Angelmonster (3 page)

Jane looked cynical. “And did he
buy
any books?”

“No, but what has that to do with it?”

“Have you never noticed how titled people are always the least ready to part with their money?”

“Jane!” I was exasperated. “Sometimes you sound more like your mama than is good for you!”

She smiled her beautiful smile. “I am teasing you because I am envious that you were there and I was not.” She leant towards me. “
And
you were wearing that blue dress which I covet so shamelessly. What was he like?”

I took her by the shoulders. “Like a god. Like an angel. Like every hero in every romance you have ever read.” Releasing her, I took up her book and looked at the title. “Like the most perfect example of male beauty represented in this book. Which, by the way, I have never heard of.”

“Why, Mary, how old-fashioned you are!” Peevishly she took it back. “It is newly published. Mama borrowed it from somebody.”

“It must be a novel, then, since Mama reads nothing else.”

“It
is
a novel.” She sighed. “But so far it is rather dull. Three or four families in a country village, that is all.”

“Abominable!” I put my hand to my throat, affecting shock. “Do you mean there are no haunted castles? No thunderstorms? No abducting and rescuing? Why, Jane, what possessed you to begin such a serious book?”

She responded to my mockery by kicking me gently. I looked at her foot, elegantly shod in one of the soft kid slippers she always wore indoors, aware how much smaller it was than my own.

“It is supposed to be a comedy,” she said. “And I must admit that the story is very true to life. There is a family of daughters whose father can leave them no fortune, so they must find rich husbands.”

“In that case,” I retorted, “male beauty will certainly appear soon. Perhaps in the very next chapter.”

“The most beautiful daughter is called … now, let me see.” She turned the pages, frowning prettily. “Oh! Her name is Jane! How penetrating this author is!”

She said this with the coyness she had learned from her mama, which never failed to drain my reserve of tolerance. But I collected myself. “Shall we speak of Mr Shelley, or do you not want to hear?”

“I can scarcely contain my impatience!” she said, putting
Pride and Prejudice
aside. “Describe his looks immediately. In every detail, please.”

“He has curly hair, quite long, over his collar. And beautiful eyes.”

“And are his clothes new, and well kept?”

“Jane! I thought you were a romantic!”

“I assure you I am,” she said gently. “But if you are going to fall in love with an earl’s son, or whatever he is, do you not think you might make sure he has money, as well as a title?”

I paused before I spoke. “His clothes are shabby, actually. His boots are quite worn out.”

“Ah.”

“Papa knows he has money, though. I could hear it in his voice when he spoke to him. You know, that way Papa has of speaking to people who admire his work, and whom he considers might be induced to give him financial support.”

Jane looked thoughtful. “Mama told Fanny that Papa is in debt for the rent. He has not paid for the shop or the house for six months. Do you suppose he is hoping this Shelley will help him?”

I said nothing. I was surprised enough by this news, without having to consider Shelley’s potential involvement.

“But of course …” said Jane with a sly look, “if he were to become Papa’s
son-in-law
…”

“Jane, do not torment me!” I stood up and walked about her room. “I must not invite ridicule by throwing myself at him.” I was glad Jane had not witnessed the performance with the ladder. “All he did was remember my name. If you had been there, do you not think he would have done the same for you?”

“No, I do not,” she said decisively. “And if we do not receive a call from Lord or Viscount or Whatever-he-is Shelley in the very near future, I will eat this novel, pride and prejudice and all, with potatoes and gravy.” She took up the book again. “Now, go away and let me read about the lover of the beautiful Jane. He must surely enter soon!”

ANGEL

H
e must surely enter soon.

Every day for three days I sat on the window-seat and watched for Shelley. Naturally I could not mention his name to Papa, and I had no wish to speak it in front of Mama or Fanny. Only Jane shared my secret. The man I marry will…

On the fourth day, he came.

His tie was neat and his jacket had been brushed, and he carried a cane with a silver top. He had a handsomely bound book in the crook of his elbow. When he was shown into the drawing-room, he took little notice of Mama’s effusive welcome but handed the book straight to me.

