by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
Since who could have imagined Claire getting into Byron’s presence, let alone his bed? He was the most popular poet in England, as well as handsome, noble, and rich, and Claire had neither the beauty nor the standing that Byron usually took as his starting point. But timing was on Claire’s side that spring, because at the very moment that she came “prancing,” as he would later call it, into his life, Byron found himself the object of the kind of scandal that the generally permissive, fashionable London ladies of his acquaintance decided not to forgive.
He blamed himself—not for his so-called crime, but, on the contrary, for his one attempt at conformity. He had allowed himself to be persuaded to marry an eligible young woman whom he barely knew, in an attempt to divert his real love from a woman he knew too well—his own sister, Augusta. Half-sister, to be fair, and they hadn’t been raised as siblings. She was older, the daughter of his father’s first marriage, and they hadn’t met until he was almost grown. He had no siblings—neither did she—and they’d found a sympathy, a familiarity, that neither had known till then. He asked to be “more than a brother” to her, and she, too, must have felt more than a sister.
As the whispers grew around them, Byron took refuge in an arranged marriage, which lasted only a few bad nights. Word got out that Byron had left his new wife to spend the summer with his sister at the family place in Nottinghamshire. After which she retired to give birth to a baby, a girl she named Medora, after the heroine in Byron’s The Corsair.
His baby, it was whispered from drawing room to drawing room. His wife moved home and filed for separation—her specific grounds were “attempted sodomy,” a serious crime in Regency England—and her father went to court, demanding that Byron be either jailed or thrown into the madhouse, or both. Mayfair and Piccadilly were outraged. Women whose love notes he’d burned without reading now could wheel their silken backs to him in the street.
And in the midst of this, he received Claire’s letter.
“I place my happiness in your hands. . . . If a woman whose reputation has yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control she shd throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she could confess the love she has borne you these many yrs., if she shd secure to you secrisy & safety, if she shd return your kindness w fond affection & unbounded devotion cd you betray her or wd you be silent as the grave?”
No reply.
She tried a different tack: “I am now wavering between adoption of a literary life or of a theatrical career.” Could she come to him for advice? Hoping to dazzle with some basic Dante: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate,” to which she appended, “A most admirable description of marriage.” Her Godwinian credentials.
Not that she needed to produce that reference—their scandal had rivaled his, and Byron would have known of Claire’s role in the Godwin/Shelley affair by then, which is probably why he agreed to see her in the first place. But lest he doubt, she brought some of Shelley’s unpublished poems along to her first meeting with him. Which was followed by an invitation that extended to her, Mary.
“Come!” Claire had begged her, “he wants to meet you,” and she went—who wouldn’t?—to his grand house at Piccadilly Terrace one afternoon, her favorite lines from his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage echoing in her ears.
Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth,
Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight . . .
True, there must be a boy like that! she had cried to the Baxter girls, at fifteen. And it occurred to her, walking to Piccadilly that day, that reading Byron had prepared her for meeting Shelley. She had recognized him at once as a Byronic hero, more even than Byron, she felt, especially after meeting Byron in the flesh. A sweet Byron, a much-subdued Byron, reduced from his usual duchesses to serving tea to an obscure poet’s outcast lover, brought his way by their own third wheel.
Claire had led her into Byron’s sitting room that day, tossing her black hair and moving to his pianoforte as if she had played it before—had she? She touched the keys, lightly but not tentatively, and then, sitting straight and concentrated, began to play better than she’d ever played before.
Shelley had been paying for lessons, expensive lessons, much begrudged by her, Mary, but on the other hand, here they were, on parade, and the result was—well, “witchcraft,” as Shelley would write. She didn’t usually succumb to the music, Claire’s chief weapon in the Shelley wars, but Shelley wasn’t there to be won or lost that day, Byron was. And he was leaning in slightly toward the music, which meant toward Claire, with a half smile on his beautiful face.
