A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  But I am running ahead of my story. After much discussion and disagreement, we eventually lighted on two properties side by side on the southern edge of the lake. These were acceptable both to Byron’s pretensions, and to our own party’s rather more modest pockets. Byron accordingly leased the Villa Diodati, and we took a charming little house close by at Montalègre, which Shelley adored, because it had a little harbour of its own where he could moor the boat he had by then persuaded Byron to buy. It was scarcely ten minutes from one door to the other—I know it, because I walked it every day. In the morning, with Shelley and Mary to breakfast, or to my desk in the library where I was fair-copying Childe Harold; in the afternoons, to dine; and later, in the darkness, to Byron’s bed. Always in the darkness, because it was impossible otherwise to avoid Polidori, who would appear like an evil genius whenever I attempted to get my Albé alone. The man seemed always to require the urgent use of some article kept only in the room we were in, and on each such occasion that face of his he clearly thought so handsome was contorted by the most scornful of sneers. But he kept that sneer, needless to say, for me alone. He was careful never to betray any such insolence to his aristocratic employer. Indeed, his presence became so intrusive I began to wonder if he had not been placed there as a spy by Lady Byron, or some other member of her unspeakable family; I could not have guessed he had been paid for his snooping by His Lordship’s own publisher.

  And so I would creep, when all in both houses were abed, along that narrow path through the vineyard, with the glow-worms winking in the thickets and the dew settling on the new-mown grass, to the Diodati. Would I could say that the positions were reversed, and that it was Byron who came to me, mad with love, limping through the summer moonlight, but it was not so. Shelley once told me there were two Claires—one gentle and cheerful; the other nervous, reserved, melancholy. Certain it is that my greatest weakness has always been that I am as easily swayed by the person I love as the reed is by the wind. I would fain say Byron seduced me with sweet words—that he wrote poetry to me, as he did to others—but he did not. I pursued him in the wild hope that love would come and that passion would endure, but it did not. I gave myself to him, as other women had and other women would, but it was not for me, as it was for them. I was no society lady, able to shield her sin under the mask of marriage. I believed—I had been taught to believe—that love is free. That to promise forever to love the same person was no less absurd than to promise to adhere to the same creed. And that was my creed. I went to Byron in that spirit, and I thought he received me as a believer in the same pure ideal. How could I have known, scarcely eighteen, that men such as he use this vicious doctrine to slake their carnal appetites, and inflict more pain and cruelty than can ever have been caused by the supposed tyranny of the institution of marriage they claim to despise.

  By the mid days of June, the pattern of that summer of 1816 was set. Byron and Shelley became as brother Poets, finding every day another common passion, another shared pursuit. And I think we were all four of us a little giddy with such a richness of thought, and talk, and laughter, and mutual delight. I remember one blissful evening when we drifted about the lake long after nightfall, trailing our hands either side of the boat as we gazed down into the limpid water, and then up at the bright dome above our heads, where one by one the stars glimmered then gathered light in the darkening sky. It was the last clear night for weeks; by morning a battalion of grey clouds had rolled down from the Jura, and a fierce wind was raging across the surface of the water. Even Shelley could not contemplate boating in such weather, and Byron was far too lazy—or craven—to try. And so it was then we spent almost a fortnight closeted together around the fireplace in the Diodati drawing-room, as the rain beat against the long windows and the mists rolled up from the lake, tossing ideas about between us like so many brightly coloured balls, and telling each other tales. Tales from literature, tales from history, and tales—sometimes—of our own lives. I remember Shelley recounting to Byron one night how he and Mary had met, and as I listened to his words I turned to Mary and saw her face, so closed and white in the flickering firelight, knowing—as she did—what a lie it all was. She did not—or could not—meet my eye, but I wondered, then, if she had started to believe what it suited them both to tell the credulous world. A world she has so blinded to her narrowness of heart and meanness of conduct that all it can see is the shining beauty of her mind.

  Not that she cared much to display it, that summer. She rarely spoke, those long evenings, but sat pale in the shadows, watching and listening and—no doubt—judging. As I look back at that fortnight now it seems to me that the room was charged with a web of unspoken feeling—a tangle of electric connections much like those currents Shelley and Polidori debated of one night, that they said might one day unlock the door of life and bring the dead back to vital warmth. Connections unseen, but irresistible, and as explosive in their expression as they were erratic in their effects. Mine with Byron, a bright secret within a darker one; Poldori’s with Mary, pursued by him, unsought by her; Shelley’s with Byron, as ardent and infatuated as Byron’s ever was with himself; and mine with Mary, the most ambivalent and enduring of them all—already so then, and how much more so now.

  I do not remember, now, what first led us to talk of ghosts.

