A Fatal Likeness (41 page)

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 his uncle 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 a 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. 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 from 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 blue-violet 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 farther 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
doppel-gänger.
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 paid at last 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 childish 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 Harriet 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 those 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.”

She hands it to him. A piece of faded blue ribbon marks the page. Cut, surely, from the sash his sister was wearing the day she died.

A gentle start convulsed Ianthe’s frame:

Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;

Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained:

She looked around in wonder and beheld

Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,

Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,

And the bright beaming stars

That through the casement shone.

Charles turns the little volume over. It is so worn with handling the lettering is disappearing into the dry leather. But it makes no difference. Because Charles has read these lines before, and he knows the name of the man who wrote them.

EPILOGUE

75 Gloucester Road

Hyde Park Gardens

5 February

Mr Maddox,

After so long a silence, after I have deliberated so deeply what I should do, and what I should say, I find that the decision is no longer my own to make. I have heard today that Mary is dead. I will never, now, discover whether all you told me had its grounding in truth, or whether we have both been prey to the fatal allure of likeness. Have we seen patterns and treacherous precedents where none were in truth to be found? Had I known she was ill I would have been sure to see her, and I bitterly resent that Percy did not see fit to give me such tidings himself, leaving me to discover the news through an intermediary. What I would not give, now, to know what she said at the last. Did she confess her darkest deeds, or regret her terrible lies? I am told the end was peaceful—that she had lain for days in her bed, unable to speak a word, and the end came at last in a succession of fits and the slow creep of a profound stupor. The physician who attended her spoke of a tumour of the brain of long standing, which he believes has accounted for many of her ills and symptoms in the last years, and yet it was a letter, I am told, that precipitated her last attack. A letter brought to her by her maid more than a month ago, that caused her such distress she fell at once into a series of fits, and was never able thereafter to speak, or to move. What it was she read that affected her so, no-one could determine, since the letter itself could not afterwards be found.

I have written myself to Percy, berating him for his treatment of me, and telling him I am myself dying. And because that is so—because I will not now live long—I have decided that I will give to you that memoir over which I have expended such pains and which would, were it known, make so prodigious a change in the eyes of the world—the vain, cold, dull-witted world. You will receive it tomorrow, and you must resolve, then, what you will do. If you choose, you may keep it safe until I am gone, and publish it thereafter, that the truth may at last be known; or you may do the great thing and consign it to the flames, page by long slow page, watching the fire eat away to ashes the last witness to our entwined and extraordinary lives.

I ask nothing, counsel nothing. It is for you, now, to decide.

Claire Clairmont

AUTHOR’S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This section contains details of the plot, so readers are advised to leave it till the end.

I did a great deal of research in preparing for this novel, and owe a particular debt of gratitude to Richard Holmes’ masterly biographical study
Shelley: The Pursuit,
as well as to Miranda Seymour’s fine biography of Mary Shelley. I also drew on the journals and letters of the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont, the Hogg, Medwin, and Thomas Love Peacock memoirs of the poet Polidon’s account of the summer of 1816, and on various modern studies such as
Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys
by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton,
The Godwins and the Shelleys
by William St Clair, Ernest Lovell’s biography of Thomas Medwin, Kenneth Neill Cameron’s
Romantic Rebels: Essays on Shelley and His Circle,
Daisy Hay’s recent work
Young Romantics,
and the book accompanying the Bodleian Library exhibition,
Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family.

My book is, of course, a novel, but I have made it a point of honour not to make free with known events or timings (with one small exception I mention later), even if that might have made the construction of my plot rather easier. Where there are gaps, I have allowed myself to fill them, and I set these out below. But I was surprised, as I wrote, at how little I needed to invent outright, and I think my readers will also be surprised by how much of my story is based on facts and contemporary accounts, even if I have exercised a degree of artistic licence in presenting them, and extrapolated from what we know, to what might have happened, or could have been said.

Those who know Shelley’s poetry well will also have recognised that each of my chapter titles echoes one of his poems, and that the opening lines of that chapter contain words and phrases taken from that poem. I also weave in some of my characters’ own words on occasion, taken from their correspondence, writings, and journals, and once or twice one person’s words are attributed to another, where I think that is reasonable. All the letters and documents I include in the novel are my own invention (though they draw on real materials in places); the exceptions are the two suicide notes, which are exact reproductions of what Fanny Imlay and Harriet Shelley left behind. You can see a facsimile of the latter on the Shelley’s Ghost website.

