‘Had my people not brought tidings of you, had you travelled incognito, you would still be my honoured guest tonight. One lord always recognises another. I would have known your noble birth instantly by the smallness of your ears, your curling hair, and your little white hands.’
Byron blushed and bowed again. He was so delighted by these words that I saw his fingers clutch an invisible quill-pen to write them down. The world will hear about this, I thought. But in Albania, I wondered, could such personal compliments be separated from a sensual intent? Would Byron understand that? Would he find the thought revolting? Or arousing? Hobhouse fidgeted and chafed at his neck-cloth. The Pasha observed to Byron in a loud voice, ‘Your friend has a plain face and a really terrible hat. How can you forgive him? Is it a Christian thing?’
I saw Hobhouse flinch and not only at the insult. I understood that Hobhouse felt that Ali Pasha looked a little too benignly at his friend. But Byron, clearly, was enchanted. He began to relax. Heedless of etiquette, he leant over and pointed to me. I blushed. My paintbrush was poised motionless at the surface of the canvas. I had held it like that since Byron walked into the room.
‘Who is she?’ he asked the Pasha. Mouchar frowned. The officials drew in their breath.
But the Pasha was inclined to be indulgent.
‘No one, an artist. This one’s from Venice. Now, my lovely young lords, I invite you to join us at our humble supper. We have lately engaged a Venetian pastry chef who makes, I am told, flowers and towers from sugar. You shall tell me if his skill merits the price I paid for him, or if I shall have to administer a little correction.’
At the words ‘a little correction’ a ripple of nervousness ran through the courtiers.
Byron and Hobhouse saluted the Pasha one more time and turned to leave. Byron limped to the door and turned back with one final graceful flourish of his sabre. The extravagance of the gesture wrongfooted him. He stumbled a little. Hobhouse reached out a discreet steadying arm. I realised then that the damage to his foot was permanent. The perfect young man was a cripple.
The Pasha, I could see, was making the same discovery. I saw his eyes flicker over Byron’s leg. But he said smoothly, ‘We shall expect you at our side again very shortly, my dear Lord.’
Byron bowed low again, his composure restored.
He murmured, ‘I can think of nothing that I would desire more.’
But as he said those words, he looked at me.
Chapter 3
El tempo, el culo e i siori
i fa quel i vol lori.
Time, arses and lords
do whatever they want.
VENETIAN PROVERB
In the Pasha’s dining room I was placed between Hobhouse and Byron, who laid his two large pistols on the table before he sat down. He glanced around. Yes, everyone was looking at him.
Turbanned slaves encircled us, bearing platters. Lying in beds of scented rice were whole blackened lambs with their little heads nodding gently. There were ragouts of flamingo flesh swimming with oil and sprinkled with cardamom seeds. There were whole fish with cabochon emeralds where the eyes should have been. The eyes were served separately impaled upon little sticks with fresh herbs between them. There were suggestively curved and swarthy vegetables stuffed with raisins and minced meat. There were whole platters of cherries and more of white peaches topped by black passion fruit, already slashed across the middle so that the vivid seeds spilled onto the pale peach flesh below. Silver jugs of pomegranate juice were poured into our glass goblets.
I was relieved to see that the Venetian pastry chef had surpassed himself. A miniature replica of the Tepelene Palace, entirely spun of sugar, was paraded around the dining chamber. As it passed him the Pasha snatched a tower and put it in his mouth. Everyone lowered their eyes while he sucked and crunched loudly.
‘Very lovely,’ he pronounced. Everyone began to talk and eat with gusto.
Byron touched nothing on his golden plate, which was continuously emptied by the servants who placed other delicacies upon it. They seemed to regard it as a challenge to tempt his capricious appetite.
The Pasha, clearly exhausted by the earlier long conversation in French, was seated with his ministers at some distance, and confined his attentions to Byron to flirtatious waves and winks. Fortunately, he did not notice how Byron spurned his food. Hobhouse helped himself only to bread and the more obvious cuts of meat. He talked to Mouchar, who listened attentively, even while the Englishman’s stentorian voice sidled off into tortuous digressions and impenetrable pronouncements.
