• • •
The following morning he wakes to hard winter sunlight and high clouds skidding across a blanched white sky. The sodden garden is suddenly dazzling and etch-edged with frost, and Charles is seized by an impulse to spend the morning outside, in the air, away from this cramped little room and the intricate density of Shelley’s words. He dresses quickly then goes down into the kitchen, where the maid is scrubbing the floor. She smiles at him, first shyly, and then with undisguised amusement, when he says he wants to work in the garden, but she gives him the key to a small out-building where he will find mattocks and hoes and whatever else the previous tenants left behind. The air outside is freezing, and for the first hour or so he can barely feel his fingers, but by the time he has raked one border, and piled the rotting stems and leaves into a heap by the far wall, he’s worked up enough of a sweat to take his jacket off. He’s just hanging it on the back of the bench when he turns to see the maid beckoning him from the house.
“Miss Clairmont was wondering if you’d like to join her for luncheon, sir.”
“Good Lord, is it that time already?” says Charles with a grin, running his hand through his hair and smearing a good deal of mud on his forehead in the process. “I would be delighted. Please tell her I will wash my hands and then join her in a few moments.”
The table has been set again in the dining-room, but this time, it is for two. The fire is lit, and a basin of soup stands ready on the sideboard, but of Miss Clairmont there is no sign. It’s the first time he has been into this room and he looks round, taking the measure of the place. More books in crates and pictures stacked against the walls, but also a piano, a piano-stool draped in rich green brocade, and a mahogany sideboard. A sideboard that (as Charles quickly ascertains) conceals only what any such piece of furniture would be expected to hold. Having achieved that much, Charles goes over to look at the music propped open on the piano-stand, wondering if this was the song he heard the night before. It’s a Mozart aria, the pages yellowing now, and annotated here and there in a rounded, flowing hand. And on the front cover, the faded inscription,
To C____
. He’s just turning the pages back to where he found them when the paper slips from his fingers and slides down onto the floor and under the piano. He curses under his breath and drops quickly to his knees, wondering sort of figure he will cut if his landlady finds him poking about on all fours. He has to move the stool out of the way to reach the pages, and he can’t understand at first why he’s unable to shift it, but then he lifts the green brocade and sees his mistake. Or rather Miss Clairmont’s subterfuge. Wedged between the stool’s four legs is a small wooden trunk. A travelling-trunk.
His heart is beating fast as he puts stool and music back carefully as he found them, and by the time his hostess comes through the door he is where he should be, behind his chair. Miss Clairmont’s long black hair is down, and she’s wearing a midnight-blue gown that clings to her body and cannot possibly have been either made or bought in England. She comes towards him in a rustle of silk on silk, and he can smell a dark musky scent on her skin.
“I thought you deserved some recompense for your pains,” she says with a smile. “That poor garden has indeed been brutally neglected.”
Charles is about to say how much he enjoyed the exercise (which is, in fact, true) but Miss Clairmont seems not to have expected a reply.
“And is it satisfactory, your garret?” she continues. “Annie and I heard so much banging and scraping yesterday that we were quite sure you had embarked on a major renovation.”
Charles blushes. “Well, I needed to get the best light. The right angle. You know how it is.”
Miss Clairmont takes her seat at the table, and rings a little silver bell. “Well I can
imagine,
certainly. I had my own portrait painted once, but I do not consider it a success. I’m sure the artist meant well, but she left me looking as if I had a raging toothache.”
“It can’t have been easy to capture your likeness.”
Miss Clairmont laughs, a bright, delicious open-mouthed laugh; he can see her white teeth, and her red throat, “I will take that as a compliment, Mr Mab, even if you did not intend it so!” she says as she unfolds her napkin. “Pray have the gallantry not to disillusion me—it’s a very long time since I have received such flattery from so charming a young man.”