MARY SHELLEY

There is nothing to suggest that Mary accused Shelley of her first daughter’s death in the way I have imagined, and no details about exactly how she died, but it is clear that the atmosphere between Mary, Claire, and Shelley was electric with jealousy by that point. On 14 January 1815, Mary’s journal entry reads

Shelley and Clary out all day Forget

Three leaves are torn out immediately thereafter. In the days before and after the baby’s birth there are several more references to the fact that Shelley and Claire have been out together alone for hours, even though it’s clear that the baby was unwell from the outset. The day after the baby was found dead Mary records “a fuss” in her journal, which, as Daisy Hay points out, is usually her code-word for an argument with Shelley. Mary’s journal also records that Shelley and Claire took the baby’s body away for burial, no-one knows where, and the two of them continued their private excursions together in the days that followed. There is also an odd episode, much later, in 1821, when Claire amused herself in her diary by composing cartoon captions for both Byron and Shelley, and wrote under the latter “He looking very sweet & smiling A little child [deleted] Jesus Christ playing about the room. He says. Then grasping a small knife & looking mild, I will quietly murder that little child.”

Whatever happened with the first Mary certainly believed Shelley’s absorption with Claire contributed to the death of their second daughter. There are references to problems with feeding this baby, even before the Shelleys left England, and after her arrival at Este, Mary wrote to her friend Maria Gisborne that Clara was “reduced to be so thin in this short time that you would hardly know her again.” It does seem to have been reckless on both parents’ part to have taken such a sick child on that last journey into Venice, when a doctor was available in Padua. I have found no actual evidence that Mary harmed her children, knowingly or otherwise, but I would hardly have expected to. I do, however, think that some of the surviving records are suggestive, as are the silences. In August 1820 Shelley wrote to Godwin that “On one occasion … agitation of mind produced through [Mary] a disorder in [Percy], similar to that which destroyed our little girl two years ago.” And when Byron forbade Allegra from going to the Shelleys that same year he wrote, “I so totally disapprove of the mode of Children’s treatment in their family, that I should look upon the Child as going into a hospital … Have they
reared
one? … the Child shall not quit me again to perish of Starvation, and green fruit … ”

I also believe that aspects of Mary’s behaviour would seem to conform to what we know now of Münchausen syndrome. She certainly suffered from periods of deep depression throughout her life, something she believed she had inherited from her mother. At the same time she was both ferociously intelligent, and ferociously determined—Godwin did indeed say her “perseverance in everything she undertakes” was “almost invincible.” It is easy to see how the poisonous environment in which she and Claire competed for Shelley’s affection might have led her to desperate measures to keep Shelley to herself (and my account of that night of ‘horrors’ in late 1814 is based on fact). But I think there are traces of the same attention-seeking behaviour long before she met him. Her mother died soon after she was born, and she thereafter developed what she herself called an “excessive & romantic attachment” to Godwin (it is interesting to note in this context that her later novel,
Mathilda,
dealt with the subject of a father’s incestuous love for his daughter—a subject that disgusted Godwin).

After his second marriage, Godwin sent Mary away from the rest of the family for months at a time, telling her, as she left for Ramsgate at the age of thirteen, that there was still a chance of her becoming a wise and even happy woman, “in spite of unfavourable appearances.” We have no idea what he meant by this, or the nature of the “dreadful evil” that the Godwins feared in relation to the problem with her arm. That is still a mystery, even now, but it was serious enough to require the wearing of a sling, and, as Miranda Seymour observes, Mrs Godwin may have suspected her step-daughter of exaggerating it, perhaps in an effort to regain her central place in her father’s life. I have always found this whole episode very odd, especially when one adds the unexplained fire in the bookshop, and Mary’s later references to herself in letters to Shelley as “Pecksie” who is “a good girl” and “quite well again now.” I have tried to create a story that might explain it.

The account of Mary threatening to kill herself if Shelley refused to marry her comes from one given by the second Mrs Godwin. Even though she is not always an entirely reliable witness, especially where Mary is concerned, that does not necessarily mean that she was wrong on this occasion. As for the possibility that Mary might have taken a lover, she did believe—at least in theory—in free love, and even if she baulked at inviting the unprepossessing Hogg to her bed, I can quite imagine she might have slept with a rather more attractive man, especially in an act of revenge.

Mary was an accomplished liar when it suited her, both by omission and by commission: Her journals are full of eloquent silences, and later in life she helped a female friend obtain a false passport so that she could travel as the ‘husband’ of another woman (there’s more on this extraordinary episode in the Seymour biography). As for the blackmail, there are two surviving letters in which Shelley instructs his bankers to make payments to an unidentified person bearing the initials
A.B.
This I have woven into my own story.

Mary fiercely resisted all attempts to have a biography of her husband written during her lifetime, having been prevented from taking on this task herself by her father-in-law, Sir Timothy. As Charles discovers, the accounts written during Mary’s lifetime by Hogg and Medwin are almost as revealing in what they don’t—or can’t—say, as in what they do.

