Jane was staring at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that Harriet knows nothing of her own husband’s talent for business,” he said. “I would be a scoundrel indeed if I took two daughters off an honest man for anything less than ten thousand pounds!”
Jane gasped. Her small white hand flew to her small pink mouth. Above it her eyes bulged, full of delight and dread.
Poor Jane. She was the perfect butt of everyone’s teasing, always taking the bait and never understanding the joke. I had lived with this characteristic too long to find it entertaining, but for Shelley it was a novelty.
Suppressing an interruption from me, he leant towards her, highly amused. “Think, Jane!” he commanded. “Your papa, having extracted ten thousand pounds from his unhappy benefactor, may now pay his rent arrears fifty times over, and take new premises in a smarter district into the bargain!”
“Shelley, stop!” I scolded.
But he could not stop. Once a joke had suggested itself, he was unable to resist stretching it to its limits. He capered around the room like a drunkard, howling. My remonstrations merely added to the noise.
“How much for an arm or a leg?” he bellowed. “How much for a heart? Or a nostril? Or the nail of a great toe, indeed!”
In the midst of this madness sat Jane, pouting like a child. She was still not certain that Shelley was joking. I could guess what her gullible mind was imagining: Shelley and our father arguing about whether the daughter who shared Shelley’s bed was worth a larger proportion of the ten thousand pounds than the one who did not, then Papa slapping Shelley on the back, and shaking his hand, and signing a document.
Anxiety, mingled with suspicion, showed so plainly in her face that I took pity on her. “Jane, you goose!” I chided. “Have no fear that Shelley is serious. Do you not know by now what a jester he is?”
But suspicion, once aroused, is difficult to disperse. Warily she watched Shelley’s laughter ebb and disappear, and his face compose itself again.
“Why do you use me thus, you wicked man?” she asked him sharply, like a governess interrogating her charge. Jane would make a good governess, I had often thought.
Shelley bowed, then raised his eyes to her face without lifting his head. He looked like a wayward servant abasing himself before his mistress. “I do it because I can,” he admitted. “Because Mary is too astute to be taken in.”
“And I am not astute, I suppose?” demanded Jane.
“You are innocent, my dear.” As he said this he bowed lower, and kissed her hand. Into his eyes came a look I knew, loved, and dreaded. “And when we find innocence in this corrupt world, must we not cherish it?”
Jane rose and smoothed her skirt. There was agitation in her eyes. “We have an early start in the morning,” she said. “I am going to bed now, and I suggest you do the same.”
When she had left the room Shelley knelt beside my chair and put his head in my lap. “Am I a wicked man, Mary?”
“Of course you are,” I told him solemnly. “Why else do you think I love you?”
He raised his head. “Thank Providence you do,” he said softly. “Otherwise, I would be lost.”
I could not do otherwise than believe him. But I was capable of greater penetration even than he knew; I had seen that he needed something I was unable to provide. He loved me, but he resisted what he had tactfully called my “astute” nature. Equally tactfully he had referred to Jane’s slower intelligence as “innocence”, a quality I transparently lacked, but which he nevertheless found temptingly attractive.
His poems were full of immortal visions of feminine beauty. But could it be that Jane and I furnished him with a two-headed goddess more divine than any in his imagination? In us, had he found one perfect mistress?
His curly hair felt warm beneath my palm. A dart of affection entered my heart, and I bent and kissed him. As I caressed him, and watched his eyes soften like a dreamer’s, I told myself that jealousy is a madness greater even than the madness of love. And there is no escape from its torture.
Shelley, Jane and I were chained to one another, as securely as prisoners. Tomorrow we would continue our journey into Switzerland. The humdrum life Jane and I had known in England lay behind us. What lay before us, we could not know. Our fate was in the lap not of the gods, but of the two-headed goddess.
CONCUBINE
Switzerland is a country of such dazzling beauty that every day unfolds a new joy. To live amid such glory is privilege enough, but to see it for the first time when already intoxicated with love, and in the company of the beloved, is heaven.
