“And Molly?”
Billy moves round behind the chair to pour the tea. “Don’t know, Mr Charles. At the market maybe. I didn’t see ’er.”
“But neither of you left the door open, even for a moment—or saw someone loitering outside you didn’t recognise?”
“No, not me,” he says, coming back with the tea. “Don’t know about Molly. Best you ask ’er that yerself, Mr Charles. Sure
you’d
get more outta ’er than
me,
if you take my meanin’.”
Perhaps it’s his tone, perhaps it’s something about the look on his round pink face, but Charles is suddenly seized by an overwhelming urge to strike him. Which he suppresses, but only just.
“By the way, Billy,” he says sharply. “I thought I’d warned you weeks ago about getting drunk with the coster-boys.”
Billy’s face flushes an even deeper red. “I know, Mr Charles. I ’eard you the first time. I ain’t done it since.”
“Don’t lie to me, Billy, I know you were out again with them the other night. I won’t have it—do you hear me? Coming back at all hours roaring, and throwing up all over the kitchen.”
Billy opens his eyes wide in outraged innocence—or a very practised impersonation thereof. “You must be mistaken, Mr Charles. Weren’t me, and that’s a fact.”
But Charles has caught the boy out once too often already. “If I find out you’ve lied to me again—”
“But I’m not lyin’, Mr Charles. Cross me ’eart and ’ope to die. It weren’t me I tell yer—and if you really want to know—”
“I’ve had enough of your impertinence, Billy. If it happens again you will be dismissed, and without pay. You will not get a second chance. Am I making myself clear?”
The boy drops his eyes, and mumbles, “Yes, Mr Charles.”
“Very well. Now bring me paper and an envelope from the office. I have a note I want you to take to Chester Square.”
Billy nods again, and is curtly dismissed, but when he gets to the door he sees that Charles has already turned his back. The boy watches him a moment, playing with some coins in his trouser pocket, and the expression in his eyes now is one of unambiguous contempt. The contempt the cunning have always had for those who fancy themselves fine intellectuals, but fail to see the facts right in front of their faces.
• • •
The following morning Charles wakes at last from a dream of drowning to find Thunder perched squarely on his chest and peering down at him with that quizzical look any cat-owner will recognise at once. Charles heaves him off—not an easy task, given Thunder’s size—and goes to the wash-stand. A bad night’s sleep has left him with a headache and dark shadows under his eyes. Worse, he now faces the prospect of an audience with Lady Shelley.
He is kept waiting at Chester Square, as before, but this time there is another factor at work, of which he is entirely unaware. The mistress of the house is standing at a second-floor window, watching as Charles scuffs his heels on the pavement and rubs his hands together against the cold. The room behind her is, at first sight at least, the mirror image of the drawing-room below we have already seen. The same long windows, the same washy sunlight filtering through the long muslin curtains, the same portrait, hanging in exactly the same place. But this time, the painting is the original, not a copy, and there is no candle on the table below and no fake wax lilies, only a plain white vase bearing stems of green leaves crowned with clusters of tiny pink flowers; the air is filled with an irresistible sweet fragrance. It’s like a room from a totally different house. Refinement, taste, restraint; elegant furniture and shelf upon shelf of books. And books that have been placed here to be read, not looked at, for the volumes are stacked haphazardly, with gaps where some have been taken out and not yet replaced. In the far corner there is a small curtained bed, in which the poet’s widow is sitting, looking towards the light, and her husband’s face.
Were you in that room, your first thought, I’m sure, would be how very frail she is. How child-like. The woman who casts so long a shadow over this story, and has left such a monstrous and misshapen creation in her name, is so fragile in the flesh, she make all those around her seem clumsy and inept. Most obviously her own son, who is at this moment lighting his pipe rather cack-handedly with a spill lit from the fire. And as we approach the bed, we can see that this woman must once have been every bit as beautiful as her step-sister, although the quality of that beauty could hardly be more different. Everything about Claire so rich and dramatic—her complexion, her hair, her figure, her choice of clothes; Mary, by contrast, all pale delicacy, her skin white, her eyes grey, her bed-jacket a quiet cloud-coloured silk. And that famous hair of hers silvered now, but showing still some red gleams of burnished gold.
