by Lona Manning
“I wish we could stay here forever,” he whispered to her when they lay still. “Here, by water, is where I first dreamt of you.”
With an expression of endearing sweetness, he recited:
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?—
He hesitated and coughed. “I know my voice is not very pleasant! I date it to a time when I was severely ill as a child. I nearly died of a putrid sore throat.”
“Good heavens! Was your family without the means to hire a good physician?”
Shelley laughed. “I have never told you about my family, have I! My grandfather is a baronet, and my father is the member for Horsham in Sussex. It is not impossible that I should succeed to his seat in Parliament one day.”
“You are the heir to a baronetcy! And your father sits in Parliament!” Mary cried. Shelley blinked, surprised that she should be surprised.
“Oh yes, my grandfather is a very wealthy man.” Shelley laughed and propped himself up on his elbow. “But do not imagine the Shelleys are an ancient house! Grandfather is a veritable old pirate and fortune hunter. He bought his honours when I was a child. My father, sadly, is a slave to conventional prejudice. He turned me out of the house.”
“But you are still the heir,” said Mary, almost sitting up in her alarm.
“Oh, certainly!”
“Would… would you not like to be reconciled to your father?,” Mary asked, not pleased to hear Shelley speak so casually of the honours and fortune he might yet contrive to throw away through his youthful impetuousity.
Shelley looked grim. “I will not disavow my beliefs. I will not give up my poetry.”
“Can you not write something which does not outrage public opinion? Something without radicalism? Would it be impossible to write a beautiful lyric poem on nature, for example?”
“I did alter my last poem at the insistence of my publisher and my friends.” Shelley began to play with a strand of Mary’s hair. “It was not my politics they objected to, but my contempt for organised religion.
“And, of course, the incest,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “I had to take out the incest. It is not as though I am incapable of making certain compromises when self-interest dictates.”
The sun, filtering through the branches of the chestnut trees, passed the meridian and Mary began to speak of returning to the village. Shelley led her to the gorge for a final plunge in the cold waters before they dressed.
Mary wrapped herself in the quilt and picked her way carefully over the boulders to the edge of the stream. She sat and dangled her legs in the rushing water. Shelley plunged into the small waterfall which cascaded between the boulders. He cried aloud for pure joy and held out his arms in an exuberant pose.
“All of my life,” he cried, “all my life, I have been drawn to water. If there was a lake or a pond or a stream nearby, I was sure to be upon it.”
He strode through the water, tugged the quilt from her shoulders, and pulled her into the stream. She shrieked with laughter like a child, and he held her tenderly in his arms. He caressed her cheek and gazed into her eyes with passionate intensity.
“You give me life, like the water,” he whispered. “My anima. My Marina. I shall call you the sea. I am reborn in you. And thanks to you, I shall write—and I shall write of you.”
* * * * * * *
Madam Ciampi stopped Mary before she went upstairs to her apartments and upbraided her for leaving her maidservant to get into mischief. “That one—that hussy from Lombardy—I always see her walking out and talking with men! One day with an English valet, and the next with an Italian. She will come to grief, mark my words madam, she will be ruined and she will hurt the reputation of my house.”
To appease her landlady, Mary scolded Lucenza, although she truly did not care what the silly girl did, and in fact preferred her to remain out of sight when she was not required. The girl was too stupid to be good company, but Mary had no other, and several days passed without a visit or a line from Shelley, apart from a brief note advising against going to the public dances as the musicians were so poor they would only aggravate her.
Mary grew increasingly offended by his neglect. Lucenza was also restless, anxious to slip away to one of her assignations. To add to Mary’s irritation, one afternoon someone was playing the opening bars of Voi che sapete over and over again on a tinkling pianoforte, with no evidence of improvement. Lucenza’s sighs and badly-rendered Mozart together impelled Mary to go out for dinner instead of eating alone in her rooms.
She chose her favourite al fresco café, so that she might entertain herself by watching the passers-by. The sultry afternoon air was relieved by several large fountains, and little birds hopped about on the colourful tiled floor, searching for crumbs. She dined on some fish and apple tart, still trying to dismiss Voi che sapete from her head.
Mary could not avoid noticing a dark-haired young woman dining alone at the next table, who was quickly devouring a plate of pork chops. The young woman was of a solid, muscular build, and Mary surmised she had been attempting to starve herself into a more slender form, but appetite had won the battle. Certainly there was something rather guilty in her air, and when another young woman walked briskly into the piazza and looked about her, the girl drew her napkin over her plate in a futile attempt to hide it.
Mary had seen the newcomer before. She was the red-headed lady who lived at the top of the street. She approached the dark-haired girl and rolled her eyes. “So, Claire, this is where you have been stealing off to! I might have guessed. How did you find the money for that?”
Amused, Mary pretended to be absorbed in her book, and she sipped her glass of mineral water as she listened to their conversation.
“The money was for my singing lessons, but I shall not be taking lessons so long as we are stuck here.”
“Then you ought to have given it back!”
“It was my money, so it is no affair of yours what I do with it.”
