Midnight

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

. . .

  They decided to set up in Bath to sit out Claire’s pregnancy, far enough from London to keep the affair from the Godwins. Shelley would go to London as needed to see to his finances. The seclusion of Bath, where they knew no one, would suit her as well. It would be nicer than London for little Willmouse, now nearly a year old, and a quiet place for her to work.

  They rented a house with a study, and there she sat to outline—hard work on the surface, but the best part of her day. She was under the spell of the story, of a sort of pure inspiration that carried her to her desk first thing in the morning, and back to her desk at night. Woke her at dawn, when she would creep down with a candle and sit shivering, jotting notes that had come to her in dreams, sometimes sent, or so it seemed, by her mother. She had been trying to picture one of her monster’s murders, and woke that morning with the painting The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli, her mother’s Swiss lover, before her eyes, and then she had it. Her poor victim, Elisabeth, arms flung out, long red hair hanging down, as in the Fuseli, murdered by the monster on her wedding bed.

  She had decided to call her scientist Frankenstein, after the crumbling German castle they’d passed on the Rhine two years earlier. To her poor motherless monster, her “creature,” she gave no name—but, like her first child, that didn’t mean she didn’t know him. She even knew what he was reading, exactly what she was reading, or rereading, that fall—Plutarch’s Lives, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels. The Sorrows of Young Werther, which book, claimed her monster, taught him “gentle and domestic manners, and lofty sentiments,” and served him, as it had served her, as a sort of Romantic conduct book. “I wept his extinction,” her monster said of Werther, “without fully understanding it.” As she had, at fifteen.

  Poor monster, poor parentless monster—she, too, found herself weeping, over him at that point, as she could look back over her own young life and weep. Like him, she, too, had “entered on life without a mother’s care,” as her mother had once written. Like him, she knew rejection. While her creature’s “father” had fled from his “watery eyes, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips,” hadn’t her own father reacted similarly when she ran off with Shelley? When he could no longer see her as the intelligent, innocent girl of sixteen that he’d been “creating”? Once she diverged from his vision, hadn’t he, like Victor Frankenstein, slammed the door and turned the key?

  Not that she’d gone on her monster’s murderous rampage, but she knew why he’d done it. She’d felt his panic, and appreciated his despair. Of her father’s behavior, she’d written to Shelley, “I know not whether it is early habit or affection but the idea of his silent quiet disapprobation makes me weep as it did in the days of my childhood.” And why this disapprobation, this wholesale rejection? Because she was pregnant and unmarried?

  But did that make her monstrous? And what about her father? Hadn’t he behaved monstrously? And Shelley’s father, too, Sir Timothy, who had banished his own son from the family home at eighteen. Shelley was his eldest son and legal heir. He had been educated by Sir Timothy to inherit, not to work. But when the result of his gentleman’s education at Eton and Oxford had led him beyond the established Church to an ongoing quest for social justice—his father had turned him out of his house, as if he were a monster.

  Though who really was the monster, now that she thought about it? The creature with yellow skin and straight black lips, or the creator who had made him that way? Godwin had educated her to be bold, to disdain social convention. Sir Timothy had somehow, must somehow, have opened a door or window for Shelley’s mind to take flight. And yet he had cut Shelley off without a penny and banned him from the house when he married Harriet, and left him to, what? To starve to death? Kill himself out of remorse? What possible outcome could Shelley’s father have been seeking? What that wasn’t truly monstrous?

  So who were the monsters? Her? Shelley? The monster or Frankenstein himself? She’d heard that when the play was produced in London last year, they’d called the monster “Frankenstein,” and she’d written to correct it, but had come to think, Yes, maybe. They were mistaken, of course, mistaking the monster’s name for that of his creator, but in the larger sense, yes, maybe he was the monster. Not the creature but the man.

  But it had taken her time to come to this conclusion. She wasn’t there yet, when she finally sat to write, on October 8, 1816. She remembered the date because it had proved so fateful, so tragic. When she wrote it in her journal, it had been hopefully, happily, even. Just to note that she had finished her outline and was planning that day to begin to write.

  But she’d barely gotten to her desk when she got a letter. Her sister Fanny had written to say that she would be changing coaches in Bath on her way to Bristol, where she was planning to visit some Wollstonecraft relations. She was hoping that Mary and Shelley might like to come have a cup of tea with her at the coaching inn.

  They didn’t “like to,” but they went—thank God they went. They hadn’t seen her since their return to England, hadn’t invited her down, their excuse being the need to keep Claire’s pregnancy strictly secret from the Godwin house. But, looking back, who better than Fanny to keep that kind of secret? And in truth, it was more that they were annoyed with her—and afraid that she would try to wheedle more money from them for Godwin. Poor Fanny—even after she’d visited them in London and seen their struggle, she’d still felt compelled to write that “it is of utmost consequence for his own”—Godwin’s—“and the world’s sake that he should finish his novel, and is it not your and Shelley’s duty to consider these things?”

  “Another stupid letter from Fanny,” she wrote in her journal that day. Blaming Fanny, and blinded, she feared, by the “stupidity” to the cri de coeur that came toward the end. “I understand from Mamma”—only Fanny would persist in calling that common, vindictive woman Mamma—“that I am your laughing-stock and the constant beacon of your satire.” When she, Mary, reread it, after, she was stunned by the wanton cruelty of Godwin’s wife. To conjure that lie, and at Fanny’s expense—Fanny, “Mamma’s” constant helper, there at her beck and call, desperate to please.

  But what about her, Mary? Had she rebutted that charge at the time? Did she and Shelley disabuse poor Fanny sufficiently, or even at all, or had it all been lost in their angry reaction to the endless importuning? In that same letter, Fanny accused them of being “selfish,” so it’s not impossible that her poor sad words at the end—“laughing-stock,” “constant beacon of satire”—painful in the extreme to her, had gone unaddressed by them, amid all the rest they were called to defend that day.

  When they met her at the coaching inn in Bath on the eighth of October, Fanny hinted about the possibility of leaving the Godwin house and coming to live with them. They’d probably exchanged glances—which Fanny would no doubt have caught. She had grown up with those glances, they comprised her earliest education. The prelude to, “No, Fanny. I’m afraid not.”

  Afterward, Shelley drew it plain enough:

  Her voice did quiver as we parted,

  Yet knew I not that heart was broken

  From which it came, and I departed

  Heeding not the words then spoken.

  Misery—O misery,

  This world is all too wide for thee.

  The next day, the ninth, they got an urgent letter from Godwin, who enclosed a note from Fanny in a shaky hand: “I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove.” She wrote that she was going to Bristol. Godwin was on his way down, but he urged Shelley to rush to Bristol, as they were much closer.

  Shelley did, but Bristol turned out to be Fanny’s smokescreen. She had in fact traveled on to Swansea, on the Welsh coast, and taken a room at the Mackworth Arms, as the local paper would report. “A most respectable-looking female, who arrived late, took tea and retired to rest, telling the chambermaid she was exceedingly fatigued and would take care of the candle herself.”

  The next morning, her “non-appearance�
� caused the door to be forced, “where she was found a corpse with the remains of a bottle of laudanum on the table.” She was wearing a blue striped skirt, a white blouse, the small gold watch that she and Shelley had brought her from France, stockings marked with G for Godwin, and their mother’s old stays with the letters mw, embroidered in red.

  Her own first thought, as she stood swaying by her writing table, fingers turning white, pressed to the wood, was to wonder if Fanny was wearing their mother’s undergarments because she liked them, or because they were all she had. Had no one ever thought to buy her stays of her own? But who would have? She, Mary, had gotten her first stays in Scotland, with Isabella and Christy Baxter. Their mother had taken her with the other girls. But who would have taken Fanny?

  Her small leather purse, the paper reported, contained five shillings and a sixpenny piece. Had Fanny paid for the room in advance? She wondered this, too—anything to try to keep from seeing Fanny lying “a corpse,” near the “remains” of the laudanum bottle. “Twenty-two,” she found herself saying aloud, at her last birthday. The fourteenth of May. So nearly twenty-two and a half.

  Fanny had left a note. “I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as—”

  As whom? How did she sign it? Fanny Godwin? Fanny Imlay? Fanny Wollstonecraft? They never knew. The newspaper reported that the signature had been ripped off and burned to ash.

  Fanny! Monstrous of them all to have left her with no settled name. Her birth “unfortunate,” her life a “series of pain”—how could she herself not have seen that “that heart was broken”? She was Fanny’s closest living relative, her sister, half-sister—why had they all made such a point of that? Why had they kept that word, “half,” between them, and why had she never once thought to slip out with her sister and buy her new stays?

  Not that Fanny would have gone along with that. Even if they’d ever been able to afford it, rather than stays for herself, Fanny would have given the money to “Mamma.” To Godwin, who returned the favor by begging Shelley not to claim the body, to “do nothing to destroy the obscurity she so much desired that now rests upon the event.” In other words, to leave his name out of it. Better to let Fanny be thrown into an unmarked grave in a pauper’s cemetery, wrote Godwin, rather than risk any further scandal to himself, and that is what they did.

  And yet, sitting here now on the terrace, it came to her that the one person whose presence she could have wished for, or even stood, was Fanny’s. That is, a Fanny free from Godwin, Fanny with her small smile. She hadn’t appreciated it then, how Fanny had been left to pick up the pieces that she herself had left shattered behind her when she ran off with Shelley. She, in love, in France, had been oblivious to the way that Godwin had been savaged by the press. His very life’s work blamed for her elopement with a married man who’d deserted a pregnant wife—criminal. And not only her, but her stepsister as well—called “both Godwin girls” in the press. Both willing to be seduced by the radical atheist Shelley. Precisely what was to be expected from children raised by Godwin.

  Which left Fanny—known as the “third Godwin girl,” at least in the press, if not at home. An outsider whose only connection to the household was the half-sister who’d disgraced them all and whose only justification thereafter was to atone for her sister’s “crime,” as best she could. She suddenly remembered a letter that Godwin had forwarded to her in Scotland, written by—painful to think of—Harriet, Shelley’s wife, after coming to dinner at Skinner Street sometime in 1812.

  Fanny would have been nineteen then. Harriet wrote that Fanny’s beautiful mind “fully overbalances the plainness of her countenance.” Yes, Fanny was plain. She had had smallpox. But Harriet was right, she did have a beautiful mind, though with no way to put it to use, no time or place to sit and write anything beyond those endless letters begging for money for Godwin. Which left Fanny, in the end, cast up on the shore, too discouraged to cut the ties that for most of her life had bound her, and that she could not, in the end, unloose.

  “Misery.” Fanny had sent her one last letter, which she barely read before she burned it. All she wrote in her journal was, “Fanny dies this night.” There was no blame in the letter, if she remembered correctly, but she couldn’t, quite. She’d been horrified at the time, guilty, at a loss, and there were still embers in the grate. She’d walked quickly over and thrown in the letter. Picked up the poker and pushed it into the hottest part of the fire. It flamed at once, and though she knew right then that it was a terrible mistake, it was too late to get it back.

  Fanny.

  It was a bad autumn after that, personal and general. She wore black for a while, but she threw herself into her work on Frankenstein, the horror on her pages, strangely enough, holding off her distress, at least at home. Outside, though, the talk was of bad harvests, food shortages, riots. Protests at Spa Fields, where revolution seemed almost at hand. The leaders were passing around pirated copies of Shelley’s Queen Mab, for better or worse. Better, in that this was always Shelley’s intention in the writing it, to inspire a workers’ movement. Worse, in that his lawyer wrote that there was talk that he might be charged with sedition. He should come to London to address that at once.

