, it is her own name he calls her by.

  ‘I have been talking to Abel,’ Maddox says carefully, as the child curls up against him and settles to sleep. ‘Though to speak strictly, he has been talking, and I have played a mere listener’s part.’

  There is still a slur to his speech, still a slight draw to one side of his face, but he is lucid; as lucid as he was – sometimes – before his last attack, before he heard again the name of Shelley and was driven back into the dark abyss of the past.

  Charles gets up from the floor and pulls a chair close to his great-uncle. And as the fire burns softer and softer in the grate, and the old man strokes the child’s golden curls, Charles recounts the case from first to last – from his commission by the Shelleys, to his stay at St John’s Wood, to the visit to the Frasers the day before. And when he is done and he has set out his conclusions, such as they are, they sit in silence for a while and Charles sees the old man’s eyes are closed. He has tired him, he thinks, and makes as if to get up.

  ‘He was mine,’ says Maddox, his eyes still closed. ‘The boy. William. He was my son. I believed that from the first, and when I saw him at her father’s house, I knew. He was the very image of my brother as a boy. There was not a shred of Shelley about him.’

  Charles is silent, wondering what it must have cost to see that child – that one and only child – consigned to the care of a man who had already killed his own baby daughter.

  ‘But there was nothing I could do to exert my claim. I could not protect him as a father; all I could offer him was my skill as a professional. And that I did. I had them watched. From that day in Skinner Street until their departure for Italy two years later. I never saw my boy again, but I had word of him, month by month, from an agent I employed.’

  So there was someone watching Shelley, thinks Charles, at the end if not at the beginning. How ironic that the man once hired to discover his pursuer should have become at the last that pursuer himself.

  ‘My abhorrence of Shelley never abated,’ the old man continues, ‘not for a moment, but he was by then under the care of a reputable physician, and the boy appeared to thrive. I believed his mother kept him safe.’

  He opens his eyes now, and Charles sees that there are tears.

  ‘I wish that were all I had to tell. But it is not. I used my position – my influence – for the first and only time in my career, to further my own ends. I allowed certain facts to come to the ear of the judge in Shelley’s Chancery case. With so much already against him – his atheism, his manner of life – I knew the information I passed on would ensure he never gained custody of Harriet’s children. I believed she would have wished it so. I believed, and sincerely, that I was acting in those children’s best interests.’

  ‘And you were not?’

  Maddox shakes his head slowly. ‘Not, at least, in the way I imagined. It was only after the Shelleys left England for the last time that I discovered the truth. That whatever he had done in the past that so haunted his steps, he was not the monster I had made him.’

  Charles frowns. ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘It was some years before I saw Absalom Blackaby again. I rarely dealt with such as he if I could help it, and avoided him all the more after the Shelley case. But there came a day when I could evade him no longer.’

  The old man stops a moment; the effort is taking its toll.

  ‘I shall not torment myself with details. Suffice it that I was wrong. Calamitously so. Blackaby saw the child’s body unwrapped, as I did not – but that is no excuse. I should have insisted. Because had I done so, I would have seen at once that there were marks not merely about the child’s eyes, but all over its body. What I had thought the proof of strangulation was, in truth, evidence only of the infection that was no doubt the true and only cause of death. The man laughed in my face – taunted me for making so elementary an error.’

  He sighs. ‘And I did indeed merit such derision. I had accused Shelley of the worst possible crime, and I was mistaken. Whatever else he might have done, he did not harm his child. But if he believed that he had, and ever after paid the penance for it in his own heart, it was my own negligence and incompetence that were to blame.’

  They sit in silence, the fire cracking softly now and again, the clock ticking in the silence.

  ‘Shelley never knew,’ says Charles, eventually, ‘what Blackaby told you?’

  Maddox shakes his head. ‘I wrote to him at the poste restante in Pisa but the letter was returned unopened. The hand that had penned my address was hers. Six months later he was dead.’

  He is tiring visibly now, his hand fluttering and his voice slowing. Charles clasps the hand that flutters so, and Maddox grasps him tight with the other. ‘There is little left to say – let me – there may not be another chance – I beseech you—’

  His eyes are pleading. Before his attack – before that moment that seemed to rend the veil of mortal frailty – the most painful part of the malady that afflicted him had been his knowing it. And Charles can see that same terror now – that same fear of the darkness, the forgetting.

  ‘You must not pain yourself,’ he whispers.

  ‘It is the not telling that has caused me pain.’

  He sits back. ‘I did not know my son was dead. Not until I heard she had come back to England a widow. She and a child far too young to be mine.’

