Midnight

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

  Thus the dark year closed for them on a hopeful note. To receive Harriet’s two children, they took a twenty-year lease on a beautiful house, thirty miles from London, in Marlow on the Thames. They visited Hunt, and were taken into his circle. At his charming house in Hampstead, they dined with Keats and the critic William Hazlitt. Mary met Hunt’s wife, Marianne, and her sister, Bessie—Marianne’s “Claire,” who lived with them, too, and was in love with Marianne’s husband.

  For the first time in two years, she had a woman she could talk to.

  X.

  On the twelfth of January, 1817, Claire’s baby, a girl, was born in Bath. Shelley wrote to Byron at once, telling him the baby was beautiful—but Byron didn’t answer. Shelley wrote again—her hair was black, her eyes blue—but still no word. There was, they knew, the real possibility of desertion, of both mother and child. “Faithless Albé,” as she called him in her journal.

  The little fictions they invented—that the baby belonged to “a friend,” one of the Hunts’ cousins, and so on—had never worked, and the truth—that she was Byron’s—was scarcely more credible. The whisperers, even in the Godwin house, accused Shelley.

  He was, after all, supporting both Claire and the baby, and had even bought Claire a piano, which she herself didn’t entirely begrudge her, until she came upon a poem on Shelley’s desk:

  Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die,

  Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia, turn!

  In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie.

  Her own eyes weren’t dark—though Claire’s were.

  Her voice is hovering o’er my soul—it lingers

  O’ershadowing it with soft and lulling wings,

  The blood and life within those snowy fingers

  Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings.

  Whose “snowy fingers”? What “witchcraft”? Byron had called Claire a “prancer.” Wrote that he’d “never loved or pretended to love her.” Did Shelley really sit there, all those nights, “cheeks wet,” unable to “forget,” as the poem went on, as that unloved prancer pounded the piano they couldn’t afford and still hadn’t paid for?

  She gazed at his face before getting into bed that night. He had a candle, he was reading. The worst part was that it was a beautiful poem, a love poem, though not to her. Did he still love her? He looked up—his eyes that clear blue, beautiful to her. Did she still love him? The answer was, “Yes, but.” She loved him the way you love a man who writes of another woman’s “snowy fingers,” the “blood and life” in them. Who is prey to another woman’s “witchcraft”—a woman who was lurking, even then, just a little way down her own hall.

  The next morning, she went downstairs, and requested that Shelley write to Byron about the baby, and, with a searching glance at her face, he did. Your child, he told Byron, “continues to reside with us under a feigned name. But we are somewhat embarrassed about her . . . exposed to what remarks her existence is calculated to excite.”

  Byron was a gentleman—she was counting on that, and she was right. Call her Allegra, Byron wrote back, a Venetian name. He would take responsibility for her and raise her in Italy, though only without interference from Claire. His original offer.

  And though she knew that Shelley shared Claire’s hopes that the child would inspire a rapprochement between the parents, she herself had few such expectations. But either way, her singular goal now was to get the child out of their house, both to quell the whispers that Shelley was the father, and to close the door on Claire.

  And had it been unreasonable to expect that once Allegra left, Claire would follow? Move on with her life, as would she herself and Shelley. Frankenstein was finished, and though Byron’s Murray had turned her down—“Faithless Albé”—George Lackington had agreed to publish it. And Ollier was publishing Shelley’s new work, The Revolt of Islam, dedicated to her. “They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth.” “Thou Child of light and love.” The poem celebrated the triumph of good over evil—“an Eagle and a Serpent Wreathed in fight”—and nonviolent revolution through love and equality of the sexes. “Can man be free if woman be a slave?”

  When she read that, she felt justified in having said nothing to him about “Constantia” and Claire. Let her strut and fret her moment. She and Shelley went up to London without her stepsister, that beautiful June of 1817. They visited Peacock in the great India House library, viewed the Elgin Marbles, newly installed in the British Museum, and went to the “Inventors’ House” on St. Martin’s Lane. Leigh Hunt saw them at the opera, Shelley “a thin patrician-looking young cosmopolite yearning out upon us,” and her “a sedate-faced young lady . . . with her great tablet of a forehead & her white shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown.”

  Not altogether unconscious, she’d thought when she read that, but said nothing. There was, at that golden moment, nothing more to say. She was pregnant again, but still young, and there were still crimson gowns to fit low over shoulders that were still white.

  . . .

  Her baby was born three days after her twentieth birthday, a daughter, Clara Everina, her third child in as many years. This baby, too, was strong and healthy, and with any luck would live. They would stay in the house in Marlow, on the river, through the winter, and come April, take little Clara with Willmouse, now a year and a half, along with Shelley’s other two children, whom he’d have certainly gotten by then, in the small boat through the gentle English sunshine, to pick daffodils and sniff violets. Byron would have come and taken Allegra to Italy, and Claire, like a mare with a foal, would presumably have followed. That would leave her with Shelley, to have an English spring.

