by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
She closed her eyes, drifted for a moment, and heard someone call her name low.
“Mary!” Low but beautful.
“Shelley!” she said in her dream.
II.
Those first words, how it had started. “Mary!” “Shelley!” Eight years ago—though there were days now when she would believe it if an elf came to tell her that a hundred years had passed.
She was sixteen then, he was twenty-one. She knew little of life, and nothing of love. He knew everything, or so it seemed to her—proof of how little she knew. She was just back from Scotland, where she’d spent almost two years. Not long enough, she felt once she had landed back in her father’s miserable house on Skinner Street, near the butcher shops in a mean part of London.
You could hear the animals crying in the night there, but it wasn’t just the surroundings that made her long for the sullen rocks and skies of Scotland. She hated the house, hated the people, except for her father and her older sister Fanny. Half-sister. The child of her mother’s impetuous love affair with Gilbert Imlay, an American bounder she’d met in Paris during the Revolution. Her mother! So brave, so strong, so dead.
Eleven days after she herself was born. “You didn’t kill her,” she was told more than once, a variation of “You killed her,” to a child. But what was that to the fact that she was dead, gone, and even if the two little girls she left behind could sit by her gravestone and read her books, worship her words, there would never be that touch, that smile, in their lives.
Fanny had had her for a few years, but Fanny could remember nothing. You would think, since she’d been nearly four when their mother Mary Wollstonecraft had died, that there would have remained something she could have told her sister, but Fanny could only shake her head and look down. Poor Fanny. She had thought herself Godwin’s daughter, too, like her sister, Mary, though when she was twelve or so Godwin apparently had a “conversation” with her.
But why? she herself had always wondered. Was it just meanness? A warning to poor Fanny that though she’d been kept through her childhood, she was not to expect much beyond?
But Fanny had no expectations of anything, even when she’d thought she was a legitimate child of the house, had always gone around with a timid second glance over her shoulder. And after that so-called conversation, she became increasingly reluctant to sign her own name. Wasn’t sure if she was meant to keep using Fanny Godwin, after the man who’d taken her as his till then, or Fanny Imlay, after the man, hateful to them all, who’d refused to support or even acknowledge her birth. The man who’d driven the bold, valiant Mary Wollstonecraft, their mother, to weight her clothes with stones and throw herself into the Thames in despair.
By great good luck, she was fished out, unconscious but alive, and she lived on after that to meet William Godwin, the passionate, radical philosopher, fighting the same war against injustice and repressive social institutions as she was. “Resolve to be happy,” Godwin wrote to Wollstonecraft, proposing that they move in together, and she did. And she was happy, they were happy, though they didn’t marry at first, as they both disdained marriage, and had said as much, in their published writings.
But when Mary Wollstonecraft found herself pregnant, they both assumed it was a boy, and, seeing a brilliant future for their child, resolved to legitimize him. On March 29, 1797, they were married in a church, and five months later, on the thirtieth of August, she was born.
“William,” they had called her before her birth, and who knows what they made of a Mary? Her father, though never warm, had always made her feel like a favorite. She was the one he called upon to meet the guests who still made pilgrimages then to visit him as the preeminent political philosopher of his day. Radical, but optimistic: “What the heart of man is able to conceive, the hand of man is strong enough to perform”; “The institutions which limit the human mind and acquisition of knowledge—the government, systems of punishment, religion, marriage—all evils to be eradicated.”
This was written in the 1790s, before she was born, and this was the man her mother had loved and married. The man her future husband Shelley had read as a prophet when he was young, and whose optimistic vision of progressive social justice had formed his own.
Though by the time Shelley came into their lives, fifteen years later, the French Revolution had gone bad, and Godwin’s dream had lost much of its currency. But when she was young, their house was still a point on the compass for forward-thinkers, politicians, poets, passing through London. She remembered her father laughing over a letter written by the American exile Aaron Burr, who’d come to tea one afternoon. She herself was twelve then, her half-sister Fanny sixteen, stepsister Jane, as Claire was still called, about eleven. The children had given a speech and served the tea. As Burr described the scene in his letter, “Mary wrote it, Fanny made tea, and Jane spoiled it by an overdose of tea leaves.”
