Charles Maddox 03 - A Treacherous Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  It is an attractive Regency villa, this one, white-faced and symmetrical, with a window either side of a pedimented porch, and another line of identical casements above. If a house can speak of its inhabitants this one conjures both care and carefulness – patches of brickwork have been diligently repaired, and the garden trimmed back for winter, all dead leaves swept neatly away. Charles pulls at the bell-rope and hears an echoing ring somewhere deep inside. He might have expected a maid to answer in such a class of residence, but the woman who eventually comes to the door is clearly the owner, or the owner’s wife. Small, grey-haired and closed about herself, she gives the impression of an untimely withering, a curtailment all too early. She starts, on seeing him, but then appears to collect herself. ‘May I help you?’

  Charles has not had much time to consider what he will say to this, and what he’d settled on had sounded thin even to his own ears, but when he looks into the woman’s faded blue eyes he feels suddenly ashamed at the prospect of his cheap lie.

  ‘It’s about your daughter, Mrs Smith.’

  Again that almost imperceptible start of surprise – or shock. ‘All these years,’ she says slowly, her voice brittle as if she has not spoken for a long time. ‘All these years I have wondered if someone would come, and that it should happen now. Today of all days.’ She holds the door open. ‘You had best come in.’

  The sitting room she shows him into is clearly not the grandest such room in the house, but it is warm and it is comfortable. She has not yet turned up the lamps, and the only light is the red-gold glow cast by the fire in the brick hearth.

  ‘What was it that brought you here?’ she asks, moving to what is clearly her accustomed chair.

  Charles takes a seat on the sopha opposite her. ‘Chance. An accident of coincidence. I was on my way to Oxford and saw the windmill. There is a passage in which it is described.’

  She bows her head. ‘And when I asked at The Crown, the landlord told me what had happened. But he could not tell me very much. The bare facts, nothing more.’

  ‘He is new to the village. My family have lived here for four generations.’

  There is a silence, and Charles senses a hesitation now, a sudden reluctance.

  ‘You said you were travelling to Oxford,’ she says after a moment. ‘Are you a student at the university, Mr . . . ?’

  ‘Maddox. Charles Maddox. And no,’ he says firmly. ‘I am not. And I never have been.’

  ‘He was,’ she says, pulling her woollen shawl closer about her. ‘That is the first thing he ever told me. That he was a student at University College. He no doubt thought it might serve to reassure me, but I knew he was a gentleman, despite his strange clothes and his dirty fingernails. It was his voice – the air he had about him that life would always arrange itself for his convenience.’

  ‘How did he come to be here?’

  ‘He was walking. From Oxford down to Marlow. It was a beautiful October day and my daughter was outside in the garden when he passed by on the road and saw her. We lived at the end of the row then, and she would sit for hours on the fence alone, talking to her doll and making up stories to herself. When I went out to call her that afternoon she came running towards me saying she had found a wonderful new friend, who told the most thrilling and delightful tales. I thought it odd, that a man of his age should be interested in a little girl, but he came at once to shake my hand saying he had been reminded, the moment he saw her, of his sister Elizabeth, whom he loved dearly and missed very much. And, of course, her own brother was away at that time, and she was often lonely. She had so few friends. Other children can be very cruel.’

  She shakes her head and gazes towards the curling flames. ‘I do not think I ever saw her so happy as she was that day. She had never had a friend only to herself – never had anyone listen to her as he had.’

  Charles nods slowly. He is remembering what Claire Clairmont had said of Fanny Imlay. No one in that house ever took the slightest notice of her, but he did. He could be very gentle, very encouraging. It is easy to see why she might have loved him for it. ‘And he came again, after that?’

