Arguing with the Dead E-Book

Alex Nye

• Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 462

Beschreibung

The year is 1839, and Mary Shelley - the woman who wrote Frankenstein - is living alone in a tiny cottage on the banks of the river Thames in Putney. As she sorts through the snowstorm of her husband's scattered papers she is reminded of their past: the half-ruined villas in Italy, the stormy relationship with Shelley and her stepsister Claire, the loss of her children, the attempted kidnapping of Claire's daughter Allegra from a prison-like convent in Florence. And finally, her husband's drowning on the Gulf of Spezia as they stayed in a grim-looking fortress overlooking the sea. What she has never confided in anyone is that she has always been haunted by Shelley's drowned first wife, Harriet, who would come to visit her in the night as she slept with her two tiny children in a vast abandoned villa while Shelley was away litigating with lawyers. Did Mary pay the ultimate price for loving Shelley? Who will Harriet come for next?

Leseprobe

For Micah and Martha, Liz, Nick and my husband Joe…

With much love.

INTRODUCTION

I’ve always been fascinated by three historical and literary figures who might seem unconnected but in my mind are linked: Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley and Mary Queen of Scots. All three are female poets and writers (Mary Stuart also merits this description) whose closeness to Nature and the landscapes they inhabited fills my imagination.

Mary Shelley, the narrator of Arguing with the Dead, has a strong literary and historical connection with wild Scotland. What fascinates me most about Mary Shelley is how Nature is a huge source of inspiration for her. Mary loved wild landscapes, mountains, rivers and bleak snowy heights, places which were still seen as hostile and unappealing in the early nineteenth century when Mary was imagining the scenes of her famous novel, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. She used wild landscapes – a Hebridean island at one point, and also the Mer de Glace at the foot of Mont Blanc - as a backdrop for her Monster and his terrible tragedy.

People have often misunderstood the idea behind Frankenstein, in part due to the clichéd Hollywood portrayal. Mary feels deep empathy for her Monster, who is rejected by his Creator, the scientist. Having created a being out of cobbled-together body parts, Dr Frankenstein is utterly repelled by what he has made, while the Creature himself struggles to acquire language, culture and education. The Creature is, however, doomed to eternal isolation, rejected not only by his Creator but by everyone he comes across. The only person in the novel who accepts the Monster and welcomes him into the fold of human intercourse is a blind man who cannot see what the Creature looks like. The novel poses the question (echoed in a poem called Basking Shark by Norman MacCaig): Who is the Monster now? Without knowing it, Mary Shelley used poignant symbolism which still rings true to this day. Her Gothic tale can be used in schools and colleges to offer profound understanding on issues like equality, inclusion, respect, the importance of education, science and belief, and of course medical and scientific ethics. From that point of view alone, it is an amazing text.

But it wasn’t just the novel itself which inspired me to write Arguing with the Dead. It was Mary’s turbulent and difficult life, full of contradiction and conflict, hope and despair.

It was no surprise that Mary came to write a ground-breaking novel. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote A Vindication of The Rights of Woman (a hugely significant text, which was neglected by successive generations until being eventually re-embraced in the 1970s).

Mary’s life was filled with losses and bereavement. She travelled extensively, and witnessed the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars first-hand. She was a woman of profound ideas influenced by everything she saw and felt. To some extent, she was more fortunate than most. Mary found a voice at a time when most women were silent.

Little did she realise that her novel would find its way into the global imagination in the way that it has. Her novel came from a deep place, and that is why it resonates today.

Arguing with the Dead bears some similarities to For My Sins. Both have a strong and sensitive female protagonist who is also the narrator, and suffers much in the course of her life. Both have a colourful and eventful history. Both have links with the Scottish landscape which I love, and both are haunted by their past losses. But that is where the similarity stops.

The seeds for my first historical novel, For My Sins, about Mary Queen of Scots, were first planted a long time ago, in the fallow soil of childhood when I read the novel A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley, and I suppose I could date my passion for Gothic literature back to this early encounter with a traditional children’s book. It is a fascinating novel set in an ancient farmhouse, where the heroine opens doors and slips back into the sixteenth century, and to the time of Anthony Babington, who saw the imprisoned queen as a tragic heroine to be rescued. He was executed for his efforts. The tragic and romantic appeal of this story planted the first seeds of my love for Scottish history, particularly the tragic queen, when I came to write my own novel, For My Sins, where Mary is imprisoned at the end of her life, stitching her tapestries while being haunted by the ghosts of her past.

What I hope to do, both in Arguing with the DeadD and For My Sins, is to inhabit the mind and heart of a significant woman of the past. I hope I have done my two Marys – one a queen, the other a great novelist – justice.

PART ONE: THE CURTAIN RISES

Putney, February 1839

Four o’clock in the afternoon: the sun has already set. My tiny cottage in Putney overlooks a broad stretch of the Thames which has been frozen all winter long. It is quiet here. Percy is away at Cambridge, and no sound of life intrudes on my solitude.

I rest my palm on my portable writing desk which is scoured and marked by its own journey through life. It has crossed continents, traversed borders and boundaries. Close by me are familiar quill and paper, pot of ink. A small fire spits and crackles in the hearth. I no longer require many material possessions. Everything I own is dedicated to making sure my son, Percy, has a good life when I am gone.