True, her father had laughed, a perfect portrait. And then there were the poets, starting with Coleridge. He was kind to her, to them all, Fanny, too, which wasn’t always the case. But to her, Mary, especially—called her hair “a golden cloud.” Allowed them to hide under the sofa while he read aloud, in his trance-like chant, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She was small then, nine or so, and could barely understand most of it, though some lines proved unforgettable.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled . . .
She’d woken that night shaking, her blanket on the floor, but years later, when she picked up her own pen to write Frankenstein, there was Coleridge’s ice. “All around.”
“Kisses for Mary and Fanny,” he wrote to her father in his long, long letters. “Dear little Fanny and Mary!” He said that his own little son, Hartley, sent his love to Mary. “What? & not to Fanny?” “Yes, and to Fanny—but I’ll have Mary.”
They still lived in the Polygon House then, on the edge of London, surrounded by fields and nursery gardens. She’d loved it there, though it was also there that her father had chanced to meet the person whom he made his second wife. She had, by terrible luck, moved in next door, and seized her opportunity.
“Call her mother,” Godwin told his girls, and Fanny, good Fanny, obeyed, but Mary herself was hard-pressed to bring that word from her mouth. She hated the woman as much as her true mother would have. “Mrs. Godwin,” she called her, though not to her face. To her face she mostly called her nothing. The woman was soft, common, stupid, though not illiterate—that is, she could read, but she didn’t, much. Preferred to cook, which was probably how women like her get men like Godwin, especially on the second round.
Plus there was bed. Their son. Those X’s in her father’s journals, which signified, she realized later, precisely that. The first X, after the woman’s name, Mary Jane, was oversized, wavy. An exclamation. It had been years, after all, since Mary Wollstonecraft had died.
Nor did the woman come unencumbered. She brought children of her own, whose father was supposedly Swiss, as well as supposedly dead, both of which dealt neatly with their mother’s claim to her widowed state—as opposed to unwed adventuress, which was the general conclusion among Godwin’s friends.
It wasn’t a happy childhood after Godwin’s marriage. She still had her father, but fathers don’t always answer—she felt a shock of recognition, alongside the horror, when years later, she first read “Hansel and Gretel.” Coleridge wrote a worried letter about “the cadaverous silence of Godwin’s children,” but not all of that could be blamed on the new Mrs. Godwin. Godwin was at that point beginning the spiral down into the debt from which he would never again free himself. His work was no longer relevant to the general public. England was at war with France, whose Revolution—liberty, equality—Godwin had dedicated his life and work to advancing. Now no one in England was buying his books. Nor did anyone in the increasingly repressive war government see fit to extend to a radical, not to say outdated, philosopher
the kind of stipend customarily offered to such figures, leaving him no clear path to supporting himself.
When she was thirteen, they were compelled to move to smaller, less expensive lodgings, on Skinner Street, near the butchers’ quarter. Mrs. Godwin had the idea of opening a children’s bookstore in the space below their apartment. Her father contributed some of the books, and she, Mary, wrote a funny poem that sold out. It seemed then like this bookstore might be the way forward. To this day she still wasn’t sure why it hadn’t worked out.
She wasn’t sent to school—being a girl—but her father hired a Latin tutor and taught her to read, and she read all the time, what everyone was reading. The Lady of the Lake, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Madame de Staël’s Corinne, and her mother’s books—A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Those she would take to the churchyard at St. Pancras, and sit beside her mother’s grave, as close as she could get. She knew her from the beautiful portrait that her father still kept in his study. The intelligent, interesting face, the auburn hair, the simple flowing gown—her mother was pregnant with her when the portrait was painted. With three months to live.