“It is exactly as Percy has explained, Madre,” says Lady Shelley, turning now from the window. “We have been given an absolute and categorical assurance that no records of that dreadful winter remain. The pages in question are missing, and a thorough search of the house has produced nothing. Doubtless the old fellow destroyed them years ago. And he is in no state now, to reveal what they contained.”
The woman on the bed looks from her son to his wife, but does not speak. Though perhaps her thin fingers grip a little tighter about the counterpane.
“So you have nothing to fear,“ continues the younger woman, seeing the gesture, and mistaking, I suspect, what it means. She goes briskly to the bed and sits down beside it, then takes her mother-in-law’s hand in her own. “There will be no revelations about Harriet. Either about how she met her death, or all the sordid circumstances that attended it. We are safe;
you
are safe.”
Mary Shelley looks at her a moment, and then past her to the portrait hanging on the wall. Sir Percy, meanwhile, seems distinctly uncomfortable, and fidgets uneasily with his pipe. His wife casts a glance of irritation in his direction, then turns again to her mother-in-law.
“Dear Jane,” the older woman says eventually, her voice thick as if she has not spoken in many days. “Always so concerned for me, always so energetic to protect my interests.”
Lady Shelley smiles indulgently, and pats the hand that lies inert in her own.
“And yet,” Mrs Shelley continues, slowly but deliberately, as if each word were a burden to her, but must still be spoken, “I could wish you had thought to consult me before embarking on such an undertaking. I should have advised against revealing so much to anyone, or putting ourselves at the mercy of a man of that low sort.”
“Well I did say as much to Jane—” begins Sir Percy.
“And you know,” his mother continues, cutting across him, “as well as I, that Claire cannot be trusted. It has always been dangerous to afford her so susceptible an audience as this young man must have been. I fear I can imagine only too easily what lies she will have told him of our childhood, and of Switzerland, and all that came after.”
Jane Shelley opens her mouth to speak, but Mary forestalls her, shaking her head, but awkwardly, as though the movement gave her pain. “
That,
my dear Jane, I have endured before. My concern, now, is what
else
she may have said to this young man—what she may have showed him.”
“I thought the Clairmont woman was in Bath that winter,” says Lady Shelley, clearly nonplussed. “What could she possibly know about Harriet—”
Mary Shelley takes her hand from her daughter-in-law’s grasp and places it momentarily against her forehead.
“Are you unwell, Madre?” says Lady Shelley anxiously.
“No, my dear,” she says at last. “A momentary faintness, that is all. I am inured to it now.”
She looks at the two of them, and when she speaks again, it seems that she has forgotten the train of the conversation.
“Do you know—did your informant say—if any other records have been discovered in that house concerning Shelley—concerning myself?”
The baronet and his wife exchange a glance. “I was not aware,” Lady Shelley begins, “that you had had any other dealings with that Maddox fellow.”
Mary Shelley flushes slightly. “
Dealings
is altogether too grand a word. It was—a minor matter relating to the time Shelley spent in Wales before he and I met—”
Sir Percy frowns. “You mean that queer incident in Tremadoc in ’13?”
“Nothing came of it.” Her tone is light now, dismissive. “Indeed I doubt so trivial a matter even merited the effort of its documentation. And as you say, had any such papers come to light, no doubt you would have been told.”
There is a knock then, and the butler appears. “Mr Charles Maddox is at the door, madam.”
“Thank you, Emerson,” says Lady Shelley, getting rather inelegantly to her feet, “you may show him up to the drawing-room.”
“What will you say to him?” asks Mary Shelley, looking up at the younger woman’s sturdy form bending over her.
“You do not need to worry yourself about that, Madre. We have no more use for that arrogant young upstart. I will listen to what he has to tell me, thank him for his efforts, and inform him that we have decided not to pursue the matter of Miss Clairmont’s papers after all. Mr Maddox has been more than amply paid for his time. Let that be an end to it.”
“And you think,” says Sir Percy, “he’ll let it go as pat as that?”
She smiles complacently, “What other choice does he have? Come, Percy, let us leave dear Madre to rest.”
