Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  ‘No,’ says Charles, his mind alight with a sudden realization. ‘Shelley was not wrong – the past was repeated.’

  She shakes her head sadly. ‘Repeated, yes, but not redeemed.’

  ‘You misunderstand me: the past was repeated because Mary Shelley made it so. Think for a moment. When the first baby died she was struggling with events she could not command – a situation she thought slipping from her grasp. But did not the death of her child restore to her a measure of control, even if only for a time? And did she not regain that pre-eminence by ensuring Shelley believed himself responsible? And was it not exactly the same with the second little girl? Her own position is under threat, she fears Shelley is turning again to you, but the death of the child restores him once more to her side. And once again it is because she insists he is guilty – guilty this time of neglect and reckless delay, because he was concerned only for you, and ignored the needs of his own dying daughter.’

  Claire comes towards him now, tears in her eyes. ‘Mary always blamed me for what happened but I swear to you I begged her on my knees to stop in Padua and allow the doctor I was consulting there to treat Clara as well. There was no need to go on to Venice that day – we had already been travelling since three o’clock in the morning, and we were all overcome with the heat and the strain. With a child already so haggard – it was taking such a terrible risk. But Mary would not listen. She forced Shelley to take her.’

  Charles looks at her. How many times has it happened before? A whole case – weeks of work – turns and opens on a nuance, a glance. Or a single word. Everything he had thought – everything he’d deduced – has just reversed and inverted. Like a photograph changing places with its negative. Dark to light, light to dark. Like Escher’s famous woodcut that is at one and the same time black birds flying by day, and white birds flying by night. The image remains the same: it all depends on how you perceive it.

  ‘The baby was haggard?’ he says slowly.

  ‘She was so weak and gaunt I should hardly have known her. Those four days in Este it was as if she was wasting away before our very eyes. Even as an infant she had never fed well – Mary was always saying that her milk would not come or the child would not take suck – that her spirits sank at the very thought of putting her to her breast.’

  Charles thinks again about what Maddox told him of Mary Shelley’s first dead child – about her skin so yellow, and her body wrapped so tightly that all that could be seen was her face. Did Mary’s deceit begin not with the death of her daughter, and the lie she told, but before that – almost from the moment that baby was born? Were the blankets she bound about the child designed to conceal the real truth – that she, too, had been starved? Was that what had really driven Shelley so distracted in the days before she died? He, after all, had been a father before – if the child was not being adequately fed, surely he of all people would have seen the signs. Perhaps he told himself afterwards that it had not been Mary’s fault – that it was her first child, and the infant already sickly and not expected to live. Perhaps he thought his own guilt so overwhelming that hers vanished into insignificance. And then, years later and all unlooked-for, he opens the door one morning to find Absalom Blackaby standing there before him. A man who saw the baby naked and unswaddled; a man who would have seen – just as Shelley had – the ribcage protruding through the sallow skin, the stomach hollowed with days of hunger. And later when his second daughter dies, and Shelley has to bury another tiny corpse that resembles only too horrifyingly the first, does it come to him, then, that this cannot be mere coincidence – cannot only be ill-luck?

  And now Charles remembers, with an icy rush of horror, that there is another baby girl entangled in all of this. Another who fits the same terrible pattern. Little Elena, the baby Mary Shelley begged for, but then refused to feed. Little Elena, who was so quickly abandoned in the Naples orphanage in 1819. Charles had thought that an appalling dereliction on Shelley’s part – an indefensible selfishness – but what if he’s wrong? What if Shelley did not abandon her at all, but rescued her? What if he took Elena to the orphanage because he thought it was somewhere she would be safe? Did he fear, after the deaths of not one but two emaciated little girls, what his wife might do, if left alone? If Charles had not felt it before he feels it now, that electric teeming of the blood as the elements of a case fall suddenly and without warning into place, and the answer – the explanation – emerges with a perfect irresistible clarity from the mire of past confusion.

  Charles takes a step towards Claire. ‘I think that when the first baby died she was barely more than skin and bone, and Absalom Blackaby saw it when he buried her – saw it and knew only too clearly what it meant. I think that was what he really threatened to reveal to the world, if Shelley did not agree to his demands. And I think that was the true reason Shelley sent Elena away. He had failed to protect his own daughters, but there was one little girl he could still save.’

  Claire puts her hand to her face, her eyes wide with terrified comprehension. ‘No – it was not just one – it was not just Elena. I did not think – not at the time – but years later, when I was begging Byron to let Allegra visit me, he said he did not trust her in the same house as Mary. He said he could not permit her to come to us only to perish of – of neglect and – and starvation. Shelley must have confided in him – Shelley must have told him – must have feared what might happen—’

  Charles reaches for her hand, knowing what such a realization must mean to her, but she pushes him away. ‘Do you not see?’ she cries, her voice raw with pain. ‘If what you say is true, it was her fault my darling was left to die in that freezing, disease-infested convent. Byron might have let Allegra come to me, if it had not been for her. She would have lived – she would be here now – I would not be alone—’

  ‘You cannot be sure of that,’ says Charles, softly.’ You cannot torture yourself with the past.’