One bird hops onto the window ledge, puts its head on one side, peers through the distorted glass. I observe his antics with quiet amusement. There is no one to remark on this little incident, to share the pleasure of it. It does not worry me, for I am used to my own company, keeping my own counsel. It was a habit forced on us from early childhood when Father required strict obedience from my sister and me.

Those words sting. “My sister and me…”

This is a melancholy time of day. Outside the world is frozen and raw, yielding little in the way of nourishment. Birds starve in search of one bright berry that is not to be had.

My thoughts catch at me. It is the early years that come back to me now, those first years at the Polygon with the big wide empty rooms and the grand piano and the first-floor balcony overlooking the bright square… Our walks to the cemetery, to sit on my mother’s grave where Father patiently taught us to trace our letters. My little fingers probed the channels carved and chiselled into the surface of the stone: the visceral feeling of mossy exploration, fingernails grating slightly as they found their way. The place was like a flowering meadow, one of the best places on earth. Mary-Jane – my replacement mother – could never understand that. Why would she?

It grows dark, and I get up to light another lantern. The little room swells with candlelight. Firewood is not always easy to come by nowadays, but I manage better than most. There are many poor souls in the city and countryside beyond who suffer in these harsh winter months.

Putney is a pleasant place to stay, and I love my cottage for all its quiet simplicity. It is small and compact with a garden which can be pretty with flowers in the summer months, although it is fairly barren at the moment. I have visitors who make their way here – when the weather permits. I have lived long enough to make plenty of enemies, but also friends.

Life would be bearable were it not for the headaches which trouble me, and the worry over Percy’s future. My father-in-law, Sir Timothy, is a bitter and resentful man, and withholds what he can while he is alive. I have no doubt that the old man has stored up a few unwelcome surprises for Percy and I. No doubt there will be certain caveats attached – as ever – to make our lives as difficult as possible when he finally meets his Maker. I try not to be pessimistic but I am afraid I do suspect the worst of both Shelley and his father. It is sixteen years now since Shelley’s death, and I suspect he will have left most of his wealth to other women, even Claire probably – my own sister – putting our son Percy low on his list of priorities.

I am a survivor. I have survived my husband, most of my children, and I will survive whatever else Sir Timothy chooses to throw at me.

I am living a life of careful penury now in order to protect what little is left, and maybe one day my son will enjoy the benefit of that. I can do without luxuries. God knows, I had enough of those once. Shelley used to put everything on account, and hoped to pay for it once Sir Timothy expired. But as it happened, my husband died first, leaving me with a mountain of debt to manage which Sir Timothy could have lifted, but refused to. For myself, it would not matter, but for my son…

The only pleasure I miss is having the means to travel again – as we did in my younger days.

Perhaps I will travel again soon, if this perpetual winter ends. It seems there will never be a thaw, and the Thames will never again flow freely between its wide banks. But of course it will, for life continues no matter what afflictions we bear. I have learned this the hard way. Even when the endless dark of winter descends, there is life underground, biding its time, the curled bud, the broken bough waiting to regenerate, to unfurl, even when we are reluctant to acknowledge it.

A white tide of snow ebbs at my window. All of England is in the grip of this big freeze. The moonlight reflects off it at night in a visible and radiant glow, and there are violet-blue shadows between the drifts by day. I have a task which keeps me tied to my desk most days. I am busily occupied reinstating Shelley’s name for posterity.

Last year I was approached by Tennyson’s publisher, Edward Moxon, who offered me the grand sum of £500 in total to edit a four-volume set of Shelley’s works. This I agreed to do, with some reluctance, but also with true diligence and purpose. My own novels do not sell so well, so why not begin on a task which will feed us and occupy my mind? I am proud to support my son and earn my living by my pen, even if it is only a meagre income, barely enough to live on. I am proud to be an independent single woman, fighting as my mother did in a world of powerful men to maintain the memory of those I loved – my mother, my husband, trying to ensure the future of my son. This is the story I tell myself.

While Percy is at Cambridge I work alone on these volumes, carefully pruning, weeding, slicing. I walk into the garden of Shelley’s poetry and attempt to tame the wilderness I find there, without sacrificing any of its magic.

I have been forbidden by Sir Timothy to write a biography of his son. He accuses me of having ruined his son’s prospects, and dragging him to the devil. When we ran away to Europe together all those years ago, we left a trail of disaster in our wake, I admit that. But Sir Timothy is no angel, and at least we lived openly and honestly by our principles. How many mistresses and illegal liaisons did the baronet hide from everyone’s view?

However, Sir Timothy grudgingly agreed at last to give Percy (being his grandson) a yearly income of £200.

“However,” his lawyer told me at the time “if you insist on writing your novels, he has intimated that he will cut that income by half with each new publication. Sir Timothy does not consider it a fit occupation for a woman, especially given the subject matter you choose to write about.”

“I see.”

“In addition,” his lawyer went on, “if Sir Timothy was ever to hear that you have fallen into debt, if he gets wind of the fact that you are struggling financially in any wise that you cannot support his grandson…”

“My son, you mean?”

“ - then he will seize Percy, and raise him at Field Place which – by all intents and purposes – would be a more fitting home for the poor lad than anything a woman like yourself can offer him. By law, he has the right to do that,” the lawyer reminds me. I do not need reminding.

I live with that threat hanging over me. But I have continued to defy Sir Timothy on both counts. I continue to write, I support my son, I avoid debt – with or without his help.