  The words are coming slower and slower now, each breath drawn in distress. ‘That journey I made to Italy. I put out that I wished to visit the Palladian villas, and so I did. But I went also to Rome, where they had buried him. It was a beautiful place. The scent of wild flowers, the shade of cypress trees. I asked directions to the grave, but the attendant said that no one knew where his body lay. They had wished to bury Shelley beside him, but when they opened the tomb they found no child’s remains. My own boy, and I could not be near him. Not even in death.’


  * * *

  In the long dark hours that follow, while the rest of the house sleeps, Charles takes his pages of notes and attempts to put them into some sort of order – some sort of connected narrative that makes sense of these tangled and poisoned lives. He knows, now, why his uncle destroyed his records, and why he tried, even in his half-insensible state, to eradicate what Charles had succeeded in deciphering. But one question yet remains – and it is one to which even Mary Shelley seems never to have known the answer. Why was Shelley tracked first to Cumberland and then to Wales, all those years ago, and shot at in the chaos of a midnight assault? What was it that had him seeing the shadow of a persecutor on every street, and an avenging demon at every turn? Was that what he’d meant, that night of storms in Geneva, when he talked to Polidori, half dazed by ether, of a spectre that pursued him wearing his own face?

  Charles puts down his pen and looks out at the slowly silvering sky, thinking of Mary, and of Claire. Mary, who will, by now, have received his letter accusing her husband of a crime she has concealed for more than thirty years, but which Charles now knows he did not commit. By rights he ought to write again, and free her from that terrible burden, allow an ill and ageing woman a last peace. But something within him stays his hand, something perverse that whispers she has deceived the world all this time, and it is little enough punishment to leave her fearing, for a few more days yet, that the world might soon discover that deception. And as for Claire, she may have deserved better than she has received, but she has lied as much as any of them. Charles has no more wish to see her again than he has to set foot within that house on Chester Square, with its sham shrine and pristine façade of imitation gentility. He writes Claire a note, explaining that he has not heard from the Shelleys, and that on consideration, he believes negotiations with them would be more fruitful if she conducted them directly. Then he seals the envelope, and has Billy take it to St John’s Wood. Though when the boy comes back two hours later it’s to say the house is empty and the inhabitants gone.

  ‘I asked around a bit, Mr Charles, but no one seems to know where she went. Left the letter next door in case, but they didn’t think it were likely she’d be coming back.’

  Charles wonders, in passing, at this sudden change of address. How many homes has Claire had in the course of her life, and not one of them her own? And is she now in flight, or merely – once again – in transit? He, in the meantime, has spent those two hours re-reading Thomas Medwin’s Life. Knowing what he knows now, this second reading is rather like deciphering the trick of Holbein’s Ambassadors – working out by trial and error exactly where it is you have to stand to turn that strange distorted foreground shape into a perfectly proportioned human skull. Charles thinks he knows now where to stand to scrutinize Shelley, but the image in the centre is not quite clear – not yet. But he is a detective, and this is not the only evidence he has to hand. So he retrieves his volume of Shelley’s poetry from the shelf in the attic and sits down in the office to read. He finds the place where he left off and starts to work forwards once more, disdaining anything overtly political, interested only in what appears to him to be personal, or suggestive. And then suddenly he finds it. Stanzas he has seen before, in the paper Maddox found on Harriet Shelley’s dead body:

  The breath of night like death did flow

  Beneath the sinking moon.

  The wintry hedge was black,

  The green grass was not seen,

  The birds did rest

  On the bare thorn’s breast,

  Whose roots, beside the pathway track,

  Had bound their folds o’er many a crack

  Which the frost had made between.

  Thine eyes glowed in the glare

  Of the moon’s dying light,

  As a fen-fire’s beam

  On a sluggish stream

  Gleams dimly – so the moon shone there,

  And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair,

  That shook in the wind of night.

  The moon made thy lips pale, beloved;

  The wind made thy bosom chill;

  The night did shed

  On thy dear head

  Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie

  Where the bitter breath of the naked sky

  Might visit thee at will.

