“Human bones?”
“Of course! Kept telling everyone he had ‘a leg and a wing,’ as if they were parts of a chicken.”
“Strange sense of humor.”
“Strange? Yes, I suppose so. His Lordship is fascinated by ‘glorious bones,’ as he calls them. Scratched over the Waterloo battlefield on his way to Switzerland but found it had been picked clean. Anyway, he managed to buy some bones near Lake Geneva when his Napoleonic carriage eventually delivered him there. They were the leftovers of soldiers the Swiss had slaughtered in the fifteenth century in some massacre or other. Made knife handles out of them. They’re famous for their knives, you know. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Mary Shelley, at the stroke of midnight, had a waking dream where the bones under Byron’s bed grew back their flesh. Someone who looked very much like Shelley was digging up more body parts and stitching them together to make a creature. The whole horrible scene was lit by huge flashes of lightning. Poor Mary jumped out of bed with a scream in her throat and Frankenstein in her head.”
“Frankenstein. Was that the monster’s name?”
“No, Victor Frankenstein was the scientist. The book’s subtitled The New Prometheus. It’s all very incestuous, because Byron was writing his ‘Prometheus’ poem at the time. Now you do know who Prometheus is, don’t you?”
“He’s chained to a lonely mountain peak, and a vulture feeds on his liver because he gave away the secret of fire to humans. Napoleon keeps saying that he is the modern Prometheus and that the fire he gave to us mortals is the Enlightenment.”
There was suddenly a cautious look of respect in the consul’s eyes. “And he is. Oh, how wonderful it must be to actually know him! You have no idea how lucky you are! Then I suppose he’s read the poems he inspired Lord Byron to write about him?”
Charlotte smiled just enough to show a flash of teeth between her full lips. “He thinks every poem is about him. He calls Saint Helena his rock, Sir Hudson Lowe his vulture, and giving man the gift of liberty his sin.”
The consul called for another brandy. Charlotte declined another beer. “All quite fascinating!” he said. “There are those who’ve read Mary’s book who say that Napoleon’s not Prometheus. He’s Victor Frankenstein stitching together Europe to make a monster such as the world has never seen.”
“That’s nonsense!”
“Read it and tell me what you think. His Lordship told me to bring him a copy. It hasn’t made its way to Venice yet, as far as I know. It’s a long tome, three volumes. Whatever you do, be careful not to blot it. His Lordship is awfully fussy about little things like smudges.”
Chapter 17: Mad, Bad Byron
Venice, the watery city. Charlotte could tell why Byron liked it. It was a decadent ruin. It looked like it was on the point of sinking beneath the waves like Atlantis.
“He wants to meet you tonight,” the consul told her. “There’s a fancy dress ball at the Fenice.” He gave her his sweet, slightly shy smile. “That should be suitable, shouldn’t it, seeing you’re already in costume?”
“He’s in that much of a hurry? I was hoping for a hot bath!”
“Oh, he’s always in a tearing hurry when he isn’t prostrate with melancholy. You’ll see soon enough. Of course there’s time for a bath. Nothing naughty starts before ten at night in Venice!”
The embassy was on a canal, like just about every building in this liquid city. The sour face of the consul’s wife contrasted oddly with the sweetness of the consul’s. “This is our guest, Miss Charlotte Knipe, who is to be called Charles for the moment to humor His Lordship. Charles this is my wife, Isabelle. She’s Swiss,” he said as if that explained everything.
“Delighted,” said Isabelle, although she didn’t look delighted at all. A child cried somewhere in a back room. “Oh, dear, she’s probably wet herself again. Please excuse me. Her nanny is out shopping.”
“You have a child?” said Charlotte.
“Yes and no,” said the wife. “I’ve been taking care of her, but she’s not mine. She’s Lord Byron’s. Her name’s Allegra, although she isn’t cheerful at all, poor thing.”
“I thought his daughter’s name was Augusta,” said Charlotte.