“I understand you are a reader,” he said, smiling broadly. “Would you do me the honour of reading this? I am very happy to lend it.”

The book was Cowper’s
Hymns
. A suitably improving text to give a young girl in the presence of her mother. Mama, admiring the book, drowned my thanks with hers. But as Shelley attended to her I realized he was not attending to her at all.
I care nothing about the book
, he was thinking,
I care only for the girl. How can I get her away from her tiresome mama?

“The day is very fine,” he declared when Mama paused. “Might we not take a walk? We are but a few strides from a pleasant churchyard, I notice.”

“I do not take walks, sir,” said Mama.

I was not inviting you
,
madam
, said Shelley’s small, pinched bow.

“But of course my daughters would be happy to accompany you,” she continued. “You will take some tea with us first?”

“That would be a pleasure,” said Shelley.

“Ring the bell,” she instructed me. “And summon Jane and Fanny.”

I went to the bell by the fireplace, dismayed. Did she think Shelley wished to escort
all
her daughters?

When Jane and Fanny appeared Shelley bowed, his gaze lingering on Jane’s face longer than on Fanny’s. Fanny, confronted with an attractive man only a year or two older than herself, flushed. But Jane remained as cool and coquettish as always. I reflected sourly that she must have rehearsed that perfect smile in front of the mirror upstairs, just as I had rehearsed my own less-than-perfect one.

We sat down uncomfortably. While Mama prattled, I examined Shelley.

He was still the angel I had described to Jane, as perfect a specimen of young manhood as I had ever seen. His smooth cheeks and light curls made him look even younger than his years. He held his head nobly, with the air of a man of means and education poised at the beginning of a brilliant career. His tall frame fitted into the armchair without awkwardness. He nodded as Mama talked, but made little reply.

I looked at his hands. They were bony like the rest of him, and white, with prominent veins. On one of the fingers of his left hand he wore a gold ring. I tried to see the seal, but he put the hand in his pocket suddenly. Perhaps it was not a signet ring, but a family heirloom of some kind. Whatever it was, I was satisfied that Shelley met all my expectations of a suitor. As I passed him a cup of tea, our fingers touched. He caught my eye. I summoned a smile as charming as Jane’s, and more sincere.

Then Mama fired an arrow into the conversation.

“May I ask, Mr Shelley,” she began, a slice of bread and butter halfway to her mouth, “after the health of
Mrs
Shelley? I hear she is indisposed.”

I was standing by the tea tray. During the silence which followed, I sat down shakily on a footstool. I could not look at Jane or Fanny.

Mrs Shelley? She was Shelley’s mother, surely. Hope rushed forward eagerly, then retreated again as I recollected that Mama was too much society’s slave to neglect anyone’s title. As the wife of an earl, Shelley’s mother would be referred to as
Lady
Shelley. My thoughts racing, I was forced to conclude that Shelley was, indeed, married. And his wife was
indisposed
. Jane and I knew what was meant by that word, even if our less worldly older sister did not – Mrs Shelley was expecting a baby.

My heart felt ready to burst, but Shelley seemed unembarrassed. He sipped his tea, put down the cup and sat back in his chair as calmly as if my stepmother had remarked upon the weather.

“I thank you for your solicitations,” he said. “She is recovering from the sickness she has suffered recently. Her family is hopeful that she may take a change of air at some coastal town next month.”

Mama had swallowed her bite of bread and butter. “And shall your little daughter accompany her?” she asked, tilting her head to one side in a way which might have been attractive twenty years before. “Or is she to be left in the care of her capable papa?”

I stared at her. Then I stared at Shelley. Then I stared at the carpet. Oh God, I thought, what it must be to bear the child of a man like this! And this woman, his wife, had already done so, and was about to do so again!

My head began to ache. If all this were true, why had Shelley taken notice of me in the shop? Why had he come here today? Why, if he was already a husband and father, had he brought me a gift and offered to take me for a walk? The effort of understanding was too great. I felt hot. The pattern on the carpet began to dance, weaving between the legs of the footstool and around the hem of my gown.