  No-one could have known what would eventually come of it, and surely it was entirely natural that our thoughts should tend in such a morbid direction, with the unquiet shadows cast by the guttering candles, and the wind howling about the walls like a banshee. I do recollect Byron coming down one night with a book of old German horror stories, and taking great delight in declaiming them to us in a loud and lurid voice. I recall one of a skull that was restored to life to accuse its murderer, another of two sisters so alike that they could scarce be told apart, and a third of a phantom cursed to kill each new heir to its line with a kiss. I shuddered as I watched Byron’s eyes seek out mine as he spoke of the hideous wraith bending over the crib, and my heart misgave me as I saw him, in my imagination, perform the same foul rite, and breathe the same cold poison onto his own infant’s brow. Shelley, by then, was in a state of the most excited animation, talking—babbling even—of how he had tried to raise ghosts when a boy. He had once sat up all night in a charnel-house, he told us, reciting from a book of spells and hoping to see a ghastly spectre rise from the heaps of dry old bones. It sounded childish, spoken in that shrill high-pitched tone that always came upon him in agitation, and I could see that sardonic sneer once again on the doctor’s face. And yet Polidori would soon observe with his own eyes that it was no passing juvenile fit that Shelley spoke of, but an ever-present terror that could reduce him, without warning, to a pitiful abject hysteria, or to night after night of sleep-walking from which he would awake hours later, with no recollection of where he had been, or what it was he had done.

  Byron then cast down his book with a theatrical gesture, declaring the thing to be contemptible trash. Surely, he said, our combined intellects could concoct a horror story worth the name? Better still, cried Shelley, Let us each devise our own tale, and contend with one another to harrow up our souls and set our eyeballs starting from their spheres! His own eyes were hardly less frenzied at that moment, and I could see Mary’s look of apprehension—she was concerned, always, to avoid any circumstance that might provoke a renewed attack, but Shelley was not to be gainsaid. He sought his notebook out at once, saying he had an idea for a story based on his own early life. Again I saw Mary’s look, again I saw the shadow of disquiet cross her face, but she said not a word. Polidori announced he would set aside the play he had been writing (which I was not alone in dismissing as utterly worthless), and that he already had an idea for a story concerning a woman with a skull instead of a face. Shelley squealed with laughter at this, saying that he could furnish him with the perfect model, an artful ugly hermaphroditical beast of a woman, who had once made his life an utter misery. And then his face darkened with thought, or memory, an
d he cast himself into a chair by the fire, declaring that the most profound horror was to be found not in the artificial apparatus of the macabre, but in the terrible depths of even the truest-intentioned human heart. I can recall moments, he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper, when I have looked upon my own being with unutterable abhorrence, and started from my own company as it were that of a fiend, seeking anything rather than a continued communion with self.

  Mary went to him then. She spoke to him softly, putting her hand to his forehead and looking into his eyes. I could see she was telling him that the idea was ill advised—that no good could come of it, but she could not dissuade him. Byron, meanwhile, had stretched himself full length on the chaise longue and was dictating at great speed to Polidori, who was endeavouring to capture it all in his leather-bound notebook. As for me, I had tried my hand at writing once before, and Shelley had been kind enough to encourage me and tell me I had a talent worth nurturing, and I saw no reason therefore why I should not make an attempt at a ghost tale of my own. Mary did her best to discourage me, but I had long since shaken off the conviction so studiously borne in upon me as a child—and not least by her—that it was fruitless, in our family, even to put pen to paper unless one could produce a work of such originality as would cast all other books into the shade. I could not refrain from an inward smile when I saw that she, indeed, seemed not a little fretful at having no immediate idea of her own to hand, but a question or two she subsequently asked Polidori about the discussion we had had of galvanism and electricity led me to believe that she was considering this as the basis of her tale. For though her tone appeared careless when she thanked him for his reply, I saw her go at once upstairs, to where she had stowed her writing-desk—the selfsame desk she would later leave, so disastrously, in that odious Maddocks’ care.

  But to return to my story. We slept at the Diodati that night, and when Byron made his appearance at luncheon the following day Shelley was already far advanced in his tale, his hair disordered and flecks of ink spattered on his hands. Mary sought to induce him to join us at table, but he shook her arm roughly away. For the rest of the afternoon he sat there, his desk placed to face down towards the water, writing with one hand and with the other conveying currants and pieces of stale bread to his mouth from the pocket of his long grey coat. As the hours wore on the weather worsened, and we felt in the air the sulphurous onset of thunder. We had seen storms in the region before, most especially in our journey across the Alps, when we cowered together against the cold through a desolate white landscape of overhanging precipices and huge menacing trees, but that night at the Diodati was the worst we had yet endured. With the descent of darkness the wind swelled to a roar, and the flashes of lightning leaping from peak to peak lit up streaks of clouds racing across the angry sky, and the bowl of the lake seething like an alchemical crucible. As hour after hour passed it was clear that this vast collision of the elements was stimulating Shelley’s nerves to an almost painful pitch, while Byron, by contrast, was evidently aroused in quite another manner. So much so, indeed, that he and I adjourned discreetly to his room after dinner, leaving the others variously preoccupied about their books.