As for me, I was too agitated to eat. I still lived in the moment, an hour before, when Byron’s eyes had met mine. It was a strange state of grace, in which I felt myself different but in ways I could not quite identify. I only knew that I heard a faint roaring in my ears and that I wanted to be with Byron, and to see if this hectic sensation was at work inside him, too. To my distress, he seemed to have moved into another state of being, a coarser, casual state. At first he and Hobhouse talked over my head, in English. At the time my grasp of that awkward language was quite imperfect and in any case they appeared to me to be talking largely in a code. I struggled to understand them. I heard ‘Plen and Opt See’, which seemed like Latin, but I could not make sense of it.
Then, reaching for my glass, my elbow grazed Byron’s and I felt almost afraid to have touched him. But now he turned to me and looked me full in the face. It was the same avid look he had given me in the Pasha’s reception chamber but now he was close to me, so close that I lost the perspective of his face and could look only at his eyes. In those, for one vertiginous second, I thought I saw something I had not seen since Casanova. I thought I saw something native to myself. But, unlike Casanova’s, this instantaneous intimacy felt perverse and treacherous. I felt as if I had discovered an unknown brother in the skin of a ravishing lover, and that I had discovered the relation too late.
Byron’s eyes said all this, and I saw his knuckles white against the table. But his voice was calm when he spoke.
‘You must be Cecilia Cornaro,’ he said in his beautiful French. ‘I have heard of you. You have painted Goethe, have you not? And Napoleon?’
I answered mechanically, still exploring the element of his look. ‘Yes, it is true.’
‘And you are from Venice. It is my favourite place that I have never been. One day I shall go there.’
‘We shall welcome you,’ I said, trying to fit the conversation and the look together, hiding my hot hands under the table.
‘Tell me about yourself. How can a female painter end up here at the Pasha’s table?’
I told him briefly, and answered his questions about Goethe and Napoleon. They were the usual questions and I gave the usual replies; this calmed me. Yes, Goethe had provided hours of scintillating conversation while I painted him. No, I did not think he was the lover of Angelica Kauffman. Yes indeed, I was proud to be compared with her. Yes, Napoleon was indeed small and morose and no, his manners were not the most elegant. No, he had not ruined Venice, though he had left his mark upon us: dismantling our churches, suppressing the convents, filling in canals and numbering our streets. I told him how when I painted Napoleon’s portrait just two years before, while he watched a Grand Canal regatta in his honour, the dull thud of falling masonry and the clanking of rising scaffolding was always in the background.
‘Yes, yes. And now,’ said Byron, ‘I imagine you would like to know about me.’
‘I can think of nothing that I would desire more,’ I quoted.
He smiled at my slightly mocking tone and drew a little closer to me. I felt Hobhouse shift uncomfortably on the other side of me and his agitated breath upon the back of my neck. I did not turn around.
And so it was that I heard from Byron himself the strange story of his ancestry and childhood: the story that is now known to all who can pay a penny for a scandal sheet. He told it without embarrassment; he was cool and detached about everything, even his deformity. After a while
he settled into the rhythm of his tale. He became animated. Anecdotes were embroidered with humour and melodrama. He spoke with a great outrush of breath, almost as if to relieve himself, physically, of boredom. He mimicked the voices of his mother, his butler and the other characters who had played walk-on parts in the drama of his early life. Even then I thought him more of a story-teller than a poet – or perhaps it was the story itself that was lacking in poetry and instead overspilling with more insolent incident than The Thousand and One Nights. It was a story anyone else would have hidden away in the dusty attic of the distant past. But Byron seemed to treasure the shameful as much as the good, perhaps more so.
Had Byron already decided that I would paint him? Because I had painted his hero, Napoleon? His future rival, Goethe? Was he merely presenting himself to me as a subject? Was he deliberately tempting me with the angles of his beautiful mouth and the graceful capers of his gesticulating fingers?
