A Fatal Likeness (9 page)

“Were you looking at this, Uncle? Is that what you meant?”

The old man eyes him narrowly, then looks down at the book.

“Is there something about this that you remember?”

Again Maddox is staring at him, but as one gnarled hand reaches slowly for the book, a coal slips with a rush of sparks onto the hearth, and Charles has to race to stop the rug from catching light. And when he turns back, the old man has lurched up with a strange stifled cry, his eyes stark open, his feet tangling in the bedding as he tries to rise from the chair.

“Now, what’s to do here, Mr Charles?” exclaims Abel, starting from his sleep, his face drawn in alarm.

“He was trying to tell me something, Abel—something about the case.”

Abel looks at him askance, clearly unconvinced, but conditioned by a lifetime in service to hold his tongue. Maddox meanwhile is belying anything Charles might now contend by sagging sideways in his nephew’s arms, his head lolling to one side and a ribbon of spittle hanging from his mouth.

“Or mebbe it was just the thunder that was frettin’ him,” Abel suggests as the two of them steady Maddox slowly back in his seat, and Charles lifts the pillows so he can sit upright. “That storm’s not afar off now.”

Maddox stares at the two of them suspiciously, then cowers back in his chair, his hands before his face as if warding off a blow. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Maddox’s decline in the last few months had been his own awareness of it—fitful, yes, but all too frequent. The strange sleep that has since descended on him has, if nothing else, saved him from that, but if the veil is now to be lifted, might that not prove more killing than the kindness of quietude?

But all the same it is progress, of a kind. As Charles keeps repeating to himself when he sits with his own dinner and watches as Maddox manages far more food—and brandy—than Abel says he has taken in the best part of a week. All things considered, Charles’ heart is as light as it has been for days as he stands in the hall making ready for the journey back across town.

“Are you sure about this, Mr Charles?” worries Abel, as they look out at a night sky electric with flashes of silent lightning. “It’s no weather for wandering about outside when ye’ve a warm bed here.”

“I won’t be wandering, Abel. I’m going straight up to the Strand to hail a hansom. All you need concern yourself about is my uncle. I can look after myself well enough. It will seem odd if I do not return on such an inclement night, and besides, there’s something I need to do. Something that may mean I will not have to stay there at all for very much longer.”

“Well if you’re sure, Mr Charles.” Abel is clearly unconvinced. “At least let me go up and have Molly fetch ’ee down a great-coat. The boss has a good heavy one he winnae miss.”

“Very well,” says Charles with a smile. “I suppose that wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

But five minutes pass with no sign of the coat, and a drumbeat of heavy raindrops is starting to patter the pavement. Charles grows irritated, and goes to the bottom of the stairs and calls up.

“Is there a problem, Abel?”

A moment later Stornaway appears on the landing looking flustered. “My apologies, Mr Charles. Heaven knows where that Molly has got to—Billy says she was sick this mornin’, but she made yer uncle’s dinner right enough.”

Charles heads for the door. “It really doesn’t matter. I can just as well do without it. Send for me if you need me, but otherwise I will be back tomorrow afternoon.”

The rain is pounding the street now, and Charles races up to the Strand through a wash of flooded gutters and wheel ruts. His feet are soaked in mud and running dung long before he gets to the top, but otherwise his luck is with him and he finds a cab within a few minutes. He calls out the address to the driver and settles down into the damp leather seat, watching the rain glittering in the jets of gas outside those few shops still open. And if the West End is empty of people, St John’s Wood is even more so, and there are no lamps in the windows at Carlo Cottage when Charles swings down from the cab and rushes up the steps to his new—and second—front door. Charles stands in the hall, waiting for his breathing to ease, and listening for sounds of wakefulness above. But there is nothing. A crackle of forked lightning pulses blue across the walls and the thunder breaks hard overhead, but still there is no sign or movement upstairs.