  When I descended again the clock in the hall was striking half after eleven, and the storm was at its very height. Byron was as always invigorated by the act of love, and had begun talking once more, and with renewed enthusiasm, of holding our own phantasmagoria. Let us extinguish all the lights, he declared, and demand the dead to appear and speak to us, for what do we have to fear? I am no murderer, he said, even if my wife’s family seem to think me capable of even blacker and more shameful transgressions. I dread no revenant come to punish me. Indeed? I replied, archly. No father of a ruined daughter, or shamed and cuckolded husband determined to seek you out? No Commendatore hellbent on revenge? He eyed me oddly then, and throwing on his dressing-gown, resumed his desk. I bobbed a mocking curtsy to his turned back, and betook myself back down to the saloon, where I joined the rest as unobtrusively as I was able, though not of course without attracting the customary look of impudent scorn from Polidori. And then as the hour of twelve struck, the drawing-room doors were thrown open with a splintering crack and a figure stood in the blue-white glare of a bolt of lightning. Both arms outstretched, and draped in a black cloak and hood that reached down over his face. It was as if a monster from a Gothic novel had come that moment to life, or returned, a vampire glistering with the clammy dew of hell, from among the mouldering dead. I saw Shelley start aghast from his chair, even as a smile of ironic amusement slid across Polidori’s face. He knew, as I did, that this was exactly the sort of cruel jest Byron delighted most to play—had he not taunted me, only a few nights before, with dark insinuations that he was the father of his own sister’s child? My own nerves might withstand this latest prank, but I feared for Shelley, in his high-wrought state. And for a moment—the briefest moment—I wondered if Mary too had not believed it. For in the dazzle of the lightning I had glimpsed her face, and seen there not just horror but something that I should almost have called ecstacy.

  But all this passed in an instant, for then Byron threw back his hood and laughed, declaring loudly that it was the night of all others for tales of the supernatural, and even if we had no spells at our command, we should be more than capable of reducing our audience to a cold sweat of terror merely with our words—those of us, at least, whose works could make any valid claim to lasting fame (this, no doubt, directed at Polidori). And so, he finished with a sweep of his black-swathed arm, we will now, at the midnight hour, read aloud what we have written. Mary began at once to protest, saying she had nothing to share, and I saw the doctor look quickly at her, as he made a few notes in that infernal pocket-book of his. Shelley, by contrast, seemed recovered from his alarm. Indeed, he appeared of all of us the most eager to begin. He went to close the shutters himself as the servants made up the fire and extinguished the lamps. I wondered what Byron could have to offer, knowing how little of his energy he had dedicated that day to his pen, but he had, it transpired, quite other ideas. As the room darkened we took our seats again about the fire, and the flames threw grotesque dancing shadows across the walls, transforming each of us in our turn from mortal to monster. Polidori, attentive but detached, ever the observer; Mary folding her hands on her lap in seeming demureness, her real feelings betrayed only by the dead whiteness about her lips; and Shelley, passing strange, his eyelids drawn back as if in pain, and his breath coming fast and shallow. As I had seen him once before, on that other day of horrors which he and I endured. That day of which I have already spoken, and dread to speak of again.

  Byron took his place in the centre of the circle, planted his feet apart and raised his arm, pointing slowly to each of us, one by one. All struggled to hold his stare but I—for what reason should I be abashed before him? And then he began, in sonorous tones, to recite. Not a piece of his own, but Christabel. Coleridge’s Christabel. And much as I have always hated it, I could not but agree that it was a fine choice for such a night, that gruesome tale of a serpent-witch taking the shape of a lost and innocent girl. We sat there, silent and motionless, as Byron’s voice mingled with the lashing of the rain against the glass and the boom of the thunder, close and far, and the room became by degrees ever more icy. The fire had risen to a blaze but seemed powerless to dispel the chill which felt, at that moment, and in that strange and heightened atmosphere, the very ice of death. On and on he intoned, and as he approached the moment when the enchantress begins to disrobe, I could see Shelley becoming painfully restless, his hand at his side and his chest heaving with the effort for calm.

  Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,

  And slowly rolled her eyes around;

  Then drawing in her breath aloud,

  Like one that shuddered, she unbound

  The cincture from beneath her breast:

  Her silken robe, and inner vest,

  Dropped to her feet, and full in view,

  Behold! her
bosom and half her side—

  Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue—

  At that moment one of the shutters crashed open against the wall and Shelley staggered to his feet with a shriek of such anguish one might have thought his living heart was being torn from his breast. No—no! he cried, and ran sobbing and stumbling from the room. Mary rose at once, but Polidori prevented her. Consigning her to Byron’s care, he seized the nearest candle and followed Shelley’s steps. Mary was by this time crying bitterly in His Lordship’s arms, and not wishing to play the role of spectator where I was accustomed to that of principal, I made my way out into the hall. I thought only at first of getting a little air and dispelling the poisonous atmosphere of the saloon, but I heard at once the low sound of voices and perceived that Shelley had taken refuge in the breakfast-room. There was a little closet next that chamber, and as the lightning flooded again through the windows and the thunder clove the air above me as if to sunder the very mountains, I pushed open the door and slid into the dark space.