But his tone was almost impersonal. It seemed as if I was simply a member of an anonymous audience; the house-lights had dimmed and I sat in the dark watching him upon the stage. Yet I knew, because I had already observed him carefully, that he groomed his every smallest gesture for effect, and that the style and telling of this story was intentioned, and therefore it was directed at me. The rendering of himself he chose to give me was that of the protagonist of a wildly tragical farce. The question in my mind, floating like pollen upon agitated water, was this: did he tell it like this because he thought such a tale, told in such a way, would attract a woman like me? And if this was the case, how could he possibly know so much about me already?
Again, I was reminded of Casanova as we tipped the kaleidoscope upward and gazed together at the tumbling fragments of Byron’s early memories.
It seems to me that the ancestry of George Gordon, Lord Byron, was a marriage of brutality misbegotten upon sensuality. The Gordon family was the cantankerous, miserable side, the Byrons the sexual and financial outlaws. Flowing together, those bloodlines, as Byron himself declared at the outset of his tale, had generated a history worse than that of the Borgias, and with as many casualties.
Byron was not destined for a high title. He was born in a backwater of his noble family. Then fortunate deaths, barren wombs and the imperative of fate put him next in line to the estate after his great-uncle, universally known as ‘the Wicked Lord Byron’. (’Soon to be known as the first Wicked Lord Byron,’ I was told, with a wink. His eyelid fell gracefully over his eye, extinguishing the blue-grey glitter for a moment.)
At the Aberdeen Grammar School the little Byron became the champion of all the marble-players, and nursed a truculent temper. He was, a neighbour declared, an ‘ill-deedie laddie’ and ‘a wee crockit deevil’. As his mother prayed in church, he would prick her fat arm with a pin. A bracelet of plump red drops would burst on her skin, and later a bruise would flower on his thigh where she beat him. These were the kinds of gifts mother and son exchanged, from the outset.
Byron flexed his own soft white arm in front of me as he talked. I was not unaware of its graceful curve. His hand moved towards his thigh to finger a remembered hurt. My eyes followed it. He went on with his story, his hand still under the table.
Neither pain nor shame could contain the child, or the mother’s anger against him. Byron was already skinless in sensibility to any insult from his mother, or anyone else. When Lady Abercromby advised his mother to beat little Byron for a misdeed, the child marched up to her and struck her face. ‘That’s for meddling,’ he told her. When a woman in the street remarked upon his handsome face, and what a pity it was that he must limp, little Byron striped her with his child’s whip, ‘Dinna speak of it.’ Now he mimicked his childish lisping vehemence for me, charmingly.
At home, the violence increased. The missiles changed from tongues and hands to tongs and pokers. On one occasion, mother and son were each seen to go secretly at night to the apothecary, to ask whether the other had purchased poison during the day, and to caution him not to accept such a commission if it came. Byron mimicked the sinewy Scottish accent of his mother for me. ‘Lame brat,’ Catherine had shrieked at him. Worse still, the worst she could fling at him, ‘You are a true Byron.’
She had miscalculated her insult. Far from feeling the sting of these words, little Lord Byron-to-be was already revelling in the myth of his ancestors. He could not hear enough about the Wicked Lord, a murderer, a duellist who carried pistols in his pockets. Scarcely less colourful was Byron’s own grandfather, the Wicked Lord’s younger brother, known as Foulweather Jack. He had been shipwrecked off Patagonia, where he was obliged to eat the skin and paws of his pet dog in order to survive. Back in England, the Wicked Lord lived like a savage. Byron told me that when his black mood was upon him his great-uncle would throw the luckless Lady Byron into the ornamental pond at Newstead Abbey, the family home, and that he had shot the coachman dead in a fit of choler. Eventually he replaced his wife with a servant-girl. Then the Wicked Lord plunged his sword, fatally, into the liver of his neighbour, William Chaworth, during an argument about the best way to hang game.