Charles moves quickly and silently to the dining-room, where he kneels down by the piano-stool and lifts the brocade away. He tries the lid of the trunk, but it is—as he expected—locked. No matter. He reaches into his pocket and extracts a ring of keys he keeps for moments such as this, confident that he will have one to fit such a commonplace piece of luggage. But ten minutes later and all dozen keys tried, he is forced to accept that—like everything else, it seems, in this house—the trunk may not be quite as ordinary as he initially supposed. He turns it in his hands, examining the lid, the hinges. He’s been lucky once already tonight, and his luck holds again now: Sometime in the past, on one of its many journeys, this trunk has been dented or damaged by water, because the wood is warped at the back and the lid doesn’t fit quite true. And when Charles bends down to look more closely he can see the edge of a sheaf of paper inside. And it just so happens he has the tool for that too: a small pair of snipe-nose pliers that are a relic of that short period he spent training to be a doctor and which he kept, unlike much else from that time, because he thought they might prove useful. As they have in the past, and as they do now. He steadies himself against the trunk with one hand and slowly inserts the pliers with the other. Holding them horizontal at first, and then twisting them a slow half turn once the pointed ends are inside the trunk. It’s a delicate job he has now, but he’s always had steady hands, and he closes the pliers carefully about the edge of the sheets and starts to edge them out, inch by cautious inch. There’s a moment when they catch on something and he hears the sound of tearing, but what he eventually pulls free are six or seven sheets of smooth handwritten paper. There is no title, no heading, and the pages are clearly only part of a much longer piece, but none of that matters. Because Charles only has to read a dozen lines to see the one word he’s been seeking all this time.

Shelley.

He looks up, startled, as a rush of lightning catches him floodlit in his guilt and the thunder breaks again over his head, but when an even deeper darkness descends, and still no-one stands accusing in the doorway to indict him, he gets up and makes his way quietly up the stairs to his room, where he lights the little lamp by his bed and begins to read.

FOUR

Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear

… 
SHOULD
THINK
,
AND
IN
any case I cared not. All that mattered was to see him, whether by arrangement, or by sleight. He came not to the first rendezvous I appointed, and I wish now that I could have persuaded my weak heart against seeking refuge, like some panting helpless hare, in the lair of a lynx that was intent only on devouring it. He wrote later that the whole
affaire
was my own doing—that he defied any man to play the Stoic to an eighteen-year-old girl who came prancing to his bed at all hours of the night—that I pursued him, after that first encounter in London, and scrambled myself eight hundred miles across Europe with no other aim but to repeat it. And I cannot deny it. I wish only that I could have divined, like the Cumaean Sibyl, that the price of my few brief moments of happy passion was to be a lifetime of loss, and penitence, and sorrow. How could I have known, that night in Geneva, as I looked down from my room and saw his coach rolling slowly to the door, that my dark Fate had by then been sealed, and the seed already planted that would bear such beautiful, and yet such terrible fruit.

Receiving no answer to my note, I made sure to be on the terrace in the morning, where I sat, as if absorbed in my book, watching all the while the movement of the boats on the lake. The water sparkled jewel-like in the sun and it seemed—then—a happy portent that the air was clear, and the white peak of Mont Blanc could be seen rising majestic above the purple mountains and the winnowing clouds. The air was fragrant with spring flowers, and the vineyards on the farther shore vivid with the young green of new leaves. So sweet a day! It was an hour or more before I caught sight of the vessel I sought. No other man could match his strength of profile, his proud and erect carriage, and even so far away I could not but recognise him. Polidori was attempting to bring them about, splashing ineffectually as the boat swung in the shallows, and showing himself thereby, at least to my eye, no better an oarsman than he was to prove a doctor. Though at that moment I blessed his ineptitude, for it gave me the few minutes I required to ensure that by the time they were nearing land, we—Shelley and Mary and I—were all walking, as if by happy accident, on the shore.

So many have asked about that moment—that first encounter between the two finest Poets of the age—and I have read accounts of it that have made me smile, secretly, in the privacy of my heart. I confess now that the reality was but a poor match for the expectation; it was, in truth, a meeting characterised by awkwardness on all sides. Mary had not been told, then, of my secret, and knowing that he was deceiving her rendered Shelley distracted and ill-at-ease, and despite all his loud disdain for rank and money, he was quite overawed to find those detested qualities incarnated in such vigorous and celebrated flesh. And Byron did indeed draw every eye, standing there, up to his knees in the water, his deformed foot thereby concealed—as he was ever eager to do—and a red scarf tied turban-wise about his hair. I could see guests gathering on the hotel terrace and whispering behind their hands, and I guessed what they were saying—people of that sort love nothing more than to titillate themselves with gossip about subjects they profess to deplore, and Byron did not only live, as he boasted, a hundred-years’ life in the space of twenty-five, but supplied meat enough for a century’s scandal in half as many months.