Claire had called him “hardly a man, a god. His beauty haunting,” which was true, she, too, thought, watching him that day, calm, relaxed, listening. She tried to remember what Claire had played—one of her French songs? Her mother had sent her to school to learn French, and she sang it well, and German, too—had she learned the Schubert yet? “The Elf King”? Anyway, it was something like that, romantic and exciting, and Byron was moved, she could see. Beyond that, she had no idea how far things had gone between them.
But as for her, she’d been expecting a fire-breather, a wild satyr, and she couldn’t believe “how mild he is, how gentle!” He told her that he’d read and greatly admired her father, and also how much he liked the Shelley poems that Claire had brought for his “advice.” She was thrilled—he liked the poetry—though sharply annoyed by Claire’s presumption. Riding in on Shelley’s poems, as if she had the right. Presuming to ask for advice.
And yet, it had brought them closer to the next step—to Shelley meeting Byron. The closest Shelley had come thus far was to meet Byron’s publisher, John Murray, who’d turned his work down flat. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, though—Murray wasn’t a publisher of poetry, he was a publisher of Byron. The Corsair had sold ten thousand copies in one day in February. Shelley’s only published work had been suppressed under the libel laws, his publisher threatened with prison.
Still, Byron was “impressed,” he told her, by Shelley’s poetry, and what might a word from Murray’s shining star not do for a fellow poet? Which had been her own secret agenda in coming that day. Though as she sat listening to Claire and looking at the curve of Byron’s mouth—cruel, possibly; selfish, no doubt—she saw that even that small favor, a word to Murray, would require some playing. Only a fool with ass’s ears would ask early and risk a no.
Anyway, Byron was Claire’s that day, and she was content to stay back in the shadows, wishing her stepsister well. Since one way to get Claire out of her own life was to get her into Byron’s. She knew Claire’s plan was to play Mary to Byron’s Shelley, to follow in her footsteps, and then leave her in the dust, Byron being more famous than Shelley.
There was, however, one detail that Claire had overlooked—the overwhelming passion that had swept Shelley to her in the first place. And there was none of that at Byron’s house that day, nothing close to passion, except at the piano, in the music itself. For as she sat there under Byron’s gaze, listening to Claire’s heartrending Schubert, she had sensed in him an emotion that was far from scandal. That was closer to love.
Though probably not for Claire—but he seemed to like her, to be amused by the “worldly ingénue” role she was playing. There was bit more teasing, laughter, and then he showed them to the door, and the two of them went off into the blue evening, Claire talking nothing but Byron.
Though Claire apparently didn’t see him again after that for a while. He was never home when she went by, nor did he answer her letters. Still, with nothing but him between herself and the deep blue sea of insignificance, she continued her pursuit. Relentlessly: “I have called twice on you, but your servants declare you to be out of town.” Coyly: “Do you know I cannot talk to you when I see you? I am so awkward and only feel inclined to take a little stool and sit at your feet.” Chummily: “I had ten times rather be your male friend than your mistress.” Politically: “Numerous vagrants lie about the Streets of Lond
on, naked and starving . . . the price of bread is extremely high.” Seductively, proffering not just the “sparkling cup . . . but the silent and capacious bowl . . . unloosed” from the “trammels of custom & opinion.”
And finally with coordinates: “On Thursday Evening we may go out of town together by some stage or mail about the distance of 10 or 12 miles. there we shall be free & unknown; we can return early the next morning. I have arranged every thing here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited.”
To Byron, there was no “no” to this. “A man is a man,” as he defended himself afterward, “& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way.”
But Claire wasn’t eighteen yet, she was seventeen, and he had recently written her what could be fairly called a love poem.
There be none of Beauty’s daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me.
Claire put it to music, and had some reason to believe that spring of 1816 that she was finally moving onto the stage of her own life, a leading role this time, especially when Byron went along with her plan for the country inn, more than once. She confessed that she’d been worried the first time she went to bed with him—not of losing her virginity, but because she’d implied a greater worldliness and was afraid that Byron might take her for a fraud.
