Shadow Conspiracy (2 page)

“Yes, though these aren’t all for me. I, too, purchased a volume of Pope for my fiancée, Lucille, who loves poetry above most things. I don’t say ‘all’ for I flatter myself she loves me best. The rest are medical journals.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“I will be...soon, I hope. Currently, I am a student at the Academy of Geneva. I hope to finish my degree within the year.”

“I’m impressed,” I said, and quite meant it. My new acquaintance was not only a man of great physical beauty, but his manner was cordial, sunny, and gentle. I applauded the inestimable Lucille. “I know what strivings are required for such a calling. I have known a great many doctors.”

As if he saw the shadow that passed through me at that absurdly mundane remark, Immanuel frowned. “Have you been unwell, Mademoiselle...?”

“Mary,” I said, offering my hand. “Mary Godwin...Shelley.” I smiled, hoping he would not note the slight hesitation.

He did not. “Godwin! You are the daughter...?”

“Yes. Quite.”

He glanced back over his shoulder at the bookstore and then laughed. He had a lovely laugh—a laugh that put me in mind of well-lit hearths and snug reading nooks, and cups brimming with hot, creamed and sugared tea. He took my hand and bent over it.

“Bonjour, Mary Godwin Shelley. I am pleased to have met such a paragon of restraint. If I were you, I fear I would have embarrassed M. Bardeau horribly by revealing myself.”

“No, you would not.”

He shook his head ruefully. “You’re right. I am bound to my Hippocratic oath to do no harm and my Christian duty to repay impertinence with civility.”

He bid me good-day then, wished that we might meet again at the little bookshop, and hoped Lucille would enjoy Pope as much as I did. Then he swung away across the park, whistling, his strides long, graceful, and confident.

Immanuel,
I thought.
Meaning
God is with us.
I hoped it was a further portent of good fortune.

Byron

 In the following days, I walked to the bookshop in Petit-Lancy whenever weather permitted—which was not as often as I’d hoped. It was a churlish spring, stingy with sunshine and sparing with warmth. Yet there were fine days and, while my little Willmouse slept under Elise’s watchful eye, I took advantage of them.

I met Immanuel in the bookshop nearly every day I walked into town and we would browse and buy and sit on the park bench talking of philosophy and politics and medicine and art. Immanuel’s heart returned ever to his beloved Lucille. His face lit from within when he spoke of her, this paragon of womanhood. And I admit, I was impressed with her, even second-hand. She had loved the Pope and wanted more poetry, so I contrived to send her a copy of one of Percy’s most recent works, which our friend Tom had suggested he entitle “Alastor.” Lucille was even, Immanuel divulged, interested in reading my mother’s work and wanted to know if she had written any novels.

I started to say that my mother’s novels were possibly not appropriate reading for a young woman like Lucille, but caught myself at a wry glance from Immanuel. We laughed at my silliness; I recommended that she read
Vindication
instead, as it was easier to find. Why even M. Bardeau had a copy!

“Are you a writer too?” my new friend asked me, and I hesitated before saying, “I pen this and that. A story here and there. Nothing worth publishing. Who would wish to read my thoughts?”

“I would,” Immanuel protested loyally. “You have good thoughts, Mary.”

As did he. He spoke much of his passion for medicine and his desire to study malaria and other parasitic diseases. He spoke with conviction and yet, an extreme gentleness of spirit. And as he spoke, he gestured with his elegant, long-fingered hands. His gestures said that, if he could, he would cradle the entire world in them.

And so, when I returned from Petit-Lancy one evening in the gathering twilight, to find that George Gordon, Lord Byron had arrived at last, I was struck by the contrast between Percy’s old friend and my new one.

George’s carriage arrived as I stepped in through the garden gate. A soft misty rain had begun to fall and we entered the house together with him complaining that, “The Damned rain followed me like a stray cat, all the way from Lyon.”

His first words to my poor pregnant step-sister when she hurried into the hall to meet her lover were, “You look like hell, Jane.”

Her first words to him were, “I am to be called Clara.”

”Very well,” he replied. “You look like hell, Clara.”

She went up to her room to pine and George rang for the butler and bid him hasten supper.

It was only when I entered the drawing room that I realized that George had brought someone home with him. It was a young man of surpassing beauty, by which I mean that he surpassed George’s own vaunted good looks. You will understand, therefore, my surprise that George should tolerate him. Only over dinner—for which Jane-Clara had been coaxed from her room by her love’s flashing eyes and dashing smile, and Percy had come out of his study, his fingers stained with ink—did I discover why he did so.

Dr. John William Polidori, George informed us, was a brilliant physician whom he had retained as his personal medic. The doctor had “ideas,” George said, that would revolutionize the practice of medicine and that would save George himself from the predations of his own many complaints.

Do I sound cynical? I was not then—or not entirely. I didn’t dislike George, but I did find his self-obsession tiresome. I bore with him for Jane’s (or rather Clara’s) sake and for Percy’s, for he and Byron were like flint and steel—they sparked each other’s muses. Alas, I sometimes believed they fed each other’s demons as well.