“Your money. Can you truly think so?” The red-headed woman sighed, and sank down in the chair next to her companion. “Is there any food left? Or did you stuff it all down?”
The girl she called Claire pulled her napkin away and revealed a plate of bones, with one half-eaten pork chop remaining. “Help yourself to the rest.”
“I dare say it will not disagree with me. Just a very little meat, a very little....” She cut up the remaining chop and rapidly dispatched it.
“Shall we go back now?” The dark-haired girl asked, after some period of silence.
The other shook her head. “The landlord sent word he was coming around this afternoon. I shan’t go home until late.”
“Oh my lord, what am I to do all day, if we cannot go back to Casa Bertini?”
The red-headed woman pushed the plate away from her, then opened a small leather satchel and pulled out a well-worn newspaper. “Do as you please, Claire. It is not my fault you lack the capacity to entertain yourself.”
A few minutes passed peacefully, with Claire absently picking up and chewing the bare pork bones, while her companion lingered over her newspaper. Mary Crawford returned to her book and almost forgot the two were there.
“Mary, how many times are you going to read that thing?”
Mary looked up from her book at the sound of her name but swiftly realised that Claire was addressing her companion, not her.
“Claire,” the red-headed woman answered slowly, as though speaking to a dim-witted child, “if Sir Walter Scott—Sir Walter Scott, mark you—had praised a book you had written, how many times would you read the review?”
Holding the ragged newspaper copy toward her companion, she repeated, evidently from memory and with gre
at satisfaction: “The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed—”
“Perhaps he would not have praised it so well, if he had known it was written by a woman. Does he not say, ‘his descriptions’?”
“Yes, he does, but do you not see, that is a compliment?” She resumed reading: “‘His descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty.’ Ah,” she sighed, leaning back in her chair. “That is the part I love the most: ‘truth,’ ‘precision.’ This delights me above all. Here is my favourite passage: “Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression.”
“But perhaps he would be shocked if he knew, after all,” countered Claire.
“I think I shall write and thank him and reveal myself to him. Or—shall I not? There is something irresistibly delicious about sitting here, so far from home, having sent forth my creature into the world, and no-one can say from whose pen he sprung! Whose hand gave him life! Really, you should not have given up your own novel, Claire. Did you keep the manuscript? You could perhaps earn some money to send to father.”
Just then, a waiter approached. “Signora Shelley?” Mary heard the waiter say.
The red-headed woman replied in halting Italian, “What do you want ?”
Mary sat frozen, staring down unseeing at the pages of her book. Mrs. Shelley?
“The coach driver, he says, there is a trunk for Signore Shelley. It was sent to Livorno, but he brought it here today.”
“Tell him to send it to the Casa Bertini.”
“No, but excuse me, Signora Shelley, the driver says, that he needs two boys to carry the trunk up the hill, because the trunk, it is very heavy, and he must have payment before the trunk will be delivered.”
The red-headed woman sighed softly. “Tell him to leave it, then. At the post office. Mr. Shelley will come to claim it.”
Claire exclaimed: “Mary! That must be the crate with his library! How long has it been held at the border?” She counted on her fingers. “The end of March, April, May, June—more than four months. Oh my lord, those stupid old priests, no doubt they were looking through all his books for something wicked to read.”
“At least if the trunk is still heavy, that means they haven’t burnt them all,” replied Mary.
“Shouldn’t we hire some men to bring it up now?”
“It is Shelley’s difficulty, not mine,” came the answer. “I scarcely have enough money to buy victuals.”
Claire looked doubtful.
“I have not enough funds to pay the servants,” Mary said crossly. “Let Shelley find the money for it.”
While the two women were arguing, Mary Bertram slowly rose from her seat. She struggled furiously with herself to maintain her composure. She vibrated with inner rage. She walked out of the café, went directly to the post office, and with the calm authority of an Englishwoman who never expects her will to be questioned, paid for Mr. Shelley’s trunk to be delivered to her apartments at the Casa Ciampi.
* * * * * * *
Fortunately, Lucenza was gone somewhere.
The trunk was a battered old school-boy’s trunk and the lock proved to be flimsy and easy to force. Mary fell upon the contents as avidly as the girl named Claire had attacked the pork chops at the café.
She pulled out books, mostly in Greek and Latin, and impatiently tossed them aside. She found a few journals and manuscripts held together with string and ribbon. But there were no letters to “Mrs. Shelley,” nor any letters from his wife to him.
The journals, which at first she supposed were diaries, proved to be a confused tangle of fragments of poetry, sketches, and other jottings. These too she set aside.
She found a slim volume entitled: Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City, by Percy B. Shelley.
So this was the poem Percy mentioned—the one he had been forced to withdraw and revise.
She opened the book and her eye fell upon the Dedication.
So now my summer-task is ended, Mary,
And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home;
As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faery,
Earning bright spoils for her inchanted dome—
Mary. His heart’s home. His Queen.
She threw the book across the room.