Jane and Fanny sat beside each other on a small sofa, Jane alert and interested, Fanny slumped languorously in her seat, her hand resting on Jane’s, her face and neck still pink. Now I understood why Mama wanted all of her daughters to accompany Shelley on a walk. The expedition was to be a family outing, with Shelley performing the role of a kindly male visitor taking a trio of spare females for an afternoon stroll.

I drew my shawl more closely around my shoulders. Beneath the thin knitted silk, more fashionable than warm, the flesh on my arms tingled. Though I was sitting on a footstool like a child, at that moment I did not feel like a child.

My heart forced its way into my throat and beat there, forbidding speech. For all my shock at Mama’s revelation, I sensed that Shelley’s intentions were quite different from hers. I had received his silent communication in the shop, and another just now when he had given me the book. He wanted me. Me, me,
me
and no other.

REBELLION AND RESPECTABILITY

D
uring the next few weeks Shelley called regularly, becoming, in the opinion of my parents, a model of elder-brotherly affection to both Jane and myself. Although it was Papa who hoped to win Shelley as a rich patron, it was Shelley who charmed Papa, spending hours in discussion with him after we ladies had retired from the dining table, and publicly declaring himself a disciple of Papa’s ideas about social reform. If Papa suspected the real reason for this blossoming friendship he did not speak of it. He merely basked in Shelley’s admiration, trusting that financial support from such a wealthy man would follow.

Jane and I would often accompany Shelley on walks to the churchyard where my mother was buried, the very place he had suggested to Mama on his first visit. He liked to sit with us on a stone bench there, reading poems or telling stories of his exploits.

Having been expelled from university because he refused to believe in God, and thrown off by his rich father, who approved of neither his beliefs nor his style of living, he now struggled to provide for himself by publishing poems and relying on the generosity of friends. My father persisted in his belief that Shelley had some money in the form of trusts or legacies, but Shelley did not provide a penny to help with Papa’s outstanding rental payments. In view of Shelley’s sensational history, his gift of Cowper’s
Hymns
was surely a joke.

Most sensationally of all, the story of his wife, Harriet, emerged. It sounded like a fairy tale. He had abducted her from her boarding school three years previously, when she was sixteen and he was nineteen, and had married her despite parental disapproval on both sides. They had had a baby girl, Ianthe, and Harriet was now expecting a second child.

“Sixteen!” exclaimed Jane. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Shelley, who was sitting between us on the bench, hung his head. “I
am
ashamed,” he confessed. I could tell from his voice, though Jane could not, that he was teasing her. “But I am obliged to bear it as best I can. My susceptibility to sixteen-year-old feminine beauty will not abate, whatever I may do.” He raised his eyes to her face, then to mine. “Have you any remedy you might suggest?”

“You are a very bad man!” I scolded. “Have you no pity for my sister’s sensibilities? She believes every word you say.”

Shelley slid off the bench and knelt on the grass in front of me. “And you do not? Madam, I entreat you, hear me,” he said, rolling his eyes theatrically. “I can explain.”

Jane and I exchanged amused looks.

“I will hear you,” I agreed, “if you will stop these monkey tricks and be serious.”

He became serious. He sat cross-legged like a schoolboy, looking from one to the other of us as he spoke. “My wife Harriet and I are estranged. We have not lived together for months. I will not weary you with the details, but I would wager that the unborn child is not mine but her present lover’s.”

Jane and I both gasped. Then, because this struck us as funny, we laughed at the same time too. And Shelley, who never could remain grave for two minutes, began to laugh, and kissed our hands.

“Why should a man with a miserable marriage,” he demanded, “whose wife has wantonly abandoned him for someone else, not enjoy new acquaintance?”

“Acquaintance with sixteen-year-old feminine beauty, that is?” asked Jane archly.

“Of course!” cried Shelley. “I adore you all!”

He might adore us all, but I adored only him. Handsome, brave, rebellious, gifted, and adhering without scruple to the principles of both my parents’ writings, he could do no wrong. Freedom for slaves! Freedom for women! Freedom from marriage! Freedom for everyone to love as, when and where they will! And a freedom of his own, his championship of which impressed me more than any other. Freedom for the human race to live without the tyranny of religion!