The headaches are blinding when they come. I am certain that extremes of emotion bring them on. I had to lay aside my pen yesterday evening and rest. I sat by the fire and held my brow, unable even to read.

This morning I rose with the dawn, put on a warm cloak with a shawl wrapped about my head, covering my face from the chill wind, and took a short walk by the frozen edges of the river. There was no one about, not even a cart rolling by. The artisans’ tools were silent. There was a wonderful pure stillness in the air. The sky was such a beautiful hue, a strange blend of orange and crimson, a roseate glow making the shadows blue and grey. Soft tonal shades… making me wish I could paint. I did not walk for long as I could not endure the cold, but I was able to collect bread from the baker. He was surprised to see me, and asked after my servant.

“Good white bread today,” he announced, handing over a loaf. I brought it home via a narrow path cleared through the drifts.

I have one maid, Lizzie, a young girl who comes in early and lights the fire for me, sweeps and cleans. I like to talk to her. I lend her books and am teaching her to read. Her young hands are already chapped and reddened from her chores. This will be her lot in life, I fear – but she has an enquiring mind, and I like to see her sit with a book and puzzle over the marks on the page, the look of triumph and delight as the words begin to form a pattern, the sentences build into a narrative.

Lizzie had the fire going on my return, and I drank my coffee and ate my bread – soft and not too chalky – by the fireside, while she bustled about me. She refused to eat with me, saying she would end her fast when her chores were done. Then, before she left, we spent a good half-hour reading. I insist upon it, whether she likes it or not. All women are sisters in adversity, did we but know it, and should support one another to overcome the barriers we face.

My mother’s spirit lives on in me; her example ever before me. She has done for women what must never be undone, though it is hard to keep her example alive.

How many women like Lizzie might have written books instead of washing pots and scrubbing floors, if the world were a different place?

Behind me the fire spits in the dark. Outside the Thames lies still and unmoving beneath the ice.

I wish I had enough money for Percy to have his own yacht, but there are no funds to be had for this, not until I have managed our mountain of debt. He has not inherited his father’s skill as a poet, but what he has inherited is a passionate and irrepressible love of sailing.

A curse, more like…

Nothing can quench that desire of his, to be messing about in boats, sailing free on the tide, managing the currents, embracing the wind. What I have ensured is that someone taught him to swim. Percy swims well, and he sails well. When he owns his own yacht, it will be a seaworthy one, well-made. There will be no half-measures or cutting corners on cost. No risk-taking, as his father was wont to do.

I lift my head and gaze across those frozen waters to the far bank – vanishing now behind a thick veil of darkness - and I think of another view in Italy, of a wide bay from a grim square villa where the wind did howl and set up a gloomy cadence. I never did like that house; I thought it a melancholy abode with dismal connotations and I was right to think so. For it was here Shelley lost his life. He set sail across the Gulf and never returned. He stayed with his friends for several days, merrily partying, drinking and entertaining everyone, in good spirits I was later told. The morning they set out to return, the sea was deceptively blue and calm. They did not heed the darker skies piling up behind them from the south.

In the darkened villa I sat and waited, and when the storm hit I comforted myself by thinking they would surely have not set sail in this. I waited, and I waited, Claire and I, like captive birds, nervous, edgy. The path down to the shore was a perilous one, almost inaccessible, and the house stood high above the bay like an exposed stage set where some Greek tragedy was about to be enacted. This is what it felt like to me. There were no comforts in that villa, no sense of calm or peace, nowhere to rest. It was just huge and bare and echoing, with the sea stretching before it, dark and boiling as the storm came on.

And my husband never came home. The sea claimed him. The boat he had built with his friend was not fit for such a journey, and with its top-heavy sails was easily capsized by the ferocity and strength of the waves.

We were not on good terms when he died. We had quarrelled.

Lizzie tells me not to mind my memories. She is a good girl. I often wonder what it is like to be her, to walk the river-path every morning to my cottage, to light the fire, to sweep and dust, and set the pot to boil on the stove?

This is such a small space – too small to contain my many memories – and yet I feel a certain peace here, in the presence of Lizzie.

Her view of it is that she is grateful to have such a mistress as I.

“You have books, Mrs Shelley, you have things just nice, and you teach me to read and write. There aren’t many employers who’d be so kind.”

When she leaves my cottage, I notice that her shawl is looking worn and in much need of mending. I resolve to purchase a new one for her the next time I visit the dressmaker. I don’t have any call to have new dresses made for myself. Two new gowns a year will suffice, but I shall make a point of visiting Mrs Sweeney to see if she has any good warm woollen shawls she can spare.

Will Lizzie be offended if I offer her such a gift?

Life was different once. For a time we lived in grand villas and castles, magnificent apartment rooms above foreign cities like Florence and Pisa and Livorno, gazing down at the Arno or the Tiber. But it was all built on sand, a palace of dreams with no material substance behind it. Shelley lived in the future, and he lived on credit.

Lizzie once asked me if I miss all of those luxuries I used to enjoy, and I told her honestly. I value this independence, despite its many hardships. In the past I was not required to eke out trifles as I am compelled to now, but I always had a skill at parsimony. I knew how to make do, even then, even if Shelley did not.

