The colour faded from Papa’s face. “My dear,” he said, taken aback, “I assure you that is not the case.”
“I do not want your assurances!” My resolve to avoid a scene was faltering. “I want to know why you consider it so scandalous that Shelley should fall in love with me! I am not a fool, Papa. I know that when you married my mama she was already carrying me, and that she was never married to Fanny’s father at all. How can you disapprove so violently of my conduct?”
He paused before he spoke. When he did, his voice was icy. “You do not understand, child.”
“I do, Papa! I understand that you do not want your principles of freedom to extend to me and Shelley. To me because I am your daughter, and to Shelley because you persist in considering him as a benefactor, and you do not want your financial association with him tarnished in any way!”
“Silence!”
He was rarely angry, and I was frightened at the severity of his countenance.
“Papa,” I ventured, “I do not wish to make an enemy of you. But I will not give Shelley up. I am resolved.”
“Resolved upon ruin!” interjected Mama. “William, the girl has taken leave of her senses.”
“Shelley is not what you think, Mama!” I protested. “He will care for me, and as soon as he is free of his wife he will marry me!”
They both looked at me as if I had, indeed, taken leave of my senses.
“Is that truly what you believe?” my father asked. He was staring at me without blinking. “Does it not occur to you that you are the second young lady, barely out of childhood, whom this man has pursued? What induces you to think that you will fare any better than poor Harriet?”
I was ready with my answer. “Because he loves me and not her!”
“And do you not think he loved her when they eloped?”
Frustration is ugly in a girl of sixteen. I clenched my fists, and my face grew heated. “But he had not met me then!” I cried. “If he had, he would never have considered Harriet. Why do you not understand that I love and trust him?”
I looked imploringly at Papa. “Did you never love my mama enough to trust her? Do you not want me to be happy?”
Throughout this outburst my father had watched me, his expression saddening. When I was silent, and had begun to cry, he took my hand.
“Mary, my dear, I do want you to be happy. But Shelley is not the man to give you the happiness I would wish for. He is not honourable – no, do not protest. We none of us know everything about him. He tells us only what he wants to. He is wealthy but uses his money in a profligate manner. Do you honestly wish to attach yourself to this man?”
I did not hesitate. “Yes, sir, I do.”
As I sat there in the drawing-room with my small hand enveloped by my father’s large one, the rebellion which had long been stirring inside me surfaced. There was no escaping the truth that Shelley had eloped with a willing sixteen-year-old. But now he had another willing sixteen-year-old to elope with. Indeed, he had two. We could not leave Jane, our little accomplice, to face my parents’ wrath alone.
My father rose abruptly, and was about to quit the room when Jane opened the door without knocking. She had been crying. In her hand was a letter. She seized my hand and thrust the letter into it.
“He is waiting in the shop! Quick, read this and go to him. Quick, quick!”
“Why are you crying?” I asked her, mystified.
Mama was hurrying towards me. “Give me that letter!” she demanded. “I suppose he thinks himself very clever, to have got in by the shop door!”
Jane stood between me and her mother. “I cannot imagine it needed much ingenuity to enter a shop during trading hours, Mama,” she said.
“Insolence!” She tried to get past, but Jane barred her way. I unfolded the letter.
Dearest,
Have no fear of what your parents say they will do. We shall still be together, I promise you. Jane shall bring your letters to me, and mine to you. She is a dear girl. Please forgive me for causing you all this distress. I did not know I would fall in love with you so hopelessly, and by the time I had, I was far beyond being able to let you go. Please, please write.
Your true love, Shelley
At the same moment that Mama at last succeeded in twisting the letter out of my grasp, we heard footsteps climbing the uncarpeted stairs from the shop. Jane yelped in dismay, but I was filled suddenly with the strength which passion bestows. I threw open the drawing-room door, neither caring what my parents saw nor what they thought of it.