She even wrote nervously before their first encounter: “On Saturday, a few moments may tell you more than you yet know. Till then I am content that you believe me vicious and depraved.”
Cute, she’d thought, when Claire showed her that note. Maybe Byron, too, would appreciate the wit of it, the geste, high spirits. And it must have gone well, since the next day Claire wrote him again: “I was never so happy.”
And there seemed to have been several more nights at the inn after that. But when Claire went by Piccadilly Terrace a week or so later with another note, she found the house in shambles, in the process of being torn apart by Byron’s creditors, who were even ripping the molding from his walls for money owed.
As for milord himself, he had, Claire was informed, decamped in the dead of night, fleeing bailiffs and a pending arrest on morals charges. He’d left no word for her, but at least she knew where he was headed. She’d been there when his new traveling carriage arrived, a replica of Napoleon’s, with his crest—“Crede Byron,” “Trust Byron”—on the doors. He’d ordered it for his trip to Lake Geneva, he let slip, though when she offered to accompany him as “traveling mistress,” he nixed that at once. When she suggested that the world was wide, and she might come anyway, he’d called her a “little fiend.” The only address he gave her was poste restante. General delivery.
What did that mean? Claire asked her.
That it’s over, she didn’t say, but it was, for him if not for Claire. “God bless you,” Claire was writing, almost daily, to Geneva. “I never was so happy.” Which was probably true. Those few weeks when she could still “Crede Byron” were probably the only unalloyed happiness in her life.
“Ten minutes,” she heard Claire telling Jane Williams recently, scorn and sorrow mixed. “But those ten minutes have discomposed the rest of my life.” True enough in retrospect, but at the time, Claire was walking around with stars in her eyes. Plotting how to get to Geneva.
. . .
As for the two of them, Shelley had just lost a court case in London, in an attempt to break up his father’s estate for ready money—which turned out to be a blessing. Since much of that money would have gone to the bottomless pit that was Godwin.
But what it meant at the time was that they had no idea where they’d get the cash they needed to live on. Then Shelley’s father offered—through his lawyer; he refused to speak to his son—to pay their debts and provide an annual allowance of £1,000. Given that a portion of this had to go to Shelley’s wife Harriet and the two children, it didn’t leave enough for them to live in England. But on the Continent, where the cost of living was depressed by twenty years of war, it might just do. There was also the allure of putting a body of water between themselves and Godwin.
To whom neither of them had learned to say a proper no. But to go far away, beyond the reach of Godwin’s messengers—as often as not poor Fanny, since he never came himself—seemed suddenly and obviously the solution. Let the English Channel keep him from their door. He would send letters, but letters could be lost, letters could be answered slowly, with deliberation, consultation between them. As opposed to her sister Fanny standing at their gate, pleading that if Shelley didn’t come up with more money, Godwin would be hauled to debtors’ prison that afternoon.
The chance to get beyond his reach seemed not only attractive but key to their survival. Shelley’s health was problematic as well—one doctor thought consumption, another kidney disease. Both recommended somewhere warm and sunny. Italy, they were thinking.
But why Italy, argued Claire, when they could go to Switzerland, equally healthful, and meet Byron? Byron would help Shelley, recommend his poems to Murray, get him published, if only they could meet. And this would be the perfect time, and lovely, sunny Lake Geneva the perfect place.
VII.
She could still see them all as they set out from England—happy, hopeful, she, Shelley, baby William, the English nursemaid, and Claire, barely contained, leaning forward in her seat, striking sparks with her impatience. They left on the second day of May, and this time, the crossing was easy—Hermes, not Aphrodite, guiding their star, they joked. They took a carriage rather than walking across France to Switzerland this time. They had brought clothes, books, the baby, and they were older—she, eighteen; Shelley, twenty-three.
