A Man of Genius (28 page)

‘Did she have a father?'

‘What?' He looked surprised. ‘I have no idea,' he said, ‘why?'

‘No reason. I was just interested – in anything that concerned Robert you know, his past life. You cannot imagine how I miss him.'

‘We all miss him,' he said and touched his hat again in another effort to leave.

He turned his back on her. She could think of no way of detaining him, when suddenly he looked round and said almost accusingly, ‘She was a most beautiful woman.'

Was that by contrast with herself? No matter. It rang in her head that beauty could indeed become loathsome. More loathsome than adders and toads.

Then he added, ‘No father, but I think an older brother. He was here once. By chance, I suppose. Curran may have met him. I did not.'

With that he really was gone.

37

A
s the weeks went by, she turned these meagre facts over and round in her mind. She knew nothing of Denmark, had only a hazy idea of where it was, where it began and ended, and what extent of land it covered. But to have heard of the country twice in different contexts – was she making significance where there was only coincidence?

There was the hiding out in Esbjerg with Richard Perry, the tale of which she remembered so clearly. The detail of the false name, Peter O'Neil, assumed because of something political. Although no one, not even Frederick Curran, knew exactly what Robert might have written to cause such fear of discovery in a foreign land, or what incendiary thing he'd done beyond any young man's posing. In her time with him, there'd been no evidence of the English law coming after him for activities in Ireland or in London – and what could he have done in Denmark or the German states to warrant any surveillance from the government? He'd said he didn't dabble in mundane politics – although even in Venice there'd been those hints of secret societies. Surely that was just men playing.

So what could it have been?

She tried to slow her train of thought. She was making a plot of life – again. Yet she couldn't but notice it was when her thoughts accelerated in this way that the modest gloom that had become habitual to her was lifted. She would try not to need such stimulation. The gloom was her due; it wasn't so painful it was worth dispersing at any cost. She must take life a little more gently, as Sarah took it.

And yet.

It was interesting that none of Robert's old friends regarded her as in need of consolation. How nice to be a widow and receive comfort! To be a real widow with all the richness of the title. Caroline had never made much of that fiction.

She'd tried but failed to find Frederick Curran, who would in any case by now be aware of her news through young Fitzwilliam. But she must see John Taylor, who seemed to have separated from his old friends. Neither Richard Perry nor John Humphries had mentioned him.

So one especially frosty day she put aside her writing and took a hackney to Islington Green. She easily discovered the house, in a new terraced development beside an open space. It was narrow and quite small but prettily appointed. It would have been handsome if on a bigger scale. Fancy railings up the steps led to a painted door overtopped by a fan of coloured glass. She took all this in, then went back to Canonbury-house to warm and fortify herself with tea before knocking on the door.

She was shown into a neat drawing room by a maid in a white ribboned cap. A plump, or more likely pregnant, woman came almost immediately into the room. Something was familiar about her but Ann couldn't at once place it.

Then she remembered. This was the friend of Frederick Curran's cousin: Lydia something, the woman who'd been making her sheep's eyes at John Taylor in the Queen's Arms. Then, he'd been a lapsed lawyer and an eager artist – rightly, for he was, they all said, truly gifted.

Evidently the eyes had worked their seduction.

It was a changed Lydia she saw, her face less pinched, fuller, but still with something of its discontented look. From the rest of the house came the sound of a baby wailing and an older woman's voice grumbling. So there was not only a wife but an infant – which may have accounted for the marriage of a man she'd thought the least likely of Robert's friends to be a husband. And there might be another
one on the way. The nagging within suggested there might also be a mother-in-law. John Taylor had made a family of women. Into Ann's mind swam the contemptuous words of the unkempt artist with the skeleton in the
campo
by San Marco. She blinked them away.

Mr Taylor was not in, she was told, but he would be home for his dinner if she cared to wait. He was always punctual.

The two women sat making stilted conversation until John Taylor arrived at precisely the time Lydia had indicated. The days were still short and it was already dark when he stepped in.

