The Stress of Her Regard (26 page)

Blood was dripping now from his fist, but Mary had forgotten about trying to get the piece of glass away from him. "Perhaps," she said unsteadily as she sank into a chair, "you'd better tell me more about this . . . this
doppelganger
of yours."

Shelley left for London later that day, and in a letter that Mary received two days later Shelley proposed marriage to her; they were wed two weeks later, on the thirtieth of December, but Mary's joy was marred a little by her suspicion that he had married her mainly to get legal custody of his two children by Harriet.

Two weeks after that, Claire's child by Byron was born, a daughter that Claire christened Allegra, and by the end of February all of them had moved to a house in the little town of Marlow, thirty miles west of London.

Here Mary's fears began to dissipate. Shelley failed to get custody of Harriet's children, but Mary's son and Claire's daughter appeared to be healthy, and she soon discovered that she was pregnant again herself; the baby, a girl, was born in September, and they named her Clara.

Even Shelley was, tentatively, beginning to relax again. He kept a skiff moored on the bank of the Thames, only a three-minute walk from the house, and frequently went rowing up and down the waterway, though he still refused to learn to swim.

It was only in his writings that he seemed to express some of his old fears. He wrote a number of poems, but devoted most of the year to writing a long political poem that he at first called
Laon and Cyntha
but later retitled
The Revolt of Islam
. Mary carefully read all his verse—she was a little alarmed by a poem called "Marianne's Dream," in which a city consisting of mountains is destroyed by fire, and marble statues come briefly to life—but there was only one stanza, in
The Revolt of Islam
, that really disquieted her:

Many saw
Their own lean image everywhere, it went
A ghastlier self beside them, till the awe
Of that dread sight to self-destruction sent
Those shrieking victims . . .

I wish you a good night, with a Venetian benediction,
"Benedetto te, e la terra che ti fara!"—"May you be
blessed, and the
earth
which you will
make
" is it not
pretty? You would think it still prettier if you had heard
it, as I did two hours ago, from the lips of a Venetian girl,
with large black eyes, a face like Faustina's, and the figure
of a Juno—tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes
flashing, and her dark hair streaming in the moonlight—
one of those women who may be made any thing.

—Lord Byron, 19 September 1818

When he couldn't take any more of the ceremony, Percy Shelley left the circle of people and walked away; in a few long strides he had followed his shadow to the top of a low hill, where a wind-twisted old olive tree seemed to point back south across the calm water of the lagoon toward Venice. Shelley turned his gaze in that direction, and the irregular glittering line that was the city seemed to him to be dominated by churches, from the Romanesque campanile of San Pietro di Castello in the east to, at the western end, the low walls of the Madonna dell' Orto.

Our Lady of the Kitchen Garden, he translated that last phrase mentally. A month ago Byron had told him that the church had been dedicated to San Cristoforo until 1377, when a crude statue, supposedly of the Blessed Virgin, had been found in a neighboring garden. Neither Byron nor Shelley had been in a mood to visit the place.

For a few minutes Shelley picked at the splinters and blisters he had inflicted on his left palm before dawn this morning; then he looked back down the hill toward the knot of people.

Mary and Claire were standing off to one side, near the flowers the English Consul had brought, and even from this distance Shelley could see that Claire was uneasily watching Mary, who simply stared at the ground.

He knew they'd have to be leaving Venice soon, now. Byron would be wise to leave too . . . but of course he wouldn't—not with that Margarita Cogni woman living with him, and with the best poetical work of his life only begun.

This was a Friday, and it occurred to Shelley that he and Claire had arrived in Venice five weeks ago tomorrow night, looking for Claire's baby—Allegra was nineteen months old now, and for the last four months the child had been staying in Venice with Byron, her father. Claire was desperate to see the child, and Shelley had agreed to help her. He had been looking for an excuse to visit Byron, an excuse that would look plausible to any minions of the Austrian government of Italy who might be keeping track of the extravagant English lord.