  ‘I have done nothing but torture myself with the past since the day I heard that she was dead.’

  And as she weeps now in his arms, her body shaking with a lifetime of loss, Charles wonders if it had been the same for Shelley. Was he, too, haunted by what he might have done differently – by the deaths he might have prevented, had he acted another way, or made another choice? And having watched the past repeat itself so tragically not just once but twice, did he see everything, ever after, through the same dark prism?

  ‘That letter you showed me,’ he says slowly, as her sobs subside, ‘did Shelley not say you had put off a visit to Allegra because he feared leaving Mary alone – that he dreaded some fatal end?’

  Claire shakes her head sadly, her handkerchief at her eyes. ‘She was inconsolable after William died – she had always suffered from melancholia, but it was never worse than after his death. She said she wished she, too, had died that day – that she would never recover from his loss. For months she withdrew from us into herself – impossible to comfort, impossible to solace. She would write, and she would sit, for hours, gazing out of the window. I would see her watching me when I was in the garden, like some sort of phantasm, some image of myself in a clouded mirror.’

  Charles nods, remembering how he had thought of the two of them as anti-types – dark and light, hot and cool, eager and reticent.

  ‘It was not the first time I have heard her talk of suicide, but I never believed it as I did then.’

  ‘And that is what Shelley feared?’ says Charles. ‘That is what the letter he sent you referred to?’

  She looks at him with a puzzled frown. ‘I have always assumed so.’

  ‘And when was this?’

  ‘1820. The late spring of 1820.’

  Charles calculates quickly. Percy would have been – what? Nine months old? Perhaps even less. ‘The letter said, too, did it not, that you had been present when Clara died – and when William died?’

  She nods. ‘I was there, yes – but—’

  ‘Why should Shelley have mentioned that? Why
raise it again then?’

  She looks at him blankly. ‘I do not understand. What are you saying?’

  ‘Miss Clairmont, I do not think Shelley feared his wife would kill herself. Or, rather, I do not think that such a possibility was his only, or even his principal, fear. Why did he talk of William’s death in that letter to you – what happened to that little boy?’

  Her eyes fill with tears. ‘It had not seemed so serious, not in the beginning. A stomach disorder, such as he had suffered many times before. But the doctor said there was no reason he should not make a full recovery. I remember how happy Shelley was that night when he took me with him to hear the music in the Piazza di Spagna.’

  ‘And how long was it before the child’s condition worsened?’

  ‘A few days. Perhaps four. Then suddenly there was a dreadful relapse – terrible heart-rending convulsions that seemed to tear his tiny body in pieces. Shelley sat up with him for three days and nights, not sleeping, exhausting himself, willing his sweet Will-mouse not to die. But it was no use. He said later he felt as if he had been hunted down by calamity – as if the whole household was somehow doomed. We were all overwhelmed by it – all of us. I loved that little boy as much as I did my own darling.’

  ‘And how did he look,’ asks Charles quietly, ‘at the end?’

  The tears are falling now, lingering heavy tears she does not wipe away. ‘He had hardly eaten anything for more than a week. He was barely recognizable as the child he had been.’

  ‘Just as Clara was – just as I believe the first baby also was.’

  Claire begins to shake her head. ‘No, not William – surely not William . . .’

  ‘You must see it, Miss Clairmont, as Shelley would have done, sitting up all those nights with his son – alone, in the dark, as the child worsened. He must have asked himself if that relapse, that sudden and unexpected decline, was once again his fault because he had chosen to spend time happily with you, rather than miserably with his wife.’

  She is sobbing desperately now, and he goes to her and helps her back to her seat.

  ‘You think I am blaming you – but I am not. I am not saying William died because of what you and Shelley did, but I believe Shelley thought so. I think he believed his wife guilty – he believed she had allowed his beloved son to die to punish him, a third time, for loving you and neglecting her. Might that not be the real explanation of his refusal to leave his son’s side, those last few days? He stayed because he feared what might happen if he left the boy alone with his own mother. And when he begged you later to postpone your visit to Allegra it was because he was terrified the same thing might happen again, to his only remaining child. Both his daughters had died, then his precious William. Percy was all he had left.’

  She rises from her chair and walks away, as stiffly as an old woman. It is long, very long, before she faces him again. ‘Let us be clear,’ she says, in a voice as brittle as February frost. ‘Let there be no misunderstanding. You are telling me that William’s death was not an accident.’

  Charles takes a deep breath. Part of his mind is telling him that the boy’s last illness was only too horribly like Clara’s. Some apparently mundane disorder of the stomach that suddenly worsened, a swift and drastic loss of weight and, at the last, deadly convulsions. Each time the same pattern. And Charles knows – as Shelley, too, must have known – that a stomach disorder is the easiest possible sickness to induce in a child, and convulsions may be the consequence not only of fever but of an adult’s choking hand. But there is nothing Charles can do to prove it. ‘It is possible the illness was exactly what it appeared to be,’ he says carefully. ‘That no human intervention either caused it, or could have saved him.’