One evening, Shelley was sitting with his hand under the collar of his shirt, casting his eyes over the splendour of the Alpine view. Deep-blue shadows lengthened beneath the mountains. Green fields, bedecked with flowers, sloped to a lake which displayed a perfect upside-down picture of the peaks and the purpling sky. Beside him on the grass sat my sister and I in equal contentment.
To a passing stranger our party must have seemed mysterious in its composition. Two ladies, similarly dressed in muslin and light shawls, drinking wine with a man too young to be their father, too well-dressed to be their manservant, too affectionate to be their brother. The pretty face of one of these ladies was shaded by a bonnet, the brim of which was adorned with local flowers, but the other displayed to the world her bright red-gold hair, pinned up in windswept strands that had earlier been curls.
“Who is for a ghost story?” asked Shelley, pouring the last dregs of wine. “I can think of no better way to pass the hours before bedtime.”
“Oh, yes!” enthused Jane. “I have no inclination to return early to that sluttish landlady’s filthy rooms.”
“No more have I,” I agreed. “Last night Shelley found a bedbug the size of a halfpenny crawling up his arm.”
“Shelley, dear,” Jane urged, turning to him, “tell a really frightening ghost story! Make my flesh creep!”
Jane and I had always delighted in feeling our flesh creep. Papa’s mild disapproval had never discouraged us from reading every horror novel we could obtain – fashionable and unfashionable, of literary merit or otherwise. In Jane’s room, by the light of the dying embers of her fire, our education had been enriched by haunted castles, bloodthirsty murders, torture and depravity of a considerably more violent nature than Papa ever knew. These were subjects very appealing to our young minds, and much more entertaining than the needlework we always managed to “forget” to do.
Shelley was a showman, especially after wine. He jumped up and spread his arms wide.
“Indeed, can you imagine a more appropriate setting for a ghost story?” he asked. “Behold, the lake! The mountains! The cobblestones! The gathering dusk! The picturesque pony and cart winding its way up the incline…”
“But to the story, Shelley…” encouraged Jane.
He smiled conspiratorially, taking a leather-bound volume from his pocket. Shelley was never, ever without a book about his person. Usually poetry, but on this occasion a collection of ghost stories.
“Steel your nerves, ladies,” he warned us.
As the darkness gathered above the lake, the mountains disappeared and the village street emptied. Flickering candles began to appear at windows. No pony hooves or nailed boots broke the silence. Shelley’s voice was the only one we heard.
But while he read well, I found myself less interested in the story than in Jane’s conduct. I watched her edge gradually nearer Shelley until her leg pressed his. Both his hands were occupied in holding the book and turning the pages, but she found some exposed flesh between his wrist and his shirt cuff, which he had pushed a few inches up his arm. Jane’s excited fingers encircled his forearm, and she leant towards him, exaggerating her décolletage by squeezing her upper arms close to her sides.
Breathing in little gasps, she hung not only on his arm, but also his words. As the tale progressed to its gory climax, she began to protest prettily, with fluttering hands and brimming eyes.
“Stop! Stop!” she begged. “I am too weak for this. Forgive me!”
Shelley went to shut the book, but Jane’s hand darted out to prevent him. “Oh, but I wish to hear the end of the story!”
She was playing on Shelley’s conviction that she was a fool. She was begging him to forgive her susceptibility to nervous hysteria while encouraging him to continue with the very thing that caused it. It was a perfect example of the helpless idiocy which he found so attractive.
But she was not a fool. I myself had schooled her for years in impressing her beauty and charm upon men. How could I be surprised that Shelley had become the focus of everything she had learned? Or that she had assumed the role of concubine, hoping he would soon lose interest in the loyal, less alluring “wife” who was carrying his child?
My elopement with Shelley lives in my memory as a summer studded with brilliant sights and experiences, and hour upon hour of happiness. But equally vivid is the mistrust which tugged pitilessly at my heart. Dear God, how I regretted the generosity of spirit I had shown in pressing my sister to accompany us!
