Midnight

by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)

  Still Jane Austen.

  But not for much longer. The ailment proved fatal, and on July 18, 1817, after a night of faintness and a feeling she somehow could not describe, she died in her sister’s arms. She was forty-one.

  The real success came after her death, the adulation later still. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral, with a nice plaque that nods to the “extraordinary endowments of her mind,” without quite bringing itself to mention her books.

  It was written by her brother James, the one with the mean-spirited wife, Mary. Jane Austen would have understood, could have written the scene herself. Good Jane. Modest Jane. Better to stick to her “benevolence of heart” and “sweetness of temper” than risk any mention of her surpassing achievements, her life’s work, her books.

  Now, however, there’s another plaque, bigger, brass, and a stained-glass window in her memory. People come to Winchester Cathedral to see her grave. Her books are sold in the gift shop. She would have had a laugh at that, too.

  They make more in a month there than she made in a lifetime. She is by now well in the way of supporting Winchester Cathedral. Though it’s no stretch to imagine that she would have preferred her posthumous endowments to shower down upon her former home, Steventon, and her remains to molder in the churchyard there. But Harris Bigg-Withers’s sisters were living in Winchester then, and one of them was the widow of a canon of the cathedral. They thought it fitting and proper that she lie among the kings and bishops there, and had the clout to make it happen.

  And this time there was no Jane Austen to face them, grave and quiet, dressed in gray in the morning, to tell them no, that it wouldn’t do for her. For others, but not for her. This time, they had their way.

  MARY SHELLEY ON THE BEACH

  I.

  Bay of Spezia, Italy, 1822

  What did it mean, she wondered, to dream about a bird in a room? Trapped, fluttering around, too high to catch and free? Did it bode ill, as the people here said? An impending omen, another death, or was it more a portrait? Herself, trapped and fluttering, beating away from any chance to get free?

  Either way, she thought as she looked out, either way. It was the twelfth of July. Shelley should have been back days ago—three days, if he’d kept to their plan. Two days, yesterday even, if something had arisen. Caught his eye, his imagination. There was a chance of that, always.

  She took a breath, tried to get up again, but couldn’t quite. Maybe later, if someone brought tea. She had barely gotten herself out here, onto the terrace, early, just at daybreak, with the morning star still in the sky. It had taken some doing—but it was good to be here now alone, which meant without Jane Williams, and especially without Claire.

  Breathe in, she told herself, breathe out. She was still slightly amazed to be alive that July morning. It was how long since the miscarriage? June 16—so nearly a month. Barely time for her to come back, in spirit as much as body, from the other side, to where she had herself sailed and nearly made land.

  She could hardly recall how it had all started—was it first the bleeding or first the fevers? They had sent for the doctor, but the doctor was far—that was another problem with this place. No help should help be needed, and with a woman, or was she still a girl? Age twenty-four, so a woman by age, but pregnant five times, five, over the past eight years, so in some ways she felt as vulnerable, as out-of-control as the girl she’d been at sixteen when she’d run off with Shelley. But woman or girl, or both, pregnant, and no doctor near, nor any wise woman among the neighbors. She’d seen them on the beach at night, “singing or rather howling,” she wrote a friend, “the women dancing about among the waves that break at their feet.” No one to turn to.

  Except her two nemeses—her far-too-constant companion, stepsister Claire Clairmont, and her co-inhabitant of this boathouse, Jane Williams. Wife of Shelley’s sailing partner, and current object—yes, she knew—of Shelley’s “platonics,” as she’d come to call them. Both women worthy of her scorn, if not her active distrust, both, she might even say, open to question as to their true heart’s intentions vis-à-vis her life or death.

  Not that any of that mattered once it had started, taking over not just her body but all the time and space around her, the way birth does, as she knew by now. Though it wasn’t quite “knowing,” at least not like she knew her father’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice or her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Or maybe it was more in the biblical sense, the physical, the violent—the men in the Old Testament “knowing” a woman, by stealth or by force. So yes, taken like that, she knew birth, and knew, too, that this time it wasn’t going as before, with the pains strong perhaps but essentially progressing, toward the customary and successful outcome. This time, she was dying.