Poor Shelley, by contrast, always loathed all such impertinent public scrutiny. He writhed so inwardly under it that no doubt his ignorant observers considered him more than a little peculiar—it was not merely his strange clothes and wild hair that set them muttering, but the shrieks of demoniacal laughter he gave out whenever Byron said anything in the least entertaining—or, indeed, anything at all. As for His Lordship, I could see from the lift of his lip that he found it difficult to reconcile the dazzling works he had read, with an author who appeared little more than an ungainly youth. For my part, I said little, being content merely to wait and to watch, for Shelley’s encounter with Byron was not the only such first meeting I wished to observe: My lord had never till then been introduced to the celebrated ‘Mrs Shelley’; not, of course, that she had any right to be called so—not then. There she stood, with those bright eyes of hers, and that famous hair falling in gauzy wavings about her shoulders and lifting in the wind off the lake. I had predicted he would fall in love with her—everyone else did, and why should he be any different, he who knew how to value a lineage such as hers? I had told him in London that it would not concern me—that I would merely redouble my efforts to stand well in her esteem, but I had not meant it. I did not wish to share him—not at all if truth be told, and certainly not with
her,
the step-sister who has been no sister to me. I had paid the price of a
folie à trois,
I was determined I would never be drawn into the yet more furious maelstrom of a
folie à quatre.
But to judge of their first handshake, I deemed I had little to fear. Byron did not appear to think Mary so very extraordinary, and indeed I have been told since, by others, that my Albé never thought her anything but vulgar, and, moreover (though how he knew this I cannot say) a great and infamous liar. I sigh as I write his name, for I called him Albé then, in gentle play on the initials
LB.
. It is my fate, and my curse, that when I think of him now those letters stand only for ‘loathsome brute.’

My first aim in contriving this meeting between the four of us had been to secure an invitation to dine, and thereby foster what would appear to others to be an acquaintance born of chance, however studiously I had in fact contrived it. But in this first step I only half succeeded, for within a few minutes Byron rather pointedly offered a place at his table to Shelley alone, then made a hasty bow to myself and Mary before stamping off back towards the boat.

His
rooms at the Angleterre were, of course, far more luxurious than ours, and while we women were banished to a meagre dinner in our far-off eyrie, His Lordship regaled his guests with roast pork and turbot, and several bottles of fine claret. I say ‘guests’ because Polidori too attended, and seemingly made a vile and malicious insinuation about Shelley’s keeping
two wives
—a remark Shelley unluckily let slip to me some days thereafter, and whence my violent dislike of the man commenced. But by then, all was in train. We would all of us breakfast together as soon as Byron rose—which was never much before noon—and in the afternoons he and Shelley would post about the lake in their little rented boat, Shelley at the oars, and Byron singing what he claimed were Albanian songs, though they sounded like no music I have ever played, and involved such strange cacophonous guttural noises that families in nearby parties dispersed before them like so many frightened chickens. Which may, of course, have been exactly his intention. Mary and I, meanwhile, read Latin and Italian in the heat of the day, and walked about in the garden with little William as the sun began to set, looking at the rabbits and the insects and the beady-eyed lizards warming themselves on the hot stone wall. It could not last, of course—we were attracting too much unsavoury attention, and our rooms were, in any case, far too expensive, so we all agreed, the five of us (for Polidori
would
intrude), that it would be politic to remove to quarters more secluded. Though nothing we did, it seemed, could stop the prying eyes. We discovered later that the wretched little hotel proprietor was renting telescopes to his guests, so they could spy on us from the terrace, and work themselves into a frenzied indignation thinking they had spied female underclothes displayed for all to see, when it was, in truth, nothing but Byron’s blameless tablecloths, left out in the sun to dry.

• • •

But I am running ahead of my story. After much discussion and disagreement, we eventually lighted on two properties side by side on the southern edge of the lake. These were acceptable both to Byron’s pretensions, and to our own party’s rather more modest pockets. Byron accordingly leased the Villa Diodati, and we took a charming little house close by at Montalègre, which Shelley adored, because it had a little harbour of its own where he could moor the boat he had by then persuaded Byron to buy. It was scarcely ten minutes from one door to the other—I know it, because I walked it every day. In the morning, with Shelley and Mary to breakfast, or to my desk in the library where I was fair-copying
Childe Harold;
in the afternoons, to dine; and later, in the darkness, to Byron’s bed. Always in the darkness, because it was impossible otherwise to avoid Polidori, who would appear like an evil genius whenever I attempted to get my Albé alone. The man seemed always to require the urgent use of some article kept only in the room we were in, and on each such occasion that face of his he clearly thought so handsome was contorted by the most scornful of sneers. But he kept that sneer, needless to say, for me alone. He was careful never to betray any such insolence to his aristocratic employer. Indeed, his presence became so intrusive I began to wonder if he had not been placed there as a spy by Lady Byron, or some other member of her unspeakable family; I could not have guessed he had been paid for his snooping by His Lordship’s own publisher.

