TWELVE
Death
H
OW
MUCH
OF
THIS
does Charles now know? Most of it, I suspect. Fraser, after all, witnessed much of it with his own eyes, and what he didn’t see, he was more than capable of guessing. So as he walks slowly back through the calm sunset from Fraser’s door, the light pinking rose the crusting snow, Charles is melding the long past with what he, too, has seen with his own eyes. The last piece has fallen into place: Claire’s shame, and Mary’s deception; Claire’s day of horrors, and Mary’s relief that Maddox, like a winter lion, has in rage forgot all brush of time, her desperate desire that the dead should die and return not. And when Maddox talked, in those words now burned, of the appalling death of an innocent creature, it was not Harriet Shelley he meant, or even Fanny Imlay, but the poet’s own baby daughter.
And what happens when you have another child? What happens when you wake in the night and find his hands at another newborn baby’s throat?
Did Maddox’s words of warning return to haunt Mary, that last summer in Italy? Is that why she was suddenly so desperate to leave, at all costs, a house she called accursed—so frantic to take her last remaining son away? Only it was not the house that was accursed, but the man within it. When she wrote to Charles of Shelley’s love for children—of his own childishness—that was her
real
deceit. Her real blind. And like all the world’s most dangerous lies, it was crafted more than half of truth. For Shelley’s was not the childishness of innocence and play, but of wanton unthinking cruelty, and the inability to feel another’s pain.
And what of Maddox?—Maddox who compromised everything he stood for, only to lose a child that could have been his. No wonder those pages were destroyed; no wonder he concealed the secret from everyone, even—or perhaps especially—from the great-nephew who has taken that lost son’s place. And no wonder Mary talked so deliberately, in her letter, of Charles as his uncle’s only heir—she was luring him, testing the safety of her secret, knowing that if he had discovered who little William’s father really was he would never have allowed those words to pass unchallenged.
When he opens the door in Buckingham Street, Charles can hear laughter from the drawing-room, and he stands for a moment, wondering how long it is since this house echoed with the happiness of a child. He’s about to go upstairs when Nancy appears at the top of the kitchen steps. Her bruises are fading, and she is wearing a new dress. Plain and grey, but elegant in its mere simplicity. She sees him looking at it and smiles, then twirls around.
“Like it? Couldn’t keep wearin’ that old blue one all the time.”
There’s another burst of giggles upstairs and Nancy glances up anxiously. “ ’ope you don’t mind my Betsy being up there. I make sure she don’t do any ’arm or break nothin’. And your uncle seems to ’ave taken to her. They’ve been chattin’ away nineteen to the dozen this afternoon.”
Charles smiles sadly. “Don’t worry, Nancy. Betsy is no trouble. Quite the opposite.”
He turns to go and she stops him. “There’s a visitor waitin’ for you—upstairs.”
Claire,
he thinks. And then
—but surely she does not know where to find me.
“A gentleman, it is,” says Nancy, watching him. “Said it were business, but ’e hasn’t been ’ere before, so you won’t know the name.”
“It’s rather late, surely?” Charles says with a frown.
Nancy shrugs. “’e said ’e wanted to wait. That ’e ain’t often in London so it ’ad to be today.”
A fire has been lit in the office, and there is a man standing over it, warming his hands. A man in clothes that evoke the church without being, strictly speaking, clerical. He looks up at Charles’s approach and comes towards him, hand extended.
“Mr Maddox, I presume? Turnbull, Horace Turnbull. I am an assistant to the Curators of the Bodleian Library.”
Charles endeavours to conceal his surprise and gestures to the chair. “How can I help you, Mr Turnbull?”
“You are wondering, no doubt,” says Turnbull, as he seats himself carefully, so as not to crease his coat-tails, “what business the University of Oxford could possibly have with a private detective.”
Charles smiles. “Was it so obvious?”
Turnbull inclines his head, “I anticipated some degree of surprise. To speak frankly, Mr Maddox—I assume I may speak frankly and in confidence?—it is a somewhat delicate matter. In consequence, and after much private discussion, my employers have decided that the most prudent course of action would be to consult someone unconnected with the university. Someone, in short, in London.”