  It’s listed as an early poem, and dated ‘November 1815’ – almost exactly a year before Harriet Shelley died. Charles leafs quickly through the others in the same section but finds nothing else he recognizes. There must have been some reason Harriet copied out these words in her last despair, because if anyone knew the mystery of Shelley’s past, it was her. Did she not say something of the kind to Maddox, when she spoke to him of Tremadoc? No one knows the truth of that night but Shelley and I. Neither what happened, nor why. Charles gets out Maddox’s papers again and looks at the page he found on her body, those scrawls and stains that evoke so painfully her last pitiful hours, that paper darkened by thoughts of drowning, and the shadow of an imminent death. But if there is some other meaning here, he has not the clue he needs to unlock it. He curses softly and sits back. Perhaps, after all, he’s looking at it the wrong way. Lines about a dying girl might well have impressed themselves on the mind of a young woman distraught enough – desperate enough – to contemplate the same fate. But what of the other words on this page – might some of them come likewise from Shelley’s poems? Could that give him the key to the puzzle? He’s left the other volumes downstairs, and when he opens the drawing-room door a few minutes later he finds Abel sleeping quietly in the big chair, his hands folded over his stomach. The fire is low and Maddox is sitting on the sopha, one of the Shelley volumes open on his lap. Charles walks slowly over to him and puts his hand on his shoulder, and it is not just the old man who has tears in his eyes as Charles realizes what it is he has been reading.

  To William Shelley

  Thy little footsteps on the sands

  Of a remote and lonely shore;

  The twinkling of thine infant hands,

  Where now the worm will feed no more;

  Thy mingled look of love and glee

  When we returned to gaze on thee—

  There is the sound of laughter then, in the street outside, and when Charles goes to the window he can see Betsy playing down there with Billy, the little girl running round and round him in excited circles, leaving a trail of tiny footprints in the smooth and perfect snow.

  * * *

  It is Monday morning, and as Nancy and Molly haul the heavy baskets of laundry down to the dolly-tub for washing, Charles is in the office going through Maddox’s old cases, in search of anything that might help him in the task he has taken on for the Bodleian Curators. He could ask Maddox himself, of course, and he may yet do that, but the strain of his last disclosures has left the old man restless and occasionally irascible, and Charles knows that the balance of his mind is only too fragile, and judges this latest case not worth the risk.

  So absorbed is he, so intent, that even though half his mind hears the knock downstairs – hears Billy’s chirpy enquiry and a woman’s reply – it is only when the door to the office swings open that he registers who it is he has before him. The little worn shawl he has seen before, a dark silk gown, and a hat the matrons of Buckingham Street would no doubt consider scandalous.

  He bows, a little stiffly. ‘Miss Clairmont.’

  ‘Mr Maddox.’

  Billy looks from one to the other, trying – evidently – to work out what can be generating such a crackle of fractious energy between them.

  ‘Have Molly bring coffee, would you, Billy?’

  As Charles takes a chair and sets it for her he finds, to his surprise and vexation, that his hands are trembling. ‘You have received my letter.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  She is furious, that much is obvious, but as he sees the anger flushed in her face he feels his own exasperation rise to meet it. Has she always known what he has only so recently discovered? And how much effort
might she therefore have saved him, had she chosen to tell him the truth? But then he remembers: truth is a commodity Claire Clairmont reserves for her own use, and at a time of her choosing.

  ‘When you left my house,’ she begins, ‘it was on the understanding that you were to undertake my commission to the Shelleys. That you would do so without delay, and return to tell me their response. Not only have you not done so, but it seems you are now attempting to renege on our agreement.’

  ‘I did,’ he replies, keeping his irritation in check, but only just, ‘visit the Shelleys. And I did, as instructed, convey to them your message.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Lady Shelley said they would consider the proposal, and inform me of their decision. Thus far, I have not heard what that is.’

  Her eyes glitter and she is about to fling her fury in his face when there is a knock outside. He gets up and goes to take the coffee from Molly, and sees Claire eyeing her as he closes the door and sets the tray on the desk.

  ‘I have, therefore,’ he continues, calmly now, steadily, ‘nothing to report. But I do have something to confess.’ He pauses, knowing now he has her attention. And the upper hand; at least for a while.

  ‘And what might that be?’ she says, apparently busy about the cups. But she is not fooling him: he can see her impatience in her parted lips, in her shallow breathing.

  ‘When last we met, I told you I had read my uncle’s files. That was a lie.’

  He sees her gasp, then attempt to conceal it by raising her cup to her mouth. ‘This coffee is barely drinkable,’ she says, with a grimace, replacing the cup on the tray.

  ‘My apologies. The maid clearly does not know the Italian way of such things.’

  ‘So what has prompted you to this sudden confessio peccati?’

  He lets a moment lapse, and then another. ‘Because I have now discovered what was in those missing papers. They concerned the suicide of Fanny Imlay. And of Shelley’s wife.’

  Her face goes pale. So suddenly and so completely that if she were not sitting down he would fear she might faint.