  ‘Sometimes with a friend, a stocky, rather taciturn youth I did not take to. But mostly he was alone. As the days drew shorter he and my daughter would sit on the floor by the fire and he would frighten her with ghost stories, and wild tales of witches and spectres and raising the devil and I know not what besides. I worried, a little, at her hearing such things, but my sister said it would do her no harm – that children enjoy being frightened, as long as they are in a safe place and with people who love them. And he did love her. Of that I am sure. Despite all that happened afterwards, I am sure he loved her.’

  There is a gust of wind then, and a branch outside the window scratches plaintively against the glass like a suppliant wraith. ‘It was forty years ago this very day. I have been sitting here these last hours, by the fire, listening to the wind in the trees and remembering, and when the knock came to the door and I saw you standing there, I thought, for a wild moment, that time had been retraced. That you came with news of her. That she was still out there, waiting to be found. Waiting to be rescued.’

  Her face buckles now with pain, and Charles feels an answering clasp to his own heart, remembering what it was like to look up and see a golden-haired child hesitating in a doorway, a child so like his own lost sister that it seemed as if his own impossible prayer has been answered, and he had been given another chance – another chance to redeem the past.

  There are tears in her eyes now. ‘I know I should never have allowed them to go – the weather was poor that day and like to worsen, and I knew she was not strong enough to walk so far, but he said he would carry her pig-a-back, that he had often taken his sisters on such expeditions, bearing them so in his arms when they became too tired to follow him. And she was so excited at the prospect of their little excursion together that at last I agreed. She had so few opportunities of that kind – so few of the pleasures other children take for granted. I remember standing at the window as I watched them go, he with that fine coat of his all torn about the buttons, and she in her favourite dress, with her best blue sash tied in a bow. And I stood there again that evening, waiting and watching as the night and the storm came on, and when I saw him stagger out of the darkness like a dead man, my heart began to beat so violently in my breast that I could scarcely breathe. He was holding her sash clutched against his chest, and he was covered in slime, his hair black with mud, and his eyes starting from his skull like a monster from some terrifying dream.’

  Charles can feel his own heart racing as the image conjures itself before his eyes – an image hallucinatingly like that infamous creature formed by unhallowed arts from the offal of the slaughterhouse. A monster that murdered the lovely and the helpless, and strangled the innocent as they slept. Now more than ever Charles wonders if the imagining of that monster was the deliberate resurrection of unbearable memories, or an unconscious externalization of everything in himself that its creator most feared.

  ‘I rushed outside,’ she continues, ‘but my husband was there before me, seizing him by the throat and demanding to know where she was. I truly think Robert would have choked the life from him had I not intervened, and when he loosed his grip he fell to the ground in the dirt, clutching his neck and gasping for breath, the marks of bruises about his throat. He said they had gone all the way down to the river, that there had been a little boat moored at the bank and she had begged him – pleaded with him – to take her out in it, to row her about a little as he had so often rowed his sisters. And it had started so joyfully – she in the prow smiling like a princess and he singing at the top of his voice and scaring the cattle come down to drink. Only then an oar became suddenly entangled in an overhanging tree and he had to wrestle to free it – the boat began to rock – he told her to be still, but she became frightened and tried to crawl towards him – she stood – the oar wrenched all at once free, and as the boat tipped she slipped over the side
. He said she uttered not the smallest cry, that her body made not the slightest movement on the face of the water. It was as if she had never been there at all.’

  She looks up at Charles, and then away. ‘He told us he searched – that he did everything he could. He tried to wade in but it was too deep and he could not swim. He said she must have become caught in the weed and been unable to free herself. He said that with her arm – her infirmity – she would not have been able—’

  Her voice falters; she has a little book in her lap, which she touches now as if it is a talisman, as if it might give her the strength she needs to finish what she has set herself to say. ‘My husband dragged him down to the river then and there – all those miles in the dark and the pouring rain – but they could not find her. There was no sign. Not then, and not afterwards. We were never able to bring her body home. Never able to lay her to rest. Two days later that friend of his came here. He said he was distraught at what had happened – crazed with grief and remorse, unable to sleep, unable to eat, threatening to destroy himself by poison, or by pistol-shot. He begged us, if we could find it in our hearts, not to blight such a promising young man’s life by reporting him to the magistrate. I remember crying out that our lives were blighted – that we would never see our daughter again, never see her married, never see her a mother – but my husband silenced me with a face of granite, and demanded money. A very great deal of money. The man floundered a moment, then stammered that there was a cousin who might be able to help – a cousin with money to command. That if we could wait a few days he would send to London.’