And so I would creep, when all in both houses were abed, along that narrow path through the vineyard, with the glow-worms winking in the thickets and the dew settling on the new-mown grass, to the Diodati. Would I could say that the positions were reversed, and that it was Byron who came to me, mad with love, limping through the summer moonlight, but it was not so. Shelley once told me there were two Claires—one gentle and cheerful; the other nervous, reserved, melancholy. Certain it is that my greatest weakness has always been that I am as easily swayed by the person I love as the reed is by the wind. I would fain say Byron seduced me with sweet words—that he wrote poetry to me, as he did to others—but he did not. I pursued him in the wild hope that love would come and that passion would endure, but it did not. I gave myself to him, as other women had and other women would, but it was not for me, as it was for them.
I
was no society lady, able to shield her sin under the mask of marriage.
I
believed—I had been taught to believe—that love is
free.
That to promise forever to love the same person was no less absurd than to promise to adhere to the same creed. And that
was
my creed. I went to Byron in that spirit, and I thought he received me as a believer in the same pure ideal. How could I have known, scarcely eighteen, that men such as he use this vicious doctrine to slake their carnal appetites, and inflict more pain and cruelty than can ever have been caused by the supposed tyranny of the institution of marriage they claim to despise.

• • •

By the mid days of June, the pattern of that summer of 1816 was set. Byron and Shelley became as brother Poets, finding every day another common passion, another shared pursuit. And I think we were all four of us a little giddy with such a richness of thought, and talk, and laughter, and mutual delight. I remember one blissful evening when we drifted about the lake long after nightfall, trailing our hands either side of the boat as we gazed down into the limpid water, and then up at the bright dome above our heads, where one by one the stars glimmered then gathered light in the darkening sky. It was the last clear night for weeks; by morning a battalion of grey clouds had rolled down from the Jura, and a fierce wind was raging across the surface of the water. Even Shelley could not contemplate boating in such weather, and Byron was far too lazy—or craven—to try. And so it was than we spent almost a fortnight closeted together around the fireplace in the Diodati drawing-room, as the rain beat against the long windows and the mists rolled up from the lake, tossing ideas about between us like so many brightly coloured balls, and telling each other tales. Tales from literature, tales from history, and tales—sometimes—of our own lives. I remember Shelley recounting to Byron one night how he and Mary had met, and as I listened to his words I turned to Mary and saw her face, so closed and white in the flickering firelight, knowing—as she did—what a lie it all was. She did not—or could not—meet my eye, but I wondered, then, if she had started to believe what it suited them both to tell the credulous world. A world she has so blinded to her narrowness of heart and meanness of conduct and heart, that all it can see is the shining beauty of her mind.

Not that she cared much to display it, that summer. She rarely spoke, those long evenings, but sat pale in the shadows, watching and listening and—no doubt—judging. As I look back at that fortnight now it seems to me that the room was charged with a web of unspoken feeling—a tangle of electric connections much like those currents Shelley and Polidori debated of one night, that they said might one day unlock the door of life and bring the dead back to vital warmth. Connections unseen, but irresistible, and as explosive in their expression as they were erratic in their effects. Mine with Byron, a bright secret within a darker one; Poldori’s with Mary, pursued by him, unsought by her; Shelley’s with Byron, as ardent and infatuated as Byron’s ever was with himself; and mine with Mary, the most ambivalent and enduring of them all—already so then, and how much more so now.

I do not remember, now, what first led us to talk of ghosts.

No-one could have known what would eventually come of it, and surely it was entirely natural that our thoughts should tend in such a morbid direction, with the unquiet shadows cast by the guttering candles, and the wind howling about the walls like a banshee. I do recollect Byron coming down one night with a book of old German horror stories, and taking great delight in declaiming them to us in a loud and lurid voice. I recall one of a skull that was restored to life to accuse its murderer, another of two sisters so alike that they could scarce be told apart, and a third of a phantom cursed to kill each new heir to its line with a kiss. I shuddered as I watched Byron’s eyes seek out mine as he spoke of the hideous wraith bending over the crib, and my heart misgave me as I saw him, in my imagination, perform the same foul rite, and breathe the same cold poison onto his own infant’s brow. Shelley, by then, was in a state of the most excited animation, talking—babbling even—of how he had tried to raise ghosts when a boy. He had once sat up all night in a charnel-house, he told us, reciting from a book of spells and hoping to see a ghastly spectre rise from the heaps of dry old bones. It sounded childish, spoken in that shrill high-pitched tone that always came upon him in agitation, and I could see that sardonic sneer once again on the doctor’s face. And yet Polidori would soon observe with his own eyes that it was no passing juvenile fit that Shelley spoke of, but an ever-present terror that could reduce him, without warning, to a pitiful abject hysteria, or to night after night of sleep-walking from which he would awake hours later, with no recollection of where he had been, or what it was he had done.