A Fatal Likeness (34 page)

“What is it, Phyllis? Have my dinner brought up to the dining-room, would you?”

“There’s a visitor, sir.”

“I cannot see anyone tonight—pray ask them to return in the morning.”

“It’s that—that
Miss Godwin,
” she says with a sniff of disapproval. “She’s been waiting here these two hours and more. Has her bags with her too.”

“Very well, Phyllis. Show her up to the blue room, would you, and I will see her afterwards in my office.”

When he opens the office door there is no lamp burning, and he considers for a moment ringing the bell to have one lit, but then changes his mind. He goes to the window and opens it wide. The moon is full on the Thames, and under the London smell of horse dung and human filth there is the faintest hint of Spring.

“Shelley once said that his mind without me was as dead and cold as the midnight river when the moon is down.”

He turns. She is in the doorway, all in white.

“But he is,” says Maddox softly, “without you now.”

“And the moon is up.”

She comes to his side and looks down towards the water. “I remember the night we crossed from Dover to France. It was such a beautiful evening—little wind, and the sails flapping in the flagging breeze. Then the moon rose, and night came on, and with the darkness a slow, heavy swell and such a violent sea that the sailors almost despaired of us making Calais. Hour after hour passed, and we were still far-distant, when the moon sunk in the red and stormy horizon and the fast-flashing lightning became pale in the breaking day.”

Maddox leans against the glass, his breath misting the pane. “You should write. You have a gift for it.”

Mary smiles. “Perhaps. But my talent is but workaday set against Shelley’s.”

“You might earn your own living by it, nonetheless.”

And be free of him.
The words unspoken resonate in the air.

“What brings you here?” he asks at last.

“Hatred. Treachery. Violence—Oh, do not fear,” she says quickly, seeing his face, “I am not harmed—I was not the victim. I was the perpetrator. That is why I had to leave. I did not know myself capable of such rage, such terrible cruelty.” She turns and walks back into the room, her features dissolving in the shadow. He will wonder, afterwards, whether this were not deliberate; whether she stood so far away that he might not see her face, not read what would have been visible in her eyes.

“After I saw you last—what you said—you gave me the courage to remonstrate with him. To beg him to reconsider. And my loss
—our
loss—his inconsolable contrition—has changed him, truly it has. He told me I was everything,
she
nothing. That I alone can shield him from impurity and vice. That if he is absent from me long he shudders with horror at himself—”

“Good God, what does that mean—what sort of man says such things—”

“Please—let me finish. He promised that he would find a home for Claire, away from us—he has even persuaded her to advertise for a position. And he took me away to Salt Hill, just he and I alone. We had three blissful days among the green fields and the trees and the solitary lanes. I was”—her voice breaks—“absurdly happy. Happier than I have been for many long bleak months. I even found it in myself to write affectionately to Hogg, now that he was to be no more to me than a friend.”

She pauses, and he sees her raise her hand to her eyes.

“And then, when we returned, it was to new lodgings and I thought, surely now things will be different. How naïve I was—how idiotically hopeful! Because now they can hide it from me no longer—I can see it with my own eyes.” She takes a shuddering breath. When she speaks again her voice is raw with rage. “They have been deceiving me, Mr Maddox, week after week, month after month. No doubt since the very day we first left London together. All the promises he made me were lies—vile brazen
lies.
All those hours he spent with her—all those journeys they took together—have ended the same way. With him in
her
bed.”

There is a silence. She is breathing hard now, to retain control.

“So,” says Maddox, “Miss Clairmont is with child.”

She nods, and puts her hand again to her eyes.

“And you—?”

“I struck her, Mr Maddox. I raised my hand and I struck her. I have always deplored violence—always seen it as the worst manifestation of man’s bestial nature, but at that moment, as she stood there, smiling that complacent self-adoring smile, her hand caressing the child
she
will bear Shelley—the child
I
should have had—it was as if a demon had overtaken me. I lost consciousness for a moment, I think, for the next thing I remember was Shelley lifting me to my feet and kneeling in alarm at her side. It was only then that I saw she had fallen—she was in pain—there was blood—but I felt no remorse—felt only that she deserved her pain, for the hurt she had given me.”

Again the silence, again the sound only of the clock on the mantelpiece.

“They sent for the doctor,” she says at last. “But I had gone before he arrived. I had nowhere else to go, so I came here.”

Maddox goes to the table and pours her a glass of brandy, then returns to the window. As he gave her the glass he felt the cold in her thin fingers.

“I should retire,” he says eventually. “I have an appointment early tomorrow.”

Yet despite his words he does not move, but remains staring down at the street, and the houses, and the silver river.

“I have often wondered,” she begins hesitantly, “that first day when I came here—to this house—how it was that you knew my name.”

He does not turn, but senses her approach, senses her nearing warmth in the chilly room. “You resemble someone I once knew. She had not your colouring, but your height—your face—your features. I thought—just for a moment—”

“And her name was Mary?”

He nods. “Is Mary.”

“I am sorry. The way you spoke of her, I thought she must be—”

“Dead? No.” He shakes his head. “She lives and is happy. If she is dead, it is merely to me.”

She places a hand gently on his arm, and when he turns at last to look at her it is as if her words have conjured the ghost he has so long striven to forget. Her hair is as dark as ink in the blue light, and this last difference gone she is uncannily, unbearably, like the woman he once loved. Something of this she must have seen—something in his eyes must have changed—for she lifts her face towards him and brings her mouth to touch his skin.

