The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (16 page)

Sometimes it’s one of the supporting-role characters that stays with you. In the lurid sagas of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, the tangential figure of Neal Cassady is ultimately the most memorable for me. And in the lives of Byron and Shelley, and then fifty years later the lives of the Rossetti family and the Pre-Raphaelites, it’s the enduring figure of Edward John Trelawny that lingers most in my mind.

Trelawny figured peripherally in my 1989 novel
The Stress of Her Regard,
and, as an old man, in my newest novel, the title of which has as of this writing not yet been decided on. But really the most important adventure of Trelawny’s life took place in the years between the times those books cover – specifically in 1824 and 1825, in Greece.

Joe Stefko at Charnel House was the original publisher of
The Stress of Her Regard,
and for the twentieth anniversary of the press he asked me if I could write something further involving Shelley and Byron; and it turned out that Trelawny was the most intriguing person in the crowd.

In order to write this story I read Trelawny’s autobiography,
Adventures of a Younger Son,
which for more than a hundred years was taken as factual and has only recently been revealed to be entirely a romantic fiction; and the 1940 biography
Trelawny
by Margaret Armstrong, written before Trelawny’s deception was discovered; and the more recent and accurate
biographies,
William St. Clair’s
Trelawny, The Incurable Romancer,
and David Crane’s
Lord Byron’s Jackal.

Somebody once said that you become what you pretend to be, and Trelawny had always pretended to be a romantic character out of one of Byron’s swashbuckling tales. In the end I admire him.

–T P.

I

May 1825

“Though here no more Apollo haunts his Grot,
And thou, the Muses’ seat, art now their grave,
Some gentle Spirit still pervades the spot,
Sighs in the gale, keeps silence in the Cave …”

– Lord Byron

“Oh, thou Parnassus!”

– from
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,

Canto I, LXII

Somewhere ahead in the windy darkness lay the village of Tithorea, and south of that the pass through the foothills to the crossroads where, according to legend, Oedipus killed his father. Trelawny and his young wife would reach it at dawn, and then ride east, toward Athens, directly away from Delphi and Mount Parnassus.

But it was only midnight now, and they were still in the Velitza Gorge below Parnassus, guiding their horses down the pebbly dry bed of the Kakoreme by the intermittent moonlight. It was half an hour since they had left behind the smells of tobacco smoke and roasted pigeon as they had skirted wide through the oaks around the silent tents of Ghouras’s palikars at the Chapel of St. George, and now the night wind in Trelawny’s face smelled only of sage and clay, but he still listened for the sound of pursuing hoofbeats … or for stones clattering or grinding, or women’s voices singing atonally out in the night.

The only sound now, though, was the homely thump and knock of the horses’ hooves. He glanced to his right at Tersitza – huddled in her shaggy sheepskin cape, she seemed like a child rocking in the saddle, and Trelawny recalled Byron’s words:

And then – that little girl, your warlord’s sister?–she’ll be their prey, and change to one of them – supposing that you care about the child.

Byron had said it only three months after dying in Missolonghi last year, and at the time it had not been a particularly important point – but now Tersitza was Trelawny’s wife, and Trelawny was determined to get her free of her brother’s ambitions … the ambitions which until a few months ago had been Trelawny’s too. A man had to protect his wife.

A great man?

The intruding thought was so strong that Trelawny almost glanced around at the shadows among the twisted olive trees here to see who had whispered it; but he kept his eyes on Tersitza. He wished she would glance over at him, show him that she was still there, that she still had a face.

Percy Shelley hadn’t protected his wife – his first wife, at least, Harriet. He had abandoned her in England and run off to Switzerland to wed Mary Godwin, and Harriet had in fact died a year or two later, in the Serpentine River in Hyde Park. Shelley had been a great man, though, one of the immortal poets – a true king of Parnassus! – and such men couldn’t be bound by pedestrian moralities out of old holy books. Trelawny had been proud to call Shelley his friend, and had eventually overseen the poet’s cremation and burial. Shelley had been a braver man than Byron, who for all his manly posturing and licentious ways had proven to be a willing prisoner of … convention, propriety, human connections.

A warm wind had sprung up now at their backs, tossing the loose ends of Trelawny’s turban across his bearded face, and he smelled jasmine.
All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them,
he thought. I am even now literally turning my back on them.

With the thought, he was instantly tempted to rein in the horses and retrace their course. The British adventurer, Major Francis Bacon, would be returning here, ideally within a few weeks, and if Bacon kept his promise he would be bringing with him the talisman that would … would let Trelawny do what Byron had advised.