I went to bed that night consumed with indignation. I could not frame the words to confront Shelley with my feelings. But a few hours later I discovered that Jane had further ammunition in her campaign to capture him.
It was after midnight when we were woken by the door of our chamber being flung open. Jane tumbled into the room, gibbering like a madwoman.
“The furniture in my bedroom is moving!” she announced. “Every time I lie down it takes one more pace towards me, as if it would crush me!”
I was unimpressed by this display of feigned insanity. “You have taken too much wine,” I declared. “Go back to bed.”
But she would not be turned away. “Mary!” she begged, plucking at our blankets. “Have you no pity? I cannot sleep in that room. I shall have to sleep in here!”
And before either of us could stop her, she threw back the covers on Shelley’s side and joined us in the bed.
But Shelley was equally unimpressed. Solemnly he climbed over me and got out of my side of the bed.
“Mary, I am going to sleep in Jane’s room,” he informed me.
“You are not afraid of living furniture, then?” I asked dryly.
“I am anxious only for sleep.” He padded across the room. “And for pity’s sake, keep your sister in here.”
“Shelley!” shrieked Jane as the door closed behind him. “Shelley, do not leave me!”
“Quiet!” I commanded. “I have endured enough of your histrionics.”
By this time my vision had become accustomed to the darkness and I could see her eyes glittering in the pale glow of moonlight. She could see me too. I could imagine the picture I presented: my hair hung in strands around my face, and I was wearing an old chemise as a nightdress. But every fibre of my body was roused to the fight.
“Your pursuit of a man who is in love with someone else is pitiful!” I told her.
“Witch!” she hissed. “How can you think he loves you?”
“I know he loves me! The greater question is, how can you think he wants you?”
“Because he said so!” she blurted.
I stared at her in horror. The only thing that had preserved my sanity during these last weeks had been the sight of Shelley responding to her onslaughts with derision or bewilderment, if he responded at all. But when I was not looking, had he truly confessed his desire for her?
“There!” she declared triumphantly. “Put that in your witch’s cauldron and stir it!”
“Tell me his words!” I demanded. “If this is true, tell me exactly what he said, and I will challenge him!”
“Oh, Mary!” She fell back onto the pillow, her hands pressed to her temples. “Is it not you who has always said, ‘A man needs no words to describe desire’? It is so obvious he prefers me, a child could see it!”
My alarm subsided. She was lying, then. If he really had spoken, she would be carrying the words engraved on her memory.
“Jane, your immorality knows no bounds,” I told her. I took her tightly by the shoulders. “Are you listening to me?”
She yelped with affected pain. “Leave me alone!”
“Gladly, but not until I have said this.” I gripped her tighter; I think I probably was hurting her. “I wish you had never come with us. I wish Shelley had never bothered to rescue you from Mama in Calais, and that she had taken you home and locked you in your room, like the child you are.”
She was crying now, as noisily as any child.
“Your lies about Shelley are ridiculous. How Shelley will laugh when I tell him!”
Her wails stopped. It was her turn to look horrified.
“Yes, I will tell him!” I assured her.
“Oh, Mary, you are cruel!”
I let go of her shoulders. I felt not a shred of sympathy for her tears.
“Now, stop this performance and go to sleep,” I said firmly. “Shelley will not be back tonight.”
He, at least, got some sleep. I got none. Jane inflicted her disappointment on me all night, alternately sobbing and snoring and almost suffocating me every time she rolled over.
THE SPARK OF BEING
Lack of funds soon meant we had to forgo our hired carriage and travel by cheaper means. I was too tired to walk far. Shelley’s boots had holes in them. Jane, out of spirits and no longer flirting with Shelley, complained endlessly. Eventually we realized that we could not drift about Europe for ever, pursued by scandal and beset by poverty. We would have to go home.