Less forgivably, in his heir’s opinion, the old Wicked Lord had let Newstead Abbey rot to ruins. He had stripped the forests to pay his gambling debts and killed two thousand deer unfortunate enough to graze his fiefdom. He built a miniature castle in the forest for his louche entertainments. He constructed two small stone forts at the edge of his lake, and would spend whole days there directing imagined naval battles. Sometimes, he would lie upon the stone-flagged floor of the kitchen and stage cockroach races up and down his body. The servants said that the black insects knew their master, who whipped them with pieces of straw to keep them in line.
‘And then,’ Murray, the old butler would recount to the young Byron – who now mimicked the speech for me verbatim, and in an almost impenetrable accent — ‘the black beetles exhausted their wee black selves scrambling in the hairs on his Lordship’s belly, which were considerable in number. Sometimes they got themselves all snarled up down there, and that drove his Lordship into such a rage that he would snap them in half, lengthways, like an almond, with his long nails, that were never cut, never, you know. Indeed, those beetles knew what it was to belong to a Byron, as did those poor deer in the forest, that ran red with their blood for a month in its entirety’
The young Byron knew what it was to belong to the Byron clan. It was untidy, he told me, leaning closely and confidentially towards me. One never knew when one might meet one’s bastard mirror image in the village, running cockroach races in the dust at the side of the road. It was to feel a rage in the blood that could not be contained. It was to have an ability to pick up and drop human relations at will, he told me.
‘We are like that,’ he told me, looking straight into my eyes. ‘My father, for example.’
Byron’s father, Mad Jack Byron, had previously fathered a legitimate daughter, Augusta. The mother died in childbirth. Mad Jack had deposited the baby girl with friends, never to be collected again, and went heiress-hunting in Bath. He found Catherine Gordon, a large girl with a strong Scottish accent, a reasonable fortune, and her own gloomy family history. Her father was a suicide. Catherine was herself inclined to histrionics and bile. But she had loved Mad Jack on sight. She paid for a ring, and married him. In some ways she was no different from the other women who were rumoured to lay out cash for his company. Mad Jack, his son now told me, grinning, was said to have taken money for various stupendous sexual feats.
Mad Jack had run through Catherine’s fortune in less than a year. Then he left her, pregnant, only returning episodically to forage for cash. The infant Byron’s first experience of domestic life was of tears, bellowed oaths and doors slamming. Byron barely knew his father, who showed not the least interest in his small son. When his father was in the house, the little boy was nervous, pulling at the corner of his handkerchief until it frayed, and biting his fingernails. Eventually, Mad Jack went to live in France, in a strangely passiona
te relationship with his sister, Frances. He never saw his son again. Within three years he was dead of consumption, and the unstable Catherine Byron was left to look after her volatile young son entirely on her own.
‘You may imagine, I did not make it easy for her,’ said Byron.
The table was cleared around us. The Pasha bade us a good evening and explained he must leave to attend to ‘a political matter’.
‘But please,’ Ali beamed, ‘take advantage of the terrace and the moonlight.’ He pointed through the arches to the wide balcony where the servants were laying cushions and glass bowls of green and black grapes.
He wagged his finger at me with a roguish smile. ‘Do not exhaust the young English lords, Madame Cecilia.’ Then he was gone.
Byron collected his pistols and made a supple gesture out of sliding them into his pockets. We walked out to the terrace. Hobhouse was still immersed in conversation with Mouchar. They appeared to be talking about votive sacrifices, a subject on which I was certain that Mouchar would have many elegant and horrifying things to say. Hobhouse was showing him a sketchbook. I flicked my eyes over it: yes, very creditable pen-and-inks of Jannina and an Albanian soldier. A good eye for detail, I thought.
Byron wanted my attention for himself. He said to me, ‘Don’t waste your time with Hobby. He is rather tardy in his appreciation of the fairer sex. From your face, you are not entirely shocked by my history so far. Perhaps you would like to hear more?’
‘Yes, I would. It already sounds like a strange kind of fairy tale.’
‘Not always a very charming fairy tale. There’s more than a touch of horror to it. It’s more like Vathek than Cinderella.’
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