by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
. . .
Though would she have? Was there still that connection? There was much that had come between them since those first euphoric days, when they fled England, and walked across war-torn France, all the way to Switzerland. It seemed incredible now, but they were young then—Shelley was twenty-one, she sixteen, Claire fifteen—and powered by the elation of their defiance. “With my heart full of youth and my beloved by my side,” as he would put it, they read her mother’s books, and started work together on a story called “The Assassins,” set in their idea of Beirut. They even kept a joint journal in those days.
But by the time the August winds had started blowing chill off the Alps, Shelley had run out of money, and they had to retreat back to England the cheapest way possible. This entailed first a crowded slow boat down the Rhine, which took them past a crumbling old castle said to have belonged to an aristocratic alchemist called Frankenstein. She didn’t note this in her journal, but it clearly stayed with her.
Once they got to the Channel, Shelley had to beg passage across, promising to pay immediately upon arrival in London. The ship’s captain agreed, but sent a man, armed with a cudgel, to dog them all the way to the bank in London. Almost comical at first, though when they got there, Shelley discovered that Harriet had withdrawn all his money, and the man wanted to haul him to prison, then and there. But he begged for time, and then led them from one friend to the next, with no results and the captain’s man close behind them with his stick. Finally, Shelley had the carriage pull up at Harriet’s father’s house.
With the man stationed outside the front door, and her and Claire huddled in the carriage down the street, blinds drawn, Shelley went inside, for what seemed a very long time—too long, she remembered thinking. If Harriet denied him, he would go to prison—but how could Harriet not deny him? What answer could there be for him from Harriet, except a well-deserved no?
She’d never brought herself to ask him about the scene inside the house that day, what he could possibly have dredged up to say to his pregnant, deserted wife. When he finally came out with the money, all she’d felt was a vast relief, but later came to see that it told of Harriet’s hopes.
Of which Shelley had to disabuse her once again—his and Mary’s “spirits,” he wrote to Harriet soon after, “are united. We met with passion, she has resigned all for me.”
Which proved to be truer than she had expected. “Mary has committed a crime,” her own father wrote to them. Though still willing to hound Shelley for money, he adamantly refused to see her. Her old friends shunned her as well, even her beloved Isabella Baxter. She had married, and her husband judged Mary unfit company. Her letters to Isabella were sent back unopened.
Painful, that, but it was the rejection by her father that caught her off guard, he being the man who had famously written that “the institution of marriage is a system of fraud, the worst of all laws.” Who’d gone so far as to assert that in his vision of utopia, “it will [not] be known . . . who is the father of each individual child,” because “such knowledge will be of no importance.”
She’d grown up on those words, and now? Just words, easy enough to write? She found the position he’d taken against her irreconcilable with the father she knew, or at least had read. She wrote out her argument, citing his texts, the texts of her mother. Even went and cried out to him, under his window. He sent down Fanny, who wouldn’t even look at her. Kept her eyes on the ground—she must have been instructed.
She herself turned and walked away from much that day. Couldn’t stop her heart from bleeding over the man who’d been everything to her till Shelley, father and mother, teacher, guiding light. But in place of the man, she put his books, and all the books she and Shelley were reading then—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Diogenes. She was learning Greek and was distracted, too, by life itself—money, for starters. When Shelley’s father learned of their elopement, he took steps to cut him off completely, and now they found themselves unable to pay any of the bills that started falling due, one after another, till they could get no further credit anywhere in London, not even for a bag of tea.
In the lunatic days that followed, Shelley left her and Claire lodged in dark little rooms, while he hid out with various friends, barely sleeping, with a string of bailiffs and bill collectors on his trail. Sundays were the only time he could stay with her without fear of arrest, it being illegal to haul in debtors on the Lord’s Day. During the rest of the week, they were forced to snatch moments, passing notes at prearranged spots—dingy inns, the steps of St. Paul’s. “Adieu,” read one she still kept, “remember love at vespers.”
And she did remember, making love on a Sunday as the evening sun came through a small window in the dark room where she was staying. But what she remembered, too, was the first inkling of the despair creeping in, a dawning of the uncertainty that would stalk the background of her life with him from then on. The question she was asking to this day: When is Shelley coming back?
Although then, that fall in London, 1814, it was more straightforward, but nonetheless hard: he was in hiding, and she was indeed the outcast her father had predicted, which had, at the time, evoked boldness and freedom, but meant in practice no friends. No one to talk to, or write to, or visit. She conjured courage, ironically, from her father’s memoir of her mother, which told of Mary Wollstonecraft’s fortitude in the face of social ostracism over her affair with Imlay.
But her mother was in her thirties by then, and had cultivated an inner strength, slowly and surely, in the process of living her life, the sort of fortitude that she, her daughter, had to summon out of the air, off the printed page. She was seventeen then. Pregnant.