  But then, astoundingly, he lost his suit for his children. Harriet’s father had gone to court and argued that Shelley, as both an atheist and a political radical, or either, was unfit as a father, and the court had agreed. This was almost unprecedented in English annals, and Shelley was shocked, shaken, and suddenly unsure of the legal ground on which the rest of his life stood. Could these same judges take his other children, should someone—his father—sue for them? In a panic, he took them all, Allegra, too, to a nearby church and had them baptized, to cover himself against those charges, at least.

  But, damn it, he cried to his friends, and damn the judges, he was an atheist. So was Goethe, who lived in Germany not only unperturbed but lionized. Supported, even, by the court. What was wrong with England?

  Though what wasn’t? With habeas corpus suspended, the government was imprisoning protesting cotton workers at will, on no charges. Paying spies to betray reformers, who were hung to the cries of “Murder!” from the restive crowds. “Reform!” Shelley was writing, but there was no reform.

  General or personal. The story of the “League of Incest”—that she, Shelley, Claire, and Byron were living in a sort of sexual melee—had become established in the prurient English imagination, and they found themselves subject to random public abuse. Women she didn’t know approached to turn their backs. A man attacked Shelley in a post office, knocked him down. Worse, his work, though praised, was suppressed. They had become untouchables in their own land.

  It was around this time that Byron wrote that he was ensconced in Venice with his new love, Teresa Guiccioli, and couldn’t come for Allegra. He was still willing to give the child his name and raise her, educate her, but she would have to be brought to him.

  Claire was crushed by this news, especially about Teresa, and wavered about sending Allegra. “Poor little angel,” she wrote to Byron in tears, “in your great house, left perhaps to servants while you are drowning sense and feeling in wine.”

  “Keep her,” Shelley had started saying—but Claire, to her own relief, wasn’t about to let the Byron association go. With him, Allegra was the daughter of a lord. How could Claire, an obscure dependent, deprive the child of that? Not to mention Byron’s fortune, his fame—wouldn’t Allegra benefit immensely from the connection?

  And wouldn’t she, too, in the end
? Somehow, sometime, if not now, soon, eventually—to this illusion Claire clung. They learned later that she had received a proposal of marriage around then, from Shelley’s friend Peacock. He was a writer, too, but with a position at the India House, so could have supported her and Allegra. And there was his house in Marlow, on the river, which could have been Claire’s house, she could have picked up Allegra right then, that spring, and walked the short distance out of their house and life, down a garden path into a life of her own.

  But Claire refused to relinquish the Byron dream, and she turned Peacock down, without telling either her or Shelley, without giving them a chance to persuade her to what, in retrospect, would have saved her own life. Figuratively. Literally, in the case of others.

  Or maybe Shelley knew and opposed it? “Constantia, turn!”

  Shelley was ill again, advised again by his doctors to seek the sun. He asked her—Italy or the English seacoast? They vacillated, tossed a coin. When it came up England, they turned to each other—“Italy.” She was, at any rate, determined to get Allegra and the scandal around her out of their house and into Byron’s. They would take her to Venice, since that was his demand. Frankenstein was about to be released—anonymously. There seemed no reason to wait for her own first copies. She had created her monster; now let him live or die on his own.

  There was the problem of the twenty-year lease they’d taken on the house in Marlow, but when they managed to unload that, they booked passage on the next boat. She took it as a good sign that they sailed for the Continent on March 11, 1818, the day that Frankenstein was officially published.

  They arrived in Milan a few weeks later, in “excellent spirits. Motion has always this effect on the blood,” as Shelley wrote to the Hunts. Her own letters seconded his: “The sun shines bright and it is a kind of Paradise we have arrived at.” The oxen pulling the carts were “most beautiful oxen I ever saw,” and the bread they ate “the finest and whitest in the world . . . Shelley’s health is infinitely improved.”

  Already. They were reading Molière, and attending the ballet and opera. It was April, Italy was heaven. Byron had sent instructions for turning over Allegra to an emissary he was sending for her. A stranger—this Shelley kept from Claire, as well as the way that he’d referred to the two, as “the bastard and its mother.” Shelley wrote back by return post, to request that they be allowed to send the child with a nursemaid whom she at least knew. Byron assented, as long as Claire wasn’t part of the group.

  Claire had expected to go along and was dismayed to be excluded. The only way she’d been able to face the prospect of giving up Allegra had been to envision herself turning the child over to Byron, who would love her at first sight “once he sees how lovely she is.” This would lead, then, Claire had convinced herself, to Byron’s looking with new eyes on her as well, the mother. She was crushed to learn that this was not to be.

  And maybe then, if Shelley had shown Claire Byron’s letter—“the bastard and its mother”—but he didn’t. And even if he had, could Claire have faced the prospect, then and there, of raising Allegra without Byron’s support? Had Claire known—but one never knows. So, with hopes and dreams reconfigured but still tenable, Claire picked up her pen and wrote to Byron, “Yet dear friend, why should my presence tease you? Why can’t the mother and father of a child whom both so tenderly love meet as friends?” This on April 28, the day after her twentieth birthday, when she kissed Allegra and sent her off to her father in tears.

  And the first reports from Venice were in fact heartening. On May 1, Allegra’s nursemaid wrote that Byron was charmed by the child, and “dressed her in trousers trimmed with lace and treated her like a little princess.” Claire was thrilled—just so. Precisely why she’d sent the child to him, after all, to be raised as a princess, and she the princess’s mother. She left it to Shelley to arrange for her visits, starting in a month or so, as “Auntie”—fine. Anything to see the child again.

  They moved then to the beautiful spa town of Bagni di Lucca, and unpacked their books and sat at their desks. She herself was buoyed by the reviews of Frankenstein, even those of the “shocked” conservative critics, who were amazed, as word of its authorship slipped out, that a girl “not yet nineteen” at the time, had written such a story. The book was selling out. No less a luminary than Sir Walter Scott had loved it, praised it.

  What next? people were writing to ask. Her father was convinced that she could support herself—him, too—as a writer. He suggested a history of Cromwell and the Commonwealth.

  But it was hard in Italy to care much about Cromwell. Shelley had found a natural spring with a waterfall, in the hills behind their house, and made himself an open-air study, where he would “undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, and then leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain.”

  Like an ancient Greek, or their dream of one, and, rather than struggling with his own muse that summer, he had decided to put his elite education, the Greek he’d studied at Eton and Oxford, to work for those who’d had no such advantage. He started a translation of Plato’s Symposium, which would give English readers the whole story for the first time—the love among the men, suppressed till then.

  Thrilling work, half classical, half radical, and what she liked to do that summer, rather than “breaking her head,” as the Italians put it, over another “story” was to sit in the shade and copy out Shelley’s translation. “A most beautiful piece of writing,” she wrote to Maria Gisborne, in Livorno. “It is true that . . . it shocks our present manners, but no one can be a reader of the works of antiquity unless they can transport themselves from these to other times.”

  This was Italy, not England, speaking. Italy of fountains and springs and clouds that came and went. A language they could speak well enough to rent the horses she and Shelley would ride, evenings, up into the hills. Occasionally they would wander down to the dances in the Casino on Sundays, where Shelley would waltz with the local girls when both she and Claire held back. Shy. Unpracticed.

  She would dance, though, eventually, she told herself, in Italy. She was already braver on horseback. “We rode among chestnut woods hearing the noisy cicala. Not long ago we heard a cuckoo.” This on a ride to “il prato fiorito,” she wrote, in Italian—the flowering lawn.

  It was beautiful there, she told Maria Gisborne. The children, Will and Clara, were playing beside her on the floor. Claire, obsessed with Allegra and Byron, was keeping herself to herself. Talking, even, of moving out, getting some work, as a singer, a teacher, whatever. Shelley’s Plato translation was now inspiring his own poetry.

  How beautiful is sunset, when the glow

  Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,

  Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!

  Which was how she saw it, too—paradise. Italy!

  XI.

  That’s how it was then. Though now—she’d started another, very different letter to Maria Gisborne just last week, stating that she found herself here “oppressed with wretchedness, yet gazing on the most beautiful scene in the world.” She regretted having sent it, regretted the complaint, though it was true, both parts. It was beautiful here, the sunlight on the water, but it came to her through a harsh glare, as she sat shivering in the heat.

  Hunt had called the year 1819 Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis. And though through the lens of poetry, she would agree.

  First his “Ode to the West Wind”:

  Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

  Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

  Then “To a Skylark”:

  And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

  “Julian and Maddalo”:

  This ride was my delight. I love all waste

  And solitary places; where we taste

  The pleasure of believing what we see

  Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

  “Prometheus Unbound”:

  Life may change, but it may fly not;

  Hope
may vanish, but can die not;

  Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;

  Love repulsed, —but it returneth.

  Miraculous poems, beautiful words, but were they true? Does love “returneth”? Does hope “die not”? Or does it die, and lie dead and buried forever, beneath a weight too great to ever rise again? Because as Shelley was writing “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” her two children were dying, one by one.

  Clara first, at a year and a half—smiling, teething, a bit feverish from that, but nothing to die from. It was late August, and she and the children were in Bagni di Lucca. Claire was elsewhere—Florence, she thought, or Venice. Shelley was away as well, though she wasn’t quite sure where he was, either. He’d promised to be back for her birthday, on the thirtieth of August. She would be twenty-one.

  Did she suspect that he was visiting Claire, intriguing with her? There must have been at least that suspicion—how else to explain her own part in what came next? She got a letter from him—“Pray come instantly,” he’d written from Este, outside of Venice, where, he wrote, he awaited her.

  She was stunned. She and the children were well situated where they were, in the hills, it was cool, Maria Gisborne was visiting. But Shelley’s instructions were precise: “Get up at four o’clock & go post to Lucca where you will arrive at six. Then take Vetturino for Florence to arrive the same evening. From Florence to Este is three days.”

  In other words, pack up the children, take the night coach, travel without stopping for five days across a blazing-hot country in August—heartless on the face of it, but what haunted her now was her own role, going along with the scheme, putting him above the children. And why? How? Because he called her “my beloved Mary” in his letter, and he hadn’t for a while? Because he said she could kiss him when she got there? Because she suspected he was there with Claire?