A Call To Arms (5 page)

‘To the Baths of Caracalla. I’ll warrant you never saw such a place in your life.’

The wager just permitted for Hervey to have seen them already, but in truth he had not yet explored them, seeing them only distantly and very indistinctly from the Palatine. It had been his intention to engage a guide and go there with Elizabeth in a day or so. He would not spoil Shelley’s enthusiasm in the sharing of a secret, however, and he therefore made no reply.

Indeed, Hervey said little throughout their approach march, but it was not dullness that made him silent, only that the poet was a most zealous guide, and there was little to say beyond an appreciative word here or an interrogatory one there. They tramped the Forum, skirted the Colosseum, briefly traced the line of the ruined walls of Romulus, explored the Circus Maximus for
a while, where Shelley was keen to hear Hervey’s opinion of the turning circles and speeds of the chariots that had once raced there, and then followed the stream called Acqua Crabra for half a mile until they reached the object of their excursion. They came on it curiously abruptly, though the baths were as massive as any structure in the city.

‘
Now
, Hervey, what think you? Tell me your thoughts ere I tell you mine!’

Hervey’s immediate thoughts were of India. The jungled ruins of the great
Terme
of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – known as Caracalla, for he favoured that Gaulish mantle above the Roman toga – looked for all the world like the palace at Chintalpore overrun by the forest. He could therefore picture what must have been in this place, rather than seeing merely crumbling brick and tangled bines. ‘Nature is remorseless, I should say.’

It was a prosaic response perhaps, but Shelley was heartened by it and expressed his approval freely. ‘Nature is the ultimate barbarian, Hervey. The Goths cut the aqueducts which gave the baths their spirit, and others stripped the place of its marble, but it is Nature that overwhelms it in the end – crushes and devours it like an enormous serpent. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely, though.’

Hervey nodded slowly.

‘It thrills me more than I can say. Indeed, it is a scene which overpowers expression.’

But Hervey was not so transported that he did not see the paradox. ‘If it overpowers expression, why does a poet seek inspiration here? Is there not other seclusion where you might summon the muse?’

Shelley smiled. ‘Captain Hervey, you would have me believe your heart is of stone, or lead – no, not lead, for that is the soldier’s precious metal! Come; there’s a winding staircase here like a mountain path. We can reach the summit of these towers. And so wonderfully overgrown with myrtle is it that you will have no thoughts but of the wilderness.’ He rushed ahead.

Hervey followed as if it were indeed a mountain path, having a care to place a hand at all times on something which might save him were the stones beneath his feet to expire after their sixteen long centuries of trampling. Shelley climbed carelessly, however,
like a boy who knows the boughs of a great oak well and wishes to display that knowledge to another; except that Hervey was certain there was no such intention in his guide, for a man less affected in his fervour he could scarcely imagine.

All about them was Nature reclaiming – a thick entanglement of myrtle and bay and white-flowering laurustinus, of wild fig and countless nameless plants which the four winds had sown. High above circled buzzards, as if patrolling the Via Appia, sentinels to the two friends’ solitude. And below them flapped hooded crows, which brought to Hervey’s mind a happy boyhood at Horningsham, its jackdaws and their prankish flight. There were indeed special places, and this he would readily concede was one.

Shelley sat in an arch, a hundred feet and more above the ground, and took a black leather notebook from his pocket.

‘Shall you write?’ asked Hervey, wondering whether he should explore elsewhere in the ruins to give the poet his peace. ‘I mean, shall you compose something as we sit?’

‘No, not at once,’ replied Shelley, removing the seal from an ink bottle. ‘I shall sketch a little first. I like to compose the place when later I contemplate the lines.’

Hervey settled on the other side of the arch and took out his own leather-bound volume, much smaller.

Now Shelley was curious. ‘What is that?’

‘My prayer book.’

‘And what will you find there?’

‘I had it with me throughout the war.’

‘So you find consolation?’

‘I generally try to read the offices of a morning and evening.’

‘Do you, indeed? Are you bent on ordination?’

Hervey simply smiled. ‘It has been a habit for so long …’

Shelley made careful pen strokes, looking up occasionally at the arch. ‘Tell me something of yourself, Hervey. Who are your people?’

Hervey placed the marker at the open page, though he did not close the book. ‘My father is Archdeacon of Sarum.’

‘Archdeacon of
Sarum
,’ said Shelley, not looking up this time. ‘That is a preferment which speaks volumes.’

‘Ordinarily, perhaps, but in my father’s case it does not. He is only very recently translated thus from an exceedingly poor
country living. I beg you do not think us fattened by tithes and extensive glebe.’

Shelley chuckled, still intent only upon the arch and his sketchbook. ‘I am glad he was not so poor that you could not come to Rome.’

‘That expense was my own,’ said Hervey, mildly insistent.

‘The spoils of war?’

‘Only in a manner of speaking.’

‘
Everything
is but the manner of its speaking, Hervey.’

‘I was lately in India and was rewarded for service to one of its princes.’