He was not the man she used to know. This one was beardless and very clean. No more than his wife did he make much effort to be welcoming. Ann would have judged him boorish if she'd not noted his lack of ease. It was not simply due to her presence, she was sure.

She told her news. He'd heard a rumour of it. For a moment he put his head in his white hands, on which there was now no sign of paint. Lydia shuffled her feet while the sound of scolding and wailing from beyond the room became louder, punctuated by the pleading of a young nurse or maidservant.

Unlike Richard Perry, John Taylor did not interrogate the manner of Robert's death. He simply accepted that people tended to die in foreign parts. Nor did he ask after the work. More perceptive perhaps than the others, he might have understood before they left that there would be little to show for the travelling.

In the silence she enquired about his painting, his Suffolk watercolours which they'd all so admired.

Before John Taylor had time to reply, Lydia interrupted, with a sharpish glance at Ann, as if she were bringing into that ordered elegant room the old raffish world of unattached men and artistic dreams that delivered no bacon or baby clothes. ‘My husband is in a very promising law firm now. I don't suppose he will tell you so himself. We are very proud of him.'

‘I'm sure you are,' said Ann.

‘You no longer paint?' she asked, turning to John Taylor.

‘I have no time for avocations,' he replied curtly.

For all the upheavals of thought and revolution, how little the world had changed. It was depressing and restful in equal measure.

She would seek out no more of Robert's circle. She was tired of tramping around in the bitter weather to be met with such emotional coldness. His friends and companions had cared for him mightily and still did, but not enough, not nearly enough in most cases. Did they not see that some surpassing spirit had gone from the world? Only Richard Perry really understood and he too, she wearily realised, would soon move on. She was hurt for Robert, though not self-deluding enough not to know that, with such thoughts, she protected herself. What had she been about, falling victim to a person so easily erased?

Happily for her brooding mind there was something else demanding her attention, something she'd not yet allowed to have its complete way with her.

Two mentions of Denmark within a year when she couldn't remember ever hearing anything at all about the country in all her past life, except for the story of George III's unhappy sister forced to marry its mad king. Ann sighed. It was an unfortunate exception.

She turned over all the early events concerning Aksel Stamer. Keeping Robert James as far away from her thoughts as possible; he must not contaminate anything.

They had met Aksel Stamer together in Padua. Nothing had been said about any connection. Then there was that earlier probable meeting in the
poste restante
at Palazzo Grimani where she'd gone to pick up the letter she now knew to have been sent by Madame Renée. He'd stood too close behind her in the line, presumably collecting mail of his own, perhaps a bank draft since he seemed to command considerable funds. It was there of course that he'd heard her maiden name, though he made no allusion to this when in Padua they formally introduced themselves both under assumed names and talked over a glass of wine – or at least he and she had made that awkward conversation in Robert's louring presence.

She concentrated on that moment in Palazzo Grimani. How close had he been standing? Too close. That much she remembered. She'd been crowded by his presence. She'd felt him overhearing what should have been private business.

She went over every aspect of the transaction, her moving up to the counter after the garrulous old man had left, her providing the document with her name on it, the offhand manner of the clerk, his rummaging among his ledgers, his passing over to her the letter from London and her signing for it.

Now it became clearer and clearer to her that Aksel Stamer – if it were indeed he (and she was almost certain that it was) – could not have looked at her signature as she signed ‘Ann St Clair', for she'd placed her left arm along the record book as she wrote with her right and, though he was taller than she, he would have had to peer directly over her shoulder to see the name. She would have protested at that sort of intrusion. Even the bored clerk would have said something. Aksel Stamer must only have
heard
her give her name.

But she had not given it.

It had surprised her at the time that the clerk, tired from too much talking and arguing with his difficult clients, had simply taken her written document as proof of her identity and not waited for her to confirm it verbally. So how could Aksel Stamer have known she was Ann St Clair and her mother's daughter?

She faced again these strange conjunctions, these seemingly fortuitous mentions of a country hardly on English people's lips in ordinary life. Aksel Stamer was from somewhere called Fyn in Denmark, this much he'd told her. She'd never heard of the place. The beautiful woman who'd not been right for Robert and who'd died pathetically young was also from Denmark. Esbjerg, near where Richard Perry had had his dreadful misadventure with the corpses on the ice, was on the north sea coast not so very far away.

