A Fatal Likeness (19 page)

“No, Mr Charles. And I swear t’ye I didnae put the book on the fire. That were yer uncle, like as I told ’ee.”

Charles nods. “Very well.” He turns to Billy. “I’m sure you have some task or other to do downstairs. See you get on with it.”

The boy leers a glance at him, then hobbles back down to the kitchen, rubbing his neck theatrically. Charles watches him go. Then he makes for the stairs, only to have Abel catch at his coat as he goes past.

“It’s a’right, Mr Charles? I havenae done aught wrong?”

Charles pauses a moment, then touches him lightly on the arm. “It’s all right, Abel. Now if you’ll forgive me I have work to do.”

His pace quickens as he goes up the stairs, leaving the old man standing watching him, his face troubled, and pale.

Charles’ heart is still beating rather too fast as he closes the attic door behind him and leans against it. Some remorse he has on Abel’s account, but as for Billy—Billy has got away with far more than he’s been punished for in this house, and Charles has no compunction in levelling up the scale, even if the boy didn’t happen to deserve his chastisement this time. He pulls off his coat and sits down heavily on the bed, the pages of Mary Shelley’s letter on the quilt in front of him. He reads it again, and then for a fourth time, but the real mystery hidden here still eludes him. As he folds it up and puts it back in his pocket he realises that in his fury at Billy he has hurt his injured hand, and goes over to the wash-stand to find a new dressing. Only the roll of bandage is not where he left it. He stands a moment looking round the attic, and it strikes him that should Maddox have thought to hide those missing pages in this room, he would have been spoiled for choice. He could have secreted them under the velvet lining in the box that displays Charles’ coins, or in the scabbard of the battered and jewel-less Persian scimitar. And there is, besides, a secret drawer only Charles knows of at the base of his case of chemical compounds. But of course the papers cannot actually be anywhere in this room—Maddox has not been up to this floor since Charles moved in, and if those pages do still exist they were removed and hidden long ago. Almost certainly before that tour of Italy whence Maddox returned, some months since, a changed and much older man. Charles wonders for the first time whether he should have asked Abel more about that trip—he knows hardly anything about it—either where they went, or why Maddox made such an enormous effort, at such an advanced age, to undertake his first and only venture beyond his native shores. For while it’s become clear to Charles that his great-uncle has been in a slow decline for far longer than anyone guessed, it’s equally clear that it was only after his return from Italy that he began to suffer the terrifying attacks of violence and madness that led Charles to move into the Buckingham Street house. A house he has now inhabited, incidentally, for several weeks without ever coming across any secret hiding-place—neither door inexplicably locked nor cupboard mysteriously sealed. The only part of the house, in fact, Charles has
not
treated as if it were his own has been the drawing-room, which is now more than ever his uncle’s personal province. Indeed, few of the other rooms were even being used before Charles moved in and hired Billy and the girl; as Maddox aged his territory retreated, and there are still bedchambers on the second floor that Molly has not yet wakened from their damp dust-sheeted slumber. Those rooms Charles knows Abel searched, but did he have the temerity to intrude upon his master’s private domain? And yet isn’t the drawing-room by far the most likely hiding-place?

Ever since he was a boy Charles has tried to follow Maddox’s methods, and emulate Maddox’s rigour of thought, and what success he has seen has stemmed from that source, both in the Detective police, and in the months since he set up in business on his own. How many times, over the years, has he heard Maddox say those selfsame words?
There is no problem, however intractable, that cannot be resolved by the steady application of logic and observation.
Logic, thus far, has not availed him; perhaps observation may prove more instructive. Charles sits down on the bed again and closes his eyes. It’s a technique he’s used before—a way of refining his perceptions, and eliminating the extraneous. Allowing his mind free play. If he went down to the drawing-room now all his senses would be assailed: the smell of the fire, the sound of the clock ticking, his uncle shifting fretfully in his sleep. Here, in the darkness behind his eyes, there are no distractions.