He pauses, then clears his throat. “You may be aware,” he resumes, “that the Bodleian houses an extensive collection of rare books and manuscripts, some of them many centuries old.”
Charles nods. “When I was a boy, my father took me once to see the Ashmole Bestiary. I was far too young to appreciate it then, of course, but I can still remember that drawing of a basilisk being killed by a weasel. I remember asking my father why we didn’t have basilisks in Berkshire.”
“Ah!” says Turnbull, his face brightening, “then you know exactly to what I refer. It is, indeed, the manuscripts in the Ashmole Bequest that are in question. The Bestiary has always been rather a favourite of mine, though of course most of our visitors are more interested in the astrological and alchemical treatises.”
“Has there been a theft? Have some of the books gone missing?”
Turnbull is already shaking his head. “No, no, nothing of that kind. We—that is, the Curators—have received a request from a foreign person—a nobleman of a very ancient lineage—who wishes to consult some of the manuscripts in the collection.”
“And that poses a problem?”
“Not a problem, exactly. There is no difficulty in allowing him to view the collection. The difficulty—if that is the word—stems from the interest he has expressed in making a donation towards its upkeep.” He coughs, “A rather substantial donation.”
Charles nods slowly. “And you are concerned to know a little more about your mysterious benefactor, before you agree to become associated with him in such a public and irrevocable manner.”
“Quite so, Mr Maddox,” replies Turnbull, “Quite so. And indeed
mysterious
is indeed the word. All that the
Almanach de Gotha
can tell, we have ascertained, but that is lamentably little. We thought of consulting the Foreign Office, but such a course might pose difficulties of its own; and then we thought of you. Well, not of you
specifically,
of course, but a man of your calling.”
“I see,” says Charles. “And how did you come upon my name?”
“It was your uncle’s, in fact. He was recommended by a Fellow of All Souls, who had, I believe, used his services in the past. But I understood from the young woman who let me in that the elder Mr Maddox is no longer well enough to accept commissions.”
There is a brief silence.
“So can I tell my employers that
you
able to assist us?”
Charles hesitates—he has never undertaken any investigation even remotely like this one. But why should that deter him? And he would give a good deal to see the Ashmole collection again. “Yes, Mr Turnbull, I am.”
“Excellent,” his visitor replies, with obvious relief, as he gets to his feet. “I will write to you to arrange a further meeting with the Curators in Oxford.”
It is Charles’s turn to offer his hand, but Turnbull is now looking past him, towards the doorway. Charles turns and sees that Betsy is peeking at the two of them round the door, her little face alight with mischief, and her long-suffering doll dandling from one hand.
Charles flushes—it’s hardly the most professional impression to give to a new client—but to his surprise, Turnbull squats down at once on his haunches and beckons to the little girl. “Your daughter is beautiful, Mr Maddox, quite beautiful. You are a lucky man.”
Charles is about to correct him, but something makes him hold back.
“Betsy,” he says, beckoning in his turn. “Come and say hello to Mr Turnbull.”
The little girl hesitates, then comes rushing in and clasps her arms about Charles’ legs. And so it is that when he sees Turnbull out ten minutes later, he has a small child nestling in the crook of his arm. As he shuts the door he hears a step behind him and turns, expecting Nancy. But it is Molly he sees coming towards him. And now he realises, with a flash of shame, that he has still not explained what this child and her mother are doing in the house. Molly reaches out her arms to the child, who clambers rather awkwardly about her neck.
“Molly,” says Charles. “It’s only for a few days. They won’t be here long.”
She looks at him for a moment, rocking the child from side to side, then nods and turns back down towards the kitchen.
Up in the office Charles takes a sheet of paper from the escritoire and pauses a moment before setting his pen to the page.
I know the truth. About Harriet, and about William.
I know how your daughter really died.
I have not decided, yet, what I shall do.
And then he seals the envelope, and pens the address.