“That’s his legitimate child,” said Isabelle over her shoulder. “Allegra is one of his many bastards. Her mother is Mary Shelley’s stepsister. A loose trollop, if ever there was one. She’s besotted with His Lordship, but he avoids her like the plague. Not because she’s loose. They all believe in free love, him and the Shelleys and all the oh so romantic poets. The type of free love that relies on someone else to pay.”
The Fenice was vast. It could seat two thousand, the consul told Charlotte. But the seats had been covered up by a wooden floor built level with the stage, where an orchestra was playing Vivaldi. Charlotte had changed into a fresh page’s uniform and wore a feathery bird mask the consul had lent her. Fortunately his wife couldn’t be with them because the nanny had better things to do in bed with someone or other, as usual, the sour Switzer complained.
After walking Charlotte around the floor and greeting several people he somehow recognized in spite of their masks, the consul took her up to a large box decorated with lavish drapes and full-length mirrors. Byron’s box. It was empty.
“He shouldn’t be long,” the consul said. “I’ll be right outside. He wants to meet you alone.”
Charlotte was terrified. She felt her shoulders nudging her ears, forced them down. She wasn’t doing this for herself. She was doing it for Napoleon, she had to remind herself. She’d greet Byron, say something polite about his poetry, give him the letter, and leave. As the minutes dragged by, she nearly did leave, several times, but somehow she couldn’t get her legs to move.
“Bugger him, dis all be crazy!” she whispered to herself in the full-length mirror. Somewhere behind her a curtain swished open. A figure appeared in the mirror. Even its mask was black.
She didn’t turn, couldn’t.
“A mask in a mirror,” a voice caressed. “What lives behind the mask?”
Once again she felt that eerie tingling sensation at the back of her neck she’d first felt when Napoleon had looked her full in the face back at Porteous House in Saint Helena. Without giving it any forethought whatsoever, she found herself swept up into the game. “You know who I am,” she said, turning. “I am the messenger.”
“You have the message?”
She reached into a pocket, produced the letter that she’d kissed more than she should have. “Here it is.”
He approached her with a quick sideways gait that was at the same time deliciously sinister and predatory, took the letter from her, impatiently tore it open. It couldn’t have said very much, because he didn’t do much more than glance at it before sliding it into his breast pocket, envelope and all.
“It orders me see your face,” he said sounding almost regretful. “Although I’m sure that will reveal nothing. The letter says that beauty is the best disguise.”
Charlotte slipped her mask up onto her short-cropped hair, where it sat like an oddly contrived cap. His approving smile, although followed by a pout on his full, almost feminine lips, gave her courage to go on.
She said, “I’m sure the letter says you are also to show me your face.”
“Are you certain you want to look on the face of the devil?” he teased.
“Yes. If he looks like his portraits.”
“Ha!” That pout again, and with a movement so sudden that it startled her, he tore off his black highwayman’s mask.
His face was ivory pale, his forehead noble, his nose as neatly chiseled as a Greek statue of Adonis, but it was the eyes that ruled his face. They were bright blue, prominent and alive with a wild recklessness that no picture could capture. Byron was the finest-looking man Charlotte had ever seen.
They were still examining each other, Charlotte stunned and silent, when the mirrored door burst open and a slender creature dressed as a woman came in. “Oh, pardon me,” the intruder said
with a feminine wriggle but in a voice only just too deep to be female. “I’m obviously in the wrong place. I’m looking for the masked ball.”
Byron slipped his mask back on, and so did Charlotte. “My apologies, Carissima, for abandoning you. This young gentleman had an urgent letter for me. All the way from Saint Helena.”
“How exciting!” said the creature, taking possession of Byron’s arm. “He’s most certainly welcome to deliver a packet to me any time he wants!”
The magic went out of the moment as the British consul appeared. “Am I interrupting anything?” he asked.
“Hello, Hoppner,” Byron said. “On cue, as usual. The message has been delivered, but the messenger must be fatigued from his long journey, I am sure.” He looked down his perfect nose at Charlotte. “Do you ride?” he asked.
