by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
The next time, he brought his friend Hogg to the house, and led him up the stairs into Godwin’s library, on the pretext of introducing him to the famous man. But when they were informed that Godwin wasn’t home, Shelley still lingered, pacing the floor.
She was in the schoolroom, on the other side of the wall, holding her breath—she knew his steps by then. She wasn’t sure then if she should, wasn’t even sure if she would, until she stepped, trembling, out into the hall.
As Hogg would tell it later, “A thrilling voice cried ‘Shelley!’ A thrilling voice answered ‘Mary!’ A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, unusual dress in London at that time, had called him.” He went to her like “an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king.”
Yes, that tartan dress. From Scotland—Hogg was right, no one else in London had one then. It fit her like a glove, she was sixteen, with clear gray eyes and gold-red hair, even more beautiful, people told her, than her mother’s. “Titian hair,” the Baxters called it. It danced around her head, Coleridge had written, “in a cloud of light.”
And as for the arrow from the far-shooting king, it must have struck her that day as she rose from her books, and that was that. They started meeting secretly, first in the sunny garden of Charterhouse School, down the street. To evade Mrs. Godwin’s suspicion, she took her stepsister with her—fatally, fatally—to walk down to the schoolyard, where Shelley would be waiting. In those first days, he would invite her to sit on a bench with him to discuss “philosophy,” and suggest to Claire that she walk to the corner. Then beyond the corner, farther each day. Never far enough.
Shelley brought to those meetings his own copies of her mother’s stirring books. “Prudence,” they read aloud to each other, was “the resort of weak people”; “Passions are spurs to action and open the mind.”
Hardly idle writing—her mother had lived by her words. Her first lover was the Romantic painter Fuseli, who had loved her for her red hair and then left her for a younger woman, with redder hair.
She’d then fled to Paris to forget him in the Revolution. She’d gone as a journalist and a partisan, one of the women marching through the streets behind the Tricolore, though she found herself in tears as she glimpsed Louis XVI, by then just a man, rolling past in his cart, on his way to the guillotine. And then came the Terror, with blood running through the streets around the Place de la Revolution—carrying away with it the hopes of a whole generation. But she’d stayed on, even after England and France went to war, since she’d met and fallen in love there with Gilbert Imlay, Fanny’s father, the same sort of cad as Fuseli, it turned out.
To his credit, Imlay, an American, saved her life by claiming her as his wife on his passport, which got her out of France. But he refused to live with her in London, refused to take any responsibility for Fanny, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the strong, brilliant author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, threw herself into the river for him.
But once saved, she found the courage to live on and “be happy,” even Fanny had been happy, and then she, Mary, was born a year later, and Mary Wollstonecraft, age thirty-eight, was gone.
But as Shelley read her mother’s words aloud on the bench in the Charterhouse School garden, it seemed to her that she and her mother had come together at last, now that she was sixteen and in no danger of “resorting to prudence.” Willing, every day more, to “open her mind” to the passions her mother wrote of, her whole life then “wrapt in excitement.” Moving ever further from her father’s problematic world; living wholly, radiantly, in the world of her mother.
Before long, she and Shelley graduated from the school garden to the tangled privacy of the St. Pancras churchyard. The place was overgrown, poorly kept, barely frequented, perfect for them. They sat among the weeds beside her mother’s grave and continued to read her books to each other.
“The man who can be contented to live with a pretty companion who has no mind . . . has never felt the satisfaction . . . of being loved by someone who could understand him.” At this, Shelley’s eyes filled with tears. He had married Harriet Westbrook impulsively, he explained, when she was sixteen and he nineteen, in a romantic escapade to rescue her from the school she hated. She was pretty, pink and white, and he thought he could educate her into a soul mate. They had trekked to Ireland and handed out leaflets favoring emancipation; to Wales, where they tried to instigate an uprising of the poor. He wasn’t sure in those days if he was a political activist or a poet, but then he wrote Queen Mab, and saw that he could be both.
Though no longer with Harriet. Soon after Wales, they had a child, and Harriet’s older sister showed up and reeled her back in, away from Shelley. Stopped her from nursing the baby, which Shelley ardently desired, and opposed their return to Wales to continue their political activism there. A diametric opposition took hold, with the sister prevailing and the husband leaving home.
Though not before “getting,” as they said, another baby, still to be born, in 1814, when she and Shelley met. This was a knot that she, Mary, couldn’t untie.
But there was her mother again, urging her “very early in life to form your grand principle of action, to save you from vain regret, of having, through irresolution, let the springtime of existence pass away unenjoyed. Gain experience—ah! gain it—while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness . . .”
“The springtime of existence”—where was she but there? In the heart of it, with her own mother’s words that she’d never heard so directly, so clearly, urging her not to let this moment “pass away unenjoyed.” And what were those words to a sixteen-year-old girl sitting breathless on her mother’s grave, face-to-face with a twenty-one-year-old boy, a poet and beautiful, if married—but a resounding yes?