France was still desolate from the Napoleonic wars, and both Shelley and Claire were pushing for Geneva. Shelley insisted on crossing a steep pass over the Jura at dusk, the snow had come up over the wheels of the carriage, and they found themselves stuck and nearly trapped overnight. But in the end, some mountaineers heaved them through, and they pulled up at the Hotel d’Angleterre on Lake Geneva on the fourteenth of May, 1816, where they took the least expensive rooms, on the top floor of the hotel.
Byron wasn’t there yet. It turned out that he’d stopped at Waterloo to tour the battlefield, a melancholic exercise, he told Shelley. The defeat of Napoleon was also the death of the French Revolution. Byron said that as he’d walked through the mud there—his carriage, too, had gotten stuck up to the top of the wheels—he’d been overcome with the memory, the feeling, of that time when Napoleon was still their hero. A beautiful dreamer, almost a Werther, but a fighting version, the liberator come to carry freedom and equality to the world. Before it all turned to nightmare, first on the plains of Spain, then through Italy, all the way to Russia, with the dead stretching across the Continent from end to end.
And now Napoleon paced alone in the middle of the South Atlantic, France was in tatters, and Byron’s carriage, still splattered with mud, pulled up at the Hotel d’Angleterre. It was the twenty-fifth of May. His trip hadn’t been easy—he entered his age as “100” in the hotel register and went straight to his rooms.
“I am sorry you are grown so old,” Claire wrote that afternoon. “Indeed I suspected you were 200, from the slowness of your journey. . . . I am so happy.”
She’d been waiting for him, watching, patrolling the gardens, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in her hand—though what she should have been reading was Glenarvon, Lady Caroline Lamb’s explosive best seller that gave a lightly disguised version of her disastrous affair with him. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Lady Caroline had called him.
Or even if Claire had just taken heed of the epigraph from his own The Corsair:
He left a name to all succeeding times,
Link’d with one virtue and a thousand crimes.
But she didn’t, just kept writing witty little note after note that he didn’t bother to answer, nor did he emerge from his rooms. Maybe he was wr
iting his beautiful, melancholic “Epistle to Augusta”: “My sister! my sweet sister!” It was true that Byron’s sister was one of his “thousand crimes,” but when she, Mary, read this poem, she felt again the sweetness that she’d glimpsed at his house in London that day.
“My whole life was a contest,” he wrote. Spoke of his “inheritance of storms.” She knew some of them: Born with a clubbed foot. Father, “Mad Jack,” first crazy, then dead. Mother banned from his school for her outbursts. Title inherited from “Wicked Lord William.” No brothers, no games at home, no one to turn to, with whom to say “us,” “our.”
Until Augusta:
I did remind thee of our own dear Lake,
By the old Hall which may be mine no more.
“Our own dear Lake.” Augusta’s, too. No explanation required. The only one in the world who could see it as he did. The only place,
. . . my own sweet sister, in thy heart
I know myself secure, as thou in mine.
And how could Claire compete with that? Claire, whose infatuation Byron would have scented from afar for what it was, both garden-variety and essentially impersonal. Cold. Little to do with him as a man with a “dear Lake,” and all to do with his “Fame . . . unsought.”
Though if Claire had once understood this deep need in his soul, or even read this poem instead of his outgrown Childe Harold, she might have turned out to be interesting to Byron after all. But Claire didn’t read much poetry, and, in her defense, was just seventeen.
. . .
When Byron finally emerged for a sail on Lake Geneva, Claire, on full alert, caught sight of him at once, and begged them to accompany her on a stroll down to the quay. When Byron saw them, he hopped gallantly out of his boat and limped toward shore. He’d managed to disguise his bad foot when she and Claire had visited him in London, and now she could see his frown as he struggled through the shallow water. He nodded briefly to her and Claire, and shook hands with much reserve with Shelley, who was equally ill-at-ease with his own role in this charade. It fell to her, Mary, to produce the small conversation—his journey, the hotel, the weather, which had been “rather bad.” It was the first nice day, they all agreed. That settled, Byron invited Shelley—pointedly, only—to dine with him that evening and then made his way back to his companion, the young doctor John Polidori, to help him bring in the boat.