Oh, the past… many things were different in the past…

Lizzie left some time ago, and I am alone now with my memories. I raise my eyes to an embroidery hanging on the distempered wall with the words ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’ stitched in bright green silk – my favourite colour. My stepsister Claire laboured over it when she was carrying poor little Allegra, and I have kept it by my side ever since, hanging it on the wall of whatever bedroom I find myself in. It travels with me. Another remnant from a former life, one that no longer exists. Remnants and relics are all I have left, the scattered leavings of a life lived too intensely.

I was never one for sewing, although like many women I mend our clothes to make do with what we have, to save on the tailor’s bill. Thrift has become a lifelong habit, and I do it well.

I look around this room where I have settled myself with my few transportable goods, all of them useful, most of them bearing cherished memories.

I am a veritable nomad. I have had many homes over the years, rented rooms and hired houses and villas here and there, across London, Germany, Italy, France, the Alps. I have been fortunate to see so much, but the losses have been legion.

I am haunted by ghosts…

There are some losses we live with every day of our lives and never recover from. I will never be done grieving for them.

Even this cottage does not belong to me. It is just another halfway house. I have had many writing rooms, many desks in many cities where I have sat with my pot of ink and begun work on a new manuscript. The tools of my trade travel with me. My memories, and my papers… so many papers, locked up in a chest, waiting to be sifted and sorted through.

Shelley left his papers in complete disarray. Jottings, scribblings, doodles, half-finished verses on torn bits of parchment, water-damaged, faded and smudged: I fight my way through the tide of paper, drowning in a sea of parchment, clinging to the raft of an incomplete stanza. Edward Moxon assures me that Shelley’s poetry would be lost and forgotten were it not for my labours. He has charged me with the onerous task of rescuing his work. I am a good editor, and I am sifting my way through his texts with a keen and incisive eye. Of myself, however, there will be no trace. This is the mark of a good editor. I will leave nothing of myself behind.

I will be a ghost, a mist on the ether.

No one will ever know how much of those towers and building-blocks of manufactured stanzas and heroic compositions will be mine. I will ensure the best survives and that the bright gems and pearls are thread through with an invisible narrative holding all together. No one will ever know. But I will receive my payment in due course, and with it, I shall feed myself and my son, and ensure he continues to study at Cambridge. (That is, after all, one condition Sir Timothy has met. He pays Percy’s tuition fees.)

It has been a long night. My neck is stiff – an occupational hazard. I stretch my arms and wince as I hear a bone crack.

The desk is scattered with a snowstorm of papers. All night long memories came flooding in. In the course of this work I have found out most of Shelley’s secrets, even those he kept from me: the ghosts of other women, his many misdemeanours, some of which I knew about, some I did not.

All night long they rose before me in the darkness, all those lost souls. Little Clara and William, Allegra, Byron. Flashes of memory… A torn scrap of paper took me back there, as if no time at all had elapsed.

I stare out at the snow-filled path in front of the river where a solitary figure walks in the early dawn. If I half-close my eyes I can fancy that young girl is my sister, returned from the dead.

But the shawled figure turns her head, and a stranger meets my gaze. I raise a hand in greeting. She walks on. The scandal of her death is brushed away, like a speck of dust on a coat collar.

Phantoms surround me.

When Percy is with me the ghosts recede. His good nature and mild company put all such gloomy thoughts to rest.

But when I am alone and my desk makes its demands, then the ghosts crowd in; the ones I left behind in Italy, my little ones.

As everyone was fond of telling me, it is a mistake to live in the past…

I am left only with the leavings, scattered about my desk, falling gently in my heart like leaves from a tree that is slowly dying.

The Polygon, London 1800

I hear our distant voices, two children, Fanny and myself, walking beside Father through a flowering meadow. Except it is not a meadow. Not really. It is August. The sun is shining, and we have a posy of flowers to give to Mother. I am two or three years old, barely big enough to walk this far; Fanny is three years older, but already she is serious and sad. She remembers mother clearly, and still longs for her.

Godwin (Father) walks beside us, talking to us as if we are adults.

“And this is not a sad place to be, is it, Mary?” He turns to me first, and I nod obediently.

Fanny’s eyes light up. “It is the best place to be, because Mother is here. And although she is sorry to be dead, I know she loves it here…”

Godwin fights a measure of impatience, as if swatting at a fly. He ignores Fanny and turns to me.

“And how indeed could you know that, Fanny dear?” He laughs a little dismissively.

Fanny’s face falls.

“… because she tells me so…” she adds, on a whisper.

At first, she is not sure if anyone has heard her, but Godwin’s head whips round. She has Father’s attention at last.

“The dead cannot speak, Fanny. Your mother loved you both dearly, and it is right we should have her memory before us, but it would be a pity for you to become irrational, child.”

Fanny – who is only six – stares back at him.

“… but she does…” her small voice pipes up.

“Fanny, dear,” Father says. “You are not quite able to grasp this yet. Your father was not a man of ideas. He was a man of passions, yes, but he did not have your mother’s – nor my – erudition. He was not a sophisticated man. Just an avaricious one…” he adds.

I have no idea what he is talking about.

“Imlay was not a bad man,” he goes on, as if talking to himself. “But he was not a good one, either. He certainly did not deserve such love as she gave him, nor the sacrifices she made for him, and let us hope, Fanny, that you will not inherit any of those Imlay traits, but show yourself worthy of your Wollstonecraft heritage. Guard against it, Fanny, dear. Be more like your Mother, less like your Father.”

“Less like you, Father?” she cries, puzzled.