“Yes, Your Lordship,” she said.
“Then we shall have a merry race of it on the Lido tomorrow, what do you say? The consul will escort you to where the horses will be waiting. Same time, same place, hey, Richard, waking the dead?”
“Certainly, Your Lordship.”
Byron gave her a smirk, a pout, and a slight bow before allowing the gay to lead him away.
It was mid afternoon the next day when the gondola arrived at the canal entrance of the consulate. The consul didn’t need to give the gondolier instructions.
“What did His Lordship mean by ‘waking the dead’?” Charlotte asked when they got underway on the watery street of the floating city.
The consul laughed. “He is mysterious, isn’t he? It’s where the grooms wait for us with the horses. Used to be a Jewish cemetery until Napoleon leveled it to make room for a gun battery in ’96. Wish he’d cleaned up after himself, because all those broken shards play havoc with horses’ hooves.”
Byron was sitting on a toppled tombstone. He looked bright and intensely alive. Two horses, held by handsome young men in tights, pawed the sand. Without a word the poet leaped into the saddle and took off down the beach.
“He’s like that,” said the consul with a grin. “He wants to challenge everybody at everything.”
It was a wild ride along the Adriatic side of the long sandbar that was the Lido, mad, exhilarating fun for Charlotte to be free as a seagull after two weeks’ confinement on a small ship at sea. Just her, the poet, and two good horses neighing with pleasure as they took in great lungfuls of cool, salty air. Forward and expert in the saddle, she caught up with him in less than a minute, swept past him with a whoop, and then, out of courtesy, slowed to let him take the lead again. She hoped he would stop for a breather, for a moment she could treasure for the rest of her life: the Venetian afternoon she had walked along the skirt of the flirtatious wavelets listening to the most famous poet in the world whisper love lines in her ear.
But Byron didn’t spare his horse. When he reached the remains of an ancient jetty staggering into the sea, he spun it around so roughly it reared up onto its hindquarters.
“You ride well for a woman,” he yelled into the sea breeze.
“I’m a farm girl. I’ve been riding since I was three!”
“No mercy, then. Race you back!”
He lost the race. Only when they were approaching the ruined graveyard did she fall back. A clutch of perhaps thirty people, both men and women, were standing among the broken headstones—the small flotilla of gondolas moored near Byron’s boat explained how the celebrity chasers had gotten there. When they caught sight of Byron, at last in the lead, they let out a bay of triumph and trotted toward him, English reserve cast to the winds, every voice straining to outshout the other.
“‘Childe Harold,’ your autograph, please!”
“Autograph! Autograph!”
“Hardstaff, The Times! Have you really just sold your ancestral home?”
“The Morning Chronicle. Is it true you’ve just received a letter from Napoleon? What does it say?”
“Crabtree of the Enquirer! Are you going to help Napoleon escape from Saint Helena?”
The poet outflanked his tormenters by spurring his horse through the ruined graveyard, hooves be damned, and thundering down the sandy slope to where his gondola waited. He leaped from his horse in a fury, dived into his gondola, and hastily drew the blinds.
Charlotte, who had proceeded through the field of splintered marble at a more sensible pace, found Byron hiding in a dark corner. “Is it like this wherever you go?” she asked.
Overtaken by a fit of gloom, perhaps because of the question, he didn’t answer. He didn’t say a word until they reached the watery steps of the British consulate. “Tomorrow’s the night of the full moon,” he said after examining her with huge, haunted eyes. “I shall go for a ride in my carriage. I shall have the letter from Napoleon. Would you care to accompany me?”
It was improper, she knew. Even dangerous. But how could she say no?
Byron, in the exact replica of Napoleon’s carriage, top folded down, came for her as the moon soared above the Doge’s Palace. The poet, dressed in a huge black cape and wearing a small ornamental dagger, was the only passenger. The black mood was still weighing him down, because he said nothing, not even a word of greeting, patting the seat next to him and calling for the coachman to drive on.