The maid comes in to serve the soup—and save Charles, incidentally, from any further reckless praise. The broth, as it turns out, is rather too watery, and the cutlets that follow rather too tough, but Charles is far too captivated by his companion to notice. It is, indeed—and despite the food—quite the most enjoyable meal he’s had in a long time. Miss Clairmont is enchanting company—well read, well travelled, and well informed, moving easily from an animated discussion on British politics, to diverting and self-deprecating tales of life in her ‘ice cave.’
“You would not believe the chaos and confusion that reigns in even the most aristocratic Russian households, Mr Mab,” she tells him, as the maid collects the dishes and places a coffee-pot and cups in the centre of the table. “I once counted some twenty children running about in the same house, and all of them more or less under my care. I cannot
quite
be sure of the number, because frankly you never could be certain who was actually in residence from one hour to the next. What with the legitimate offspring, the foundlings and orphans, and the ramshackle tribe of cousins, half cousins, old maids, and idiot aunts, you can picture to yourself the constant racket and quarrelling I had to contend with. Truly, Mr Mab, it was like living in an everlasting state of Saturnalia.”
“It must have taken courage to journey to such a far-off place on your own.”
A shadow crosses her face. “I believed I had no alternative. I thought that in Russia I might be able to forget all the disasters that had blighted my youth—all the misery I met with in Italy. But the more I fled the more they haunted me, and the wounds have now carved themselves so deep in my heart I do not think I will ever be free of them.”
She is being—he suspects—deliberately mysterious, though an unkinder word might be
manipulative:
Charles defies anyone to hear such an intriguing overture without wishing to know the rest, but he’s prepared to bet that all such questions will be met only with silence and withdrawal. But he’s willing to play that game, if she is. After all, he has enquiries of his own to pursue.
“I am sorry to hear that you were unhappy in Italy. That a country we both love should have caused you such pain.”
“I do not blame the
landscape,
Mr Mab,” she says sullenly.
“Speaking for myself, I always found the Italians most hospitable—somewhat wily, yes, and not the cleanest—”
Her face hardens, but she does not reply.
“I’m sorry,” says Charles, after a pause. “I should not have pressed you.”
She nods quickly, then lifts her cup and takes a sip. The silence spreads and softens, and a sudden wave of her scent sifts oddly with the bitter aroma of the thick black coffee, so unlike any Charles has ever tasted. He wonders if he should take his leave—if he has offended her—but just as he is on the point of rising she begins to speak again, though her voice is so low, and her eyes so distant, that her words seem for herself alone.
“I lingered in Italy for almost five years, always hoping for some change for the better, but none ever came. On the day I left it seemed the very skies shared my grief as the coach ploughed on in the pouring rain, and I could scarce even bring myself to look out of the window at the trees and mountains I had once so loved. Every hill we came to, I made myself get out and wade up through the mud and the mist, in a desperate attempt to numb my heart by fatiguing my body. When I wrote my journal that night—stiff in a chair in a dire hovel—I swore I would never take up my pen again, if it was only to record such desolate, impossible misery.”
The maid comes in and replaces the empty coffee-pot with another, then stirs the fire, bobs to her unseeing mistress, and closes the door.
“Many times since I have wondered,” Miss Clairmont continues softly, “how my life might have been different had I chosen another path. But I have always been a hopeless idealist when it comes to love.
Tutto, o niente.
”
“I’m sorry?”
She raises one eyebrow, the flicker of a smile returning to her lips, “ ‘Everything, or nothing.’ And you, a traveller in Italy, ask me that? I would have thought you might have picked up a little of the language, having spent so much time there.”
Charles turns to pour himself more coffee. “I travelled with two companions. One spoke Italian so well I never had any need to learn it.”
Miss Clairmont smiles wryly. “I had a similar experience myself, many years ago. Only in that case
I
was the one to be taken along to make a third, merely as interpreter.
Or so I was told.
Sometimes it seems to me that my whole life has been spent in the thankless and unacknowledged service of others. One of those same two people once had the insolence to tell me that I bring down all my sorrows on my
own
head, by following too much the devices and desires of my own heart—
I,
who have always been forced to do everything my heart abhors!”
