A Fatal Likeness (38 page)

Charles can well believe it, though even his imagination shrinks from the full horror of what it must have been to live in such a household, as the venomous rivalry of one generation began to replicate itself only too unerringly in the next. And as for Mary Shelley, Claire’s very presence—Claire with her daughter more beautiful than her own—must have seemed a retribution designed by fate purposely to torment her. Is this what she revealed in those letters she later wrote to her dashing young friend Gatteschi—letters she claimed would have destroyed her forever if ever they saw light? Is this what she meant when she said her whole life had been an endless atonement for some dreadful crime she had committed all unknowing? Only she had not committed it unknowing. Mary had always known what it was she had done. Both to Harriet, and to her own husband. Not merely letter after dreadful letter that helped drive a vulnerable young woman to a terrible suicide, but a lie that she could never take back—a lie she could never after unsay. And her punishment? Claire. Never to have had the life she yearned for without Claire.

Charles goes thoughtfully to the table and pours himself more coffee. “And when did you and Shelley renew your
affaire
?”

Once more there is that defiant lift of the chin. “Mary had only herself to blame. She did nothing but carp and criticise, nothing but complain. With me he could be happy; with me he could be himself.”

“I do not doubt it,” says Charles. “But imagine the unbearable downwards spiral that now entraps her—the more she protests, the more she drives him away, and yet she cannot stop herself—cannot break the deadly circle. And then, after all she believes she had suffered, Shelley summons her on a journey of more than a hundred miles across Italy for what she deems
your
convenience. With her daughter already seriously ill. It must have been the last straw.”

Her eyes narrow. “I see you have heard the Shelleys’ version of that event. But
I
was there, and I tell you little Clara was not so very sick when they first reached Este. Shelley and I had had three blissful weeks alone with my darling—the house was so beautiful, the air almost luminous, and the garden full of flowers—and then when Mary arrived it was as if winter had come again. We endured day after day of her furious accusations and all the while that little girl was becoming more and more unwell. It was horrible
—horrible—
as if we were condemned never to escape the past—I knew it was to tempt Providence to call her so—”

Charles frowns. “I do not understand—”

“They called the baby Clara. It was the name they had given to their first daughter. Only she had never lived to be christened.”

Charles stares at her, unable to credit the evidence of his own senses. “They called their second daughter by
the same name
as the baby Mary accused her husband of
killing
?”

“Shelley insisted. It was that same superstition he had always had about names—that the past might be redeemed by repeating it. But he was wrong. It was not true, was it. Not for Clara.”

“No,” says Charles, his mind alight with a sudden realisation. “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.

“The child 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 this girl, 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 rib cage 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 realisation must mean to her, but she pushes him away. “Do you not see?” she cries. Her voice is 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. “Mary 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?”

“In 1819. The late summer of 1819.”

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. 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 Willmouse 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 recognisable from 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 Mary 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.