The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  Byron and Hobhouse were on their feet, and they both shouted furious curses until the men on the shore had run away into the woods.

  “Damn me!” Byron said, sitting down and pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket. “No one’s hurt? Pure luck—those idiots could have killed us.”

  The women were talking excitedly among themselves, but they seemed to have recovered from the shock, and soon resumed their rowing.

  “I think it was bad luck that they saw you rowing,” said Crawford. “It made them think we were by ourselves, unaccompanied by any innocent locals.”

  Hobhouse groaned. “You really should be writing novels, Aickman! Why do all of Byron’s physicians feel called on to indulge so in—in morbid fancies? Those men were just careless louts trying to get an obstruction off their beach without going to the trouble of hauling it away! Look, if they had wanted to murder us, why didn’t they simply shoot us? Or, if they had their hearts set on actually blowing us up, why not simply pitch a bomb at us? Why go to the trouble of dragging a big damned rock down to the water and blowing it up when we’re nearby?”

  “Maybe because it was a rock,” said Crawford. “That is to say, because it was a rock. Things that can protect you, that can … oh, say, raise a shadow to prevent you from drinking poisoned brandy,” he went on, glancing at Byron, “might not have the power to block or deflect pieces of one of the sentient stones, one of the living ones. Maybe they can’t interfere with family. Is this making sense?”

  “Oh, yes, excellent sense,” said Hobhouse nervously. “Do take my hat, old fellow. And maybe a nap would be a good idea—after all, yesterday was a strenuous—”

  “Hush a moment, Hobby.” Byron leaned forward. “Go on, Aickman. Let’s say that is the only way they could have killed someone with such protections. Why would they want to do it? If someone wanted to stop us from going to the mountain, that’s one thing; but why try to kill any of us now? We would pose no further threat to them. We have no more connection with these things.”

  Crawford reluctantly let his gaze go back to the Jungfrau. “Maybe that’s not altogether true,” he said softly.

  Byron shook his head and picked up his oar. “I don’t believe it—and I won’t believe it, watch me. I don’t mean to seem to speak ex cathedra, but I think you have to concede that, in these matters, I have a good deal more—”

  Crawford was scared, and it made him irritable. “More like ex catheter, actually.”

  Byron barked one hard syllable of laughter, but his eyes were bright with resentment. “Hobhouse is right,” he said. “I have unfortunate taste in doctors.” He resumed his seat beside the prettiest rower, and began animatedly talking to her in German.

  Hobhouse gave Crawford an amused look that was not without sympathy. “I think you’ve lost a position,” he said.

  Crawford sat down and reached over the gunwale to trail the fingers of his four-fingered hand in the cold water. “I hope I’ve lost a lot more than that,” he said.

  The sunlight had begun to slant in through the window from the west, and Mary Godwin put down her pen, stretched back in her chair and looked out the window at the housefronts and gardens and fence-walking cats along Abbey Churchyard Lane.

  Their unconventional household—herself, Shelley, their nearly eleven-month-old son William, and the ever more obviously pregnant Claire—had been back in England for just a little more than three months; and often, especially at times like this when she had spent a few hours rewriting her novel, she was startled to look up and see the low Welsh mountains on the horizon beyond the Bristol Channel instead of the snowy majesties of the Alps.

  Shelley had seemed nervous during the crossing from Le Havre to London, though it had been an uneventful trip—the only annoyance had been when the London customs officer had leafed through every page of the manuscript of Lord Byron’s third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, evidently supposing that Shelley was trying to smuggle lace into the country between the sheets of paper. Shelley had been entrusted with delivering the manuscript to Byron’s publisher, and he didn’t want anything to happen to it.

  She waved a page of her own manuscript in the air now to dry the ink. She was apparently the only one to have taken up the challenge Byron had tossed out on that rainy evening almost exactly six months ago, when she and Claire and Polidori and Shelley and Byron had been sitting in the big upstairs room at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Leman, after Shelley had had that nervous seizure and run out of the room.

  “I really think we should each write a ghost story,” Byron had said when Shelley had returned and the awkward moment had passed. “Let’s see if we can’t do something with this mud-person who’s been following poor Shelley about.”

  She’d had a nightmare shortly afterward—a figure had seemed to be standing over her bed, and at first she had thought it was Shelley, for it had resembled him closely; but it had not been him, and when she had reared up in horror it had disappeared.

  She had used the vision as the basis of a novel; it was the story of a student of natural science who assembled a man out of lifeless parts, and who then managed by scientific means to endow the thing with unnatural life.

  Shelley had been very interested in the tale; he encouraged her to write it out, and to freely use incidents from his own life to amplify it. She’d taken him at his word, and the story had become almost a biography of Shelley, and a chronicling of his fear of being pursued by some kind of double of himself, a sort of dreaded twin that was destined to kill everyone he loved.

  Shelley had even suggested the name of the protagonist, a German word meaning something like the stone whose travel-toll is paid in advance. She had wanted to use a more English-sounding name, but it had seemed important to Shelley, and so she had obediently called the protagonist Frankenstein.