  And so she would die. She knew that, too, as she slipped in and out of consciousness, now and then aware of bustling activity around her, worried faces, tears, sweat, and the blood, hers, and so much of it. Sheets being wrung into buckets, carried away, new sheets slid under her, and then they, too, carried away, drenched in what was clearly too much blood. As it flowed from her, she felt herself flowing with it, flowing off, only occasionally opening her eyes to other eyes, which seemed to be darkening, along the scale from alarm to real fear.

  She, too, had attended childbirth, not so long ago for Jane Williams herself, who was at her bedside. She, too, had shot frightened glances out of doors and windows for a doctor who was late, who hadn’t come. But she had been lucky—she’d never been witness to a fatal outcome, never had to carry out the sheets dripping with blood. There had been blood, of course, always, but dark, not the clear red she was seeing in her sheets. Lifeblood that was telling its own tale, even while those clustered around her bed—her bier—still held out hope.

  Maybe it was better from where she lay that day, outside it all. “Where can the doctor be?” she heard them whispering with desperation. She opened her eyes for a moment—Claire, Jane Williams, and then Shelley.

  Still her love, even then. She filled her eyes with his face, still beautiful to her. His blue eyes, too big, really. His soft brown hair, his thin form, leaning forward, gazing on her, very still, unmoving, among the activity, the sheets, the chaos, the fear. I’m dying, Shelley, she wanted to whisper, not to scare him, but to bring him in, as it used to be between them. To let him know that she wasn’t afraid, that it was all right. She had no fear. She wasn’t happy to die, but she wasn’t unwilling. That’s how she would have put it to him.

  But by then she couldn’t muster the strength even to whisper, and maybe she didn’t have to, maybe he knew. He had been reading Plato lately, learning, he’d told her, “all that could be said on the immortality of the Soul.” And though that would have, she thought, prepared him for her loss—for her transfiguration, as it was feeling to her then, from body to spirit—Shelley, rather than submitting to her death, took action.

  He somehow managed to get a load of ice brought to their isolated beachhead from one of the nearby nivieras, the ice caves, and had it dumped into the tin bathtub. Then, with Claire and Jane arguing against it, arguing that the shock might kill her, he swooped her up and carried her, sheets dripping, to the tub, where he sat her, fainting and bleeding, in the ice.

  And it was shocking, but it saved her. Stanched the bleeding, which stopped the fainting, and before long she could open her eyes, sip some brandy, and feel death receding, sip by sip. And when the doctor finally arrived, there was nothing left for him to do, as Shelley wrote to their friends the Gisbornes, “but applaud me for my boldness.”

  Which was why she was alive this dawn, to lie on this sofa and keep watch out over the troubled waters of the Bay of Spezia, which were coming to look, more and more, to her like a grave. Treacherous waters, which swept under the house at high tide, more changeable than they had first appeared. Storms, she was seeing, came up here in the summer out of nowhere, impossible to predict. From the Alps, people said—the cold air clashing with the heat, unsett
ling the sea.

  And them, too—unsettled, strangely. When she’d last written to the Gisbornes, she had considered telling them about the nightmares that had recently been plaguing Shelley, mostly to see if they had any thoughts, any similar experiences. In the hopes of getting an answer from the dear wise Maria along the lines of, Oh, yes, John had the same kind of dreams, though she knew he hadn’t.

  Not dreams like Shelley’s. One night, it was that their housemates, Ned and Jane Williams, were covered with blood, their bones sticking through their skin, running, crying that the sea was flooding into the house. Another night, he saw himself strangling her. He’d come screaming into her room, “yet he dared not approach the bed.” His eyes were open, but he couldn’t speak, just stood with such a haunted look on his face that she, terrified herself, though still unable to stand after the miscarriage, had somehow managed to crawl into the Williamses’ bedroom, to get Ned to help her. He’d carried her back to bed, and brought Shelley some brandy, managed to calm him.