“Dear God...” he exclaims impatiently. “Less like your natural Father, dear. Keep up.”

“Natural?” she asks.

Still we are none the wiser.

The memory of us skipping through that flowering meadow with our little posy to visit Mother’s grave is one of many I can recall, for we visited her every day, Father, Fanny and I, until Godwin began to exclude Fanny, and took only myself…

“I see in you something your Mother would approve of… something she would encourage and nurture.”

“And not Fanny?”

Fanny is no longer beside us. She has vanished from this memory.

“Oh, Fanny is all very well. A good, kind girl, but she has not your heritage, Mary. She lacks spirit. Perhaps throwing my blood-line into the melting pot has helped, after all…” he chortled.

It was best when Father let Fanny come too, then we three would wade through the long grasses like mariners braving the sea, myself up to my neck in it. And when we reached Mother’s grave at last, we sat against the tomb and read books, or else we traced the letters in the worn stone, spelling out the words of our mother’s name until we knew them by heart. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

Our voices twitter on through the flowering meadow. We are still too young to realise this is a cemetery, and that the stones around us are the markers above dead people, to anchor them to the earth. To us it is a place of happiness and peace.

Number 29, The Polygon was a haven of peace to Fanny and I. I can still remember the library with its smooth sea of parquet flooring, shelves of books towering to the ceiling, surrounding us like a high fortress. It always seemed to be summer in Somers Town…

In most of my memories I can feel the sunlight pouring through the tall windows, bathing us like a baptism. But then something shifts. A shadow passes the window. I feel it darkening our world.

Is this the moment it all changed?

I remember Father bursting into the room, his cheeks flushed and inflamed in an unaccustomed way. He was not normally given to sudden, jerky movements, but that afternoon he looked oddly agitated.

“Ah, my dears,” he cried, with a touch of melodrama. “We are going on a little jaunt today. How would you like that?”

Trips usually meant a walk to the stationer’s or the bookstore or through the fields to St. Pancras churchyard where the flowers grew tall between the familiar grey stones.

“A trip to the theatre with our neighbours, the Clairmonts!”

Fanny looked up.

“Is she the lady you were speaking with the other day, when you were out on the balcony?”

Father made an attempt to hide his fluster. “That is the one, my dear. Charming woman. She has always been a great admirer of my work, you know. Her children are…”

“Noisy…” Fanny said boldly. Those were the days when she would still speak her mind, long before she had been crushed by life.

He paused.

“Are they, my dear? I hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t aware you had met little Jane and Charles.”

“We haven’t, Father,” Fanny murmured. “We can hear them. They’re quite loud; their voices echo in the square.”

I nodded my head in agreement, although I was not entirely sure of the facts. After all, there were so many different sounds out on the square, the slow rumble of cartwheels or the clip-clop of hooves. Voices, laughter, children too, but none of it usually invaded the quiet interior of our well-appointed house. Not that I knew of.

All of this was about to change.

Time has a way of tricking us, speeding up when we least expect it. The next thing I knew we were squashed inside a hired carriage as it rumbled over the cobbles. Myself, Fanny, Father, Mrs Clairmont and her two unfamiliar children. Two families, cheek by jowl. There were too many feathers and ribbons and pins and brooches which scratched and fluttered at my nose. There were different smells, overpowering and aggressive. These new odours were not the ones I was familiar with: they were sweet and sickly, feminine. Like a small animal, I sensed our territory being invaded: I was not in the least happy about the way Father was conducting himself. Normally sober, calm and collected, he seemed all aflutter, too ready to burst into raucous laughter at a remark made by Mrs Clairmont. He was flushed.

I remember the impression the theatre made on me. It was huge and buzzing with excitement, row upon row of animated faces in the auditorium, eagerly awaiting the rise of the curtain. The footlights burned hotly at the edges of the stage. There were painted ‘flats’ to suggest hidden and imagined worlds, and there were heroes on stage who faced darkness and distress, but rose victorious at the end.

I sat in rapt silence, completely unaware of Charles and Jane bickering away to the left of me while Fanny regarded them both with barely concealed horror. Father was preoccupied with Mrs Clairmont and seemed to miss quite a bit of the drama.

Then we had to endure the torture of the carriage ride home, where the adults bundled us children together declaring with delight that we were “bound to be friends.”

Jane regarded me with a sour look from her corner of the carriage. She was one year younger than me, and although we did not know it yet, we would become firm rivals and have a long history together which would stretch far into the future – with dark repercussions.

The next morning Fanny and I were very quiet.

“Did you enjoy the performance yesterday, girls?” Father asked at the breakfast table, his eyes glittering in a way that didn’t seem natural for him.

Fanny bowed her head but would not speak.

“I loved it,” I piped up. “We both loved it, didn’t we, Fanny?” Fanny did not reply. “Could we visit the theatre again?”

Father laughed. He seemed unusually delighted by life at present… since the Clairmonts moved next door.

“Well, we shall see about that. It’s certainly a possibility. Mary-Jane…” he cleared his throat, “Mrs Clairmont, I mean, is very fond of the theatre, and she is in sore need of some companionship. As, I find, are we.”

“Are we, Father?”

Fanny remained silent.

When she did speak, it was not what Father wanted to hear. “Could we go alone next time? Without the Clairmonts?”

An ominous hush fell. I could tell – even at that young age – that Father was not pleased.