No, no, she didn’t blame herself. Still, it was hard to keep from whispering, “I’m sorry.” But her mother knew, had to know, had to love her, not blame her. She had lived for eleven days after the birth, long enough to have kissed her daughter’s head, surely. Breathed in that lovely scent all newborn babies had in their soft hair.
Still, her mother never really came to her in those days, there was never the feeling that maybe a dragonfly alighting on the gravestone or a robin hopping nearby might be a visitation. Fanny would never talk about her at all, refused to come to St. Pancras. “Mamma” wouldn’t like it, she said, in her nervous way. Rather than growing, Fanny seemed to be getting smaller, as if she were trying to disappear. Take up less space, lest someone notice her one day, and put her out.
But why would they, when she ate little and ruffled no feathers in the household? She had overheard Godwin describe Fanny as “modest, and by no means handsome,” as opposed to “Mary,” who was “invincible,” “very pretty,” and, according to Mrs. Godwin, “getting worse.” She’d already been sent away once, at twelve, for a few months, to a stifling boarding school at the seaside, allegedly for her health. She’d begged to come home, but once returned, had fallen back into continual strife with Mrs. Godwin. To the point that when she turned fourteen, her father informed her that she was to be sent to Scotland on an extended visit to his acquaintances, the Baxters.
The Baxters were vegetarians, and took hikes together, and trips to the sea around Dundee. Their daughter, Isabella, was obsessed with Charlotte Corday and Lady Jane Grey. The talk, when she first arrived, was of an Arctic explorer ship lost somewhere in the ice. The “excessive reserve” of which Godwin had warned the Baxters fell away as she became an enthusiast—of Scotland, of Isabella Baxter, Charlotte Corday, even the boat in the ice. Arctic exploration. They talked of it for hours. And it was here, as she would write later, that “my imagination was born.”
She barely skimmed her father’s letters from home, some of which told of a rich young poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had appeared as “our Saviour,” with an offer to solve Godwin’s money troubles. Shelley was said to greatly admire her father’s work, and had pledged to be “a lasting friend” who would give Godwin money for the rest of his life. Pay his debts. Free him from all cares and woes. Godwin had told Shelley about her, he mentioned, at the end of his letter. Boasted that he had planted in her the “seeds of intellect” that had already “unfolded to the delight of every beholder.”
That was in 1812. Fanny wrote, too. Shelley had come to dine with his wife, Harriet, who was “a fine lady” with a beautiful complexion. The young poet himself was beautiful, too, if very thin, with blue eyes and long wavy hair, and had just published a book called Queen Mab, named for the fairy in Romeo and Juliet. Fanny quoted Mary some of her favorite lines:
War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight,
The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.
Which Mary liked well enough, but the point here seemed to be that her father had miraculously found a way out of his money troubles. When she paid a visit to London with one of the Baxter girls around Christmas of that year, she met the so-called “Saviour” when he came to supper one night, though for some reason without his wife.
Or no reason—it was still all the same to her. He wasn’t the one she and Christy Baxter were talking about on the long boat trip back to Scotland a few weeks later. Godwin had taken them to one of Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare that were a sensation in London that season, and Lord Byron was said to have been in the audience. They had both read, reread, half memorized Canto I of his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. They, too, were “sore sick at heart” with their lives of “revel and ungodly glee,” or were hoping one day to be. Longing, dreaming, to know enough of the world to be, like Byron’s hero, weary of it.
The sun was rising higher. Soon it would be hot. She shifted a bit on the sofa—carefully. Cautiously. Yesterday evening, when Jane Williams and Claire were preparing to go out for a walk in the hills behind the house, she’d gotten up as well. “No, don’t, be careful!” they’d come running to her. Tried to keep her in bed, but she couldn’t stand it, said she’d just come out to watch the light change color over the water, she’d sit still out here, she told them. But once she got out, she found she couldn’t sit still here, either, found herself pacing back and forth, one-two, pacing and, yes, bleeding.