Was she being absurd to make such links? Denmark was after all a whole country, quite large. For by now she'd seen it on a globe in Sarah's house – Charles consulted it for his work and young William pressed his finger along the oceans. A country of that size would have
room for many inconsequential coincidences.

And yet.

She went back to that incident in the office in Palazzo Grimani. She'd noticed Aksel Stamer because she thought she'd already seen him somewhere else, a foreigner with features difficult to place in any particular nation, not quite Austrian, not English or French. If he'd not been close enough to see her name there and not been given an opportunity to hear it spoken on that occasion, then what and where?

There was another possible meeting, one much earlier during her stay in Venice, not long after she'd arrived. On this occasion a man whom she'd suspected just might be Aksel Stamer had assuredly been close enough to hear a full and formal introduction.

It was near the Gesuati church where she'd been addressed by the friendly Giancarlo Scrittori as she studied her English guidebook. She'd noticed the man close enough to be considered a companion of the young Italian, so close that she'd awaited an introduction. But he'd not been with Giancarlo and, after remaining near for a little time, perhaps perusing a news-sheet, she couldn't now be sure, he'd wandered off to leave them talking. It was long after this that she'd thought she recognised him at Palazzo Grimani when she'd used her maiden name of St Clair. She'd jumped to the conclusion that this second encounter was where it all began.

Then he'd reinforced her conclusion that it was as Ann St Clair he knew her by asking after her mother and remembering she'd been called Caroline. But he could have learned that during the awkward talk in Padua when she'd mentioned her proposed trip and the dying mother by way of easing conversation. It could then have been a stray and courteous enquiry during a difficult journey. She'd become so unused to common politeness that she may have imbued it with far too much meaning.

The name she'd given by the Gesuati church was the one that provided a respectable identity.

She had said clearly, ‘I am Signora James, Signora Robert James.'

She was certain of this for, at the time, she'd wondered if it was the Italian form of address. She had said the name ‘Robert James'.

She had spoken it loudly for she was addressing an Italian who might not know her language well, and the last name always gave trouble to Italians. And this man, this foreign man, this perhaps Danish, Dutch, German, Austrian man, was standing close enough to overhear.

Then, despite the erratic behaviour of Robert in Padua, he had forged an acquaintance with them. She had assumed it the kindness of exiles.

But, no, it had continued. He had stayed and developed the friendship when it was clear that Robert was crazy – she'd once but no longer feared to employ the word. No man without a need or purpose could possibly have done this.

Robert said he'd been in Germany – he mentioned Hamburg – though he never spoke of experiences there, not even about his time with Richard Perry in Esbjerg, and certainly never described a woman. In all his disparaging of her, he might have made comparison with this acknowledged beauty but he had not. So what had happened to her? Another supposed fever, an unfinished sentence, a dubious exit?

Who told the truth if they had a chance to hide it? Only the stationary were stuck with the reality of the past. Robert had moved around a good deal. Though he spoke so much of higher truths, he cared little for the lower quotidian sort.

It was
Robert James
's name that mattered.

Had Aksel Stamer in the past cared for him? He did have a profound effect on men. But, if he'd cared so much, how could he have accepted his death so easily and why had he gone to such trouble to help someone who he could never be absolutely sure was not his murderess?

Perhaps he
had
suspected her – he had after all taken such speedy action to save her from the consequences of something only she knew she hadn't done.

Or, if she hadn't employed the bloodied knife herself, could he have thought that she'd driven this genius to his death?

Hardly that, for he'd seen enough of their life together. In no sense was she his murderess – she berated herself for the word, determined yet once more to keep melodrama for her books.

Not for a second would she let her mind loiter on more furtive purposes or on stronger arms and any knife sharper than her own.

However she looked at it or tried to refuse looking at it, the coincidence was there and, though in truth, so slight and possibly so insignificant, it had, she knew, taken its hold in a particular way. She sighed. It was another train of thought she'd no wish to follow. But knew she must and would.