And sick in bed much of the time, though at least with Cicero for company. Shelley had given her a copy of Paradoxa Stoicorum, a quaint defense of the Stoics’ so-called laws, like “All fools are mad.” Sometimes she laughed out loud, and wondered if Shelley had possibly laughed right then as well, since he was reading it “with her,” he wrote.
His letters always buoyed her, but there came a day when she and Claire had to sell a watch Shelley had left them, for food. They both were starting to grow desperate during those weeks of real poverty in London, and Claire was about to peel off, go back to Skinner Street. She told her mother she’d had enough of the adventure by then, and her mother, greatly relieved, was helping her to rent some rooms where she could teach music, or was it French?
Both, maybe, and there was that moment when Claire almost set her own life aright, when she still could have escaped relatively unscathed. Tarnished a bit by a madcap adventure, but always under the influence of her older stepsister, Mary, on whom the blame could be, and was, firmly placed.
But it was then, too, right then, that Shelley managed a détente with his father, who agreed to pay his debts and even advance him some funds. This allowed him to come back and live with her—and Claire, who, though about to leave, hadn’t left. Claire, who was not pregnant, not sick.
And that’s when it started, Claire’s first push for Shelley. Her stepsister didn’t touch his face or kiss his lips, but she saw her eyes on his face and his lips, and when she herself fell helplessly into bed, early, exhausted, Claire would sit up late at night with Shelley. Listening to ghost stories, giving herself “hysterics,” only to rush screaming into their room in the middle of the night.
And that’s when she started hating Claire, recognizing her “horror” tricks for the escapades that they were. Claire was sixteen then, and excited, even fevered, to be in Shelley’s constant company, his magnetic field, one might say. She herself was sleeping so much they called her “the Dormouse,” but still she saw, or rather felt, the electric excitement of a growing familiarity between them, waking up in the same house, down the hall from each other—not in the same bed, but still too close. And then would come the daily rounds, all that had to be seen to and done in the city, and though Shelley would kiss her and call her his sweet Dormouse, his great love, what was that compared to what
fell to the unpregnant, unsleepy Claire, ready and waiting each day, to head out, “hopping about the town with Shelley”?
And on top of that, those “horror scenes” at night, when Claire just wouldn’t leave well enough alone. That’s what she hated most. That she conceded to her stepsister the days, but she took the nights—tried to, wanted to. Wanted Shelley.
Who was hers, he swore, and she was his “beloved,” but that didn’t keep the days from darkening that autumn. They saw practically no one but Shelley’s few loyal old friends. No one else would receive them: she was pregnant with his child, Harriet was pregnant with his child—unanswerable, indefensible. Brought to a close only with the birth of Harriet’s baby in October, a boy they’d named Charles, Harriet’s sister wrote to Shelley, his “son and heir.” A freighted word, given her own status as interloper, with a child soon to come into the world heir to no one and nothing.
Nor was there any way out for any of them, Harriet, either, divorce being close to impossible. And then there was their shared and adamant philosophical stance, hers and Shelley’s, against marriage, against allowing church and state into one’s private life.
Which was what kept her warm that winter, that resistance, them against the world. Godwin maintained his stony silence, and prohibited Fanny from coming around as well. Looking back, she could almost forgive him. When the word had gotten out—the married atheist Shelley had run off with both of Godwin’s “daughters,” leaving a pregnant wife behind—Godwin, too, had been dragged through the mud, along with his whole life’s work. Which was seen as leading directly to the calamity that had befallen both girls, in one fell swoop. Logical, the Tory press pointed out, if you read Godwin.
Not that anyone was reading Godwin anymore. This, too, was remarked upon in the press.
Her own baby, a girl, was born on February 22, 1815—a “six-months baby,” the doctor called her. Said she wouldn’t live, and packed up his bag. Still, they tried. Didn’t name her, but they fed her, even started loving her, and she hung on for ten days, but on the eleventh, they woke to find her twisted up and dead in her cot.
Fanny broke Godwin protocol then and came to see them in the rain. Kind and sisterly, but then she turned and caught Fanny gazing with longing on Shelley. So—Fanny, too. Not just Claire.
Not that Fanny was another Claire. Fanny was shy and loyal, she would never come screaming through the house in the night for Shelley like Claire did. But still, she kept him up talking till three that morning. Till finally he mumbled an excuse and fled to bed.
She tried to remember if Fanny slept there that night. Or was she left to slip out alone, with no one to notice, or even wonder, if she got home safely or not?
Fanny.
That April, she, Mary, and Shelley determined to move away from London, some place by a river, or in the woods, it didn’t matter where, so long as it was, in her words, “absentia Clariae.” She wrote it in Latin—it had come to her that way. More authoritative, closer to neutral, though to her it was nothing close to neutral, and Shelley seemed to agree. Then.
They took a house in Bishopsgate, near Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock, close enough to the Thames so they could keep a small boat. She wrote of “regeneration,” took it as the start of the life they would live now, the two of them, boating, reading, studying. They even ventured into London to visit an animal show, where they fell in love with a “very pretty antelope”—and glimpsed her father across the park. He pointedly turned away, but wrote to a friend that he found Shelley “so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked.” Fanny said that her hand shook when he had her copy out the letter for him.
