well do without it. Send for me if you need me, but otherwise I will be back tomorrow afternoon.”
The rain is pounding the street now, and Charles races up to the Strand through a wash of flooded gutters and wheel ruts. His feet are soaked in mud and running dung long before he gets to the top, but otherwise his luck is with him and he finds a cab within a few minutes. He calls out the address to the driver and settles down into the damp leather seat, watching the rain glittering in the jets of gas outside those few shops still open. And if the West End is empty of people, St John’s Wood is even more so, and there are no lamps in the windows at Carlo Cottage when Charles swings down from the cab and rushes up the steps to his new—and second—front door. Charles stands in the hall, waiting for his breathing to ease, and listening for sounds of wakefulness above. But there is nothing. A crackle of forked lightning pulses blue across the walls and the thunder breaks hard overhead, but still there is no sign or movement upstairs.
Charles moves quickly and silently to the dining-room, where he kneels down by the piano-stool and lifts the brocade away. He tries the lid of the trunk, but it is—as he expected—locked. No matter. He reaches into his pocket and extracts a ring of keys he keeps for moments such as this, confident that he will have one to fit such a commonplace piece of luggage. But ten minutes later and all dozen keys tried, he is forced to accept that—like everything else, it seems, in this house—the trunk may not be quite as ordinary as he initially supposed. He turns it in his hands, examining the lid, the hinges. He’s been lucky once already tonight, and his luck holds again now: Sometime in the past, on one of its many journeys, this trunk has been dented or damaged by water, because the wood is warped at the back and the lid doesn’t fit quite true. And when Charles bends down to look more closely he can see the edge of a sheaf of paper inside. And it just so happens he has the tool for that too: a small pair of snipe-nose pliers that are a relic of that short period he spent training to be a doctor and which he kept, unlike much else from that time, because he thought they might prove useful. As they have in the past, and as they do now. He steadies himself against the trunk with one hand and slowly inserts the pliers with the other. Holding them horizontal at first, and then twisting them a slow half turn once the pointed ends are inside the trunk. It’s a delicate job he has now, but he’s always had steady hands, and he closes the pliers carefully about the edge of the sheets and starts to edge them out, inch by cautious inch. There’s a moment when they catch on something and he hears the sound of tearing, but what he eventually pulls free are six or seven sheets of smooth handwritten paper. There is no title, no heading, and the pages are clearly only part of a much longer piece, but none of that matters. Because Charles only has to read a dozen lines to see the one word he’s been seeking all this time.
Shelley.
He looks up, startled, as a rush of lightning catches him floodlit in his guilt and the thunder breaks again over his head, but when an even deeper darkness descends, and still no-one stands accusing in the doorway to indict him, he gets up and makes his way quietly up the stairs to his room, where he lights the little lamp by his bed and begins to read.
FOUR
Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear
… SHOULD THINK , AND IN any case I cared not. All that mattered was to see him, whether by arrangement, or by sleight. He came not to the first rendezvous I appointed, and I wish now that I could have persuaded my weak heart against seeking refuge, like some panting helpless hare, in the lair of a lynx that was intent only on devouring it. He wrote later that the whole affaire was my own doing—that he defied any man to play the Stoic to an eighteen-year-old girl who came prancing to
The rain is pounding the street now, and Charles races up to the Strand through a wash of flooded gutters and wheel ruts. His feet are soaked in mud and running dung long before he gets to the top, but otherwise his luck is with him and he finds a cab within a few minutes. He calls out the address to the driver and settles down into the damp leather seat, watching the rain glittering in the jets of gas outside those few shops still open. And if the West End is empty of people, St John’s Wood is even more so, and there are no lamps in the windows at Carlo Cottage when Charles swings down from the cab and rushes up the steps to his new—and second—front door. Charles stands in the hall, waiting for his breathing to ease, and listening for sounds of wakefulness above. But there is nothing. A crackle of forked lightning pulses blue across the walls and the thunder breaks hard overhead, but still there is no sign or movement upstairs.
Charles moves quickly and silently to the dining-room, where he kneels down by the piano-stool and lifts the brocade away. He tries the lid of the trunk, but it is—as he expected—locked. No matter. He reaches into his pocket and extracts a ring of keys he keeps for moments such as this, confident that he will have one to fit such a commonplace piece of luggage. But ten minutes later and all dozen keys tried, he is forced to accept that—like everything else, it seems, in this house—the trunk may not be quite as ordinary as he initially supposed. He turns it in his hands, examining the lid, the hinges. He’s been lucky once already tonight, and his luck holds again now: Sometime in the past, on one of its many journeys, this trunk has been dented or damaged by water, because the wood is warped at the back and the lid doesn’t fit quite true. And when Charles bends down to look more closely he can see the edge of a sheaf of paper inside. And it just so happens he has the tool for that too: a small pair of snipe-nose pliers that are a relic of that short period he spent training to be a doctor and which he kept, unlike much else from that time, because he thought they might prove useful. As they have in the past, and as they do now. He steadies himself against the trunk with one hand and slowly inserts the pliers with the other. Holding them horizontal at first, and then twisting them a slow half turn once the pointed ends are inside the trunk. It’s a delicate job he has now, but he’s always had steady hands, and he closes the pliers carefully about the edge of the sheets and starts to edge them out, inch by cautious inch. There’s a moment when they catch on something and he hears the sound of tearing, but what he eventually pulls free are six or seven sheets of smooth handwritten paper. There is no title, no heading, and the pages are clearly only part of a much longer piece, but none of that matters. Because Charles only has to read a dozen lines to see the one word he’s been seeking all this time.
Shelley.
He looks up, startled, as a rush of lightning catches him floodlit in his guilt and the thunder breaks again over his head, but when an even deeper darkness descends, and still no-one stands accusing in the doorway to indict him, he gets up and makes his way quietly up the stairs to his room, where he lights the little lamp by his bed and begins to read.
FOUR
Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear
… SHOULD THINK , AND IN any case I cared not. All that mattered was to see him, whether by arrangement, or by sleight. He came not to the first rendezvous I appointed, and I wish now that I could have persuaded my weak heart against seeking refuge, like some panting helpless hare, in the lair of a lynx that was intent only on devouring it. He wrote later that the whole affaire was my own doing—that he defied any man to play the Stoic to an eighteen-year-old girl who came prancing to
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