  The story took place in the Swiss locales Mary and he had lived in, and the name of the protagonist’s infant brother, slain by the monster, was William,

  the same as the son Mary had had by Shelley; the areas of science involved in the monster’s vivification were ones Shelley was familiar with, and the books the monster read were those Shelley had been reading at the time.

  And, based on Shelley’s description of the intruder he’d wounded in his house in Scotland in 1813, she wrote a scene in which the monster’s face is seen leering through the window of an inn at its creator, who later tries unsuccessfully to shoot it; though here Shelley had showed some hesitation, and made her omit certain details. The physical description of the monster couldn’t actually be that of the thing Shelley had shot in his parlor on that occasion—Mary remembered the drawing of it that he’d done from memory, that night in Switzerland, and how much it had upset Claire and Polidori—and for some reason she couldn’t mention the fact that Shelley had pulled a muscle in his side, at the scar under his ribs, during the encounter.

  She hoped the book would be published, but it seemed already to have fulfilled its main purpose, which was to draw out and dispel Shelley’s outlandish fears. He was much calmer now that he was back in England and she’d written the story out—it almost seemed that she had taken the fears one by one from Shelley’s head and transferred them to the novel.

  And Shelley seemed comfortable without them—"Maybe she did stay over there with Aickman,” he had said recently while half asleep, and Mary got the clear impression that the “she” he’d referred to was the thing that he feared.

  Mary hoped that the worst of their problems were now behind them, and that they’d soon be buying a house to raise children in.

  She heard Shelley put a book down in the next room, and then she heard him yawn. “Mary,” he called, “where’s that letter from Hookham?”

  Mary frowned slightly as she put the sheet of paper down and stood up, for while Hookham was Shelley’s publisher, this letter was probably in answer to the inquiry Shelley had made a month ago about the situation of Harriet, Shelley’s wife. Mary was determined to get Shelley to d
ivorce Harriet and marry her, and she hoped the woman wouldn’t have got herself or the two children into some situation Shelley would feel called on to help out with.

  “It’s on the mantel, Percy,” she said cautiously. Soon she heard paper tear, and wondered if she should go into the sitting room and wait expectantly while he read it, but then she decided that she shouldn’t seem to care.

  She hoped that the news, whatever it might be, wouldn’t drag Shelley back to London—the city never seemed to have a good influence on him. Only yesterday he had returned from a visit to the London suburb cottage of one Leigh Hunt, a mildly revolutionary poet and editor, and the visit had apparently almost caused Shelley to suffer a relapse back into his fear of supernatural enemies—for he had met there, he said, a young poet who was “clearly marked by the attentions of the same breed of antediluvian devils” who had supposedly harried Shelley back and forth across the map.

  “You can see it in his face,” Shelley had told her, “and even more clearly in his verse. And it’s too bad, for he’s as modest and affable a fellow as I’ve ever met, and he celebrated his twenty-first birthday only a month and a half ago. He has none of the pose and morbidness that neff—that this crowd usually affects. I advised him to postpone publishing his verse; I think the advice offended him, but every year that he can avoid drawing the attention of … certain segments of society … will be a blessing.”

  Mary tried now to remember what the name of the young poet had been. She remembered that Hunt had nicknamed him, to Shelley’s considerable disgust, “Junkets.”

  John Keats, that’s what the name was.

  She heard Shelley shout in the next room, and ran in to see him sprawled across the couch, the letter clutched in his hand.

  “What is it, Percy?” she asked quickly.

  “Harriet’s dead,” he whispered.

  “Dead?” Out of love for him, Mary made a determined effort to share his grief. “Was she sick? How are the children?”

  “She wasn’t sick,” said Shelley, his lips pulled back from his teeth. He stood up and crossed to the mantel and picked up a piece of smoked glass that had been sitting there since they’d gone out to view a recent solar eclipse. “She was killed—as her murderess promised me she would be … that was four years ago, almost, in Scotland. God damn it, I didn’t do enough—not nearly enough—to protect her.”

  “Murderess?” said Mary. She’d been wondering how to tactfully take the piece of glass away from him, but this last statement had jolted her.

  “Or murderer, if you’d rather,” said Shelley impatiently. “I—” He wasn’t able to finish, and for a moment Mary thought it was rage, rather than grief, that choked him. “And she was pregnant when they found her body!”

  Mary couldn’t help being glad to hear it, for Shelley had been separated from Harriet for more than a year. “Well,” she ventured, “you have always said she was of weak character….”

  Shelley stared at her. “What? Oh, you mean she’d been unfaithful. You don’t understand any of this, do you? Mary, she undoubtedly thought it was I. You should be able to grasp that, you thought it was I who was standing over—” He shook his head and clasped the piece of glass in his fist.

  Suddenly Mary was afraid that she did understand, and she was frightened. She remembered his strange fears, and all at once they didn’t seem so ludicrous. “Percy, are you saying that—this thing you’re afraid of—”

  Shelley wasn’t listening. “And her body was found floating in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. The Serpentine! Was that damned …joke … necessary? She—he, it—can’t really have thought that I’d have failed to recognize its handiwork without this … this hint.”

  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 doppelgänger 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 …

  INTERLUDE

  SUMMER, 1818

  I wish you a good night, with a Venetian benediction, “Benedetto te, e la terra ehe 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 s
ee 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.