  ‘But you do think both those little girls were harmed – deprived of food – that Mary must have known it but did nothing.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Clairmont, I do. I know it is hard to believe any woman could so ill-treat her own defenceless infants, but I trained for a while as a doctor, and even in those few months I saw women reduced to a state of abject misery after childbirth, women otherwise gentle and tender-hearted—’

  ‘Mary was never that,’ she says quickly.

  ‘—who became erratic, even violent after their delivery. I have read since that some turn their fury on their husbands, others on their own babies. If she were already predisposed by an inherited weakness, such an illness might well have driven her to commit these dreadful acts, hardly knowing, perhaps, what it was she did.’

  He is trying to make it easier for her, but she is shaking her head now, not in sadness but in grim and fierce refutation. ‘You do not know her. I have known her intimately from when she was a child. Mary has a tenacity – a ferocity of resolve – such as I have rarely seen even in the most ruthless of men. Her own father acknowledged as much. He, if anyone, knew of what she was capable. Knew it, and feared it. Do you not recall in that selfsame letter what Shelley said of the injury to her arm when she was still a girl?’

  Charles nods slowly. ‘And some veiled reference to Godwin and your mother fearing some greater evil.’

  ‘I did not know what that was – not at the time. My mother did not tell me until a few weeks before she died. She said the physician who came to the house thought Mary might have caused the injury herself. That she exaggerated its severity – indeed may have prevented the wound from healing by scratching it again and again with her fingernails. There were marks the doctor could not otherwise explain. My mother believed she did it to secure to herself, once more, the whole of Godwin’s time and attention. They had been excessively attached to one another after her mother died, and she fiercely resented being supplanted. Especially by a woman like my mother.’ There is a settled bitterness in her face now, the scar of an ancient unhealed resentment.

  ‘I could never comprehend, then, why Godwin sent her away so often when she was supposed to be such a favourite – why he would so carefully burn every letter she sent him when they were all those months apart. Once, when she had returned from such an absence, there was a fire in the bookshop downstairs that no one could explain. She had been in the house less than ten days.’

  They are silent. Charles is thinking about what Maddox told him. Of a woman who spoke to her lover in the voice of a ten-year-old-child, and promised to be a good Pecksie and not vex him any more; of a woman who claimed to be ‘quite well again’, when of sickness there had been no outward sign. The same woman who had once basked in her father’s undivided love, then seen that love stolen from her by another she despised. A woman who may have been willing, even as a mere girl, to inflict an unsightly wound on her own body in a desperate effort to regain the love she craved. A woman who, perhaps, made her own babies sick to secure her lover to her side, and punish him for daring to neglect her. Charles has not heard, of course, of Münchausen’s syndrome, and it will be another century before this mental disorder is named, and even longer before it is fully understood that there are women who will harm not only themselves but their own children to compel the attention, the affection, or the sympathy they believe they are owed. But Charles does not need to name it to recognize in Mary Shelley the possibility of the same terrible and overwhelming affliction of the mind.

  ‘That letter you showed me,’ he says eventually, ‘did it not say she was pregnant again in those last few months? What happened to the child?’

  ‘She miscarried,’ Claire says quietly, turning away once more. ‘At the house in Lerici. It was not eight weeks since I had lost my own darling. They did not tell me of her death for days, fearing how I would react, and they were surprised, I think, that I seemed to rally so well. But they did not know what I knew. Shelley was going to leave her, Mr Maddox, and be with me. As he had always wished to.’

  Charles moves softly towards her, and stands at her shoulder. She seems scarcely to know that he is there.

  ‘Lerici was such a beautiful place – beautiful and haunting. The landscape so wild, and the house right on the e
dge of the sea, with the waves crashing against the rocks, and the water swelling sometimes right up to the steps. Mary hated it from the start – she claimed to have a presentiment of coming evil – but I loved it, and Shelley loved it. At least at first. He began writing again – furiously, prolifically – a poem he called The Triumph of Life. And he had a vision – a vision that troubled him at first, but which he came to see as a pledge of forgiveness, a promise that all would be well for the two of us, he and I. He was out on the terrace one night when he started suddenly as if in pain and pointed out to sea crying, “There it is again! There!” He said afterwards that a little naked child had risen from the water, looking towards him, smiling, its hands clasped together as if in joy.’

  ‘It was a child of his own he saw?’

  ‘I do not think so. A few days later I departed for Florence to collect my possessions. We planned to tell Mary of our intentions as soon as I returned. I left him happy, composed – settled in his own mind. When I entered that house again two weeks later everything had changed. He was ashen with exhaustion, wrung out to his last atom of energy by Mary’s unceasing demands. She was one moment in hysterics, the next in a state of near collapse requiring waiting on hand and foot.’ She shakes her head. ‘It was intolerable to be in that house – to be forced to listen to the endless recriminations, the dreadful repeated violence. Two days after my return the whole household was roused by her shrieks – she was beside herself, screaming that she was losing the baby and blaming Shelley, but in the end it all came to nothing. A friend who was staying with us said to me later that he thought she had made the whole thing up – he remarked rather tartly how strange it was that she had managed to recover so quickly.’

  And how revealing, thinks Charles, that this phantom miscarriage should have happened so soon after her rival’s return.