A Fatal Likeness Read Online Free PDF Page B

which rather—in his opinion—defeats the whole object. And who is this ‘Ianthe’ Shelley talks of, with her dark blue eyes, who sleeps and may never waken? He picks the book up again, and turns, with some frustration, to the notes on the poem written by Mrs Shelley, which turn out to reveal rather more about her devotion to her husband’s memory than they do about the actual meaning of what he wrote. Charles sits back, wondering for a moment about that very literary marriage, and what Shelley would have thought if he had lived to see his wife’s fame out-star his own. Say ‘Shelley’ in 1850—or, indeed, in 2013—and what will come to mind will not be Queen Mab, or Adonais, or even the Ode to a Skylark, but Frankenstein. Then as now, it is Mary who is celebrated, Mary who is recognised. She may do due obeisance before her husband’s poetic genius, but it is her own hideous progeny that endures. Or rather the idea we image of it, for as Charles well knows—having sat through an excruciating burlesque version at the Adelphi Theatre only a year ago—it is the caricature dramatisations that have made the myth of the monster, not its creator’s chilly, cerebral prose.
    Charles is about to turn back to where he left off in the volume when the door opens and Abel appears carrying a plate of mutton and potatoes. Charles has been so engrossed he’s completely forgotten about lunch.
    “Summat interesting in the end, was it, Mr Charles?” says Stornaway, putting the hot plate down a little gingerly on the desk. “So there was nae threat to the pastry-forks after all?”
    There’s no disguising the I-told-you-so gleam in his eye, and Charles has the good grace to return grin for grin. “You can breathe again, Abel, the cutlery proved to be entirely unscathed. It was something rather more complicated than that, as it turned out.”
    He hadn’t realised how hungry he was and picks up the knife and fork and starts enthusiastically on the meat. Abel hovers in the door, transparently eager for elaboration. And as it happens, Charles had been on the point of summoning him.
    “Do you remember a case involving a William Godwin, Abel? Some sort of legal matter?”
    “Lawyer was he, Mr Charles?”
    Charles makes a face; his recent experience of lawyers has not been a happy one, as perhaps you know.
    “William Godwin, my dear Abel, was as far from a lawyer as one could possibly imagine. He was a philosopher, and a celebrated one. And a writer of novels in his spare time, if you can credit such a shift from the sublime to the banal. And he was also my new client’s grand-father, and it seems my uncle also worked for him, years ago.”
    Abel’s spry old face now looks concerned. He’s always prided himself on his memory, but having witnessed the drawn-out disintegration of a far finer mind than he ever had, he’s now disproportionately disturbed by any failure in his own.
    “A client of Mr Maddox? When was this, Mr Charles?”
    Charles shrugs. “I’m not sure. Sir Percy didn’t say.”
    “Well,” says Abel slowly, “I remember there was a period in ’16 when I were away from London for a time. It were when me old father died. And I were in Ireland on a case a year or so afore that. A smuggling ring, that one was.”
    Charles smiles, seeing the remembrance of triumphs past in the old man’s eyes.
    “Would you mind going through the files for me, Abel, and seeing if you can find Godwin’s name?”
    Abel smiles now in his turn. It’s not escaped his notice that there is a flush to his young master’s cheeks that has not been seen there for more than a week. “It’d be my pleasure, Mr Charles.”
    When Charles takes his empty plate downstairs an hour later he finds Molly in the kitchen chopping vegetables for dinner. She looks up briefly when he comes in, then drops her eyes again. Her skin is so velvet dark that he cannot see if she is blushing, and even though we know he has rather an acute alertness to