  The room is still, but it is not the stillness of peace. Then Charles gets up and pokes the coals, and as he returns to his chair and the shadows begin to dispel in the sudden leap of firelight, he notices there are two portraits by the window he had not seen before. ‘May I?’

  She glances up, then nods.

  The first is set in an oval frame carved intricately with flowers and butterflies, and the little mice and rabbits so beloved of young girls. She is half turned towards him, her fair hair curled in ringlets, and her dark blue eyes lit with such an expression of pure, enchanted joy that Charles can hardly bear to look at her. But then, as the fire gathers strength, he can see the picture more clearly – see not only the name engraved beneath it, but what the little girl is wearing about her neck.

  A string of bright blue beads.

  It cannot be a coincidence. It must be the same. The same beads Maddox saw in Hans Place all those years ago, wound about the neck of Shelley’s little daughter. He must have found them in the water that terrible night and kept them until he had a daughter of his own. A daughter he gave two gifts, the day she was born. A string of blue beads, and the name of the girl who once had worn them. That the past might be redeemed by repeating it.

  Charles turns to Mrs Smith. ‘Ianthe Mary. It is a beautiful name. And she is a beautiful child.’

  She nods. ‘The artist has captured her to the life, but he has flattered her, all the same. You cannot see it in that picture, but she suffered a cruel accident when she was hardly more than a baby. Her arm and shoulder were withered ever after, and she could only walk with her own strange little jerking gait. Other children shunned her and mocked her, as children do who know no better, and do not understand their own heartlessness.’

  Charles looks at the picture again, this picture so seemingly insignificant, but which holds the key to so many dark mysteries. So this is the secret that lay buried deep in Shelley’s past and cast its shadow over all the rest of his life. This is why Harriet Shelley died with words of death and guilt and a young girl drowned, hidden among her clothes. This is what Hogg meant when he talked so obscurely of a need for repentance – Hogg who must, surely, have been the friend who came here after Ianthe died, just as Medwin must have been the cousin in London who gave them the money. And this is what left Shelley terrified and shaking, that night of ghost-raising in Geneva, when he heard Coleridge’s poem of the deformed witch Christabel and talked, half mad, of a tale of his own that would rouse those who heard it to terror, and a dire fear of what lurked unseen in their own souls. A tale of a young girl, in the like way misshapen, whose face still haunted his waking days and would not let him rest. Not then, nor till the hour of his own death. Was it a vision of this dead girl that Shelley saw rising out of the waves from the terrace at Lerici, those last few fevered weeks? Was it Ianthe he saw smiling and clasping her hands in joy, and did he see absolution in that joy – a promise that she was finally at peace, and he at last forgiven?

  And as Charles thinks of those last weeks, and of hope dying slowly into a desire for death, his eye is drawn, half unthinking, to the second portrait hanging next to the girl’s. A portrait of the same size, but more austerely framed. The portrait of a young man. Charles looks at it for a moment in horrified disbelief then turns, his blood running cold, to the woman.

  ‘But surely this is—?’

  ‘Not the man you suppose it to be. It is my son. Henry.’

  Charles looks again at the painting. Despite her words, he can still scarcely believe it. The likeness is more than close – it is uncanny. The same striking violet-blue eyes, the same pale skin, the same wildly curling hair. And now, at last, seeing this, Charles knows everything. Not just what it was that Shelley had done, but how – and how ruthlessly – he was punished.