But he bitterly recognized the dishonesty of his own rationalization. Major Bacon would probably not be able to make his way back here before Midsummer’s Eve, and after that it would almost certainly be too late. And – and Trelawny had told Tersitza that their expedition tonight was to rescue her brother, the
klepht
warlord Odysseus Androutses, from his captivity in the Venetian Tower at the Acropolis in Athens. Odysseus had been imprisoned there two weeks ago by his one-time lieutenant, Ghouras, whose palikars were already camped in several places right here in the Velitza Gorge. Trelawny knew that Ghouras meant soon to blockade the mountain entirely, and that tonight might be the last chance he and Tersitza would have to escape.

He had no choice but to turn his back on the mountain, and on the glamorous damnation it offered.

Not for the first time, he forced down the forlorn wish that Byron had never spoken to him after dying in Missolonghi.

A year ago, in April of 1824, Edward Trelawny had ridden west from Athens toward Missolonghi with a troop of armed palikars, eager to show Lord Byron that an alliance with certain maligned old forces really
was
possible, and would be the best way to free Greece from the Turks. Previously, especially on the boat over from Italy, Byron had laughed at Trelawny’s aspirations – but shortly after their arrival in Greece, Trelawny had left the dissolute lord’s luxurious quarters in Cephalonia and struck out on his own across the war-ravaged Greek countryside, and had eventually found the
klepht,
the Greek warlord, who knew something of the ancient secret ways to summon such help – and to virtually make gods of the humans who established the contact.

As Trelawny had furtively guided his band of palikars westward through the chilly mountain passes above the Gulf of Corinth, hidden by the crags and pines from the Turkish cavalry on the slopes below, he had rehearsed what he would say to Byron when they reached Missolonghi:
The
klepht
Odysseus Androutses and I have already paid the toll, in rivers of Turkish blood on the island of Euboaea, and in blood of our own drawn by the metal that’s lighter than wood – we have our own army, and our headquarters are on Mount Parnassus itself, the very home of the Muses! It’s all true – join us, take your rightful place on Parnassus in the soon-to-be-immortal flesh!

Byron wasn’t nearly the poet that Shelley had been, in Trelawny’s estimation, but surely any poet would have been flattered by the Parnassus allusion, Parnassus being the home of the goddesses called the Muses in classical Greek myths, and sacred to poetry and music. Trelawny would not remind Byron that Mount Parnassus was also reputed to be the site where Deucalion and Pyrrha landed their ark, after the great flood, and repopulated the world by throwing over their shoulders stones that then grew up into human form.

And Trelawny would not mention, not right away, his hope that Byron, who had once had dealings with these powers himself before foolishly renouncing them, would act in the role the Arabs called
rafiq:
a recognized escort, a maker of introductions that otherwise might be dangerous.

Trelawny had imagined that Byron would finally lose his skeptical smirk, and admit that Trelawny had preceded him in glory – and that the lord would gladly agree to serve as
rafiq
to the powers which Trelawny and Odysseus Androutsos hoped to summon and join – but on the bank of the Evvenus River, still a day’s ride west of the mudbank seacoast town of Missolonghi, Trelawny’s band had passed a disordered group of palikars fleeing east, and when Trelawny had asked one of the haggard soldiers for news, he learned that Lord Byron had died five days earlier.

Damn the man!

Byron had died still intolerably imagining that Trelawny was a fraud –
If we could make Edward tell the truth and wash his hands we will make a gentleman of him yet,
Byron had more than once remarked to their mutual friends in Italy – and that all Trelawny’s reminiscences about having captured countless ships on the Indian Ocean as second-in-command to the noble privateer de Ruyters, and marrying the beautiful Arab princess Zela, were fantasies born of nothing but his imagination. Trelawny had always been sourly aware of Byron’s amiable skepticism.

His horse snickered and tossed its head in the moonlight, and Trelawny glanced at Tersitza – who still swayed in the saddle of the horse plodding along beside his, still silently wrapped in her shaggy cape – and then he peered fearfully back at the sky-blotting bulk of Mount Parnassus. It hardly seemed to have receded into the distance at all since they had left. If anything, it seemed closer.

Only to himself, and only sometimes, could Edward Trelawny admit that in fact he
had
concocted all the tales of his previous history – he had
not
actually deserted the British Navy at the age of sixteen to become a corsair and marry a princess who died tragically, but had instead continued as an anonymous midshipman and been routinely discharged from the Navy in Portsmouth at twenty, with not even the half-pay a lieutenant would get. A sordid marriage had followed a year later, and after the birth of two daughters his wife had eloped with a captain of the Prince of Wales’s Regiment. Trelawny, then twenty-four, had vowed to challenge the man to a duel, though nothing had come of it.