“You do not mean this,” he says in despair, as her cheek brushes his. “You will regret it—you do it for the wrong reasons—it would make me no better than him—”

“You have not betrayed me—you have not told me lies—”

He seizes her shoulders now. “And is this not a lie? The worst lie of all?”

But it is too late—she can feel his body deny his words. And as she draws his head towards her and her lips part, he hears her whisper, “She is gone but I am here. If you wish it, I will be your Mary. I will be the love you lost.”

It is long since he has taken a woman to his bed; longer still since that act was anything but a business transaction, concluded to the satisfaction of both parties, but this coupling is like no other he has ever had.

He tells himself, afterwards, that she has had no lover but one, and that everything that unnerves him can surely be traced to that. For he is unnerved, and profoundly. She is no virgin, but he senses all the same that he is breaching a locked wall, that this is for her an initiation, an opening of places cold and closed. And yet she is no prude either: his own desire spent, there is a striving for satisfaction—a willingness to ask for what she wants, both in words and in gestures, that he has found in no other woman, and will never find again. And when, at the end, she turns her back to him silently in the dark, and he realises what it is she expects him to do—to take—the hot blood comes to his face and he buries his face in her hair, murmuring, “No, not that, not that.”

• • •

Hours later he opens his eyes to a shaft of milky sunlight and a clock that tells him it is past nine and he is late. He sits up abruptly to find that the bed is empty, and she is gone. Downstairs in the dining-room breakfast is laid with one place, and when he enquires of the maid he is told, “Miss Godwin has eaten, sir. And gone out.”

It is a long day in Whitechapel, followed by a bad-tempered meeting with a bad-tempered client, who cannot understand why his case is taking so long. Maddox has to explain several times that he has six good men pursuing different lines of investigation, but that the murder of a banker throws up so many possible suspects it takes time and patience to eliminate them all. He returns to Buckingham Street hungry, tired, and out of humour, already wondering what he is to say—what he is to do.

As he takes off his hat and coat in the hall he sees Fraser coming up the kitchen stairs. There is a scratch on his cheek that wasn’t there that morning.

“Good God, how came you by that? Were you not interviewing Mr Orchard today? I should hardly have thought him likely to resort to blows.”

Fraser makes a face. “That Shelley came here. Two—three hours ago. Accused us of harbouring his—that woman—and demanded to see her. Started having one of those fits of his—thrashing about, kicking, screaming. It fair distressed the maids, but not me. I was wise to it all right. Told him I’d send up for her if he comported himself with the decency as befitted the premises. That sobered him up—enough at least to get him off the floor and onto a chair. But by then she must have heard the noise because she came running down the stairs and climbed onto his lap.”

Maddox stares at him, wondered if he has misheard. “His
lap
?”

“I know guv, I thought it odd meself. She always seemed such a chilly one—so clever and aloof, but to listen to her then you’d have thought she were ten years old. Talking all high-pitched and silly like to a baby. Begging him not to be angry with her because ‘your Pecksie will never vex you so again. She is a good girl, and is quite well now.’ And a lot more such fatuous stuff besides. It were like eavesdropping on the nursery.”

Maddox turns away, his heart frozen in his chest. Every time he thinks he has understood her, she eludes him; every time he allows himself to believe her, she confounds him.

“Did
you
know she was ill, guv?”

“No,” he says distractedly. “I had no conception. Where is Miss Godwin now?”

“No idea, guv. Packed her things and left. With him.”
And good riddance,
as his face plainly shows, though how much of that relief is down to personal irritation, and how much to a growing uneasiness on his master’s account, you would be hard put to fathom.

“Thank you, Fraser. Ask Phyllis to bring up my dinner, would you.”

His words sound composed enough, but his heart is beating hard as he climbs the stairs to the room she occupied. There is hardly a sign, now, that she was ever there. The window is open, and the muslin curtain catching in the evening breeze. The bed is tidy, the furniture placed exactly as it was before she came. The only trace of her presence, in fact, is the ashes in the grate, which have not yet been raked away by the parlour-maid. Maddox goes to the fireplace and crouches down. The draught from the window has proved too strong for the fire, and most of the paper thrown here has not burned through. He takes the poker and lifts the edge of the remains. Pages torn from a journal, it seems. Some from the past three months, some from the past few days. He knows he should not do it—knows no good can come of it—but he reaches out and lifts the blistered paper in a shower of ash, and takes it to the desk. And then, for a long time, he sits, gazing into the distance, his mind the only thing about him moving.

Torquay, 22 June

Sir,

I received your letter, but I chose not, then, to reply. And I write now not to offer excuses, for there are none. Nor do I offer explanations, for you would not understand. My Shelley and I are reconciled—reconciled more irrevocably than any wedding rite could ever bind us. The business is finished. Miss Clairmont has gone to Lynmouth for her lying-in, and I hope that we may never more be troubled by her. The issue, if it lives, will be adopted by some people thereabouts, that she might be freed to earn her own living, and forge a life for herself, separately from ours.

They walked out, that last day, she and he, for a last conversation, and the next morning he took her to the coach. He was gone a long time, and I was, for a time, in fear—I even went out to seek him in the rain—but he came back to me at last, and I know now that all my fears were groundless, and he will always return. After what we have suffered—after that insupportable loss for which he still repents—he is bound to me forever.

And so we begin again with our regeneration. And it will be, indeed, a regeneration, for there is to be a child. A child to be born at the turn of the year. I know how it will be when you hear this—I know you will wonder, and you will question. But I will not answer. There is nothing I could say that would not give you unmingled pain.

I do not ask you to forgive; I tell you only to forget—

M.W.G.

PART THREE

1850