The following morning, Mary summoned a horse and rode to the grove with the waterfall. He wasn’t there. Mary slid off her mare and tethered her. She sank down upon the long boulder which had previously served as a bench for the two of them. She had intended to brood upon her anger, her betrayal, but instead she was consumed by the memories of her body entwined with Shelley’s. She closed her eyes and surrendered to the sensations which flooded through her.
When she opened her eyes again, there was Shelley standing before her, carrying his books and his little napkin filled with raisins and almonds. She sprang to her feet.
“You have a wife. You have a WIFE! And you never told me!” She spat the words at him.
Instead of looking guilty, Shelley looked bewildered. “And you have a husband. But that did not prevent you from becoming the partner of my soul.”
“Now I know why you would not call me Mary!”
“My dearest Marina—”
“Do not call me that!”
Shelley held out his hand, inviting her to sit down with him, as though he were summoning up the patience to explain the multiplication tables to a child. Astonished at herself, Mary obeyed and sat down, though she was so angry, her blood pounded in her ears.
“Mary is her name,” he said. “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the lady who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—”
“I know who Mary Wollstonecraft is! A madwoman who threw herself off Putney Bridge! I wish to heaven she had been left to drown! Then she would never have whelped that red-headed succubus you call your wife!”
“And Godwin,” Shelley continued, unperturbed, “I have told you how his philosophy is the wellspring of my creed, the foundation of all my beliefs and principles. Imagine, my dearest, imagine meeting the daughter of two such glorious parents! I can’t reproach myself for thinking she was marked out to be my partner. And she was infatuated with me! In fact, it was she who spoke of love, before I ever did, it was she who gave herself to me, completely, in front of her mother’s tomb!”
“I saw your dedication in your poem. She is your own ‘heart’s home.’“
Shelley attempted to take her hands, but she pushed him away. He shook his head, more in disbelief than in apology. “Did you not think yourself in love with your husband when you married him? Do you not comprehend that you and I have made the same grievous error, and are suffering the same miserable regret? I have been a good husband to Mary. But she has withdrawn her affections from me. She does not understand me.”
Mary tossed her head and turned away; she felt Shelley move closer to her, pleading with her.
“My dearest Marina, you spoke of your husband being cold. I have felt the same torment. I was frozen in ice, even here, under the Italian sun, for my wife’s disapproval is so impenetrable. And just as you remained with your husband, year after weary year while he crushed your spirit, so I have stayed with Mary, for the sake of our children.”
He leapt up and knelt before her, pleading, his eyes filling with tears. “My soul has been seeking you, my Marina, across England, and Ireland and Italy, and there you were, following me!”
The intensity of his gaze was so overpowering that she looked away.
“I know you, my love. I know you were restless, dissatisfied, as though you were one half of a whole, seeking for you knew not what.”
Mary felt herself swaying, as though she might faint, at the urgency of his pleas, which seemed to bore through her very being. With an effort, she pushed him away; she rose, intending to walk away, but he followed her and grabbed her arm, and pulled her onto h
is lap.
“My love, my soul, have I ever blamed you, or reproached you, for being attracted to some other person, before we came together? What is the past, compared to the future?”
“But you never told me about her!” To her humiliation, Mary began to weep, and Shelley gathered her in his arms, and she laid her head on his shoulder, and wept for a while.
Finally, Shelley sighed. “The matter is complicated, my love. Do you not wish to be with your children?”
“Of course I do!”
“No less than I, you may be certain. And will not your longing for your children keep you tethered in some respect to your husband? My dearest one, can you be so unjust and ungenerous as to reproach me for doing the same? I love my children. And,” he added, with a look of conscious nobility, “I will always protect their mother. She became a social outcast—for me. I shall always treat her with the consideration she deserves.”
“What will you do, then?” Mary demanded. “What circumstance did you foresee, which would enable you to free yourself?”
“I must move by gradual degrees to acquaint my wife—and Claire—with my new situation, and to persuade them, if I can, that we could all be friends together.”
“All be friends together?” cried Mary. “I need to understand your definition of the word ‘friends’ and the word ‘together.’ Pray explain.”
He sighed. “Ah, if only you and she could love one another as sisters.”
Mary shook her head in incredulity, but Shelley persisted.
“My regard for her in no way diminishes my love for you, do you not see that? Love is like a candle flame, it grows, love does not divide like gold or clay. We could all live together, in mutual respect and love.”
Mary gasped and jumped to her feet. “You are talking about Free Love! You want to set up a harem for yourself! And you believe your wife will befriend me, after receiving this explanation? She will be content, once she understands that your love for me exceeds your love for her? You are mad. Pray,” Mary said coldly. “Assist me to mount my horse.”
Silently, and with the mien of a child who has been unjustly scolded, Shelley helped Mary into her saddle, then stepped back, with a final plea: “And if I am destroyed, Marina, what becomes of my work? Think of our duty to the future ages which will come after you and I are mouldering in the dust! I am mankind’s servant, but I cannot survive this desolation of loneliness! My soul cries out to thine—my love, canst thou not pity me?”