Cruel of Godwin, really, to make her copy it. Both parts—the “wicked,” which Fanny knew to be false, and “so beautiful,” which she knew to be true.
So true—because he was beautiful that summer, everything was beautiful then. Claire had gone to Ireland, where with any luck she would stay forever. Longer.
And then came the further great news that Shelley had gotten a windfall—his grandfather had died and left him some money. He had to go down to London to see to that. He would be back shortly, he promised as he kissed her and left.
She was pregnant again. Had not yet turned eighteen.
Days passed, one and then another, until it was the twenty-eighth of July. One year to the day since they’d run off together. Their “anniversary,” they both called it, him, too, not just her. She was sure that Shelley would come back to mark the day. She waited, kept watch, jumped up at every noise outside, every possible sound of arrival.
But the clock chimed heartlessly on, noon, afternoon, dusk. At midnight, she picked up her pen in tears.
“Dearest best Shelley, pray come to me—pray pray do not stay away from me,” she found herself writing. Knew she shouldn’t, but what was keeping him? Claire wasn’t answering her either, there’d been no response all week to the letters she’d sent to Ireland. Was she in Ireland? If not, where was she?
Shelley had just written a beautiful homage to Coleridge:
Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope
On the false earth’s inconstancy?
“Pray,” she couldn’t stop herself from writing at the end. Using a nickname, to lighten.
“Pray,” she wrote, “is Clary with you?”
VI.
And, looking back, she realized that she still didn’t know. When he came home that time, she didn’t ask, and he didn’t say. And it was still unspoken between them, which was better—her dignity—though sometimes she wanted to break those chains, too. Beg him to swear, to tell her there was nothing, ever. That he hated Claire, too.
Though he didn’t—hate Claire. She glanced out, sat up—there was something on the horizon. Sails, and she had a moment of thinking, Yes! but they weren’t his, they were too big, the triangular rigs of one of the local feluccas. Some fishermen coming home early, before the storms blew in.
The way they did around this bay, out of nowhere. These seas were always changing, hard to read—a local girl who came yesterday with the laundry told her that July was always “difficile,” meaning, she thought, more “complicated” than “difficult,” though neither was good on the water. Especially since she wasn’t convinced that Shelley quite understood how difficile it could be.
She wanted some tea—there was a bell. She picked it up to ring, but then stopped, in case it would bring Claire out onto the terrace. She didn’t think she could stand the sight of her just now.
Though Claire seemed to be history these days to Shelley. Now it was Jane Williams, whom she had to put up with living right here, under her nose, though she’d come to terms with the phenomenon. Saw how his infatuations led to poetry, and came to regard his muses as little more than sequential midwives to his best poems.
First Claire:
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet.
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!
And then Sophia Stacey, an Englishwoman who played the harp and chanced into their pension in Florence:
Thy deep eyes, a double Planet,
Gaze the wisest into madness.
Next, the beautiful Italian girl whom they called “Emlia” and had both half loved for a while:
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?
And now Jane Williams:
Forget lost health, and the divine
Feelings which died in youth’s brief morn;
And forget me, for I can never
Be thine.
Poems of longing, but unconsummated, if one read closely. “Unheard melodies,” as Keats had put it, but there was another poem, with nothing unconsummated. On the contrary.
His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess
Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom;—she drew back awhile,
&n
bsp; Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
His poem to her, which the English critics read as pornography, but which she took as an expression of pure love, written in the fall of 1815, that moment when the two of them were finally living together with no Claire. They’d spent the fall taking long and delirious boat rides on the Thames, which seemed to set something alive in Shelley. He was writing such beautiful poetry amid the calm that they’d cultivated between them, the stillness.
She, too, was happy then, even well, though pregnant again. Reading Locke and Voltaire, studying Greek with Shelley, who was reading Aeschylus and Euripides. He would lie in the grass, books open, as the autumn wind tossed leaves and blew around his pages. Claire was back in London from Ireland, but living at Skinner Street, so not with them. She knew Shelley was giving her money, he felt responsible, but was he—responsible? Again, she refrained from asking. Not wanting him to put in searing words why he might be responsible, or for what.
And then, too, it seemed less to matter. First, because in January their second baby was born, a son, William, strong, healthy, and beautiful. A full nine-months child who would live this time.
“Willmouse,” they called him. He was their hearts’ delight. Their heads together, they would watch him, gazing into their eyes, looking from one to the other, the smiles bouncing back and forth between them. Still absentia Clariae. Because that spring of 1816, Claire had found another poet to chase.
Looking back, she wondered if she would have stopped it, given the chance, the way one stops a child from wandering into a pond. Not that she could have foreseen how badly it would end, with what degree of casualty. Nor had she been given any hint of what was afoot at first, when it might still have been deflected. Though even if she had caught wind of Claire’s scheme to seduce Lord Byron, she probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought.