Scanning the horizon had now become habit for Mary Shelley. Whether she did so in Marlow, staring at the droopy willow trees hanging like tentacles over the rooftops, or in Naples, where in the distance the volcano puffed, it didn’t matter: her eyes always watched the changing light before her, as she could see her own life change in the various colors reflected in the seasons of nature. In 1822 she found herself staring at another horizon, with the new waves of another sea. This time, the Gulf of La Spezia, on the upper northwest coast of Italy, stretched before her, the blowing of the Mediterranean winds bringing not relief, as she and Percy had anticipated, but a strange prequel to sorrow.
Mary had come to literally despise the place, not only the bay itself, but Casa Magni, where they were living for the summer. Percy had found the house along with their friend Edward Williams and their new acquaintance E. J. Trelawny. They had scoured the region for a peaceful place where they all could live but found nothing worthwhile, other than Casa Magni, which had the look and feel of a fishing shack. Though ramshackle, its one redeeming feature was its position on the hill, which made it possible to watch the sea and to feel as if the waters were leaning into and retreating out of the house.
The back of the house was surrounded by trees so dense that the wind passing through the branches made a sound resembling the crying of children. Combined with the angry waves, these sounds seemed like premonitions to Mary. In this feeling she was like her father, who despised the sea.
The whole place filled Mary with a sense of doom she could not shake off, until she left the house and accompanied Shelley in his small boat. There, sprawled inside the wooden contraption, Mary rested her head in Shelley’s lap as he slowly rowed outward, looked up toward a splendidly blue sky, and imagined Casa Magni fading away, along with her fears.
She was not well. Those around her knew it, and she was aware that physically and mentally, she was exhausted. On June 16, she had suffered a miscarriage and the subsequent hemorrhage had left her drained. The ordeal could have killed her, if not for Shelley’s swift actions. When he saw the profusion of blood spurting out of her, he lifted her into his arms and plunged her into the icy waters of a bathing tub. Mary must have shivered as the deep chill seeped through her bones and her blood halted its speedy course, all the while seeing the desperation in her husband’s eyes and his hurried movements. She had slowly recovered, though she knew it would take longer to heal emotionally. It did not help that Shelley, who seemed tired of her latest bout of melancholy, seemed unable or unwilling to soothe her this time.
Mary also knew she could not rely on her father, who had no patience for feelings of melancholy. A few years earlier, upon the death of her son, William, she had written to William Godwin looking for answers and parental wisdom. Instead, she received a sermon: “I cannot but consider it [Mary’s depression] as lowering your character . . . & putting you quite among the commonality & mob of your sex.” Unable to offer succor, he became even harsher, plying her with guilt. “What is it you want that you have not? You have the husband of your choice . . . a man of high intellectual endowments . . . You have lost a child: all the rest of the world, all that is beautiful, all that has a claim upon your kinship, is nothing because a child of three years old is dead! . . . You seem to be shrinking away, & voluntarily enrolling yourself among the worst.”
Unlike Mary, Percy adored the area. It was the waters that attracted him most, the boat that he was having built, the simple pleasure of puttering into the sea whenever he wanted to. But lately Shelley had been dealing with his own issues in the form of odd dreams—or not dreams really, but visions, waking dreams. He was familiar with them because he had suffered from this since childhood. Sometimes the dreams subsided for weeks, but recently they were causing him to scream out in the night and disturb Mary. Not that she had been doing much sleeping herself. Partly due to her physical discomfort and partly due to her spending so much time in bed, her own sleeping pattern had changed dramatically.
She was startled one night when she heard Percy screaming. Fatigued and sore, she got out of bed and began calling his name. But nothing, it seemed, could wake him, until she shook him and he eventually came to and described the dream to her in ways that frightened her as well.
He told her that in his dream their friends Jane and Edward Williams had come to wake him up. When he opened his eyes, he noticed that their bodies had been ripped apart, broken joints poking through their skin, their colorless faces smudged with blood. They were leaning on each other, holding their broken bodies as if for support, and had come to warn him that rushing waters were going to flood the house. In the dream Shelley heeded their advice and ran toward the window, where he noticed a flood of angry water coming toward the house, covering the verandah and eventually engulfing the interior.
Mary shuddered and must have thought about the boat Percy was having constructed, and of their friend E. J. Trelawny, who not long ago had come by the house reciting some of Shakespeare’s lyrics he had found so apt for their nautical adventures: “We will all suffer a sea change! We will all suffer a sea change!” Shelley had been charmed by the rhythm of the words and had determined to have the lines—quoted from “Ariel’s Song” in The Tempest—inscribed as a motto on his new nautical toy. But those who knew the quotation in full, as Mary no doubt did, must have heard in the words a dire warning:
Full fathom five thy father lives;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Hark! Now I hear them—ding-dong bell.
But Shelley’s boat, the Don Juan, would never carry the lines from “Ariel’s Song.” Rather, the words Nothing of him that doth fade, but suffer a sea change would be etched on Shelley’s tombstone in Rome.
Whether E. J. Trelawny knew it or not, whether the Shelleys even thought of it, he was responsible for their being where they were and for Shelley’s eagerly awaiting the completion of his boat. This was odd primarily because Trelawny had joined this circle of acquaintances only months earlier, though he had quickly gained Shelley’s trust.
Until the summer of 1819, Trelawny hadn’t even heard of Percy Shelley and his friends, and then he found himself in the area of Lake Geneva and was introduced to the name by a local bookseller, who showed him some of Shelley’s works. Not long after, Trelawny met Thomas Medwin, Percy Shelley’s cousin, whose friendship with Shelley had impressed him deeply. Trelawny then set out to meet the poet. The opportunity came about sometime later through a friend of both parties, Edward Williams. Williams wrote to Trelawny in April 1821, “Shelley is certainly a man of most astonishing genius in appearance, extraordinarily young, of manners mild and amiable . . . full of life and fun.”
In subsequent letters, Trelawny was invited to Pisa, and it was there, in the Williamses’ apartment, that he met Shelley. Not surprisingly, Trelawny was stunned by the “mild-looking, beardless boy” and could not help but admire the slightly womanly grace about his persona. Soon Shelley returned and introduced Trelawny to Mary Shelley, who was then twenty-seven years old. Trelawny was struck not so much by her beauty or literary accomplishments, but by “such a rare pedigree of genius.” Being the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin was enough to overwhelm “her own merits as an authoress,” but there was also something in Mary’s eyes that put him at ease, even though he could not miss the melancholy that seemed a part of her. Trelawny wondered what caused it.
A friendship quickly developed between Trelawny and Shelley, who set out to bring Lord Byron into the mix. Byron was then living across the Ponte Vecchio in Palazzo Lanfranchi. On the day Shelley and Trelawny arrived there, they were received into the palace by the growls of Moretto, Byron’s dog. As the two waited for Byron, they walked into a large and opulent room that led directly into
a richly decorated parlor room, at the end of which rose a spiraling staircase leading to the upper floors. Trelawny later reported in his memoirs that he noticed right away that Byron limped, though the poet made every effort to hide it by walking quickly toward them.
Unlike John William Polidori, who had tried so hard to be welcomed by the group and was cheerfully mocked, Trelawny was not only befriended while in Pisa but made an essential contributor to their circle. His stories of adventure while in the navy, which for the most part were fabricated, captured the imagination of the poets and their families, who had no problem visualizing the places he spoke of, imagining the people he had met, conjuring the smells he described. In no time, Trelawny was spending his days with the Shelleys and Byron, and his evenings at the Williamses’.
On a daily walk through the harbor, Shelley and Trelawny came upon a collection of boats, and one made in America appealed to them particularly. Trelawny managed to get them onto the boat, and Shelley was so taken with its construction he talked about it and all things related to the sea for days afterward. Trelawny saw such beauty in the boat’s lines, he became convinced that only a poet of the sea could have designed it. He proposed that they draw up a model and have boats built for themselves. Shelley, of course, agreed. They drew the lines of their boats in the river sands of the Arno, imagining a colony of English boaters in the Gulf of La Spezia, of which Byron would be a part. Byron also joined them in this dream about the boats and immediately set out to find a large home on the Gulf of La Spezia.
Trelawny hired his friend Captain Daniel Roberts to build the boat. Roberts had risen through the ranks to become a commander in the Royal Navy. His special skills and sociable disposition made him fully capable of building such boats, but he also had the know-how to procure the required permits from corrupt Italian officials. The only thing left was for the Shelleys to find a place to stay.
Byron wanted something similar to his Pisan palazzo, which on the shores of La Spezia was impossible to find, but the Shelleys’ needs were far less ostentatious. When they had searched the Ligurian coast, they had only come across Casa Magni. Though the place was deemed unappealing, the Shelleys quickly made arrangements with the owner to move into it for the summer.
For someone who did not know how to swim, Shelley’s desire to launch himself into the open waters and to test its mighty powers was foolish. The Don Juan was a relatively small boat, barely twenty-five feet in length; Percy certainly should have known it could not withstand the risky currents and strong winds of the Mediterranean waters.
As excited as Shelley was by his new possession, he and Mary still carried a pervasive sense of depression around with them. In June 1822 Shelley sent Trelawny another letter, speaking not only of the boats he and Lord Byron were enjoying, but of a darker sentiment that his mind was ruminating upon: “Should you meet with any scientific person, capable of preparing the Prussic Acid or essential oil of bitter almonds, I should regard it as a great kindness if you could procure me a small quantity.”
Prussic acid was the poison John Polidori had died of. Shelley continued: “It requires the greatest caution in preparation, and ought to be highly concentrated; I would give any price for this medicine. You remember we talked of it the other night, and we both expressed a wish to possess it; my wish was serious, and sprung from the desire of avoiding needless suffering. I need not tell you I have no intention of suicide at present, but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chambers of perpetual rest. The Prussic Acid is used in medicine in infinitely minute doses; but that preparation is weak, and has not the concentration necessary to medicine all ills infallibly. A single drop, even less, is a dose, and it acts by paralysis.”
Shelley ended his letter by telling Trelawny that Mary was still quite depressed.
An odd dynamic had been set up in the steering of the Don Juan. When Trelawny finally visited, he could not help but notice that Edward Williams felt nervous about the boat, making certain everything was in its spot, keeping his eyes constantly on the open waters, so stiff he seemed unable to enjoy the experience. Shelley, on the other hand, seemed completely relaxed, maybe too much so. He steered the boat holding a book in his hands, believing he could read and manage a vessel at the same time, as the activities were “one mental, the other mechanical,” therefore requiring different sides of his brain to work.
On July 2 Shelley, Williams, and Trelawny took both boats to Leghorn to care for certain businesses and to buy provisions, having left Casa Magni days before. On the bluff overlooking the Gulf of La Spezia, Mary waited impatiently for her husband’s return. Her strange presentiment of doom had not yet left her, so she longed to see the sails unfurl as they docked in the harbor.
The plan was for Shelley and Williams to sail the Don Juan across the Gulf of La Spezia, Trelawny following them in Lord Byron’s boat, the Bolivar. But as they set out to leave, Trelawny was detained in Leghorn for a few days by the harbor patrol due to some irregularities in his paperwork. This did not please Shelley or especially Williams, who was eager to return to Casa Magni and his wife, Jane. After much fanfare, Shelley and Williams decided to set sail on their own. It was already three P.M., an unusual time to depart for such a journey; most boats had left the harbor at dawn. Later Trelawny recalled a mariner standing next to him commenting on the unusual time of departure and giving a dire warning: “They are standing too much on shore . . . The current will set them there . . . she will soon have too much breeze . . . that off-top sail is foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board . . . The devil is brewing mischief.”
Trelawny thought it was odd that the old man was talking about a breeze because there was not a hint of it in the air. It was hot and still, and the sailors and mariners were going about their business in a great bustle. “Shifting berths, getting down yards and masts,” Trelawny later recalled. “Veering out cables, hauling the ships and quays, boats swelling rapidly to and fro.”
Trelawny looked out in the distance at the completely still and calm waters and saw no sign of his friends. But suddenly, the sea turned the color of lead and became as thick as a frozen lake; then raindrops, big hearty ones, started falling from the sky and seemed to bounce off the still surface. The air rippled and thrashed, great noises were heard from the sky, and a terrible gurgle arose from the deepest recesses of the ocean. Trelawny noticed the smaller boats that had not been anchored at the harbor being tossed about like toys while fishermen staggered trying to knot their belongings. It was a fast-moving storm, one of those summer squalls that comes and goes in the span of twenty minutes.
Peace soon returned to the area. Fishing boats and schooners that had been at sea were coming back to their ports. Trelawny hoped to catch a glimpse of the Don Juan, thinking that perhaps Shelley and Williams had decided to turn back. But there was no sign of them. He asked those who had returned for information, but no one said they had seen signs of the boat in the open waters.
Trelawny spent the late afternoon and early evening scanning the horizon and the harbor, but as night fell a new storm arose. He returned to the Bolivar. The bellowing thunder, the incessant rains, and the constant worry kept him awake, and he resolved that if nothing was heard in the harbor by morning, he would return to Pisa, where Byron was. Perhaps word had come from Casa Magni that Shelley and Williams were safely there. By morning the storm had passed, but all his inquiries about his friends’ whereabouts remained unanswered. A terrible feeling of dread had begun to settle upon him, and he hurriedly rode to Pisa, where he found no news from Casa Magni. On Trelawny’s arrival, Byron had quickly staggered down his staircase. Trelawny described the events of the past two days, and as he spoke Byron’s “lips quivered, and his voice faltered” as he too thought of the possibilities.
At Casa Magni, despair had set in.
Trelawny made his way up the Ligurian coast to Casa Magni. When he got near the city of Via Reggio, he learned that “a punt, a water-keg, a
nd some bottles” had washed ashore and been located by locals. These items were often found on boats, so they did not immediately cause too much concern in him. For several days, parties of searchers tried to find the missing friends, but each day ended with no news. When a week had passed, their worst fears came true. Trelawny heard that two decomposing bodies had been found in the sands near Via Reggio. He rushed to them, wanting to be sure they were the corpses of his two friends.
“The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless,” he later wrote. Right away, he recognized Shelley. It was not so much because the remains were those of a lanky and slight person, but because there was a “volume of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats’s poem in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away.” Edward Williams’s body had washed ashore nearly three miles away. His corpse was even more mutilated than Shelley’s, the only dignity remaining that of a shirt covering it and the tips of a black silk handkerchief, which Trelawny had seen many times before. Those few bits of fabric are what told Trelawny the body was Williams’s. The corpse of the sailor boy who had accompanied them, Charles Vivian, was not found until three weeks later.
Trelawny quickly made his way to Casa Magni, where Mary had been awaiting news of her husband. The two stared at one another. “Is there no hope?” Mary was said to have asked. Trelawny could not bring himself to reply, in essence answering Mary’s question.
It was decided that Shelley’s remains would be removed from the sands of Via Reggio and interred in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Williams’s remains would be returned to England. But given the length of time that had elapsed and the conditions of the corpses, quarantine laws prohibited the removal of the bodies for fear of the spread of infection. The only way to safely get them out without harming anyone was to cremate them. Oddly enough, Mary did not mind having her husband’s body reduced to ashes. Trelawny took it upon himself to arrange the cremations. Williams, it was agreed, would be the first to undergo the procedure.
The Lady and Her Monsters Page 21