A note of querulous self-pity has now crept into her voice, and deep lines have appeared on either side of her mouth, dragging her face down into petulance and middle age. And now Charles is wondering whether those sudden shifts in mood, which he dismissed at first as mere caprice, might indicate something more profound, and possibly disturbing, about this woman. Her manners are entrancing, without question, but the character that lies beneath them is beginning to seem far more complex. Not just unpredictable, but even—perhaps—perilous.
He clears his throat. “The life of a governess is, I’m sure, always a hard one. Especially for one so young, and so far from home.”
She sighs, and he sees, with some shame, that there are tears in her eyes.
“
That
I was resigned to, though I confess it was a long and bitter struggle to reconcile myself to the life I was forced to live. No, it has not been work that has exhausted me. Not work, but love.”
She gets up suddenly and moves to the window, where she stands with her back to him, gazing out over the withered garden, and into the past.
“When my mother was ill she and I lived together in a room scarcely bigger than this. There was space only for one bed, so I slept on the sopha, every night for more than a year. And still I had to labour every daylight hour to keep us from starving. In all that time, I had no respite. Others who might have helped—who
should
have helped—merely turned their backs, saying such a life would be hell itself. And so it was. So it was.”
There is grief in her voice now, and a deep, unbearable, long-silent resentment.
“Six days in seven I endured two hours in a creeping stinking omnibus to teach Italian to a spoiled, stupid girl, and all I had to return to was the remnants of a filthy meal, and a mother who scarcely knew me. Who would go out when I was gone and wander the streets half dressed, not knowing who she was or where, and handing money I had slaved for to chance-met strangers and passers-by.” She hangs that proud head of hers now, and leans heavily against the window.
Charles takes a step forward, torn between pity and a terrible recognition. “What did the doctors say? Could they not help you?”
She raises her head a little, but does not turn. “They claimed she was suffering from nervous fever. An ‘excess of function in her nerve centres,’ or some such words. By the end she could scarcely keep still—day and night she would writhe and mutter and pull at her clothes. She had no rest—and gave me none. You cannot possibly comprehend what that is like.”
“I do,” he says quietly. “More than you know. My great-uncle is suffering from a very similar malaise. We are doing what we can to care for him, but that seems all too pitifully little. But we are hopeful. We are hopeful.”
Miss Clairmont turns, and he can see compassion in those luminous eyes. “I am sorry, Mr Mab. Truly. I fear it is a malady that does not retrace its steps.”
Charles swallows, and nods.
“If you will forgive me,” she says. “I have letters I must write.”
Charles bows and moves aside to let her past, and as she draws level with him she puts her hand on his arm. He feels the warmth of her skin for the briefest second, and then she is gone.
Charles knows better than to try to investigate the trunk in the broad light of day, and by the time he leaves that afternoon for Buckingham Street the light is growing dim, and the sky has turned the sickly yellow-grey of imminent thunder. The fire has burned low in the drawing-room, and the wind whips in the chimney as Charles settles down at his uncle’s side with a glass of brandy. Abel is asleep on the other side of the fire, and Maddox sitting quietly, his hands twitching now and again, and his head moving slightly erratically as he looks about the room. Charles takes one of his cool dry hands into his own. The left hand, the lifeless hand.
“How are you, Uncle?”
He says it in no expectation of a reply, but sees, with surprise that the old man seems to respond. Or perhaps it is just a coincidence. He edges closer, and on the other side of the room Abel sniffles suddenly in his doze, then settles back once more against his cushions.
“I am sorry I have been away so much recently, Uncle. I have been on a case.”
Again that tiny movement.
“Indeed I believe you worked once for the same family. Many years ago. The name of Godwin?”
And now he is sure. There is something in the old man’s face that is an answer to his words. Charles moves forward in his seat.
“You remember the case?”
A jerk of the head and Maddox’s eyes swivel past Charles’ face. Charles looks round but there is no-one there—no-one, and nothing, except the little side table that bears the remains of his great-uncle’s lunch, and his case-book for 1816. Abel must have brought it up to look at it. Charles reaches quickly for the book and places it gently on Maddox’s lap.