‘India? A vast plundering-house for the Honourable Company!’

Hervey would not be drawn.

‘And we know there is a sister of spirit and education,’ said Shelley, sketching still. ‘Who else?’

‘I had an older brother in holy orders. He died five years ago.’

‘I am sorry for it. How did he die?’

Perhaps it was Shelley’s concentration on the pen strokes that made him so direct, Hervey supposed, but it startled him nevertheless. ‘He died of a winter ague in Oxford.’

‘Fellow of which college?’

Hervey hesitated. ‘He was curate of a parish thereabouts. A poor one, I understand.’

Shelley stopped his sketching momentarily to look across at his companion. ‘I am sorry.’

‘He was a truly good man.’

But Shelley would not allow the mood to be sombre beyond the moment. ‘And no female has secured this sensible military man and his fortune?’

Coming so soon after mention of John Hervey, it was as if a spent ball had struck him square in the breast, knocking out the wind. It did not matter that he knew it must come at some time. ‘I was bereaved of my wife but a year ago.’

Shelley looked up again, his expression horrified. ‘You too? My dear fellow, my dear dear fellow …’ He placed his hand on Hervey’s forearm, squeezing hard to impart his sympathy.

Hervey knew of Shelley’s circumstances, for Elizabeth had told him. Harriet, Shelley’s estranged wife, had taken her own life scarcely two years before. The circumstances could not have been
more different from his own, and yet he was not inclined to imagine another’s heartache was less than his. But although he might concede that, he was not yet inclined to entrust this man with his grief. He made no response.

‘Now I see the cause of last night’s melancholy, and the distance generally in your air. I pray you would tell me more of it.’

Shelley had laid aside his book, and he now looked him in the eye with a directness which spoke of candour. Hervey saw in that instant that if he did not now trust his grief to this man, he might never do so to any. He closed his prayer book, took a deep figurative breath, and began his story. He told of the earliest days, of Henrietta in the schoolroom, of his first going on campaign, of his returns and his fumbling courtship, of their becoming wed, and their short-lived bliss, and of the fruit of that passionate union. He told how he had struggled for half a year with his conscience respecting a craven and vindictive commanding officer and the obligation of loyalty to a superior. And then he related the circumstances and manner of Henrietta’s dying: a cold, lonely affair – terrifying, knowing, above all
needless
. In the course of not one half of one hour, Hervey supposed he had spoken of more with this man than with any living soul.

When he was finished, Shelley, who had sat throughout with arms clasped about his knees like a rapt schoolboy hearing some dorrying tale, gazed silently into Hervey’s eyes and saw what was left unsaid – yet which he knew must not remain so. ‘And your love’s cold grave is of your bringing, you believe.’

‘It is. I could own to no other’s accountability.’

‘Not even your craven commanding officer? His guilt seems amply proven.’

‘And that is the opinion of everyone. At his court martial he was censured for it, though there was no culpability in law. His destruction has given me no relief, though.’

Shelley looked out across the Roman plain. Countless thousands must have died by the hand of others there, and might do so again: why was a single life worth repining over? ‘I would read you some fragments of verse I am composing when you have the inclination to hear them.’

Hervey would not have wished for the consolation of Scripture at that moment. He returned the kindness with a thankful smile.

Shelley reached into his pocket for a second notebook. ‘You have read Goethe, so you will know the legend of Prometheus?’

‘That is to make of my erudition what it is not,’ warned Hervey, frowning. ‘But yes, I know the legend.’

‘You were reading last night of defying power which seems omnipotent.’

Hervey nodded. ‘And convincing it sounded.’

‘I write of Promethean resistance to the Furies, the ministers of pain and fear, disappointment, mistrust and hate. I write of the terrible alternative of giving way to Jupiter’s tyranny.’

Hervey saw a lofty analogy, yet was not dismayed, for Shelley’s was a wholly honest candour. ‘When you are ready to read it, I would listen.’

Shelley grasped his arm again. ‘My dear friend, the eagle tore at Prometheus’ vitals by day, and by night those vitals were restored, so that the evisceration could begin anew in the morning.’

Shelley’s warning, perhaps for its intensity, startled him. ‘Do you tell me the pain must endure, then? Is that how your verse shall end?’

‘No,’ said Shelley, shaking his head decidedly. ‘Jupiter shall be dethroned and Prometheus unbound, though I own I am undecided yet by what means. But until that day, Prometheus shall defy the Furies, or else it can never come. Here, let me read a little, rough-hewn as it still is.’

Shelley read him fragments, turning many pages at a time to find what he thought was most apt or diverting.

Hervey sat spellbound.

‘And this is how I conclude; perhaps you might recognize, now, of what it is I speak:

‘To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

‘To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

‘To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

‘To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

‘From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

‘Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

‘This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

‘Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

‘This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.’

Hervey did not know by what providence he had come to trust this man, so different in every doctrine and practice was Shelley to himself, but for the first time since Henrietta’s passing he wanted to speak his heart freely. And it seemed that here he might find the means to do so.

Two weeks later