And so he stands now, in imagination, in the centre of that elegant room downstairs, turning slowly about. Exploring the space as if for the first time, yard by yard, inch by inch, as though it had become some Renaissance theatre of memory, each object to be considered not just for itself, but as a sign of something else—as a place of potential concealment. It is, as far as he can tell, exactly the same room it was when he was a boy; the same books, the same busts of the philosophers, the same picture of the gardens at the Villa d’Este hung between the two long windows. The books are too obvious for a hiding-place, and the busts are solid stone, as Charles remembers only too well from trying to lift one as a child. But perhaps the painting is a possibility—there could be a space, perhaps, between the canvas and the frame. But the picture is a favourite of Maddox’, and Charles doubts his uncle would have risked doing it damage. Charles loved that picture as a boy—the avenue of dark cypresses, the
enfilade
of retreating statues, the figures half seen in the shadows, and there in the centre, on the crown of the rise, the villa glimpsed between the trees, so imposing, and so sinister, and so unlike any other house he had ever seen. Every time he was taken to visit his great-uncle he was drawn to it again, to the colours and the soft
sfumato
and the story the picture seemed to suggest. A story, incidentally, that he once tried to write down, hesitantly at first, but with a slowly growing confidence, only to have his father demand what he had been doing all day, and dismiss his efforts as nothing but an idle and childish indulgence, unworthy of his time. You, I suspect, will think that a pity, and find it significant that Charles never attempted to write anything like it again, and scarcely even remembers the incident any more. You may also think it a shame that he is considering the painting now not as a story, or a work of art, but solely and exclusively as a physical object—a piece of evidence that may, or may not, have something to reveal. And what he can see in his mind now is how the stipple of the brushwork catches in a shaft of sunlight cast slant-wise across the canvas. And then, suddenly, he knows. Knows, as a scientist knows, and he is of course—among many other things—a scientist. Because hung where it is, that painting is never touched by direct sun; the only light it ever sees is
reflected onto
it, from the mirror hung above the mantelpiece on the opposite wall. A mirror, Charles recalls with a tingle of excitement, which has always seemed rather elaborate for such a classically austere room. And now he remembers a dull afternoon years before, when Maddox forced a much younger and more fidgety Charles to stand before that mirror, showing him the carving and the rich detail, and telling him that the proper name for that style of frame was—not baroque, but something else. Charles racks his brain, searching for the precise word. It began with an
r—
rococo? No, not that—but something similar. Not rococo but
rocaille.
And when Charles’ hopeless incompetence in French left him staring blankly, none the wiser, Maddox had pointed out the abundance of tumbling conchs and serrated scallops and asked him what they looked like.

“Shells, Uncle Maddox. Like the one I found on the beach at Filey last summer, only bigger. Much bigger.”

So what might the word
rocaille
mean?

A frown, then, tentatively, “Shelly?”

Charles has never understood why Maddox roared with such delighted laughter at that.

But he does now.

A minute later Charles is racing down the stairs and into the drawing-room, scarcely noticing Molly on the stairway landing, whisking away the cobwebs with a long feather duster.

“Abel!” he calls. “Where are you, Abel?”

“Whatever’s to do, Mr Charles?” says Abel as Charles clatters into the drawing-room to find the old man sitting by his master’s sleeping form. “I dinnae want to waken him.”

Charles comes to a halt, breathing heavily. “I think I may know where those missing pages are,” he says, more softly now. “They’ve been here all the time—hidden somehow in that mirror.”

Abel looks at the mirror and then back to Charles, transparently sceptical. “Whatever makes you think so?”

“I’ll explain later—can you help me—I want to see what’s behind it.”

Charles lifts one of the hard-backed chairs in front of the mantelpiece, and Abel steadies it as he climbs up and reaches for the heavy frame. He’d assumed it was hung like a picture but finds, to his chagrin, that it won’t come away.

“Is the damn thing nailed down, Abel?” he says, catching sight of his own shadowed angry eyes in the tarnished mirrored glass.

“I cannae tell ye, Mr Charles,” says Abel from below. “It werenae me as fixed it. The boss had a carpenter come in special to do it. But that were years ago now.”

But even as he’s speaking Charles has shifted onto his tiptoes and realised that the mirror is set at a slight angle from the wall. So slight as to be almost imperceptible from the floor, but wide enough at the top, as he can now see, to allow the insertion of what looks like some sort of thin silver tube. It’s a stretch, but Charles is just tall enough to reach in and draw it out. The metal surface is rusted here and there, but otherwise it seems intact, and must have been made—surely—for the purpose, so perfectly does it fit its narrow niche. Even in the rush of discovery a part of Charles’ mind notes how much trouble his uncle has gone to, and how much, therefore, must have been at stake. But all that is for later. Now he just wants to
know.
He turns the tube upside down and shakes it gently, and then watches—with that
frisson
the detective, the journalist, and the academic researcher all share—as a sheaf of yellowing paper uncoils slowly into his waiting hand.

EIGHT

Harriet

3 January 1817

I
NVESTIGATIONS
IN
THE
M
ATTER
OF
M
RS
H
ARRIET
S
HELLEY
C
ONDUCTED
AT
THE
B
EHEST
OF
W
ILLIAM
G
ODWIN
, E
SQUIRE
, S
KINNER
-
STREET
, H
OLBORN

There follows in these pages my final report in this all too bitter case, which has been the occasion of so much grief, and for which I have paid so great a price. Would that I had never accepted it; would that I had kept to my determination to forswear all dealings again with aught of that name—a name my hand trembles to write, and that I struggle even now to hear, far less utter. But my pledge to one, and the duty I believed I owed to another, induced me, against my reason, against my judgment, against my
self,
to concede. I believed that I might by a slight endurance on my part help secure to them a lasting happiness. I could not know then it would be so fatal a cure.

Remarkable as it may appear, given all that has gone before, I had not met William Godwin until he requested me to call at his house in the third week of September last. But if I knew the name, I knew, likewise, the reputation and the work, as any man must who reads widely, and has an active mind, though I state at once that I disagree profoundly with the argument of
Political Justice,
and condemn utterly the influence it has had, having seen with my own eyes the pernicious consequences. It was indeed those pernicious consequences, which I have steeled myself with so much anguish to relate, that led me initially to refuse the meeting. But when Godwin wrote again, insisting that I alone possessed such intellectual powers as he had need of, and that I had been warmly recommended by several great men of his acquaintance (whom he obligingly enumerated), I confess my pride was flattered, much as my curiosity was piqued. And thinking, wrongly as it transpired, that the individual I reviled was no longer in England, I judged I risked little in agreeing at least to a preliminary meeting. How mistaken—how disastrously mistaken—I was in this, will become only too clear in the pages that follow.

But all of this, was, as yet, in the future. As I made my way to Skinner-street that morning I was anticipating, with some degree of apprehension I confess, an introduction to a distinguished philosopher, a fine thinker, an exacting intelligence. What I encountered in his stead was a short balding solid little man, with a long thin nose, and a very disagreeable wife. And even had I not my own sources of information as to the perilous state of the gentleman’s finances, I should have seen at once that the bookshop of which he had become the proprietor was a failing concern: ill managed, ill situated, and the shelves half empty. I wondered at first, and for a moment, that any man of business could employ such a timid and self-effacing assistant behind his counter, only to find that the young woman in question was none other than the elder daughter of Mr Godwin’s first wife, a Miss Fanny Imlay. A modest gentle well-meaning creature, to judge of first impressions, though it was evident, from words Godwin let drop later, and—may I say—in the young woman’s presence, that he adjudged Miss Imlay considerably inferior in capacity to his own daughter by that same lady. That he considered the latter to be singularly bold and active of mind, and almost invincible in everything she undertook, while the former, though sober and observing, was too much given to indolence; that he thought his own daughter very pretty, while Fanny could at best be termed ‘not unprepossessing.’ I glanced more than once at the aforementioned young woman during this exposition, and it was evident to me that she was only too accustomed to hearing her own talents thus denigrated in comparison with her younger sister’s. I say this, not only in condemnation, however well deserved, but in anticipation of what is to come, for I believe such behaviour on Godwin’s part—such arrant thoughtlessness—played its own part in the tragedy that was so soon to unfold. For my own part, and from such limited observations as I was able to make, I considered the young lady to be virtuous, gentle, and kind; qualities, in my opinion, to be both admired and fostered in woman, even if they were neither valued nor encouraged by her celebrated mother, with her infamous concern only for the rights and freedoms of her sex. That Miss Fanny resembled that lady as little in looks as she did in temperament I could see for myself, by reference to a very fine portrait of Mrs Wollstonecraft Godwin which hung over the fireplace. Such a fine portrait, and so centrally displayed, that any subsequent wife might have found it irksome; that the second Mrs Godwin did so, and profoundly, was obvious to me at once, as was the fact that her husband seemed not in the slightest aware of it.

The said Mrs Godwin busied herself, firstly, in providing refreshment, or rather in instructing Miss Imlay to do so; she then took a seat beside her husband, and proposed to lay before me the facts of the case. I was, I admit, disconcerted. I have, in the course of my profession, encountered women of insight and intelligence—women able to follow the principles of logic and observation that I have always expounded—but I did not expect to find one in Mrs Godwin. Appearances were decidedly against her, but I gradually divined that her coarse features, prominent bosom, and rather extraordinary green-tinted spectacles concealed a mind of considerable cunning, even if she could boast neither education nor understanding, in the strict meaning of those terms. I had wondered, on my first introduction to her, and recalling what I had heard of her from others, that she had induced a man such as Godwin to take her to wife, but the more I knew of her, the more I discerned how the feat might have been accomplished.

The lady in question was, at first, most insistent that the matter be handled with the utmost discretion, but I made bold to remind her that her husband had already been given assurances as to that by clients I had served, and that they might rely, therefore, on its continuance now. Thus reassured, she proceeded at length to relate the circumstances as they then stood. It was evident as she spoke that she, at least, had no notion of the events I have already related here, although it was impossible to discern from his impassive expression whether her husband was in a state of the like ignorance. And so it was that I was forced to endure a long account of the adulterous
liaison
between Mr Godwin’s daughter and the man who had debauched her—a man my interlocutress abused in one breath, and exalted the next as “the son of a baronet, you know, with the most enormous fortune.” She told me likewise, as I already knew, that her own daughter had departed England in their company, and had still been of their party in their late excursion to Switzerland. What I did
not
know until that moment, was that there were rumours Shelley might be contemplating a return to his former and still-lawful marital abode. I will say at once that I was neither shocked nor surprised at this, and with good reason: Given what I had witnessed I knew no conduct, however base, was too vile for such a scoundrel.

But the woman in my presence now knew nothing of this; and it took, moreover, no preternatural or superhuman insight to discern that if there was indeed such talk of Shelley’s intentions it had been considerably amplified, in the Godwins’ minds, by the consequences for their own two selves of any such decision. Mrs Godwin was careful, in my hearing, to express only a parent’s proper concern for the invidious position in which her step-daughter Mary would find herself, should such an event occur, but I was convinced in my own mind that the extraordinarily precarious nature of the Skinner-street establishment was an even more urgent anxiety. Doubtless they were unaware that I already knew what lavish promises Shelley had made to assist Godwin with loans, and that most if not all of these had still not yet been paid. I knew, too, that Shelley had been evading apprehension by the bailiffs in the weeks before his last precipitate departure for the Continent.

I asked then, feigning ignorance, but interested as to the reply I should receive, if either Mr or Mrs Godwin had spoken in person to Shelley as to his plans in relation to his wife. A look passed between them at this. Mrs Godwin answered, somewhat pink about the cheeks, that all direct communication had ceased the day the poet first left London in company with the two young women, some two years previously.

“Mr Godwin has forbade him the house,” she said, “and quite right too, after such a scandalous and disgraceful betrayal. He swore he would stop seeing Mary, you know. He stood there, on exactly the spot where you’re standing now, and swore the affair was over and there would be no more clandestine meetings and midnight assignations and secret messages going to and fro. And the next we hear he’s upped and gone with her, and tricked my Clairy into going with them.”

Mr Godwin had, his wife continued, maintained an uninterrupted correspondence with ‘the delinquent’ but only in relation to ‘certain monetary matters.’ It was only much later, and too late, that I was to learn that Fanny had acted as intermediary between the two hostile parties after Shelley’s return to London, taking to herself—it seemed to me—all the woeful consequences of that bitter and fractious exchange.