I cannot be so ungrateful. Were it not for our friend’s graciousness and largesse, what we told ourselves was a lover’s holiday would have been revealed as an exile. Truthfully, I was glad of Dr. Polidori’s presence on several counts. First of all, with his willing medical ear available, George would be less inclined to sigh into ours. Second, my baby boy now had a live-in physician; my fearful heart could rest somewhat easier.

Directly after supper, I went up to the nursery to hold my Willmouse and fill Elise’s head with praises of the good doctor. She was impressed enough to peek at him over the banister as he and George left the house to take an evening stroll.

“He’s very pretty,” she told me after. She opened her mouth to say more, then shook her head and put a finger to her lips.

“What?” I asked.

“He looks at the lord strangely,” she said, blunt as always.

“As if he loves him?” I suggested.

“As if he studies him,” she replied.

Polidori

 George set Dr. Polidori up in the coach house with a laboratory in which he might experiment with his “brilliant ideas”—ideas George assured us would set him completely to rights. No amount of cajoling on my part or Clara’s or Percy’s could get him to divulge what those ideas were. I soon came to the conviction that he didn’t know what they were because the doctor was every bit as secretive with George as he was with the rest of us. The half of the coach house in which Polidori worked was shuttered and locked. Our host even had the door to the adjoining stables bolted.

Of his experiments, the dear doctor would only say (with a sweet, boyish smile) that he was building a machine.

A machine. I tried very hard to imagine what sort of machine would heal Lord Byron’s deformed foot and straighten out the labyrinthine passages of his mind, but I was at a loss.

One afternoon on my way into Petit-Lancy, I passed rather close to the coach house and heard the strangest sounds coming from it. There was a humming like the chorus of a million angry bees, then a pop, as if someone had opened a bottle of champagne. Then came a rhythmic swishing sound and a second, softer hum. After a moment, this died away and I distinctly heard a man’s voice raised in anger. There was no reply, so I assumed the anger was directed at something other than another human being.

Only when the sound of the swarm started up again did I realize that I had drifted over to the rear door of the coach house and stood with my ear practically pressed against it. Embarrassed, I cast a furtive glance around and hurried to the bookshop.

Immanuel was there, and he had no more than said “good-day” to me when I launched into an excited narrative about the strange sounds coming from our coach house. I explained about Dr. Polidori and that he had some idea of aiding Lord Byron through some of his maladies. It would be tragic, after all, I opined, if one of the greatest poets of our time was hostage to the frailties of mind and body. In truth, I was ravenously curious about what Dr. Polidori could be doing that required such industry.

It was not until we were walking side-by-side to our park bench that I realized how quiet was my partner. I laughed. “I must strike you as a feather-brain, indeed, to go on so about what is probably nothing at all.”

“No, not at all,” said Immanuel.

I glanced up at him sharply, for the tone of his voice was uncharacteristically solemn and heavy, his words slow and measured. His expression, likewise, seemed to have lost some of its vivacity and his eyes...

“Immanuel, what is wrong? Please tell me that nothing has happened to Lucille.”

“No. Lucille is well.”

“And everything is all right between you?”

His mouth gave a wry little twist that nearly broke my heart.

“Have you fallen out with each other, then?”

He shook his head—a strange, awkward movement—and it struck me suddenly and forcefully that his gait, his posture, even his face were subtly less graceful than usual.

“I seem to have fallen out with myself.”

I stopped him at the bench. “You are ill? Well, come with me, then, and see Dr. Polidori. Perhaps he can offer some medicine.”

He smiled at me, then, and some animation returned to his face. “Something that Dr. Dessins cannot offer?”

I laughed at myself again for having forgotten what studies my friend pursued. “Now you must really think me silly.”

“Never,” he said, and together we sat and chatted.

But though he conversed with me and smiled again, and his eyes occasionally sparkled, still there was something indefinably
wrong
about him. His speech was not as quick, his facial expressions less refined, his movements almost graceless at times. I went away from our encounter with a creeping dread that he was ill and knew he was ill and simply did not wish
me
to know it.

Arriving at the villa, I took my time passing by the coach house and heard, coming from it, the same sounds as before, except that this time, the strange buzzing was sustained and I distinctly heard John Polidori cry out, “That’s it! By God, that’s it!”

Another voice said something in response that I could not make out, though the lilt of the voice was distinctly Italian and had the inflection of a query. One of the servants, then. Perhaps even Polidori’s man, Paolo Foggi. Polidori’s reaction to whatever the other man had said was swift and emphatic: “No! Nothing! You will say nothing until we have made it work on...!” He paused and pitched his voice lower so that I could not hear.

I found myself edging closer and closer to the rear door of the building, wondering if I might peek through the door frame. I had reached out my hand to the latch when I heard Polidori’s voice again just on the other side of the barrier.

“Yes, yes!” he said impatiently. “The rabbit. We want the rabbit.”

I retreated swiftly to the house, where I found Percy and George in the drawing room conversing idly over snifters of brandy.

“George, what is Dr. Polidori building in the coach house?” I asked.

Lord Byron stared at me over his brandy as if I’d spoken to him in Hindustani. “I have no idea what John is building. Indeed, I thought his talk of a machine was sheer fabrication—a dodge. What makes you ask?”

I sat upon a low ottoman and described what I had heard, including the shouting just now. “Clearly, he’s done something he considers exciting. You have no idea what he’s working on?”