  When he got there, he also got the news that Harriet had been missing for over a month, and no one knew where she was. This was in late November. Apparently she’d taken up with a military man and had been living in Knightsbridge, under the name of Smith. But she hadn’t been seen there since the ninth of November. According to her landlady, she was “in the family way.”

  Her body floated up in the Serpentine on the tenth of December. On the twelfth, there was a notice in the Times. “On Tuesday a respectable female, far advanced in pregnancy, was taken out of the Serpentine river and brought to her residence in Queen Street, Brompton, having been missed for nearly six weeks. She had a valuable ring on her finger.”

  Harriet, too, had left a note: “Too wretched to exert myself, lowered in the opinion of everyone, why should I drag on a miserable existence?” She bade a touching farewell to her sister, thanked her, loved her, and then addressed Shelley, whom she called “Bysshe.” His middle name. What she must have called him.

  “My dear Bysshe, let me conjure you by the remembrance of our days of happiness to grant my last wish, Do not take your innocent child from Eliza who has been more than I have, who has watched over her with such unceasing care. Do not refuse my last request. I never could refuse you. . . .”

  But he did refuse her. To her own surprise, dismay, for she’d been moved by Harriet’s plea, he went straight to court to fight for custody of the daughter Harriet wrote of and the son he’d never met. He was quite sure of winning his case. He had the whole of English common law ranged behind him, which always stood firmly for fathers, as opposed to mothers, no matter the circumstances, his lawyers assured him. Though to further legitimize his claim, they advised him to take advantage of the fact that he was now free and “regularize” his current relationship. He agreed and urged her to come up to London right away to marry him.

  This took her by surprise, and she hedged—she was working on her book, she had her principles, she scorned marriage, and didn’t he? Rather than answer, he turned to Godwin, who was, he wrote to her at once, overjoyed at the prospect of seeing her “according to the vulgar ideas of the world . . . well married,” to a “future ornament” of the English aristocracy. Though taken aback by his delight, even his choice of words, she could not in the end resist him. Thus it was that she found herself standing beside Shelley in St. Mildred’s Church on a dark day at the close of a very bad year, pledging her troth in the eyes of a God she didn’t believe in and men she for the most part de
spised.

  All she told Byron of her marriage was that “another incident allows me to sign myself Mary W. Shelley.” The “incident,” Harriet’s suicide, went unmentioned in the letter. Between themselves, she and Shelley blamed the seamy side of Harriet’s life—her pregnancy, her officer—for the despair into which she had fallen, never once going near what lay beneath, their own part in it.

  Which worked for a while. It was only as loss after loss struck her own life that it occurred to her that Harriet, in some demonic, avenging form, might have had a role. But that December 1816, she didn’t mention Harriet to Byron. It was just as well that he was still abroad, she wrote. England was a disaster—failed harvests, regressive taxes, armed troops firing on the peaceably assembled people. Shelley’s own father had spoken in Parliament in favor of the suspension of the ancient right of habeas corpus. So-called libel laws were tightened. Journalists opposed to the repressive government were either exiled or imprisoned. Shelley was tormented by all of this, and couldn’t sleep at night.

  But in the midst of all the turmoil, he received a brilliant notice in the “Young Poets” edition of the influential intellectual paper the Examiner. “Three young writers,” wrote the editor Leigh Hunt, “appear to us to promise a considerable addition of strength to the new school”—Keats, John Reynolds, and Shelley, whom he singled out as “a very striking and original thinker.”

  He wrote separately to say that he’d like to publish Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”:

  . . . music by the night-wind sent

  Through strings of some still instrument,

  Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

  Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

  Shelley was overjoyed. He had felt till then, he wrote to Hunt, “an outcast from human society.” And shortly after that, even the hated Tory Blackwood’s called him “a scholar, a gentleman and a poet . . . strong and original . . . well entitled to take his place near to the great creative masters.”