by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
Looking back, she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t written, We can’t, Clara is teething, feverish, or not written at all. What letter? That was perfectly plausible, in that time and place, though it would have entailed a lie to Shelley, a breaking of the faith between them. But that’s precisely what she should have done, since when she discovered what lay at the heart of the matter—a ruse to get Byron to release Allegra for a visit with Claire—she realized that that faith had been broken, before she ever set out.
Because while Shelley and Claire and Allegra were strolling through cool, sunlit hills around Este, her own child was sickening unto death in a dusty coach, her fever rising in filthy roadside inns. And shortly after they arrived from the five days of frightful travel, baby Clara died in convulsions in her arms.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
This was what Shelley wrote then, but did he bleed? Her father, hearing that she had fallen into “a kind of despair,” wrote her that only “persons of a very ordinary sort and pusillanimous disposition sink long under a calamity of this nature.” But then what sort of calamity did brave and extraordinary people sink under? she wondered. Or do they never sink, just plow forward, writing poetry, marveling at sunsets, and the rest of it?
But she still had Will then, so she did try. That winter, they moved to Rome, where Shelley found inspiration again. And she picked herself up instead of sinking—even got back into bed with Shelley, and by spring she was reading the Decameron and expecting another child.
But then, in Rome that June, 1819, Will, her Willmouse, four years old and “all the hopes of my life,” as she wrote to Maria Gisborne, got very sick.
“Roman fever,” people called it. They had been warned to leave Rome, were planning to leave Rome—why had they lingered? Was it for Shelley to finish his epic Prometheus? Or just the fact that they were foreigners and didn’t quite understand? That the Roman swamps were malarial at that time of year, you leave Rome in May or your children will die.
Mary is “cold, chaste,” Shelley wrote in one of his poems soon after. And in another, unfinished, on a scrap of paper:
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Mary, he was saying, is no longer the lovely carefree girl he picked up five years before, at four in the morning in a muffled coach with curtains drawn. Now Mary is a black cloud, even in sunny Italy. Mary is “cold.”
Et tu, Shelley? she had wanted to ask him. True, she couldn’t put it in words the way he could. “Everything on earth has lost interest to me, I am not fit to live,” was what she was writing those days. On August 4, they celebrated Shelley’s twenty-seventh birthday. Not celebrated. Marked.
She hadn’t been able to face her journal, but now she started a new one. “We have now lived 5 years together, and if all the events of the 5 years were blotted out, I might be happy.” She’d had three children, all dead that day. Blot that out, and “I might be happy.”
They made their way—somehow—to Livorno, and took refuge with the Gisbornes. In November of that year, Percy Florence was born, and after that, one might say that she came back from where she had “gone.” They moved to Pisa, and she started work on Valperga, a historical novel. It wasn’t Frankenstein, and Shelley mocked it as “raked out of fifty old books.” But that’s how you write historical fiction, and at least it was something, and maybe even some money. There had somehow been none from Frankenstein. Despite the reviews, the publicity, the stir around its publication, only five hundred copies had been printed, and there was no talk of a second edition, at least none that reached Italy. Her letters to the publisher went unanswered. Her sum total of earnings so far was £29.
So she would rake what she could out of old books, and Shelley could mock if he liked. At least she no longer spent half the day in bed, face to the wall. She had come back, with her red-gold hair and gray eyes, and went out and about in Pisa, had friends, even admirers, but Shelley was right, his “Child of light and love” was gone.
When could she last be glimpsed, she wondered, with what they’d called her “sidelong smile”? Because now that she thought about it, here on the terrace, as the sun rose higher and the five shadows of the arches receded back across the floor, she realized that that smile had stayed with her dead children. Not that she didn’t smile—especially at baby Percy, she smiled at him and at her Greek admirer, Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, who had come every day in Pisa for “Italian lessons,” and lingered to talk, to whisper, even. So, yes, she’d smiled at him, but not the way she’d smiled at Shelley, in St. Pancras, in Geneva, in London, in Bagni di Lucca, and even once or twice, after Clara, in Rome.
But not after Will. That smile was dead and buried with him in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. And Shelley—had he changed, that way? He’d gotten older, there was gray in his long curling hair, noted his cousin Medwin, who had seen him recently, for the first time in seven years, “but his appearance was youthful” and there was “a freshness and purity in his complexion.”
Which was true. He had remained untouched in some profound way, in some part of his soul. Not that he hadn’t been desperate at Willmouse’s bedside, his deathbed, but then he’d gone back to his desk and put it into words:
’Tis like a child’s belovèd corse
A father watches.
“Time Long Past,” he called the poem. Time Standing Still was how it seemed to her. It continued:
. . . till at last
Beauty is like remembrance, cast
From Time long past.
“Beauty,” he wrote—but what beauty? Where was the beauty, she’d wanted to cry, in all that death? But she no longer cried to him.
