“If it is that same fellow to which you refer—” I began, when he interrupted me, a fire in his eyes.
“How vile you are to doubt me!” he cried, setting the wizened locals at the hearth pointing and whispering. “I saw him—that
creature—
only yesterday. He was there
—there,
I tell you—staring at me as I boarded the coach for Bristol—I went looking for her there—she wrote to me from there—”
And it was only at that instant, I think, that he realised that I was not, after all, some dark excrescence of his own troubled mind—that I was real, and my presence there was no coincidence, but compelled there by the same dire misfortune that had brought him hither.
“But tell me not,” he gasped, “that she—that you—”
I saw his look of terrible pain, I saw the flicker of a last and desperate hope, but my heart was frozen iron in my breast. And so I told him; everything that had happened, everything I had done, every last and dreadful detail. Without mercy, without kindness, without sparing.
Anyone else would have pitied him then. Had I not known what this man had done, I too might have pitied him. But I did not. I held the knife, I knew the wound, and I twisted the blade with all the savagery in my power.
“I saw her,” he stammered, when I had finished. “Two days ago. She wrote to me asking me to meet her off the London coach. She said—she
promised—
that she was on her way to Dublin. That her aunts had relented—that she looked forward to happiness at last. But her voice was quivering as she said the words—”
His voice broke then, and he buried his head in his hands, weeping uncontrollably that he had not known, that she had never said, not expressly, and that the whole world was not wide enough to contain his misery. Not now. I was on the point of berating him yet further—of telling him what heedless hurt he caused to all the women unfortunate enough to encounter him—all those other young women he induced to love him, be he aware of it or not—when he suddenly gave out a piercing cry and fell to the floor, his body racked by fearful spasms. The landlady was upon us in an instant, terrified at the sight, but I had seen those fits of his before; I knew they always supervened at some moment of sudden shock or high-wrought feeling, and never led to the fatal consequences the landlady clearly apprehended. I likewise suspected—though I have voiced the thought only once, and to no avail—that Shelley was not above simulating such attacks, as a means to divert attention from whatever culpability might otherwise have attached itself, at those moments, to him. I instructed the landlady, therefore, that he should merely be put to bed in one of the rooms upstairs and the doctor sent for in due course, should the symptoms not abate.
I myself was too exhausted to attempt anything further that night. I charged the landlady not to wake me unless in case of emergency, or should a message come from the coroner. Imagine my irritation, then, when there was a loud knock at my chamber before first light. I arose wearily and opened the door, and found the maid holding a note in what I knew to be Shelley’s hand.
I can do no more for her. All that could be done, you have done; and I have received this last hour, a letter from Godwin urging my return to Bath. He begs me not to disturb the silent dead—to comply with her own last wish for obscurity, and avoid at all costs any risk that his wife and remaining children might be exposed to the horror of the public papers. Should I remain for the obsequies, that risk must only be augmented. I will, therefore, depart this very morning—this very hour—and return to my Mary, knowing that even if her family will not be present to see poor Fanny committed to the earth, that you, at least, will undertake that sad duty in our stead.
P.B.S.
I write out these words from memory; the note itself I cast into the fire in disgust, within a moment of reading it.
Of that interment, I wish not to speak. The rain driving in off the sea, the black-suited clergyman racing through the service that he might return to the comfort of his own fat fireside, and the bodies, three of them, sewn into their rough sacks, heaved one by one into the tainted pit of a paupers’ grave. I did not even know which one was hers.
A vile journey I endured home, with none of the comforts of my own private carriage, the public coach crowded, and the heavy wheels jarring and jolting on the dirty road. I spent all that long expanse of hours cast in my own thoughts, and debating whether I could, in conscience, continue with Godwin’s commission, given the base opinion I now entertained of he who had hired me. I understood his terror of the press, I had sympathy with his wish to avoid further needless scandal, but I could not—and do not—forgive him for having abandoned that poor child to be buried alone and nameless, and with no-one who loved her by. I have discovered since that he and his wife contrived to conduct themselves so calmly—so coldly indeed—in the face of this tragedy, that not one person in their household had the smallest apprehension of the truth; I have discovered, likewise, that they continue, even now, to give out all manner of spurious accounts to explain Fanny’s supposed absence, and even after so many weeks have passed one of her step-brothers still has not the slightest notion of her death.