“You were right. It is a full moon,” she said to break the awkward silence.
He stared at her, his eyes made mad by the moonlight. “The bats are out. I’ve set the werewolves free. Witches soar on broomsticks. At midnight I will let you read Napoleon’s letter. It will set you free!”
“What does it say? At least give me a hint!”
“Faster!” Byron yelled at the coachman. “Imagine,” he said to her, “that we are careering down a narrow road carved out of an immense rocky mountain, ruined castles hanging over precipices, sheer ravines on every side, rivers raging down crevasses wetting us with their spray, everything mad and dangerous. Faster!”
The coachman whipped the horses; the carriage’s rumble became a roar, which was fortunate so that the few peasants still afoot had time to scamper out of the way.
“She walks in beauty, like the night,” he sang out.
“Of cloudless climes and starry skies,”
Charlotte, who had caught the mad spirit, sang out. “And all that’s best of dark and bright—”
“Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”
The same poem she had recited with Daniel in another age and on another planet. But now she was reciting it with the poet himself! The rush of emotions swept Daniel away. She saw him disappearing, growing smaller in the rushing torrent of her imagination. A last wave of his hand and he was gone, and she was back with the poet in Napoleon’s windy chariot pulled by horses maddened by the whip.
Byron looked skyward, observing the position of the moon, perhaps. “The time has come,” he said. He handed her the letter. “Read it aloud, it’s bright enough.”
“I can’t,” Charlotte said. “It’s in Italian, I think.”
“I’ll summarize. Napoleon says that Lady Holland has sent him a copy of Frankenstein, clearly meant to be Napoleon himself, who creates a superhuman creature, clearly meant to be me, since I have been molded like clay by his ideas. This creature, me, is powerful but hideous, Napoleon says, a reference to my clubfoot and the way it repulses every woman I meet.”
“But that’s not true!”
Byron ignored her. “Soon, writes Napoleon, the creature begs his creator to make him a mate, which the scientist is unwilling to do, because even one monster is too much for the world. Are you following all this?”
“Yes, but—”
“Napoleon, of course, goes one better than Frankenstein the scientist. He creates a beautiful woman for the monster. Read the last line.”
Charlotte struggled with the Italian.
“Do you know what that means? It means, ‘Take her, she is my gift to you.’”
Without warning, he threw himself on her like a lightning bolt. She astonished him by responding like its thunder cla
p. “Lady Holland said you are a virgin,” he said, breaking her fierce embrace. “And that you are to remain that way.”
“I am more than that. I am a command from Napoleon.”
His second kiss was fiercer than his first. “Which I am going to enjoy obeying,” he said.
Afterward Byron called to the coachman, who must have heard everything, with the order to drive back to the consulate.
“Thank Napoleon for his beautiful gift,” he said. “Assure him that I am doing everything I can to promote our cause.”
She was so shocked by his sudden coldness that she lapsed into Yamstock. “I wazz tinking,” she began before she caught herself. “I was thinking of visiting Venice for a while. The consul has invited me to stay.”
At least her lapse aroused mild curiosity. “Is that your Saint Helena dialect coming out of hiding?”
She shot him a teasing grin. “Eirce—that means yes. As in: eirce, you done be one werry famous poet. Everybody done hear about you. Wot you tink about Yamstock?”
Byron sighed with such a deep sadness she felt tears spring to her eyes. “Charlotte, go back. Europe is bad for you. I’m worse. Go back home and tend to Napoleon. Console him in his desolation. I’m sure you are his favorite creature. Be the dove that Noah released. Take the emperor back an olive leaf from me.”
“Perhaps I’m the raven that never returned to the ark,” she said, fighting to revive her spirits.
“No,” he said. “I am the raven. I can never return to England.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you think Lady Holland had you dress as a boy? Why do you think I enjoyed you as I did? What do I care about virginity? Housemaids, shop assistants, messenger boys, countesses. All whores!”
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