Partly because Claire had come back. She, Mary, had picked up his journal for the year 1820, and found her mark, her—what do you call it with animals? Scat? Droppings? On the inside of the back cover, she’d found written, “3 still/Clare.” Right after Will had died. She’d had to keep herself from ripping the book apart when she saw it, tearing the triumphant declaration from the proximity of Shelley’s words, his hand.
How dared Claire? And yet, wasn’t it true? Weren’t they “3 still,” as late as that? And wasn’t Shelley as much to blame as Claire? That was the real treachery, she could see now—his, not hers. For what was Claire’s role, beyond the classic stepsister from all the old tales? The undead twin who slipped into church first, to marry her sister’s bridegroom.
Or tried to, would have. And Shelley? The bridegroom who in a twist of his own had had them both? Funny, that. There’d been a rumor last year, about a baby, Claire’s with Shelley, even blackmail around it. He’d denied it passionately, and she still believed him, especially since Claire, though increasingly on her own, living in Florence, had been around enough for her to have seen. Noticed.
They couldn’t have hidden it—unless it was just a pregnancy, not a baby. An early miscarriage—Claire had been ill, she remembered. Still, she defended Shelley, in writing even, but then went to her desk in a rage, and wrote Mathilda, an incestuous love story, father-daughter. It wasn’t true, of course—she had had no such dealings with Godwin, though she killed him off in the end, and rejected her poet-suitor, too, or, rather, Mathilda did. Definitively. The “no” she hadn’t given either of them in real life. And then she—Mathilda—retired from all society. No children to be born and lost to her.
She sent the manuscript to her father to publish—what had she been thinking? Just that it was good, authentic if not true, and could bring in some money. That people, women, in despair could turn to it for consolation, as she had, again and again, to Mme. de Staël’s equally tragic Corinne. But Godwin had found it “detestable,” and refused either to submit it for publication or send it back, claimed to have lost it.
Thinking what, that she hadn’t made a copy? But she had, she loved that book. Loved writing it—sitting there, replaying it all,
in an alternate version, and dealing them all their just deserts. It was at least some relief from the role she’d fallen into, of “other,” almost of stranger in her own home.
“Heigh ho, the Claire and the Ma / find something to fight about every day,” Claire had written in her journal then and left it open, for her to see. Another salvo. Along with the “3 still.” “Mary is cold.”
More than cold, freezing. Keats died around then—“Lost Angel of a ruin’d Paradise!” Shelley called him in his elegy, which rang only too true, not just for Keats but her own lost angels, too. As she read it, she suddenly saw them again, setting off from England that March day, praising the easy crossing. The “3 still,” true, her, Shelley, and Claire, but three children as well. It was a beautiful day. If she’d heard the “herded wolves, bold only to pursue,” or the “obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead,” would she have turned back? Yes, of course—but she hadn’t heard them, though she thought she knew death then. Her mother, Fanny, Harriet. But that was nothing like the death she knew now. The “deaf and viperous murderer” who “could crown Life’s early cup with such a draught of woe.” Clara and then Will.
Three children in that boat that day, crossing the Channel with a gentle tide, a good wind. She didn’t want to see it anymore—she got up, slowly, trying not to see. Turned away from the sea, toward the hill, the tangle of chestnut and the scrub oaks, nothing noble or tall. Not her place.
She had been shocked when she heard that Byron had put Allegra in a convent outside of Ravenna. The child was only four years old. They knew it wasn’t unusual for aristocratic Italian families to send girls of sixteen or seventeen to convents, to wait out their marriages—but a four-year-old? Unheard-of, certainly for an English child. Shelley went to Byron, to plead for an alternative.
But Byron had his reasons—it had gotten complicated to keep Allegra in his house, he explained. His lover, the Italian countess Teresa Guiccioli, was only nineteen, and of problematic status herself. Her rich, elderly husband was suing for her return. She hadn’t risked all and left home to play Mama to Byron’s love child.
Nor did he have time for Allegra. He was then deep into the writing of Don Juan—“My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.” A child had no place in his life, either, especially one who was proving headstrong, and reminding him more and more of Claire.
When Shelley had suggested an English boarding school instead of the convent, Byron replied that he had no intention of giving “a natural child an English education.” And, given her illicit status, who in England would marry her, he asked, without the kind of dowry that he was in no way prepared to expend? But in Italy, someone would come out of the woodwork for much less, maybe even someone with a title, particularly if she was raised Roman Catholic. Hence the convent.
Which had its logic, Shelley had to admit, but Claire was outraged and wrote bitterly to Byron that he was “condemning” the child “to a life of ignorance and degradation.” Which turned out to be true—when Shelley visited a year later, Allegra no longer spoke English, just babbled in Italian, mostly about “Paradise and the Bambino.” He gathered from the nuns that he was her first visitor all year. When he left, she begged him to bring “Mamina” to visit, and he realized, with sinking heart, that she meant Byron’s lover, Teresa, and not Claire, whom the child had forgotten.