The room is silent after they have gone, and the woman in the bed does not move. But it is not the immobility of repose. Her face is pale with anxiety now, and the hand once again tugs at the counterpane. After a moment she turns, with some difficulty, to the small travelling-desk that has been placed carefully within reach on the bed, and there is a rigidity discernible now, on her left side, that calls to mind the stiffness Maddox also suffers. Her travelling-desk is smaller and more graceful than Claire’s trunk, but this rosewood box has clearly seen the same long years of journeying, the same restless moving from place to place. And as she lifts the lid we can see a large bundle of letters, tied with satin and neatly stacked, with here and there a petal pressed between them. And next to them the copy of
Adonais,
so badly water-stained the title is barely legible, that they discovered in Shelley’s pocket when his rotten and half-eaten body was thrown back by the sea. Mary Shelley gazes a moment at the book, then reaches to the bundle of letters and places it carefully on her lap. They are all, the letters, written in the same hand. All but one. And that lies folded at the bottom of the box, without ribbon, and without remembrance.
Mary was, they tell us, famous for her reserve, so practised at concealing her emotions that even those closest to her condemned her freezing coldness, and perhaps that accounts for the oddly blank expression we see now on her face, as she reads this letter she has hidden from all the world. Or perhaps Leigh Hunt was right, and she was indeed ‘a torrent of fire under a Hecla snow.’ All we can know for sure is that she reaches now for the bell-rope, and when the bright and freckle-faced maid arrives a few moments later she is dispatched downstairs for paper and ink.
“And be sure, Alice, not to trouble Lady Shelley, or my son.”
Charles, meanwhile, has followed the butler up the stairs to the blue drawing-room, where all is as it was before. The knick-knacks, the case of books, the candle still steadily burning. Charles goes over to the portrait again, struck, this time, by the choice of epigraph beneath it. No praise for the sublime Genius of the Poet, such as he would surely have expected Lady Shelley to select, but a reference that is at best ambivalent to envy and calumny and hate and pain, and an unrest that was at once a torture and delight, but can touch the Poet now no more. Was it, Charles wonders, his widow who chose these words?
“Good morning, Mr Maddox.”
It is Lady Shelley. Wearing—surely—the same plain grey dress. As well as a look of some self-satisfaction on her rather masculine face. She takes a seat, but does not motion him to do the same.
“Well, what have you to say?”
Treating him like any other hired hand is—of course—trivial in itself, but the discourtesy rankles and Charles finds himself replying with equal impoliteness.
“What have
you
to say, Lady Shelley?”
She is clearly not used to be spoken to in such a manner, and recoils in distaste. “I do not take your meaning.”
“You omitted to tell me, when we met, that the person who was allegedly persecuting you is a lady—”
“Hardly a
lady,
and hardly
allegedly
—”
Charles ignores the interruption.
“—and if not your relation, most certainly your husband’s.”
She stiffens. “There is absolutely no blood between them. She is no relation of his, or of Madre’s.”
“I believe most reasonable people would take my side of that particular question, Lady Shelley. But we shall let that go by, for the moment. Whatever the truth of it, Miss Clairmont has clearly been very poorly treated—by Lord Byron, by Mrs Shelley, and by Shelley himself, while he lived.”
There are deep stains of colour, now, on her cheeks, and a look of mocking scorn on her face. “Oh
I
see—I see it
all
now—you have been taken in, just like everyone else! The woman should have been on the stage, so artfully does she play herself. Claire the martyr, Claire the poor put-upon, Claire the brave innocent, betrayed by the world. And I thought you an
intelligent
man.”
Charles bridles. “I am not so easily deceived, Lady Shelley—”
“Ha!” she snorts. “You are a
man,
are you not? And therefore as much prey to her devious wiles as every other sorry member of your sex.”
Such a disdainful dismissal of the entire gender does not augur well for the serenity of the Shelley marriage, but Charles had guessed that much already, even before Claire’s waspish observations.
Lady Shelley draws herself up in her chair. “That woman loves nothing better than to cast herself as a forlorn victim, abandoned and deceived. You are a fool if you believe a single word that falls from her lips. You know nothing of her—nothing whatsoever.”