“You will get used to them in time. It is good to have company – once in a while.”

It wasn’t long before our quiet household became invaded by the clatter and chaos of the Clairmonts. Mrs Clairmont laughed loudly, and reprimanded her children as they pounded noisily across the gleaming floors of our peaceful home.

Fanny and I watched in silence.

There was nothing to say.

And there was nothing to be done.

At night in our beds we whispered about it under cover of darkness.

“Perhaps they’ll move away soon?” I suggested.

“But they have only just arrived,” Fanny pointed out.

I blinked at her through the gloom. She seemed to have changed lately. Her boisterousness and candour had gradually faded. She seemed less like herself, more … absent.

“Fanny, Mary, I have some delightful news for you both, and I am sure you will share my happiness and – yes, relief. After these years of difficult solitude, we are to have comfort, at last.”

Fanny tried to smile. I could feel the tectonic plates of the earth shifting beneath my feet. The world was about to end.

“I would like you to say how-do-ye-do, very nicely, to…” he paused for effect before turning towards the open door “… your second mamma.”

As if on cue, our next-door neighbour appeared in the room, smiling almost apologetically. She had already become a too-frequent visitor to our home as far as Fanny and I were concerned.

It was very unwise of Father to surprise us with this news in front of Mrs Clairmont herself, as there could only be one outcome, and it was embarrassing for us all.

“We do not want a second mamma!” Fanny and I wailed.

Mrs Clairmont reddened while Father stammered and stuttered, at a loss for words.

I wondered if Mrs Clairmont knew about our daily visits to the graveyard. A dead loved-one held dominion over us all, and no one living could replace her. Mrs Clairmont – my poor stepmother – had yet to learn this. You cannot argue with the dead.

How easy it is, to conjure those early memories, to feel what it is to be a child again. I remember brushing my way through a sea of grasses, releasing clouds of pollen into the air, picking at the tiny dusty seed-heads of dead flowers. I remember thinking that the bumblebees looked like fat little soldiers, decked in imperial-looking gold.

Men in aprons and uniforms helped Mrs Clairmont move her wooden boxes and few pieces of furniture into Number 29. Now the house she used to occupy beside our own stood empty, waiting for new tenants, while our own home was full of intruders.

We hid in our rooms, or took to escaping to St. Pancras.

When I leaned against the tombstone, I could feel mamma’s secret heart beating beneath the earth.

I told her about Father’s plans for a second mamma.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin did not reply.

Father was supposed to be strong and resolute; he was supposed to soldier on alongside his daughters, educating us in the ways of liberal independence. Instead he had failed at the first hurdle. He wanted a wife to mother his girls, to order the food and meals, to see about the laundry. He wanted assistance so that he could retreat further into the dusky obscurity of his own study.

And when he emerged from that study, it was not to be with his daughters any longer, but to laugh and cavort with Mrs Clairmont, to blush and stammer and behave in an unrecognisable manner that we were not at all used to.

I tore at one of the stalks and swatted a fly with it.

Fanny and I were accustomed to speaking quietly in our house. We lived among writers and knew how to keep the peace, but the Clairmonts had absolutely no understanding of the rules.

There were some compensations. When we returned home, there was a meal waiting for us. Clean vegetables with our meat, and a pudding. As my spoon carved up the soft deliciousness of that wobbling confection, I watched Mrs Clairmont (Mary-Jane, as we agreed to call her) attending to her son Charles, fussing over his collar.

I decided that this was one of the benefits of living under a new regime: there were more puddings at table whereas before we had none. Fanny and I acknowledged that Mary-Jane was quite good at dealing with the food and laundry. Is that why Father had taken up with her?

When I heard them giggling together behind his study door, I wondered if there might not be another reason.

The Polygon, 1807

Years pass and we gain a little brother, William, five years younger than myself. Father dotes on him. He is the apple of everyone’s eye, the fruit of the Godwin/Clairmont union...

Another memory rises to the surface, one of furtive eavesdropping…

I had crept outside onto the landing, and was listening intently. There were no lights burning. A pale bone-white moon shone in at a high window. In the hall below was a faint flicker of candlelight beneath the study door, and voices raised within. The rest of the house was in darkness.

“I have always respected her memory, like a second presence in this household…”

I leaned over the banister, slid towards the top of the staircase.

I could hear Father’s voice, stern like gravel or a bed of stones when the sea hits it.

“… difficult, my dear…”

I listened at doors while the adults conducted their lives in sticky disarray.

I was halfway down the staircase when the door opened and Mary-Jane emerged, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. It was too late to escape. I stood still, hoping she would not notice me.

She was halfway across the hall before she happened to glance up. I must have appeared as a silent ghost, standing there in my white shift.

She gasped, but recovered herself quickly. We stared at each other.

I can repent of it now, in my wisdom, but as a child I think I must have sent her a look of triumph.

She and Godwin were not getting on so well after all, then? Our replacement Mamma had not succeeded in becoming quite the replacement he had hoped for – as is so often the case with ‘second mammas’.

Later, when I climbed back into bed, I warmed my cold toes against my sister’s bare legs, and she stirred in her sleep. The bed sheets rustled.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“Nowhere.”

I began to scratch at my rash until my fingernails were bloody.

“Leave it alone!” Fanny scolded.

“I can’t help it.”

“You will make it worse.”

“The chamber pot is full,” I murmured, playing at the helpless little sister, in need of my elder.

