Angelmonster (18 page)

“Oh!” My heart convulsed in my breast and I put my hand to my throat. “Poor Keats! What a tragedy, to die so young and in possession of such genius!”

Shelley looked up, his eyes alight. “Indeed, Mary, it
is
a tragedy. I must write to George.”

He sat down at the writing-desk and chose a pen. “Where have you put that volume of Keats’s poems your father gave us?” he asked. “I must reread his lines.”

Claire’s letter contained more pleasing news. It seemed that my husband’s scheming concubine had been removed even farther away from us. The Livorno family had not lasted long as Claire’s employers, and she was now living in Florence. In the last words of the letter she even hinted she may take a position in
Russia
, a notion I could not but applaud.

“How is Claire?” asked Shelley, scribbling busily.

“The same.”

I did not choose to speak of Claire to Shelley. I knew he received letters from her and burned them.

But as the year wore on, the increasing warmth of the sun melted grief and suspicion. I began to believe, as Shelley had promised, that we would surface, and live again.

It gave me joy to see Shelley and Edward shed the formality of early acquaintance and form a friendship fuelled by their love of sailing. They hired a small boat, which they took out every day on the canal that runs between Pisa and Livorno. Shelley learned quickly. He was soon boasting that he knew the handling of boats better than George, and was looking forward to mocking his wealthy friend’s ham-fistedness.

“George’s boat is almost completed,” Shelley announced one evening when the Williamses were dining with us. “He is impatient to sail it.”

He glanced at Edward, who took up his part readily. “Shelley and I have a plan.”

“Oh, a plan!” exclaimed Jane, looking at Edward with her languorous eyes. “Why do men always have to have a
plan
?”

“Do not jest, my dear, we are in earnest,” said Edward. “What do you ladies say to moving to the coast? We shall take one villa only, to save money, and Shelley can have his own boat built.”

“Why?” Jane and I asked together.

The next question was obvious to both of us, but it was Jane who voiced it. “Edward, dear, is not the sea around this coast dangerous?”

Edward kissed Jane’s hand. “I am honoured by your concern,” he told her. “But remember, my love, I have survived the tempests of the Cape on several occasions.”

I was not convinced. “I agree with Jane,” I said to Shelley. “The plan to live together is a good one, but I must question the wisdom of buying a boat. Where will the money come from?”

“Mary, do not trouble yourself over such things,” he said. “Do you think I plan to have a craft the size of George’s
Bolivar
? Of course not!”

“There, Jane, you see?” said Edward, smiling affectionately at her. “Even Mary’s common sense will not deter Shelley from sailing on the sea. His appetite for adventure will never be satisfied.”

“Shelley cannot swim, Edward,” I ventured.

“No more can I,” said Edward.

They both burst into laughter, and I knew my case was lost. But after dinner, when Jane and I had retired to the salon, our conversation returned to the subject.

“They are all for going to the coast, Mary, and getting Lord Byron to join them there,” she said anxiously. “Tell me, is Lord Byron a knowledgeable sailor? And is he less reckless than Edward and Shelley?”

I could not help but laugh outright. Unsettled, Jane waited with a frown. “Why do my words amuse you?” she asked solemnly.

“Oh, Jane! I am not laughing at your words,” I assured her, “I understand your fears only too well. But if I could only begin to describe the way Lord Byron approaches life!”

“Why? Is he as wild as he is reported to be?”

I composed myself, and considered. “Perhaps … it is best to say that his desires sometimes exceed his prudence, and he is wealthy enough to indulge them.”

“Alas!” cried Jane, and put her hand over her mouth.

“Do not make yourself unduly anxious,” I added, more optimistically than I felt. “George has none of Shelley’s childish abandon. He is a calculating man, who would not risk his life merely for the sake of adventure.”

Her eyes looked into mine, over the hand she still held to her mouth. Then she took her hand away, and grasped my own hand with it. It felt damp from her breath. “But Edward would,” she said softly. “There is a madness in him. And that madness, I feel sure, has touched Shelley.”

I thought I was dreaming. I thought I was being carried across a calm ocean in a boat, rocking like a baby in its mother’s arms, content. But as I surfaced from sleep I realized I was truly being rocked, by Shelley repeatedly rolling against me. I sat up and, fumbling in the dark for a tinderbox, lit the candle in the stand on my side of the bed. I held it aloft and looked at Shelley in the small light it shed
.

He was sweating, and the skin on his face had the cold, white sheen of fear it took on when his mind detached itself from reality and he sank into nightmare
.

“Shelley!” I whispered, trying to restrain him with my free arm. I was too weak – he continued to roll like a lunatic in a straitjacket. “Shelley, wake up!”

His eyes were staring but he did not seem to be awake. I was afraid. Putting down the candle I tried with both arms to calm him, but he was stronger when demented than when rational. “Allegra!” he shouted. “Allegra, I am dying!”

Oh, God. It was two weeks now since we had received the news that Claire’s child had died of typhoid at the convent school where George had insisted upon sending her. A distraught Claire had visited us at Pisa, throwing herself upon Shelley as if she had decided to employ him, and only him, as her comforter. Day and night he had borne her grief-induced hysteria. She had fought him and he had restrained her. She had screamed like an animal, keeping Percy awake, and Shelley had talked to her for hours, until she was calm again. The strain of this unlooked-for appointment, and the resulting lack of sleep, had pushed him further into dependence upon opium
.

“How much have you taken?” I demanded. Reaching across him, my heart filling with panic, I felt for the bottle beside the bed. In the candlelight I saw it was almost empty
.

“My Allegra, my darling…” he murmured. “Claire, dearest…” He sat up suddenly, his hands clutching his head. “See my blood? I am covered in blood!” he groaned, lying down again and squirming in evident, though imagined, agony
.

As I was powerless to end the nightmare, I did what I had become accustomed to do. I lay as far away from him as I could, on the very edge of the bed, all my senses alert, facing him so that he could not attack me unawares
.

By the morning he would have sunk into torpor, his face as white as the pillow he lay on, the veins in his eyelids showing blue. When he awoke, about midday, he would have no recollection of the apparitions that had peopled the darkness and made him scream
.

And I had learned, after so many years, to make no mention of it
.

DON JUAN

T
he villa we moved into with the Williams family was on the coast near the village of Lerici, in the north-west of Italy. The location was wild, the house primitive and the dialect of the local people incomprehensible. We felt as if we had taken a step into an alien world.

That Lerici was a beautiful place was not in doubt, but housekeeping and care of the children was not easy in such an inaccessible place. A few days after our arrival I remarked to Shelley that we might as well be on a South Sea island for all our contact with society.

He beamed at me, squinting against the sun, which streamed into the garden where we were trying to dig a vegetable patch. “My dear Mary, what more could you desire? There is clean water, and a fire, and beds in the bedrooms.”

I sighed, straightening my aching back. “I suppose so. But there are not going to be any vegetables until rain has softened this earth, and it will be months before that happens.”

“Let us stop this pitiless task, then,” he suggested, “and be thankful.”

I did my best to get used to life at Lerici, but something prevented my nerves from settling. I had difficulty sleeping, and suffered sudden rapid beatings of my heart.

I did not forget the fear I had felt during Shelley’s latest nightmare, but I stored the memory of it in a deep, seldom-visited place. Allegra joined the ghosts of children I had loved, whose spirits slumbered by day and hovered on the edge of my repose by night.

And Claire … Claire no longer had any power to pain me. Her own pain had raised her higher in my affections than she had been for years. What did love for a man signify when it is love for a child that holds the real power over women? Claire had learned that brutal lesson in the most brutal way.

I was again expecting a child. Every day I prayed that God would send me a daughter, and not take her away again as He had her sisters.

“Do not be morbid,” chided Shelley. “You are always the same in the early months. Believe in life, not God. Do not pray, but love, and all will be well.”

The summer gathered momentum. By early June, hot day followed hot day with a relentless certainty which, however long I lived in Italy, astonished my English sensibility. No clouds, no wind, not a drop of rain or dew. I took to rising early, as the heat of the day burst over the horizon, before the sun was high enough to drive us indoors.

One glorious morning I pulled a light shawl over my nightdress and went down to the beach. I stood at the water’s edge, thinking about the past. The sea melted tantalizingly into the distance, full of the same promises of love and adventure that had brought me to Europe all those years ago, when I had been a girl of sixteen in body but a woman in spirit.

I seated myself on a rock, and pondered. My body was a woman’s now: I had borne four children, and was soon to bear another. The muscles in my back and legs had become strong from strenuous walking among mountains and the rocks of this unforgiving coastline. Yet I felt drained, as if my blood were too thin. Adjusting my shawl, I examined my veins. They threaded their bluish-green way from my wrists to my forearms, then disappeared deep into my flesh like underground rivers.

This flesh had endured much, and the spirit it enclosed had been driven to the brink of disintegration. Where was that unshackled dreamer who had soaked her dress and flirted with Shelley in the shop that day? Where was the witchery he had fallen in love with? A wild spirit, my father had called me. Had loss and estrangement suffocated that spirit, or was it awaiting the right moment, when circumstances demanded, to burst forth again?

Something was flickering on the horizon. I stood up, waiting and watching. What I had seen was the sparkle of the sun’s rays glancing off the mast of a sailing boat. I stretched my neck. Yes, it was the right boat. Yes, it was approaching the shore. And yes, the right man stood like a figurehead on the deck, shouting greetings and waving what looked like a torn petticoat.

I waved back. The boat, which I knew was the
Don Juan
even before the lettering on its hull came into view, glided peacefully nearer and nearer the beach. Hanging on the ropes was a young boy with a scarf tied about his neck. He was laughing. He looked picturesque, I thought, with his bare toes curled around the ropes like a cat’s paws.

“Where is Shelley?” called George from the deck.

“Asleep!”

“On a perfect day like this?” He dropped his white ensign – I was right, it was a petticoat – and leapt into the shallow water.

I hurried between the rocks, the sun hot on my bare head. “Why are you so late, George?” I scolded. “Poor Edward and Shelley have watched for you these four days.”

He reached the tide line and stood before me on the pebbly sand, his eyes appraising my appearance from between strands of wet, sand-blotched hair. However many times I saw George, I could never resist the notion that he was more of the air than the earth. Or perhaps, indeed, a creature of the sea.