Shelley was standing in the hall with one hand holding his hat and the other on the back of his neck. The sight of this familiar gesture filled my heart, and I ran into his embrace as if I belonged there. I did belong there. I held him tightly, speaking close to his ear. “What will you do? Will you take me far away, to France, or farther? Do you know that Jane speaks perfect French? Please, please let us go away from here!”
He released me. Mama shouted for him to quit the house. But he strode into the drawing-room and faced her and my father without fear.
“Madam, be quiet, if you please,” he instructed. “I wish to bid farewell to my future wife in peace. Yes, by God, I will marry Mary!”
Mama was shocked into silence. Jane, who was still half-crying, put her hand over her mouth.
“And as for you, sir,” said Shelley sternly to my father, “if you abided by your principles you would not object to anything that has passed between your daughter and me. A man should not be bound by the shackles of marriage if he finds a superior love.”
My father did not reply.
“Make way,” ordered Shelley. “I will take my leave now.”
He bowed to them, and, turning to me, kissed my hand. His eyes said, “I will never be allowed into this house again, even through the shop!”, as he spoke aloud, “I hope to see you all on a happier day. Until then, goodbye.”
MISTRESS
At first it was a game. Intoxicated with freedom, our spirits remained high all the way to Dover in the carriage, and all the way to Calais on the boat.
I will never forget the sight of Jane on the windy deck, her bonnet-strings flapping about her chin, clutching her wayward skirts, screaming with laughter. And Shelley, his hair wild, his eyes wilder, roaring poetry, the words whipped this way and that by the gale. I held his arm so tightly I could feel his bones through his flesh, shirt, jacket and greatcoat. I was drowning in love.
At the inn in Calais, Shelley and I were too excited to feel tired.
“Tonight is our wedding night!” he said, laughing and kissing me. “Although, of course, we had no wedding…”
“And, of course, you are about to find that your bride is no virgin…”
“And yet her virginity is mine,” he replied softly.
My heart began to thump. If only Jane could hear Shelley when he was at his most romantic!
“The whole world will know I am no virgin now we have eloped,” I reminded him.
He ceased his kisses. “Oh, Mary! Does it trouble you that you are a ruined woman?”
“Not at all. A ruined reputation is without doubt the only kind to have.”
“You will go to hell, dearest.”
“You don’t believe in hell, dearest, so how can I go there?”
Very late, I awoke from a brief sleep to find that Shelley had opened our bedroom shutters to the moonlight. He looked pensive but released from care. Reaching for his travel-stained shirt, he pulled it on over his head like a child.
“Why have you no nightshirt?” I asked.
“Because I have lived so long with nobody to see to such things. I was cast adrift. But now you are my anchor, and I am cold. Warm me up.”
It was late July. The cheap room, high up in the eaves, was airless. But I put my arms around him and we lay and talked, and he took me and ruined my reputation further, and we talked more.
I did not tell him about our baby. I wanted to keep the news inside me, as deeply embedded as the
child itself, until the moment came to reveal it. My happiness was real, but even on that momentous night I was aware of the ease with which happiness, like other fragile objects, can be destroyed. What had happened, I wondered, to the happiness of Harriet Shelley, in the arms of whose husband I now lay?
As the sky lightened over the roofs of Calais, Shelley slept. I lay curled up, my arms around him under the dirty shirt. He turned onto his back, snuffling like a dog. His head lolled off the bolster. He did not look handsome, but the sight of him stabbed me with desire.
Angel, lover, master. All these adored things, until a few weeks ago utterly unknown, lay beside me in this foreign bed. The fancy came to me that Shelley, too, was as safe and adored as a baby inside its mother. My love was stronger than my parents’ outrage, or Harriet’s prior claim, or Shelley’s father’s dismissal of him. Only death, I was convinced, would part us from one another. I kissed his unshaven cheek.
But it was not my kiss that awoke him. The sound of raised voices made us sit up. Groaning, Shelley put his head in his hands.
Mama had pursued us. She was arguing with the landlady in the fluent French she had learned in her youth and taught to Jane. Her voice was accompanied by the noise of the ebony handle of her best parasol repeatedly striking the door of Jane’s chamber, which lay opposite ours.