I returned at last, dirty and hungry, to my own house. Perhaps it was the sad fate of poor Fanny Imlay, or the fruit of too much solitary introspection, but I found myself, that night, overwhelmed by a sudden foreboding. I told myself my fears were irrational, but I could not rid myself of them, knowing as I did that no one had suffered more at Shelley’s hands than his wife, and that Harriet’s, even more than Fanny, had seen her young life blighted forever by his brutish selfishness. Late as it was, therefore, I summoned Jacob Todd, the man I had set to ingratiate himself with one of the serving-maids at the Westbrook house in Chapel Street, in the hope we might come thereby by news of Mrs Shelley, and yet in all that time he had discovered nothing. Todd confessed, at length, that he had recently seen Mrs Shelley’s sister leave the house for several hours together, but had not followed her, being—I suspected, though he denied it—too engrossed by the object of his feigned affections, to attend to the task he had been engaged to pursue. I berated him then, and cruelly, accusing him of a careless and indefensible breach that might have consequences far beyond any he was competent to conceive. Once I had sent him from the room and dismissed him from my service, I instructed Fraser, to watch the movements of Mrs Shelley’s sister, Miss Eliza Westbrook. I had been told by my informants that she and Harriet enjoyed a remarkable intimacy, given that there were some thirteen years between them, and I knew the elder sister had, indeed, lived for some months with the Shelleys when first they married. That this state of affairs had degenerated into bitter recriminations, even before the poet’s desertion of his wife, did not surprise me; that Miss Westbrook was among the most zealous in her family to punish the reprobate, and disgrace him publicly, surprised me even less. But all that concerned me for the moment was that Eliza, if anyone, would know where her sister had fled.
In the week that followed, I received, almost daily, supplications from Godwin to augment the account I had sent him from Swansea with whatever further information I had now at my disposal; supplications I steadfastly refused to gratify with even the briefest of replies. I cared not for his feelings, judging he possessed very few; I did care, and very much, about young Mrs Shelley: where she might be, and what circumstances had driven her to such a reckless course of action. I feared the worst, and those fears were brought to a greater and more painful intensity when Fraser brought me word that the Westbrooks had hired a young man, one William Alder by name, to drag the ponds in the area of Hyde-park nearest the house. My distress on hearing of this was extreme, but Fraser soon established that nothing had been found. It was some time before I was to receive further news and I attempted to engross my mind with cases recently neglected, until one morning in November I was woken by Fraser pounding on my door an hour before breakfast and calling to me, hot-faced and out of breath, that Miss Westbrook had dressed the children herself before the rest of the household was awake, and taken them to an address near Hans-place, Brompton.
“And I know as why she chose it,” he said in his deep slow tones, as we waited for the carriage to be brought round. “That fellow Alder has a room in the same lodging-house. Seems likely he might have found a room for her there. And that odd-looking husband of hers has been there too.”
“Are you certain?” I enquired, my attention aroused.
“The landlady’s daughter described him to the life. Said she’d seen him two or three times since the young woman moved in, the latest only last week.”
I glanced at him, wondering, not for the first time, at the facility Fraser displayed in obtaining information from women; the fair sex seemed to find him unaccountably appealing, despite his shaven head, broken nose, and less than engaging manner. I had employed him for quite other reasons, and in that role he had never failed: Many a man had had cause to regret lying to me, after enduring the undivided attentions of George Fraser. He had a talent for persuasion of the physical kind, and I never scrupled to employ that talent in a just cause, but it appeared I had underestimated other, more intangible capacities which have since proved almost as valuable on occasion.