Though there is no suggestion that Sir Percy and Lady Shelley ever employed anyone to investigate or acquire Claire’s papers, Lady Shelley certainly became the ‘keeper of the flame’ as far as the poet’s reputation was concerned. She constructed what can only be called a shrine to him at the family house in Sussex (on which mine is based), and became ruthless in her determination to expunge or destroy anything she considered to be inappropriate, or which detracted from the ethereal image she was determined to bequeath to posterity. She was particularly sensitive to references to Harriet Shelley, or accounts of Shelley’s elopement with Mary (whom she called ‘Madre’) that cast him in a poor light. It’s almost certain that many letters and papers were destroyed as a result, and Lady Shelley was also implicated in the printing, if not the production, of at least one forged letter, supposedly from Shelley. This letter repeats the accusation that Harriet lived with a groom named Smith and “descended the steps of prostitution,” and has Shelley accusing “that beastly viper” Eliza Westbrook of murdering her sister, in order to lay hands on their father’s money, though how Eliza was supposed to have done this is unclear.

Late in life Claire offered to sell some of her papers to Sir Percy through an intermediary, only for him to reply that she was “no relation of mine.” Relations between the Shelleys and Claire deteriorated markedly in the wake of the incident with her niece at Field Pace which I describe, and after Mary’s death on 1 February 1851, Jane had the coffins of Godwin and his first wife exhumed from the Pancras cemetery and re-buried with their daughter in Bownemouth. The second Mrs Godwin was left behind; one can only imagine what Claire would have thought of that.

Mary did indeed have a sudden series of fits at the very end of her life which left her in a coma, but there is no suggestion that this was the result of receiving a letter. These fits took place in late January 1851, though I have this happening a little earlier, to fit the sequence of events in my own story.

CLAIRE CLAIRMONT

As far as we know, Claire never completed a memoir of her life, but Daisy Hay has recently discovered fragments of what may have been an attempt at one, written in old age, in which Claire attacked both Byron and Shelley for their lies, cruelty and treachery; there is more on this fascinating find in Hay’s book. Claire certainly kept journals at certain periods throughout her life, some of which may have been lost. She did not die in 1851, though she did write to Sir Percy to say she thought she was dying. In fact she lived on until 1879, the last survivor of a doomed and extraordinary generation. By then she was living with her niece Pauline in Florence, and Henry James’
The Aspern Papers
is famously inspired by the relationship she developed there with an American called Edward Silsbee, who was desperate to see her papers, and hear her first-hand account of Shelley, Byron, and the rest. The St John’s Wood sections of
A Treacherous Likeness
are a deliberate echo of—and homage to—the Henry James story. Before Claire died she asked to be buried with a shawl Shelley had given her sixty years before, which I have her wearing in my own novel.

There has long been speculation as to the true nature of Claire’s relationship with Shelley. Many people believe that they were indeed lovers, even if only for a short period. I am not the first to wonder whether Claire became pregnant by Shelley in the spring of 1815—I develop this from a suggestion by Miranda Seymour, who speculates that Claire’s otherwise rather mysterious departure for Lynmouth might be explained in this way. This period is an example of one of those all-too-frequent and extremely puzzling periods when pages have been deliberately torn out of the journal Mary and Shelley were keeping at this time, which may in itself be revealing. If there was such a pregnancy, it surely must have ended in miscarriage or stillbirth, since it’s hard to believe Claire would have abandoned her child, given the passionate devotion she later exhibited for Allegra. Needless to say there are no references to any of this in the records that remain, and I have, of course, invented the episode in which Mary discovers the pregnancy.

The relationship between the two step-sisters was problematic from the start, and for the best part of forty-five years they alternated between periods of comparative calm and outbreaks of wild hatred and recrimination. Claire once went so far as to say that the sight of Mary made her feel as if “the sickening crawling motion of a Deathworm had replaced the usual flow of Blood in my veins,” and to compare her to a woman who would enjoy the spectacle of the killing of a child, and shake the hand of the executioner afterwards. What, I wondered, could possibly have provoked so horrifying an image … 

SHELLEY

Shelley’s personality and childhood were every bit as disturbed and disturbing as I have described them. He was indeed followed by Home Office agents for a time, and everything I have the fictitious Sir Henry Pearson say is based on fact. Shelley also had what we would now see as an unhealthy fixation with young girls; he contemplated both adopting and indeed ‘purchasing’ them at various points in his life, for the purposes of ‘education’ (his friend Joseph Merle called the latter project, to involve two girls of four or five years old, “more than absurd … horrible”).

The idea of pursuit, and of a dark anti-type or likeness of the self, pervades Shelley’s poetry from a very early stage; as Richard Holmes observes, “ghostly following-figures” were to “haunt Shelley both in his life and in his writing.” Shelley became obsessed with the idea that he was being pursued by Robert Leeson, as irrational as that notion was. He was said to have seen his pursuer as late as 1821, in Pisa.