On Sunday, the twenty-sixth of June, the Godwins went to tea, and she slipped out alone. Shelley was waiting in the graveyard. They pledged their love. He blessed her “beloved name.” For the first time, she felt the truth of what she’d been told: that she’d been born under a lucky star. A comet had blazed at her birth. It was auspicious after all.
Later Shelley would write how it was that day, how she looked to him as she stepped from the shadow of the old church, into the light.
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walked as free as light the clouds among . . .
And he was right, she was both ecstatic and calm. Proud, too, that she had, like her mother, “burst custom” and “walked free.” Shelley called it his “real birthday.” His plan now was to ask Godwin for her hand, not in matrimony, given his entangled status, but ceremonially, nonetheless. As he foresaw it:
We will have rites our faith to bind,
But our church shall be the starry night,
Our altar the grassy earth outspread,
And our priest the muttering wind.
And she, too, had expected it to be like that. Expected her father to bless their love, their union, and Harriet to agree to a legal separation or, if she preferred, to come to live with them “as a sister.” She’d actually envisioned it this way—that was when? Eight years ago, in those light sunny days of that summer of 1814. Looking back now, she wondered if she was already pregnant.
IV.
July is never what June is. It’s high summer, true, but without that promise. No longer offering infinite, lengthening days. Shelley approached Godwin on the sixth of July. He offered him £1,000, which, God knew, her father needed, but also asked for her hand. Godwin, shocked and incensed, barred him from the house and ordered her to her room. He did not, however, refuse—was incapable of refusing—Shelley’s money.
Two days later, Godwin called her out and confronted her under her mother’s portrait. Shelley was a “seducer,” he told her. If he’d really loved her, he wouldn’t have asked
her to become “an outcast.”
She had given herself freely, she answered.
If so, countered Godwin, then she had encouraged him to do what the unspeakable Imlay had done to her mother. She, Mary, his pride, his great hope, was bringing infamy on the family—Godwin was shouting now. Infamy, and would she send her own father to debtors’ prison as well? Since how could he continue to take money from a blackguard who was ruining his daughter?
That was the only argument that could have succeeded with her, and it did. She had read her Corinne—she knew about romantic letters of renunciation. She would write Shelley, give him up, she told her father, and retreated to her room, ill and in tears.
Shelley was forbidden access to the household. But a few days later, a porter from the street came into Godwin’s bookshop and slipped her a copy of Queen Mab, with a letter, written hastily in pencil: “You see, Mary, I have not forgotten you.”
She slid the book under her clothes, next to her skin, and took the first chance to escape back to her room. “This book is sacred to me,” she wrote inside. On July 13, Shelley went to Harriet, to put his situation to her in plain English. He was still her friend, he told her, but no longer her lover. There had never been between them, as she must agree, the “all-sufficing passion” to which he was now subject. He could never live with someone who didn’t “feel poetry and understand philosophy,” as Mary did. Surely she could see the logic of that?
Harriet was silent, and Shelley left, thinking that she was reconciled. Whereas, she was simply stunned, and once she caught her breath, she went to the Godwins in tears and begged them to keep Mary from Shelley. To this they agreed wholeheartedly, but what it turned out they couldn’t do was keep Shelley from Mary. On July 19, when Godwin was out, Shelley pushed past Mrs. Godwin, rushed upstairs, and burst into the schoolroom with a pistol and a bottle of laudanum. Mary could take the poison, he told her, and he would shoot himself then and there, and they would be together in death, where no one could part them.
She ran to him in horror, and begged him to be calm, to wait, she was his, she would always be his, she swore to him, tears running down her cheeks. He finally left but—but then what, exactly? It was hard now to sort through the chaos of the next few days. Did they see each other in that eternal stretch, that interim, or live through go-betweens, secret messages? All she could remember was that he somehow got word to her: if she could slip out of the house at four in the morning on the twenty-eighth of July, he would be waiting at the corner with a coach to speed them to Dover, where they would catch the first boat across the Channel and be free.
And then—even now, she found herself drawing her hand across her eyes so she didn’t have to see it, though she did see it, clearly. One of those Maniac’s moments, as Shelley would call it in his poem “Julian and Maddalo,” when mischief is set inexorably afoot. As she was slipping into her black silk dress that dawn, her stepsister awoke and begged to come along. One definitive No! or, better, knowing her capacity for “spoiling the tea,” some temporizing—We’ll send for you—and her own life would have, could have, had more of the dream that shone before her eyes that morning.
But she didn’t say no—why? Because she was trembling and thought she might not mind the company of the girl who had been helpful to them, lied for them, covered for them? Because she was distracted, overexcited, in love with all the world? Quidquid id est, as Virgil was saying the very day Shelley first came to her schoolroom, for whatever reason, instead of no she had said yes—one small word whispered in a dark hour, and never to be unsaid. No matter how many “If only’s” she’d thrown up against it since that day.
If only she’d slipped out of her father’s door alone—but she didn’t, she slipped out with Jane Clairmont, who soon changed her name to the more romantic “Claire.” As if a change of name could change a fate, or a fateful slash through her own life. Though that morning she had no sense of what it boded, to have her fifteen-year-old, black-haired, black-eyed anti-double running by her side down the still-dark street to the corner, where Shelley was waiting with his carriage. If he was surprised to see two girls instead of one, he made no objection. On the contrary, community had been part of his greater quest all along, ever since his father had barred him from his own home for “atheism,” when he was just eighteen.