• • •
The following morning Charles goes out as soon as the shops are open, crunching through a layer of new snow dusted diamond by the bright winter sun. His letter posted, he’s just turning back into Buckingham Street when he smells the aroma of roasting chestnuts. There’s a coster on the corner of Villiers Street crying, “Chestnuts all ’ot, a penny a score,” as he stamps his feet by his stall’s iron stove, the charcoal glowing crimson underneath. Remembering how he had longed for some on Christmas Day, Charles stops and buys a bag, warming his hands on them all the way to the house.
Up in the drawing-room Betsy is sitting on the floor by the fire playing with the cat. A slightly one-sided affair, admittedly, as Thunder is far too regal to deign to kittenish antics, but he seems happy enough to lie on his back and wave the occasional lazy paw in the direction of the knotted string Betsy hangs over his head. Charles crouches down and offers the little girl a chestnut from his bag, and grins as she reaches out, then realises that these lovely brown shiny things are hot and whips her hand away with a shy smile. The two of them blow big puffs on the bag until the nuts are cool enough to hold, then sit cross-legged together on the floor, munching happily and stroking the cat. And this it is that Maddox sees when he wakes, blinks, and focuses slowly.
“And what are you two doing? Making all sorts of mischief, I’ll wager.”
Charles wonders for a moment if he is still adrift in the past—if it is Charles and his sister as children that he sees—but there is a clarity in the old man’s eyes that was not there before, and when the little girl goes to clamber onto the chair beside him, it is her own name he calls her by.
“I have been talking to Abel,” Maddox says carefully, as the child curls up against him and settles to sleep. “Though to speak strictly, he has been talking, and I have played a mere listener’s part.”
There is still a slur to his speech, still a slight draw to one side of his face, but he is lucid; as lucid as he was—sometimes—before his last attack, before he heard again the name of Shelley and was driven back into the dark abyss of the past.
Charles gets up from the floor and pulls a chair close to his great-uncle. And as the fire burns softer and softer in the grate, and the old man strokes the child’s golden curls, Charles recounts the case from first to last—from his commission by the Shelleys, to his stay at St John’s Wood, to the visit to the Frasers the day before. And when he is done and he has set out his conclusions, such as they are, they sit in silence for a while and Charles sees the old man’s eyes are closed. He has tired him, he thinks, and makes as if to get up.
“He was mine,” says Maddox, his eyes still closed. “The boy. William. He was my son. I believed that from the first, and when I saw him at her father’s house, I knew. He was the very image of my brother as a boy. There was not a shred of Shelley about him.”
Charles is silent, wondering what it must have cost to see that child—that one and only child—consigned to the care of a man who had already killed his own baby daughter.
“But there was nothing I could do to exert my claim. I could not protect him as a father, all I could offer him was my skill as a professional. And that I did. I had them watched. From that day in Skinner Street, until their departure for Italy two years later. I never saw my boy again, but I had word of him, month by month, from an agent I employed.”
So there
was
someone watching Shelley, thinks Charles, at the end if not at the beginning. How ironic that the man once hired to discover his pursuer, should have become at the last that pursuer himself.
“My abhorrence of Shelley never abated,” the old man continues, “not for a moment, but he was by then under the care of a reputable physician, and the boy appeared to thrive. I believed his mother kept him safe.”
He opens his eyes now, and Charles sees that there are tears.
“I wish that were all I had to tell. But it is not. I used my position—my influence—for the first and only time in my career, to further my own ends. I allowed certain facts to come to the ear of the judge in Shelley’s Chancery case. With so much already against him—his atheism, his manner of life—I knew the information I passed on would ensure he never gained custody of Harriet’s children. I believed she would have wished it so. I believed, and sincerely, that I was acting in those children’s best interests.”
“And you were not?”
Maddox shakes his head slowly. “Not, at least, in the way I imagined. It was only after the Shelleys left England for the last time that I discovered the truth. That whatever he had done in the past that so haunted his steps, he was not the monster I had made him.”
Charles frowns. “I do not understand—”
“It was some years before I saw Absalom Blackaby again. I rarely dealt with such as he if I could help it, and avoided him all the more after the Shelley case. But there came a day when I could evade him no longer.”