Their gondola had come in to the city from the mainland—they must have passed close by this island, though in the dark and the storm they could never have seen it—and though the string of lights that was Venice had been nearly invisible through the thrashing downpour beyond the gondola's rain-streaked window, the water had been no choppier than it was today, for the long islands of the Lido to the east protected the lagoon from the wild Adriatic.

Pulling a long splinter from his palm now, he grinned bleakly. The lagoon's always calm, he thought. Even though the city's not ritually married to the sea anymore, the sea evidently still has a . . . soft spot for the place.

They had arrived at an inn at midnight, and even before they could go to their rooms the fat landlady, learning that they were English, felt called on to tell them about the wild countryman of theirs, an actual lord, who was living in a palace on the Canal Grande amid a menagerie of dogs and monkeys and horses and all the whores that the gondoliers could ferry to him.

Claire had turned pale, imagining her infant daughter living in the midst of this pandemonium, and for a while Shelley had thought he would have to send for some laudanum to get her to bed. At last she had gone to sleep—but before going to bed himself Shelley stood for a long time at the window, watching the dark twisting clouds.

He had known Claire as long as he had known Mary, which was to say two years before Claire had gone to London at the age of eighteen to seduce the notorious Lord Byron; that had been a project he'd helped her with, for he was instinctively unpossessive of his women . . . though Claire couldn't really be said to be
his
. Shelley had always found her attractive, and often in their travels he had shared a bed with her and Mary, but he had so far not ever made love to her.

He certainly had no reason
not
to—she and Mary and he were in agreement about the unnatural laws, forced on people by the twin oppressors Church and State, concerning marriage and monogamy. And now at the age of twenty she seemed more beautiful to him than she ever had—just thinking about the way she had fallen asleep against him in the gondola, the black ringlets of her hair spilled across his shoulder and one warmly soft breast pressed against his arm, made his heart pound again and almost set him tiptoeing to her room.

Idealist though he was, he was a shrewd enough judge of women to know that she wouldn't be alarmed or particularly reluctant.

But it would certainly complicate his situation. Experience had made her realistic, but she couldn't help taking any such—liaison?—as at least partially a promise of getting her daughter Allegra back, and he was not by any means sure he'd be able to talk Byron into that.

It was getting late. A stagnant smell had begun drifting into the hallway on the draft from the window, and he guessed that the canals, when all the gondolas and grocer's boats were retired for the night and no longer agitated the water into the bright choppiness so dear to painters and tourists, gave off this nocturnal evidence of their great age.

It humbled him, and he went quietly to his own room.

The next afternoon Shelley had gone alone in a low, open gondola to the palace Byron had leased. Shelley had been uneasy, for he hadn't told Byron he was coming, and he knew Byron detested Claire and had said that if she were ever to arrive in Venice he would pack up and leave.

The previous evening's storm had blown away, leaving the sky starkly blue behind the pillared and balconied palaces of green and pink stone that walled the broad waterway, and Shelley had blinked at the needles of sunlight reflected from the gold trim and gleaming black hulls of the gondolas that were ranked like slim cabriolets in front of the Byzantine structures.

Dozens of the narrow craft were moored to striped poles that stood up in the water a few yards out from the palace walls, and several times Shelley noticed wooden heads—
mazzes
—at the tops of the poles; once he was even close enough to see the gleam of a nail-head in one of the crudely carved faces. Shelley had heard that the
mazzes
now represented opposition to the Austrian rulers of Italy. It's still resistance to the Hapsburgs, he thought.

The gondola passed under the ornate, roofed bridge that was the Rialto, and soon afterward the gondolier began trying to point out the palace Byron was renting, on the left ahead.

The Palazzo Mocenigo was actually several big houses which had at one time been united by one long, neoclassical facade of gray stone. No one was visible on the balconies or at the huge triple windows of the palace as the gondola glided across the water toward it, and when the gondolier had poled them in under the shadow of the huge palace, and brought the craft to a rocking stop at the puddled stone steps, Shelley couldn't see anyone in the dimness beyond the open arches of the ground floor.