“You must be mistaken,” I began. “I have had a lad watching the Marchmont-street lodgings from the first, and he insists that Shelley has not returned to town.”
“That’s as may be, guv,” Fraser replied grimly, transparently sceptical. “But I don’t see as how anyone could mistake Shelley. Never seen such a peculiar cove, and that’s a fact.”
I could not disagree. Indeed, it chimed oddly with an experience I had had of my own, some three or four months earlier, of which Fraser could not be aware, when I had thought I glimpsed Shelley walking ahead of me in the Strand, even though I knew to my certain knowledge he was not then in England.
Less than half an hour later the coachman set us down outside the lodging-house, where I made myself known to the lady proprietor of the establishment and asked if I might go up to Mrs Shelley’s rooms. She could not be unaware of the richness of my equipage, and she was now eyeing my attire with an obvious, if concealed, interest. It cannot have been often that she welcomed gentlemen so handsomely accoutred.
“Mrs Shelley, sir?” she said, looking—or feigning—ignorance. “We have no lady by that name here.”
“A lady of below middle height,” intervened Fraser, who had the advantage of me as to her appearance. “Rather plump than trim as far as her figure goes. Quite a beauty once, I should say.”
“Ah,” said the landlady with a look I could not at once decipher, “you must mean Mrs
Smith.
Do you bring word from her husband? She is hoping to see him every day.”
“But did he not—” began Fraser, but I replaced a restraining hand on his arm, and requested he return to the carriage and await me there; I did not wish that all the information at my disposal should so quickly be revealed.
“I am, as you so cleverly surmised, a fr—”
But my tongue stumbled against the word, and I could not utter it.
“—a business connection of her husband’s,” I continued. “It has but recently come to my knowledge that his wife has been reduced to the painful circumstances in which she now finds herself, and I wish to do all in my power to assist her.”
That last, in any event, was the absolute truth.
“Well,” sniffed the woman, folding her arms, and looking up and down at my fine marcella waistcoat. “You can begin by assisting
me
with the
money.
A month’s rent Mrs Smith owes me, and that’s a fact.”
I smiled in what I hoped was a gracious manner, and proceeded to take my pocket-book from my coat and count out the coins, one by one. The landlady’s acquiescence, if not her confidence, thus purchased, she informed me that the young lady’s room was “at the top—the last you get to,” and left me to find my own way up.
As I climbed the narrow stairs and smelled the damp seeping from the walls, I knew what I would in all likelihood find: a tiny room, cramped under the eaves, with but a small window and the whole place no doubt reeking. And when I reached the last landing I could see at once that some, at least, of my assumptions were correct. I knocked sharply and heard a few moments later the sound of a bolt drawing back and a light but weary female voice saying, “If it’s about the rent—” as the door swung open.
“Oh,” she said then, drawing back and frowning. “I took you for Mrs Thomas.”
I had wondered at Fraser’s remark that Mrs Shelley must ‘once’ have been a beauty, for I could not believe she was much more than twenty, but I understood his observation now. The woman who stood before me looked at least a dozen years more, with none of the freshness and bloom of youth the calendar surely owed her. Her brown hair was lank, her eyes lustreless. And if her figure did indeed incline to
enbonpoint,
her face was gaunt and her skin dull.
“Who are you?” she said, holding the door close and pulling her shawl about her. “What do you want?”
“It is, indeed, about the rent, or at least in one respect,” I replied, as I proceeded to inform her that I had just had the honour to assist her with that particular obligation.
The smile that greeted this information was enough to show me how lovely Harriet Shelley must once have been. It illuminated her whole face, lifting the lines from her eyes, and setting the ghost of a flush on her thin cheeks.
“Do you come from Shelley?” she asked with a gasp. “Is he well—does he want to see the children?”
How I cursed the man then, in my soul; to have abandoned this young woman so callously, depriving her of the protection she had every right to expect, and leaving her suspended in a pitiable state that was neither marriage nor widowhood.
“I regret,” I began, “that I have no commission from him. But what I may do for you, you may rely upon.”