She began to shriek in English, “Jane! Jane! I command you to see me!” Another parasol strike. “If you do not open the door, I will have this woman instruct her servant to break it down!” Two more strikes, then what sounded like a kick with a stout boot. “Open the door this minute!”
The cacophony was enough to wake everyone in Calais. Shelley slid out of bed and looked through the keyhole. He put his finger to his lips, stifling giggles. His bare feet noiseless on the wooden floor, he mimed Mama’s shuffling gait. He tied imaginary bonnet strings and waved an invisible parasol. I stuffed the corner of the sheet into my mouth.
Then all was quiet. I heard a door slam and the land lady’s footsteps descend the stairs. “Jane has let her in,” I whispered. “What shall we do?”
Shelley was putting on his clothes. “We shall do nothing,” he told me with authority. “I can deal with this.”
“But she is my stepmama, so –”
“You and Jane are my responsibility.” He was bending towards the mirror, hastily brushing his hair, and the shoulders of his coat, with my hairbrush. He inspected his reflection. “But if your stepmother thinks I intend to take her along with my two dear girls…” He looked at me in horror. “Get dressed and meet us downstairs. She will be on the next sailing home.” He struck the hairbrush defiantly upon his other palm. “And without Jane, I give you my word.”
He was just in time. Mama and Jane emerged from the room opposite as he opened our door. Both saw me in the instant before he closed it again. Both conveyed messages – contempt on Mama’s part, anguish on Jane’s. I did what Shelley had instructed; stepping into my travelling gown, I fairly flew down the stairs and tumbled into the public room of the inn.
“Mama…” I began, but Shelley gestured to me to be silent.
He was standing at the empty fireplace, his hands in his pockets, his eyes alight. Mama’s bulky form filled an armchair. Jane, her luggage at her feet, wept softly into a handkerchief.
Poor Jane, I thought. She loves to imagine fictional dramatic scenes but is powerless to deal with a real one.
“I insist upon it, Mr Shelley,” Mama was saying. “I must save my own daughter from the clutches of infamy while I can.” She nodded in my direction. “My stepdaughter’s fate is out of my hands, but Jane has nothing to do with you.”
Shelley did not reply. Mama’s eyes held his face in a cold, quivering stare. “You are yourself the parent of a daughter, Mr Shelley. Would you not, in similar circumstances, do the same for her?”
I thought Shelley would buckle under this sly thrust at his own parental responsibility. But my anxiety was unfounded.
“You are correct, madam, in one particular,” he said. “I am the parent of a beloved daughter, to be sure. But my wish for Ianthe is joy greater even than that which your stepdaughter has given me. If, in willingly fleeing her family for new friends, she found the happiness lacking at home, I would give her my blessing!”
Mama’s outrage filled the room. She stood up.
“How dare you, sir? How dare you – you, of all people – accuse me of making my daughter unhappy? All you know is profligacy, adultery, seduction! And may God have mercy on you when your time comes!”
Trembling, stumbling over the hem of her gown, she hauled Jane to her feet. “Come, Jane, let us leave this place with dignity!”
There was no sound except Jane’s strenuous sobbing. She went with her mother to the street door. The carriage Mama had hired was waiting outside.
My feelings were stirred. Here, in this crudely furnished inn room, I saw for the first time what it might be like to be the protector of my own child. Would Shelley, with his fierce love for his little daughter, ever fight to preserve her honour as my father had fought to preserve mine, and as Mama now fought to preserve Jane’s? I looked at him, my eyes stinging. He neither moved nor spoke. I could not read his feelings.
Then Mama, stepping into the carriage first, released Jane’s arm and Shelley saw his opportunity. He seized my sister, sweeping her feet from under her.
Surprise made her scream, but within an instant she put one arm tightly around his neck. “Oh, Shelley!” she cried. “How brave you are!”
“Quick, Mary, coins!” panted Shelley.