“I know. I’ll empty it in the morning.”

Then she rolled over and went back to sleep.

Jane Clairmont, on my other side, lay very still, as if she was listening to us. I lay between them both, trying not to scratch. A human buffer. Soon enough, divided loyalties would come into play.

“Mary, why can you not be a good girl towards your stepmother?”

I hung my head.

“Why do you show her such insolence?”

“I didn’t mean to upset her.”

“That’s not your mother’s view of it.”

I wanted to cry out, She is not my mother, but stifled the words before I spoke them. For that would not do at all.

“Fanny is grateful for the attention we give her,” Father said. “She is grateful for all that Mary-Jane tries to do for her, whereas you?”

He broke off.

I stared at the floor, my cheeks burning.

“I would like to see some improvement in your behaviour towards your mamma,” he muttered. “Please make an effort to be more accommodating.”

Under Clairmont there was a new regime. The portrait of our mother still hung in the study above Father’s desk; she could not banish it to a remote corner of the house, much as she would have liked to. She dismissed the nursemaid and the two maids we had been used to, and hired new staff. Strangers. A governess and a tutor.

I was ten years old when Godwin began to voice his worries and anxieties about money. While we children revelled in the freedom of our address at the Polygon, with its wide empty rooms and its first-floor balcony overlooking the bright square below, we had no idea that it was all built on credit. The notion that we could afford to live at such an illustrious address was an illusion. Here we had access to clean air, clean food, clean water, well away from the stench and filth of the city streets. We had space to play and to roam, but I was beginning to sense that it could be taken from us at any moment. It was a precarious palace we lived in. There were invisible cracks in the edifice through which the winds of change were blowing, threatening to transform our fine hopes into a ruin.

I withdrew even further into Godwin’s library. I liked to be surrounded by books, quietly reading, the smell of leather and dust scenting the air with its perfume, heavy volumes towering above me, the grand piano in the bay window overlooking the square. It gave me comfort and joy almost as deep as the flowering meadow where our First Mamma lay.

It did not always last long. The door would slam open, and Mary-Jane might appear.

She would stop if she saw me.

“I am looking for your father…”

“I have not seen him,” I would reply.

She would prepare to leave then glance back at the piano. “And leave that thing alone, will you? Unless you hope to learn to play it.”

Have I imagined such harsh rejoinders, with a child’s sense of injustice? Perhaps she was kinder than I remember.

That afternoon, she caught up with Father in his study across the hall.

“Not again…” I heard him murmur, before the door swung shut behind them.

“But I am worried, William. I have been through the accounts, and it is simply not adding up. Surely, dear, even you must see that?” Then her voice became soothing. “I know you have so many great preoccupations of the mind, believe me… I know… and I value that above all else, but… well, we cannot live on credit alone, dear. You know where it will end.”

A muffled response from Father.

“Debtors’ prison!” Mary-Jane barked. “That is where it will end. Believe me, I know. I have been there. My own children have been there.”

My ears pricked up, and I found myself leaning forward to listen.

Debtors’ prison? This was news to me. Fanny and I had no idea that Mary-Jane had such a colourful past. We always imagined her to be the respectable widow Father told us she was.

“I know you are right, my dear, but what is to be done? I have a status to maintain...”

There was a short silence.

“I know exactly what is to be done. We have to leave this house.” I heard Father make a noise of protest, but she added, “You cannot afford to pay the bills.”

My heart sank into my stomach. Leave this house? I gazed up at the rows of silent books, the tall windows letting in the bright light, the vast expanse of parquet flooring, stretching away from me like a polished sea of gold.

But what troubled me more was that Mary-Jane had revealed herself to be a person of more good sense than Godwin. She, it appeared, was the practical one, ready with a solution to our problems.

I flinched suddenly as a door was slammed.

Then I heard her heels rapping sharply against the flags. She was sobbing again, in rage.

A carriage drew up outside Number 29.

We had been ordered upstairs to our room.

I cracked the door open an inch, and listened to the quiet commotion far below, the cheerful greetings, Father’s obvious delight, Coleridge’s familiar voice full of warmth and good humour. We have a visitor.

“Mary,” Fanny warned. “Close the door.”

“No.”

“You will embarrass Father.”

“He did not used to mind.”

“Mary-Jane will catch you.”

“We shall see.”

My stepsister Jane was watching me in mute admiration, in awe of my quiet defiance.

I crept to the banister, peered over the side.

Father was greeting our old friend, Coleridge, below.

“Come,” Father said, and ushered his guest into the study. The door softly closed behind them, excluding me. Their voices became muffled.

There was no one about.

Mary-Jane was in the nursery with William.

I crept stealthily down the stairs into the hall, Jane trailing me like a shadow.

All was quiet.

The study door opened and a maid emerged, carrying a silver tray. She left the door ajar and sailed across to the back kitchen.

Here was our chance.

We slipped inside, and disappeared behind the couch. Two silent girls in our nightshifts.

The study was warm, and full of crimson light. A cheerful fire was blazing in the hearth, and the reflected flames danced on the hearth-rug. There were candles lit, and a shaded oil lantern burning on a side table. I remember the ruby glint of a bottle of port, and the tinkle of glasses being filled. The smells were rich, wood-scented, exotic almost, for that is what Coleridge was like: he brought with him the essence and dark excitement of his travels. I could hear the roar of the tiger, smell the wild untamed jungle in his presence, as if he conjured them there with his words.

