A Fatal Likeness Read Online Free PDF

man’s mind wanders still astray, his dreams darker than any wakened eyes behold. Charles hesitates in the doorway, fighting the urge to go straight back downstairs and ask Abel exactly what he thinks he’s doing leaving Maddox here alone, but then there’s a movement on the other side of the room and he realises that he is not, in fact, alone. Molly is with him. She’s been raking the hearth and making up the fire, but now she gets up from her knees and goes silently over to where Maddox is lying, wrapped in blankets in his favourite arm-chair. She pulls up another chair and sits down by his side, then takes one of his dry old hands in her own and reaches out gently to caress his rough grey hair. She does not speak—has never spoken since the day she was first employed in this house—but Charles watches mesmerised now as she starts to sing to Maddox in the low keening hum he has heard once or twice before. Moment by moment, as the sound lifts and ebbs, the old man’s restless body quietens to a peace, and the fretfulness slowly smoothes back from his face. It’s the first time Charles has ever felt like an intruder in this room. He watches a moment more, then closes the door quietly behind him and goes back down to the front door, and a sudden shaft of sunlight that glows the street golden against the inky indigo sky.
    Up at the Strand the traffic has come to a standstill, and as Charles comes level with the road he can see at once why. Lumbering up from Holborn are three enormous pyramids, balanced somewhat precariously on a dray cart pulled by two labouring horses, and decorated from top to bottom with hieroglyphs, toothy crocodiles, and enigmatic elongated cats. Four young men in loincloths are posted at each corner, passing down handbills inviting the discerning London public to present themselves at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, there to peruse Mr Bonomi’s Panorama of the Nile, a show unparalleled for both its entertainment and its edification, during the course of which they will traverse more than a thousand miles by river to the second cataract, and visit the temple of Abu Simbel by torchlight. And all for the paltry sum of a single shilling. Charles smiles at the proprietor’s notion of ancient Egyptian garb (and not for the first time, since he saw this particular diorama a year ago when it opened and was actually rather impressed), then ducks behind the barrel-chested constable who is even now bearing down upon the Pharaoh’s coachman, with instructions to move along there, move along.
    Once safely on the opposite side of the street, Charles edges behind the crowd of excited onlookers and attendant ragtag and snot-nose pickpockets, and slips up Bedford Street to Nattali & Bond, Purveyors of Second-hand Books. From whence he emerges, in due course, with a parcel containing a set of Shelley’s poetry. He’d wanted the Medwin memoir too, but Mr Bond had doubted many were printed, though he has promised (for a small inducement) to ask among his fellow booksellers and let Charles know if it can be found. The four volumes in Charles’ parcel have gold-embossed spines and smooth marbled cardboard covers, but only the first seems to have seen any wear. An impression confirmed when Charles gets the books home and discovers that the pages in the other three have not even been cut. It’s not a promising portent, and it’s with a rather heavy heart that he sits down with Volume I to begin Queen Mab. Only to put the book down again twenty minutes later, completely nonplussed. He has a vague memory that the poem was supposed to be a furious attack on everything from religion to meat eating, to the institution of marriage, and Charles had been looking forward to a spirited polemic. Only what he’s found instead is a seemingly endless introduction peopled by spirits of quite another kind. Quite how Death and Sleep and the Fairy Queen can possibly be relevant to the task in hand, Charles has absolutely no idea,