He stepped out, paid the gondolier, and was looking back out across the wide face of the canal when, simultaneously, the gondola he'd just quitted emerged into the sunlight with a flash of gold, and the door on the landing behind him was echoingly unbolted.

The person who pulled the door open was Byron's English valet, Fletcher, and he remembered Shelley as a frequent visitor at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland; his master, he told Shelley now, had only awakened a little while ago and was in his bath, but would certainly be glad to see him when he emerged. He held the door open so that Shelley could enter.

The ground floor of the palace was damp and unfurnished, and it smelled of the sea and of the many sizeable cages that were stacked against the back wall; stepping around a couple of locally useless carriages in the dimness, Fletcher led him to an ascending marble stairway, and by the sunlight slanting down from above, Shelley was able to see the animals in the cages . . . monkeys, birds and foxes. He knew that if he had brought Claire, she would have theatrically insisted on searching the cages for Allegra.

Upstairs, Fletcher left him in a wide, high-ceilinged billiard room on the second floor, and went to tell Byron he was here; and as soon as Shelley had leaned back against the billiard table, a little girl wandered into the room from the direction Fletcher had taken.

Shelley recognized Allegra instantly, though she had grown taller even in just these last four months, and was beginning to show the Byronic dark hair and piercing eyes—and when he took some billiard balls from the table and, smiling, crouched down to roll them one by one across the threadbare rug to her, she smiled back, clearly recognizing her old playmate; and for several minutes they amused themselves by rolling the balls back and forth.

Claire had given birth to her while they were all living back in England, at a time when that country had begun to weigh on Shelley: only a month before her birth he had learned of the suicide of Harriet, his first wife; and two years before that, his first child by Mary had died of some sort of convulsion near London. The infant Allegra had for a while been more company to him than Mary or Claire, and he had missed her during these last four months.

"Shelley!" came a delighted call from another room, and when he looked up he saw Byron striding toward him from an inner archway. The man wore a colorful silk robe, and jewels glinted in the brooch at his throat and the rings on his fingers.

Shelley got to his feet, being careful not to let surprise show in his smile—for Byron had put on weight in the two years since Shelley had seen him in Switzerland, and his hair was longer and grayer; he looked, Shelley thought, like an aging dandy, making up in finery for what he had lost in youth.

Byron seemed to know his thoughts. "You should have seen me last year," he said cheerfully, "before I'd met this Cogni girl; she's my—what, housekeeper now, and she's thinning me down fast." He peered past Shelley. "Claire's not with you, I hope to God?"

"No, no!" Shelley assured him. "I'm just—"

A tall woman appeared in the archway then, and Shelley paused. She stared suspiciously at him, and he blinked and stepped back, but after a moment she appeared to make up her mind favorably about him, and smiled.

"Here's Margarita now," said Byron, a little nervously. He turned to her and, in fluent Venetian Italian, explained that Shelley was a friend of his, and that she was not to turn the dogs on him or throw him into the canal.

She bowed, and said to Shelley,
"Benedetto te, e la terra che ti fara."

"Uh," said Shelley,
"grazie,"
He squinted at her, and wished the curtains were not drawn across the tall windows at the far side of the room.

Little Allegra was standing behind Shelley's leg now, gripping it tight enough to hurt, and after a moment he looked down at her and noticed how wide her eyes were, and how pale she was.

Her grip loosened when Margarita turned around and disappeared back into the depths of the house.

"Where's Mary?" Byron asked. "Have you all moved out to this coast? You were staying at that spa, last I heard, near Livorno."

"Mary's still there. No, I came here to talk to you about . . ." He touched Allegra's dark curls. ". . . about our children. There was something you said in a letter—"

Byron held up a pudgy hand. "Uh," he said, "wait." He turned away and walked to the curtained window, and when he turned back Shelley could see that he was frowning and chewing his knuckles. "I think I remember the letter. I don't think I still believe—still find mildly interesting, that is, I never
believed
—the things I wrote about. I told you to destroy it—did you?"