This he kept from Claire, but she knew, or knew something. She had moved, at long last, permanently to Florence, to make a stab at a life of her own, as a governess, but she was having recurrent nightmares, night after night, the same dreams. Sometimes it was the arrival of a letter, stating that Allegra was “ill, and not likely to recover,” always that wording. Other times, it was that the child had been returned to her safe and well, “never to go back again.” On those mornings, she’d wake up happy only to have to face the bitter reality once again, from scratch.
Claire began concocting plots to rescue the child. She would kidnap her, or, better, engage some local folk, shepherds, bricklayers, to slip over the convent wall in the dead of night. Or draw up some official-looking papers and forge Byron’s signature. Then she could walk in and back out, with Allegra in her arms. To sleep in her bed with her and “never go back.”
But Claire needed Shelley, to forge the letter, scale the wall, whatever it was, and then help them slip out of the country to Switzerland or Austria—she was studying German assiduously for this purpose, so she and Allegra could make their way, once they got there. Would Shelley help her? He had to—it was the only way. She was begging him, on her knees, she wrote.
Shelley put her off, and it was left to her, Mary, to lay out the consequences of breaking Italian law. Italian prison, for starters, followed by the duel to which Byron, a crack marksman, would certainly challenge Shelley for any part he might take in the affair. But before she could send the letter, Teresa Guiccioli came to their door, one chill day in April, dressed in black. Allegra had died in the convent of typhus. Filth and poverty. She was five years old.
Shelley wrote a poem not long after that, a sort of cosmic wandering through the women in his life. Claire was the “Comet”:
. . . beautiful and fierce,
Who drew the heart of this frail Universe
Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion,
Alternating attraction and repulsion,
Thine went astray and that was rent in twain.
“Astray,” “rent in twain.” They didn’t tell Claire at first, afraid that she would kill herself, or try to kill Byron, or both. It was in fact why they’d rented this house in such haste—they needed a place to bring her, away from Byron, where they could break the news. Which, too, was why she’d agreed to move into a house that didn’t function, on a bay that had struck her as bleak. To atone for her own part in ridding the world of an inconvenient child. The child of a mother who had tried and half succeeded in “spoiling the tea” of her life.
They managed to keep the news from Claire till they got down here. But a few days into it, when they and the Williamses were huddled in a side room, debating how best to tell her, she walked in on them and knew at once. She didn’t collapse. She didn’t try to slip into Byron’s palazzo with a poisoned knife. She wrote sadly of “hopelessly lingering on Italian soil for 5 years, waiting ever for a favorable change,” yet “every hr has brought its misfortune, each worse than the other.”
And as she herself ran over it now, impersonally, taking herself out of it, she was stricken with how tragic it all was, how disproportionate, punishment well beyond the crime.
For what had Claire done, besides be Claire and fifteen one fateful midnight? A regular young girl who, through sheer chance and no fault of her own, found herself in the Godwin household where, as she’d told Jane Williams recently, “if you cannot write an epic or novel, that by its originality knocks all other novels on the head, you are a despicable creature, not worth acknowledging.”
Which had its grain of truth, and when Claire had tried to make a place for herself there, by bringing home the head of Lord Byron—was that a capital crime? To get life wrong at seventeen, and then be “rent in twain” at twenty-three?
It didn’t seem justified, not that she would ever love Claire. But as she looked back on them all now—them and their three little children, all dead now—she could see that they’d been wrecked on the same shore.
And now Shelley—would he come back? Could he possibly not come back? And if he didn’t, what would it all mean? That their Italian sojourn had been nothing but disaster? There’d been enough of that, true, but she’d recently picked up his searing “The Masque of Anarchy”:
As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea.
And she realized that it had to be “from over the Sea.” They’d had to come to Italy. You couldn’t write a poem like this anymore in England. They’d call it libel.
I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh.
&n
bsp; Castlereagh was the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the United Kingdom. Leading the charge against liberty and reform, against workers and farmers, the people, the poor—Shelley’s cause, justice, simple, fair, all his conscious life. People for whom he’d written what to her were his most stirring lines, the end of the poem:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.
Suppressed in England, but he would publish those words and others like them here, in the magazine that he and Hunt and Byron were launching, and his words would get back to the people. Who would one day rise.
Thanks at least in part to his poem, and he’d needed her and maybe Claire, too, and Italy, to find the strength and courage write it. Needed them both to flank him here. And they’d needed him, too—to face the forces they’d unleashed against themselves.
And she knew something else now, too, that if she’d died that day, three weeks ago, if she’d bled to death and Claire had stepped into her place, tried to step into her place, it wouldn’t have worked. Because Claire could stand as Shelley’s “3,” but not his one. She, Mary, was that. She was the one he’d come to Skinner Street for that day, the one who’d captured not just his heart but his imagination. Which with Shelley was absolutely key.
As it had been with her. He, too, had captured her imagination, which is the most solid of all foundations for true love between people like them. It took them both to another plane, where everything else—all their faults, all their failings, as well as the whole world ranged against them—had become very small. Details, that is—even Claire, she saw now, was just a comet in their cosmos. From which height they had been able to defy the world, together.