So perhaps in one more girl, he saw the sisters he’d lost. He helped them in, the driver whipped the horses, and they started off on a seemingly endless drive to Dover, eleven hours on the hottest day of the year.
She was sick along the way. Despite fearing pursuit by Godwin, they had to stop a few times for her to rest in the shade. Was she already pregnant? The baby was born—early—in February. So probably yes, though she had no idea then of that. Just knew she was sick enough when they finally arrived at Dover to need a swim, to seek relief for her aching head and heaving stomach in the icy water there.
And then there was no proper ship in the harbor to take them across, so Shelley hired an open boat. It was a terrible crossing—a storm came up, she was sick, and lay with her head on Shelley’s knees, falling in and out of sleep, of dreams, until, finally, he kissed her.
“Mary, look,” he said. “The sun rises over France!”
V.
Someone had come out onto the terrace—she opened her eyes. Jane Williams, though not really “Williams.” That is, not really married to Ned. She was married, though, but to another English officer whom she’d left behind in India, when she ran off with Ned. She and Shelley had found them “very soft society,” as he’d put it, when they’d first met, in Pisa. But the Williamses had brought some fabulous costumes with them from India, which they’d put on for Carnival, and that’s when she started to like Jane, when she saw her in a brilliant turquoise sari, eyes lined with kohl. A red dot on her forehead—the East.
She, too, had caught the spirit and got up a Turkish rig, all silks and veils, and went out into the night with them, for the first time in a long time. And life in Pisa took on a lightness, a charm with the Williamses as neighbors, not that one would have thought to share a house with them.
But then Shelley had found Ned Williams an ideal sailing partner. He brought a bit more experience, a level of expertise beyond Shelley’s own, and a sort of calm on the waters that suited. No poetry—unlike with Byron, with Williams Shelley was the poet, and Williams the clear-eyed navigator. And it was this sailing partnership—more than partnership, this linking of passions—that had tumbled them all together here this summer.
Which had been fine, even key, for Shelley, and not all bad for her, especially at first, since she liked Jane well enough, and often enjoyed her company. Until she realized that, over the summer, as she found herself increasingly laid up and helpless with a troublesome pregnancy, Shelley was becoming smitten with Jane.
Or rather, with her music—the way it often was with him. Love coming in through the ear. He’d even bought her a small guitar, beautiful, inlaid, which she took out in his boat on gentle evenings, and, propped picturesquely—again, those Indian costumes—against some pillows, sat playing languidly, sweetly, the music wafting into the very room where she herself lay bleeding in bed. One stupid song after another.
Which Shelley seemed to love. The good news being that Ned was always out there, too.
Now Jane Williams came out on the terrace, cheeks pale with two bright spots of red, as if she had a fever. Maybe she did. “I’m going to Livorno to find out—”
She, Mary, pulled herself up now, straighter. She didn’t want her to go, wanted to be left to drift here a bit longer. As it was, the mail would come in an hour or so—there was no stopping that. “We’re bound to get a letter,” she said to Jane.
But Jane insisted she could wait no longer. It had been five days—“Too long!” Jane Williams cried.
But wasn’t this limbo better than the worst of all news? And how could dumb Jane Williams not know that? Because, alla fine del giorno, as they say here, at the end of the d
ay, despite looking exotic as a Hindu princess and playing to Shelley’s small guitar, Jane Williams was dumb.
“I’m going!” cried Jane Williams.
She, Mary, considered. There was, of course, the chance that the news might not be bad, might even be good. Jane could arrive in Pisa to find that both Shelley and Williams were fine, had been fine all along, had simply been delayed—there was much to keep them there. For starters, the Liberal, the magazine that Leigh Hunt had come to Italy to publish—and which Byron had promised to fund. Had even agreed, at one of their midnight suppers, to house Hunt and his family in his grand, half-empty Palazzo Lanfranchi.
But Byron, being Byron, was starting to pull back at the very moment that Hunt and his wife and too many children had landed on their shores at long last, which left Shelley to mediate between “the eagle and the wren,” as he called them. He being the only one who could keep Byron—the eagle—both engaged and “vegetarian,” so as not to devour Hunt, Shelley’s beloved wren.
So there was that in Pisa, as well as her own sense that had something happened, something dire, she would have known it, dreamed it, felt it.
So, “Fine,” she said to Jane Williams, “go,” and Jane went back inside and bustled around, then rushed down to the beach to get someone to row her across the bay to Lerici, to catch the coach to Livorno. But the sea was coming up again—she could hear it, pounding on the rocks, starting its rush in, under the house—and no one would take her across.
“Dopo,” they told her, later, and Jane Williams limped back, bedraggled, wilted—but couldn’t this also explain why Shelley and Williams hadn’t come back this morning? First detained by something, Byron and Hunt. And now the impassable seas. A high swell.
And the fact that she would have known.