I understood, and pressed some sous into Jane’s outstretched hand. As Shelley bore her away, she threw the coins at the carriage man’s feet, giving him rapid instructions in French.
He nodded, kicked the carriage steps up and closed the door.
“Au revoir, Maman!” called Jane. “Bon voyage!”
The driver whipped up the horses. Mama’s face, consumed by fury, appeared briefly at the window. Then she was gone.
Shelley deposited Jane on the cobblestones. “Can you not picture her,” he grinned, “pounding the roof of the carriage with her parasol, shouting to the driver to stop?”
“He will not stop,” Jane assured him, her tears drying on her cheeks and her eyes ablaze with admiration for Shelley. “I told him she has the cholera, and must be put on the first sailing, whatever her protests, to rid France of the infection she may spread.”
I had surveyed this scene from the door of the inn. Now I descended the steps and took Shelley’s arm. “You should invest in a parasol yourself, Shelley,” I suggested. “That would surely give the gossips something to talk about!”
THE TWO-HEADED GODDESS
From Calais we went to Paris. Then we travelled farther and farther south.
Shelley had left a forwarding address, and at the hotel in Grenoble, near the Swiss border, we picked up letters. The three of us took them up to the bedchamber Shelley and I shared.
“This is from Fanny,” I said as I broke the seal on the only letter addressed to me.
Shelley heard my dismay and looked up from his own letters. But before I could speak, nausea rose. I felt hot. My ears buzzed. Unable to support myself, I leant against the back of his chair. I still had not told anyone about the child, but the child was telling me constantly of its presence. Pretending the French food did not agree with me was making Jane very suspicious.
They both looked at me. “What is it, my love?” asked Shelley. “Come, sit down.”
He pulled me onto his lap. Fanny’s letter fell unread from my fingers.
“Shelley, are you blind?” Jane demanded. “Can you not see that your ‘love’ is in the same condition as your wife?”
He looked at me with his abandoned-child look. “Are you, Mary?”
I nodded, ashamed, ready to cry.
“Why have you not disclosed this sooner?” he asked. “My dear, I have not been caring for you and the child properly! You must not walk so much! You must
have a horse, or a carriage!”
“We have not the money for a carriage,” observed Jane.
Ignoring her, he caressed my face and hair. I accepted the caresses gratefully, wetting his collar with my tears. Then I blew my nose on Jane’s handkerchief, and felt better.
Shelley was smiling broadly. “Our own child!” He squeezed me. “How delightful it will be to have our own child! Are you not happy?”
“Of course I am happy. And so relieved!”
While I had been crying, Jane, who had never had any scruples about invading my privacy, had picked up Fanny’s letter. She took it closer to the window. “I hope this letter does not find you as it leaves me,” she read. “I am greatly distressed by a rumour which is circulating in London, and of which I feel I must warn you.”
“Only one rumour!” said Shelley good-naturedly.
“Shelley’s wife, Harriet, has been gossiping,” read Jane. “She is telling everyone that Papa allowed you and Jane to go off with Shelley for the price of fifteen hundred pounds. In other words, that he sold you.”
There was an astounded silence. My instinct was to laugh, but Shelley’s expression became serious. He slapped the table with the palm of his hand. “Harriet!” he exclaimed. “Treacherous, infantile, gossiping wretch!”
As he stood up, I slid off his lap onto his vacant chair. He snatched the letter angrily from Jane. “Fifteen hundred pounds!” he cried. “Fifteen hundred pounds! Can you bear to listen to this poison, Mary? I will never forgive her!”
“Harriet seeks not forgiveness,” observed Jane calmly, “but revenge. And if anyone believes that our father could do such a thing then they are ignorant scandalmongers worthy only of contempt.”
Shelley looked at her with interest. The flickering candle threw shadows on his face, and in his expression I read indignation but also mischief.
“I am shocked, indeed,” he said gravely, turning to the letter once more. “But what truly aggrieves me is the amateur quality of Harriet’s gossiping. Does she not care to find out the true sum, before she spreads the rumour abroad?”
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