  But the very next day, he’d come to her again, awake this time, with tears streaming down his face. He’d seen himself, he told her, walking on the terrace. He took courage and approached the vision, who had turned to him and asked, “How long do you mean to be content?” That had chilled her, too, not that she feared it as a haunting, but more as an interior call to arms. “How long do you mean to be content?”

  It was Friday, the day the mail came—such was the isolation here. Mail only Monday and Friday, and who could blame the postman? She, too, hated to come here, though it had looked beautiful at first, from the water. The white house, the terrace with its five arches, the green trees behind, the chestnuts and scrub oaks she’d come to love in Italy.

  But once they’d arrived, once they’d moved in, she’d seen that it was scarcely more than a boathouse, set right on the sand, where, she wrote, the “sea came up to the door” and “the howling wind swept round unremittingly.” The ground floor was nothing but dirt and sand, since it flooded at high tide, which left only the upper floor for both them and the Williamses, whom Shelley had convinced to join them, along with their children and household help. This left no place for a dining room—dinner was served in a dark narrow hallway between the bedrooms.

  “It would be complete madness to come,” she had recently written to Shelley’s friend Leigh Hunt, who had just arrived in Pisa. Adding, incautiously but she had to—had to—“I wish I cd break my chains & leave this dungeon.”

  Afterward she wished she hadn’t written that, lest Hunt show the note to Shelley; Shelley who not only liked this place, but loved it, for precisely what she hated. For the gales, the squalls, the way the sea came in and the salt speckled the windows. “This divine bay,” he called it. He was happy here “reading Spanish dramas and sailing.”

  Yes, sailing. She, too, had sailed with him a bit now and then, around the bay for fun, but with him it wasn’t diversion, it was his passion, what he lived on. Because he’d fallen into that despair that always hit him when he was writing little. Silenced, once again, by spending too much time with Byron. “Albé,” as they called him between themselves, slightly mocking, Frenchifying his initials, L.B., their answer to the way he made a point of the “Lord.” “Lord Byron,” even with them he couldn’t leave it—it was absurd. As if Shelley would go around insisting on the “Sir,” once his father finally died and he inherited the title.

  But Byron—always “my lord.” His crest everywhere, on the doorposts of his house, on his gates, his carriage, his guns. Was it because of his bad foot, she sometimes wondered, that he woke up every morning slightly unsure of it all? Needing to be deferred to on a daily basis, even by them, his closest friends?

  If they ever really were friends. If there could be the possibility of friendship with mythological horses and ancient mottos blocking that narrow way, like Milton’s covering cherubs. Friendship, tenuous enough, she had found, with all ways clear, all doors wide, but with Byron, Lord Byron, strait was that gate, too narrow, anyway, for Shelley, who’d found the “demon of mistrust and pride lurks between two persons in our situation, poisoning freedom.”

  Not to mention another demon. Even that summer as Shelley found himself wondering if he’d ever write another line worth the ink and paper, fearing that he’d “lived too long near LB and the sun has extinguished the glow-worm,” Byron was turning out page after page of his latest work, his Don Juan, which he read aloud to the suffering Shelley at their midnight suppers in Pisa. And it was great work, maybe his best, relaxed, sure, teasing, challenging:

  Thou ask’st if I can love? be this the proof

  How much I have loved—that I love not thee!

  But it wasn’t Shelley. How could anyone compare Byron’s “Sultana’s sensual phantasy,” or his “tigress robbed of young,” with Shelley’s:

  Or thou, immortal Childe, with him that saw,

  Islam’s revolt, in rapt prophetic trance—

  One came from a picture book, a beautiful one, granted, the other from the depths of soul. From mystery, by miracle, but Byron didn’t work that way. She had seen him six years ago, that summer on Lake Geneva—he could write almost half chatting in a room, almost in public, as if his sources were in the air. As if Byron gave voice to the midnight dreams of literary London.