Shelley proposed to take us back to England by riverboat, sailing up the Rhine to Holland, and from there across the Channel. But for me, with nausea a daily burden, even the prospect of travelling by river – I could not contemplate the sea – was unattractive.
“I will not go,” I declared.
He and I were dining at yet another inn, on food as ill-cooked as we had come to expect. Jane had not appeared at the table. I was feeling low and could not eat.
“But Mary, my dear,” protested Shelley. “Do you not want to feel the fresh air on your face, and see beautiful scenery?”
“No,” I told him.
“Then consider this,” he persisted, taking my hand: “we shall be sailing towards the sea. I am done with Switzerland, notwithstanding the wondrous Alps, because the sea is so far away, and sailing is such a pleasure!”
I regarded him doubtfully.
“The wildness of the sea is in an Englishman’s blood,” he continued, patting my hand enthusiastically. “The River Rhine, majestic though it may be, provides no competition for the thunderous music of the waves.”
I pondered. “We three – you, Jane and I – are like the sea, do you not think? We have no beginning and no end. We come from nowhere and are going nowhere. We are vagabonds. We are outcasts.”
Shelley always grew impatient when I spoke of my feelings of exile. He dropped my hand. “We are not. When we arrive in England, our families –”
“Our families have already disowned us.”
“Do not say that! Your father will welcome his child’s safe return, as any decent man would.” He saw my sadness, and softened his voice. “I promise you, my love, that the outdoor life will agree with you. Nature always compensates for the miseries of mankind.”
The next day we boarded the passenger vessel that was to take us to Holland. The weather was indeed kind, and soon the loveliness of the Rhineland and the revival of spirits offered by mild air and daily exercise restored me. I began once more to drown in love.
Shelley appeared to be drowning too; he did not let his enthusiasm for river traffic and ruined castles distract his attention from me. We spent many hours strolling up and down the deck, his arm around my waist, talking of plans for the birth of our child and our future life together.
And what of Jane? She remained the same sister I had grown up with: pert yet artless, knowing yet naïve, trustworthy yet treacherous. Forced into the role of unpaid companion to a
pregnant sister and a man who would not take his attraction further than flirtation, she had to retreat. Much of the time she stayed below in her cabin, shunning the sunlight, nursing schemes which only God was privy to. I was not sorry.
The Rhine cuts a deep chasm through wooded hills. As our vessel meandered its way northwards, we glimpsed great houses between the trees. Tiny villages and larger towns lined the cliff-tops, spilling like foam to the water’s edge. Every few miles we would pass below a castle on a rocky promontory, sometimes inhabited, but more often the ruined relic of medieval wars.
One evening, near sunset, the boat moored beneath a spectacular castle. Most of the passengers came out on deck to look at it, several sitting down to sketch it. Jane stayed below, saying she had some letters to write.
Warmed by the dying sunlight, I fell asleep in a chair on deck. When I awoke Shelley was admiring the sketch an elderly German man was making. Shelley spoke little German, but the man seemed to have fluent English.
“This castle is very interesting, my dear sir,” he told Shelley.
The castle looked very romantic, with the late sun gilding its towers. Surrounded by heavily wooded countryside, it looked a perfect medieval fortress. But, like most of the others, it was a ruin.
“The man who lived there was an alchemist,” the elderly gentleman was saying.
I sat up. Who could not be fascinated by the idea of alchemy, the power to turn base metal into gold? The search for its secret had occupied men for centuries, and continued to do so. “What happened to him, sir?” I asked.
“Oh, you are awake!” exclaimed Shelley affectionately. “This is Herr Keffner, my dear.”
The man bowed and addressed me politely, taking me for Shelley’s wife.
“Please,” I repeated, “tell us about the alchemist.”
Herr Keffner looked into my face with watery blue eyes. He was perhaps seventy years old, but as trim and well worn as his walking-stick. “More than an alchemist,” he said. “A scientist, and a … what is the English word? A lunatic?”
“That word will do,” agreed Shelley, with a glance at me. “For poets as much as for scientists!”
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