Father and Coleridge continued their conversation. If they knew we were there, they gave not a hint of it, ignoring our presence completely.

“It does me good to see you again,” Father said.

“It has been a long time.”

“All is well?”

I heard Father sigh. “Too many creditors knocking at the door. Sometimes I do not know how to stave off disaster.”

“Life is hard. Perhaps something will turn up soon…”

“Writers always live in hope.”

When Coleridge began to share with Father his poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I fancy he knew fine well that we girls were hiding behind the couch, listening. Maybe that was why he choose to recite it.

The crimson and ruby shadows glowed in the darkened room as he swept us back in time to the horrors and riches of his tragic story

“What evil looks had I from old and young! Instead of

the cross, the Albatross, about my neck was hung!”

The mariner killed an albatross and thereby caused the deaths of his shipmates. Guilt hung about his neck like a noose. I felt a cold, nervous excitement. It chimed with something buried deep in my own experience.

I know what that feels like, I thought to myself. I know what it is to carry a burden of guilt, of blame and responsibility. Was I not responsible, indirectly, for my own mother’s death? Child-bed fevers are common, even now. Mothers often give up their lives so their daughters might live… But the realisation that I might be to blame for my own mother’s demise arrived in my lap as if it had fallen from above like a great fat bird with bloodied feathers. I am guilty of murder! I thought. Or manslaughter at the very least. I carry my own albatross.

At this point the door burst open and Mary-Jane appeared among us. The spell was broken, the world of the Ancient Mariner shrivelled and died. We were no longer travellers in an inn, listening to foreign tales. We were two errant girls, caught out in the act of eavesdropping.

Mary-Jane was quick to out us from behind the couch, fulsome with apologies. Coleridge made to protest, but Father looked conflicted, as if he did not know whether to insist that we be allowed to stay.

Mary-Jane clasped a shoulder each, and dragged us from the room.

I heard a voice behind murmuring “… surely… too severe…?”

We were not given the chance to say goodbye.

There were tears and protests as she noisily marched us back up the staircase, her voice echoing through the household.

To Coleridge we were the two little girls of the great Mary Wollstonecraft, come to eavesdrop. He remembered us listening to his tales with open-mouthed wonder when we were knee-high; I wonder if he even noticed that the girl beside me was not in fact Fanny, but another – an interloper. Children often look the same to adults, and they change so quickly as they grow…

Fanny had decided to remain upstairs, too depressed to join us in eavesdropping. I feel a trace of guilt now when I think about how we excluded her that evening, and on other occasions too.

Fanny Imlay was slowly being usurped.

PART TWO: REBELLION

Skinner Street, 1807

We were sworn to secrecy by a desperate Mary-Jane, as she hissed at us to hurry and dress.

Creditors had been beating a path to our door all winter, and then turned away, disappointed. Godwin and Mary-Jane had been unable to pay the rent on our beautiful home for the past six months – the visits had been getting more aggressive - and so they plotted an elaborate and farcical escape in the middle of the night.

We gathered our few things, and I held William’s hand while we tiptoed down the staircase for the last time. We assembled in hushed tones in the grand elegant hallway under cover of darkness. There was not even time to glance into the library, that space I’d always revered, and whisper a final farewell.

Outside a cart was waiting, already loaded up with Father’s books. Another was full of our linen and other household effects, all hastily packed into wooden chests.

Father looked furtive, like a comic figure from the Merchant of Venice.

This was our leave-taking of the Polygon, the place where Fanny and I had been so happy – at first, anyway. The houses around the square were all shuttered against the night, no candles or lamps lit, not a light showing: no one observed our departure. Our neighbours were all in their beds, like the good citizens they were. But we – the Godwins/Clairmonts – had already begun to stumble on the wrong side of respectability once more.

It was a strange journey, undertaken at night when no one respectable was abroad. Mary-Jane comforted and cajoled us, declaring that it was “an adventure”, that it was “best for everyone” and that our new home was “quite delightful, much more central and therefore interesting…”

On and on she prattled, while we listened to the quiet rolling of the wheels against the cobblestones, and the tramping of the horses’ hooves. Poor Mary-Jane. With the hindsight of age I can see she was perhaps doing her best to console us.

When the carts rolled into a dark and narrow street, and then passed the ominous facade of Newgate Prison, we three girls glanced at each other curiously. Not long after this the front cart drew to a halt.

Surely, there must be some mistake?

“London is a city of contrasts,” Godwin was saying “where the rich and the poor live cheek by jowl.”

“But which are we, Father?” I couldn’t help asking. There had always been some confusion over the issue. One moment I was taught that my heritage was of the highest order, the next that we were teetering on the brink of ruin. We must buy our groceries on credit and lie to the landlord about the rent! Is that what rich people did?

“All writers, Mary, come up against the challenges of straitened circumstances. You ought, really, to understand this by now.”

I was ten. I was beginning to understand a lot of things…

If you have the appearance of being rich and grand, if you live at an illustrious address, you will easily obtain credit from local tradesmen, especially if you happen to be a lord or baronet’s son.

But there may come a point when your creditors grow impatient, lose faith in your wealthy status, and expect to be paid. Lord knows, our Father was no lord or titled earl. He owned no lands. He was a man of ideas. And ideas do not necessarily pay the rent.