  ‘You said your son was away when Ianthe died?’ he asks, with forced calmness.

  ‘Henry was in London. He came as soon as he got our letter. He was furious with my husband for not going at once to the magistrate – he said we should never have accepted the money, never bought this house with such tainted coin. He swore he would never rest until he had found the man who had killed his sister, and taken his revenge. He did not see why he should be content, and we so miserable.’

  ‘He was working in London?’

  ‘At that time, yes. He was a writer, for the newspapers.’

  Charles wanders, as if casually, to the window. ‘Work such as that must be relatively easy to come by. Even in out-of-the-way places. Even in a county as remote, perhaps, as Cumberland.’

  She flushes. ‘I am sure you are right.’

  ‘Or the north of Wales.’

  ‘Possibly. I could not say.’

  ‘And did your son ever have cause to journey further afield? To Europe, perhaps?’

  She hesitates. ‘He did travel at least once to Italy. To the neighbourhood of Lerici. Do you know it?’

  Charles nods. ‘Only by reputation. But I believe the air on the coast there is said to have a magical quality. People see visions – dream dreams – may sometimes even believe they have glimpsed what the Germans call a doppelgänger. An image of themselves as like as to the reflection in a glass.’

  She looks away and folds her hands. ‘I know nothing of such things. But perhaps there is something in what you say. There was a change in Henry, that summer. I could tell from his letters. He seemed happier than he had for many years. It was as if he was finally at peace.’

  At peace, thinks Charles, because he had confronted the man he believed had killed his sister; at peace because that man had at long last paid the price, and his task was done.

  Charles turns again to the portrait. The portrait that is Shelley, and yet not Shelley. A likeness both of the poet, and of his persecutor. The man who tried to kill him first in Cumberland, and then in Wales. The man whose face Shelley caught sight of at the window, that dark night, and saw in terror that it was his own. The man he glimpsed thereafter so many times – on the London streets, in the Italian squares – that he began to believe himself deranged. The man whose last appearance, walking calmly towards him on a sunlit terrace, was to precipitate a final reckless plunge towards death and forgetting.

  The blurred image Charles has been pursuing fuses finally into focus. What was it the assailant threatened at Tremadoc? That he would murder Shelley’s wife and ravish his sister. And there is reason now, and not childi
sh caprice in Shelley’s later obsession with kidnapping his sisters from their school – he must have seen Henry Smith in London, and feared the girls were in terrible danger. The rape of a sister, the death of a wife; the first threat never came to pass, but what of the second? Charles remembers now, with a terrible foreboding, the name of the man Harriet was said to have taken as a lover before she died. The man seen about her lodgings who was so like her long-absent husband that everyone assumed it was indeed him. The name she was living under when she went to her death. Had Smith deliberately sought out Shelley’s wife when she was at her most vulnerable, her most forsaken? Did he get her with child and then callously abandon her, leaving her so desperate at this second desertion that she fulfilled his threat of vengeance by her own hand? Or did he truly love her and return one night to find that she was dead? She and his own unborn baby together. Another death to lay at Shelley’s door. Another cause that cried aloud for vengeance.

  The woman is on her feet. ‘I think you should go now. You have, I take it, found what you sought.’

  ‘When I came here I had only questions. But now I have answers, I do not know what I should do with them.’

  ‘I have lived with what happened these forty years. Nothing you can do now will change the past.’

  It’s clear this strange encounter is at an end, and Charles follows her back to the front door. She shakes his hand and he is about to leave when something makes him turn back. The empty, quiet house. Those two solitary portraits. All the walls otherwise bare.

  ‘Where is your son now, Mrs Smith? Does he have a family of his own?’

  She would never have told him, had he not asked.

  ‘He died, Mr Maddox. That summer in Italy. He was on his way home when his ship went down in a storm. They found his trunk, weeks later, washed up on the sand. There was hardly anything in it – a few clothes, some papers. And this little book.’