  And Byron, unlike Shelley, was popular, famous, lionized. “I awoke one morning,” as he put it, “and found myself famous.” His Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was a sensation when it was first published, in 1812. She was fourteen then, on an extended visit to a remote corner of Scotland, and even there they were talking about Byron.

  And to call down these beautiful, poetic outpourings, Byron had only to sit at his table and pick up his pen. Unlike Shelley, who had to wander into the woods with a half-torn old notebook and lie on his back looking up at the clouds if it was daylight, and the stars and moon if it was night, and get cold, get hot, get sick, and scribble his inspiration on ink-blotted pages that as often as not had to be collected from over and under the fallen leaves.

  Had she ever seen him sitting at a desk to write a poem? She didn’t think so. He sat to read, to study, she often with him—especially in the beginning. Sometimes now. But to write? No. His poetry was a magick spell to him, brought by the faeries. Queen Mab. A muse. Often in human form.

  And now by boat. Because what this boat was to him this summer was more magic carpet than canvas and wood, whose sails were the very “wings of poesy,” as their friend Keats had written. Their dead friend Keats. “Already with thee, tender is the night,” and it was for Shelley, the night tender, in his boat. The Don Juan, as it had been christened—a bad joke, that.

  Shelley’s boat named after Byron’s poem, though it turned out to have been Trelawny, not Byron, who’d had the name painted on the sails. Trelawny, who claimed to have come to Italy straight out of adventuring in deepest India, or the wilds of America, or both, and looked the part. “Six feet high,” she’d written in her journal, “with raven black hair.” And it was his pirate spirit that had inspired first Shelley and then Byron to build boats this summer in the first place.

  Trelawny had pitched up one night that spring at their house in Pisa with a model of an American schooner, and she and Jane Williams, also a new acquaintance, had sat and laughed as their husbands “caught fire.” Trelawny said he knew a man living in Genoa, a retired naval commander, who could build them just this kind of “demon” of a boat. A two-masted schooner, “fore & aft rigged,” with sails in line with the keel, about thirty feet long, which, according to Trelawny, would fly through the calm Mediterranean bays around here.

  “The Corsair Crew,” she had playfully dubbed them. Byron wasn’t there that night, but jumped in afterward, and, as always, raised the stakes. Since, when he heard about Shelley’s boat, he wanted one, too, only bigger—a three-masted square-rigger, and, unlike Shelley’s open boat, decked, with guns, staterooms, even a library.

  Which was what had caused Shelley to add
the extra sail to his boat, and why she was worried this morning. Shelley had gotten it into his head that if Byron’s boat would be bigger, his would be faster. To that end, Trelawny had got the boat builder, Roberts, to “pile on topmasts,” as well as add a false bow and stern to stretch out the length.

  “Tippy, under-ballasted,” Shelley’s cousin, Medwin, himself a former naval officer, had objected, but Shelley was beside himself with joy. When he caught his first sight of the boat, cutting across the bay here, it was so beautiful that he thought it must be Byron’s. When he realized it was his, he fell into a trance of love.

  And took his passion to the water—“Fast as a witch,” proclaimed Williams, excited, too, at the speed, thanks to the extra rigging. And yes, the boat was beautiful, swift and sleek, more so without a deck, and who would want a deck on calm days, as they raced across the glassy bay that May and June?

  Though once when she was out with them, the light blue sky had suddenly darkened in the first of those summer squalls—the temporales, as the fishermen call them—and the waves had started to splash in and fill the open hull. Then they’d all had to bail madly, and she saw how easy it would be for the boat to not only to “tip,” but to fill with water. Founder and sink.

  She’d been alarmed then, especially for Shelley, who’d somehow never learned to swim. But they were near enough to shore for Williams and the boat boy to fetch them in, wet, chilled, but none the worse. Still, she could see how it could have been trouble, if they’d been farther out.

  She scanned the horizon, as much as she could see through the arches—nothing yet. But it was clear and calm today so far, with the kind of still bright waters the Don Juan was built and over-rigged and under-ballasted to sail through. The weather he must have been waiting for. The perfect day for Shelley to sail home.