It is not a comfortable image, and Charles gets up and walks to the window for light and air, his mind sombre with mute rage. Claire gave him this letter—this letter never burned, much read, and stained here and there with tears—because she deemed it proof—proof of Shelley’s love for her. But to Charles the proof—the evidence—in this letter is not of love, but of death. A woman threatening suicide in terrible revenge. Three innocent children dying before their time, and a fourth discarded because she did not suit. And yes, of course, children died, no-one knows that better than Charles—in the first quarter of the nineteenth century almost a third of babies were dead before the age of five—but for the Shelleys to lose three of their children, one after the other, argues that something more disturbing than mere misfortune was at work. Even a mother’s constant care was not enough, it seems, to counter that grand self-centred disregard that characterised so much else about Shelley’s life.