But somehow the back-and-forth, the counting of her steps, had floated her back to that time, that interlude, when she’d met Shelley but he was nothing to her. When she was still free, her own sovereign self—she had gone back to Scotland wholly free from Shelley, any thought of Shelley, and turned fifteen and then sixteen. As for love, the closest thing she knew of that was her attachment to the older Baxter girl, Isabella.
She tried to remember if Fanny’s letters from those days had mentioned Shelley. They might have—she had somehow gotten the idea that Fanny was taken with him. Maybe her father had mentioned it in passing, joked about Fanny having a “chaste infatuation.” Or maybe Fanny had said something, but either way, the only feeling she herself had about Shelley then was that he was Fanny’s subject, not hers.
It was hard now to truly recall that detachment. She would try, sometimes, to conjure it again, grasp that golden bough of her girlhood, her own autonomy, that last early spring in Scotland that had somehow reflected it back to her. She’d climbed mountains, read Shakespeare, eaten vegetables, and sometimes found herself alone with Robert Baxter, Isabella’s older brother—who meant little to her, compared to Isabella. She played chess with him, and they went walking, sometimes even read plays together, nothing more. Though when she finally went back, reluctantly, to London, he eventually followed and asked her father for her hand. She was sixteen then, but might have accepted him, just to get back to the Baxter family—if he’d come a month earlier.
But he hadn’t.
She arrived in London in March, to the same Mrs. Godwin, the same dreary Skinner Street and butchery of animals, the same not-quite sisters and brothers and no money, as before, only more oppressive to her now, for knowing another way of living. Her time was divided between working in the bookshop under Mrs. Godwin’s mean little eye, and studying upstairs in what they called the schoolroom. She was working on her Latin, and resolved to save her own life by making a new translation of Virgil. That was all the light there was for her in that house that spring, until the fifth day of the merry month of May 1814, when Shelley came again.
Apparently his finances were too entangled for him to simply write her father the check he’d promised, so he’d come to London to sign off on an extortionate loan against his future assets in exchange for ready cash for Godwin. Who was avid for the thing to go through, despite the even
tual loss to Shelley, since, as Godwin would argue all his life, he needed money, and it was the role of those who had it to provide it. His “saviours.”
Which was how he saw Shelley—but that wasn’t what she saw, that day when he slipped into the schoolroom, where she was working. She hadn’t heard him come in, and when she looked up, it was straight into two large blue eyes and a gaze that didn’t waver. She was taken aback, stammered hello and maybe something about her work. He didn’t answer, just kept looking at her intently, as if studying her, until she felt her cheeks grow hot. Finally he smiled, and asked what she was reading. She mentioned the translation, they exchanged a few more words, and then he left and it was over, she told herself. Nothing.
But that evening she asked Fanny to loan her her copy of Queen Mab. She wanted to read it straight through this time.
Fanny wouldn’t loan it, though. She was being sent to Wales in the morning, she said, to visit their mother’s cross old sisters. Mrs. Godwin was insisting.
She was surprised. Fanny clearly didn’t want to go, why send her? She was always so helpful, worked in the bookshop, served as Godwin’s scribe, copied his manuscripts, his letters. Why? she asked Fanny.
“To get me away from Shelley!” Fanny said low to her.
Fanny’s face was an unaccustomed pink. Was she in love with Shelley? Had he come to the schoolroom to see her rather than Mary? That made sense. Fanny was older, Fanny had known him longer, he’d come to see Fanny. Of course.
They didn’t say anything further on the subject, and Fanny left on the mail coach the next morning, Shelley’s Queen Mab clutched in her hand.
III.
He came again, ten days later, into the schoolroom, and this time Fanny wasn’t there. He didn’t ask for Fanny, though. He had brought her a present, he said, a notebook for her Virgil translation. That was May 16. She marked the day in her journal, not that she had to. All these years later she could still call back those days in May, when Shelley began to replace Virgil as the sun in her sky.