I observed with mounting irritation Mr Godwin’s rather supercilious expression throughout his wife’s narration. Despite my abhorrence of Shelley, and my utter repugnance for both his conduct and his principles, I was very much tempted to enquire how the philosopher Godwin reconciled his own public condemnations of the institution of marriage with his continued ostracism of a man who appeared to have followed those precepts only too assiduously. Neither did I venture my own opinion as to the justice—moral or indeed political—of importuning such an individual for money, while refusing to afford him even the time of day. Mrs Godwin, meanwhile, had become increasingly testy, saying that the current state of affairs was most trying and unsatisfactory, and had rendered it difficult, nay almost impossible, to obtain the information they required as to Shelley’s wider intentions in relation to Miss Godwin.

That, in short, was to be my undertaking.

I had already, as I have related, forsworn any further contact with a man I considered to be both a felon and a blackguard, and I had no intention of becoming embroiled once again in circumstances that could only lead, I knew, to further misery and regret. I rejoined at once, therefore, that this was not at all my customary class of investigation, and I would seek out another man in my line of work who would be better placed to assist them; whereupon Mrs Godwin began to talk in the most graphic terms of her step-daughter’s distress at the dreadful possibility of abandonment by a man into whose protection she had so recklessly thrown herself.

“And there’s her little William to consider,” she said, taking out her handkerchief. “Such a darling little boy, not nine months old, and the brightest, most sweet-natured, trusting wee creature. If only you could see him, Mr Maddox, I am sure you would relent.”

And so—with the greatest misgivings—I did.

Mr Godwin then spoke for the first time, supplying me with various practical details, and giving me thus the distinct impression that the less seemly facts were far beneath his lofty notice, and that he left such unpleasantness for his wife to manage. His daughter and Mrs Godwin’s were both, he said, at that moment resident in Bath, while Shelley had been seen in London more than once, in consequence he believed of a charge undertaken on behalf of the Lord Byron, to deliver a manuscript to his publishers which his lordship had entrusted to Shelley in Switzerland. It was possible, he continued, that Shelley had visited his wife in the course of one of these expeditions, but Godwin was unaware whether Mrs Shelley was still residing at her father’s house.

Mrs Godwin became most voluble at this point, venturing the loud opinion that Harriet Shelley was not, in fact, a ‘lady.’ She was a tavern-keeper’s daughter, who was no match for the son of a baronet for all her fancy ways, and she had, moreover and as everyone knew, tricked him into that marriage out of pity, and that anyone with the slightest knowledge of the affair knew for a fact that he had never loved Harriet nor she him. Godwin became understandably uneasy at this uncouth outburst, but while carefully qualifying the coarser aspects of his wife’s assertions, claimed he could only, in truth, confirm that Mrs Shelley was a very foolish, if a very beautiful girl, and he himself had witnessed her on more than on occasion making unconsidered statements on subjects about which she evidently knew next to nothing.

“I cannot deny,” he continued, shaking his long bony head, “that my daughter Mary is by far the more apt helpmeet for a man of such undoubted abilities, despite the unfortunate, not to say untoward manner in which the connection between them came about. The partner of such a man should be one of a philosophical and intellectual cast of mind; Mrs Shelley, self-evidently, is neither.”

Miss Fanny became somewhat
distrait
upon hearing the Mrs Shelley spoken of in such terms. She began to weep rather piteously, insisting that Harriet was a sweet girl—that she spoke very nicely, and dressed very neatly, and never had an unkind word for anyone. That the only harm she had done Shelley was to have loved him, and to have been too young and innocent to know what such a love could mean. I wondered at that, at the time—wondered at what a girl like her could know of love, and at the flush on her cheeks as she spoke the poet’s name. It was the intuition of a moment only, but I ask myself now what might have been prevented, had I acted upon it. But how could I, a stranger unknown to her, offer the comfort and counsel that is a mother’s part? The lady that Fate had decreed should play that maternal role seemed entirely unaware of what I had perceived, retorting only, and rather unkindly, that “Harriet always could wrap poor silly Fanny round her little finger”; an observation that served only to distress the girl the more. Mrs Godwin then pursed her lips together and announced that it would be better if Fanny retired to her own chamber, before leading her smartly from the room, as if for all the world she were a child of eight, not a young woman of some two and twenty years. I, meanwhile, had seen enough. I made ready at once to depart, saying I would as requested do whatever was in my power to ascertain the current whereabouts of the absent Mrs Shelley.