“Oh, Shelley!” cried Claire, falling on her knees at his feet. “How good you are!”
I regarded my husband coldly. “Do what you will,” I told him, “but be sure that George will discover what you have done.”
He glared at me. “What if he does? He will hardly throw the mother of his child into the streets.”
“That is what you believe, is it?”
“Silence!” he commanded.
Then he closed his eyes, and put his hands to his temples. “My head aches,” he sighed. “Mary, I do not want to lose George’s friendship over this. He will not see Claire. But at least she may see her child, who needs her. Leave it to me.”
Standing up, he helped Claire to her feet. “All will be well,” he assured her. Then he took my hand, and kissed my cheek. “You are a good girl, my dear. But you must trust that I am good, too. I will return almost before you have noticed I am gone.”
I did notice he was gone, however. And during the long, light August evenings, as I sat alone, writing, when the children were asleep, I thought about him and Claire in the empty villa, and wondered what right he had to demand my trust when he had so seldom proved worthy of it.
INTO THE DEPTHS
Italy baked under a heatwave. Continuous sunshine had dried up streams and stunted crops. Animals lay dead in the fields. Pisa itself shimmered as if enveloped in a brilliant veil worn by an Indian bride. In such heat, we might as well have been in India.
One night, about a week after Shelley and Claire had departed, baby Clara refused to sleep. Nothing we did could soothe her. Milly, who adored all the children and had wept when Elise had been compelled to take Allegra away, could not conceal her anxiety.
“Clara has a fever,” she informed me. “What shall I do?”
I instructed her with more calm than I felt. “Fetch me a cloth and some water, and go to bed. I will watch by Clara tonight, and bathe her. If she is no better in the morning we must call a physician.”
Memories crowded my brain. My other daughter, lying in her cradle with her cheek on her fist. Cold, cold, cold. On that English February night I had had no warning of the battle with death my firstborn was to have, but this time, in the relentless Italian heat, I was prepared. Small – less than a year old – and weak my dear Clara might be, but if death threw down the gauntlet, I would fight it with my own life.
That wakeful night passed slowly, but in the morning Clara was cooler. I decided there would be no need for a physician. Milly went as usual to collect our post, and when she returned she held out to me a letter addressed in Shelley’s handwriting.
Letters. Always letters. In my dreams and out of them.
George had invited us all to the villa in Padua, Shelley informed me. The letter described the beauty of the villa, the sweetness of the air, the perfection of the situation and aspect. I was to bring Milly and the children as soon as possible.
I did not understand. What could be Shelley’s motive for wanting us to go to Padua, when only a week ago he had been so adamant that we stay in Pisa?
I went straight to my writing-desk and informed him of Clara’s illness. As he had himself observed, children – especially a sick baby – could not travel in such heat.
But indignation was stamped plainly on his reply. Mary, why can you not accept the simplest request? it demanded. I want my family with me, and I want to accept my friend’s invitation. Is that unreasonable? Why are you continually placing obstacles in my way? Clara is past the dangerous age, and a robust child. Kiss her and William for me, cease complaining and come as soon as you can.
Girlish rebelliousness, such as Claire had so admired, rose in my breast when I read these words. But I had to quash it. I was not a girl any more. I was the mother of two children, and we all depended upon my husband for money and protection.
I did not wait for the threats I knew would follow another refusal. I scribbled a hasty note, agreeing without enthusiasm to go. Then Milly, the children and I set off on the long, dry road to Padua.
Clara, still feverish and with a livid rash on her body, was as weak as the day she was born. She seemed to be waiting for the end of the nightmare with fortitude. She did not cry, nor demand to be cradled. She could neither suck nor swallow. As I watched her I felt the same stone-dead weight in my stomach as had been there when Fanny died. This is my fault, this is my fault, this is my fault. My daughter was dying because I had not protected her. Because I, too, was weak.
When we arrived at the villa I could not bring myself to greet Shelley warmly. His concern at Clara’s condition was eclipsed by the contentment that neither he nor Claire could disguise. Shelley’s appearance bore witness to a more rapid rate of recovery than he had achieved in Pisa, and Claire’s blood, as ever, pinkened her cheeks.
“Where are Allegra and Elise?” I asked.
“Allegra has recovered, and they are gone back to Venice,” explained Claire.
Taking the baby into a bedchamber, I cradled her in my arms and wept, longer and more bitterly than I had ever wept. Allegra had never been ill at all. There had been no letter from Elise. Shelley and Claire had concocted the story in order to be alone together in George’s villa.
That he had now seduced her was clear. They had been in Padua for almost a month. Claire’s radiant appearance was not due to Allegra’s deliverance, though of course she would insist it was. And I knew her well enough to see the futility of writing to Elise to demand her contradiction of their story. Claire was too clever not to have silenced the nursemaid by some means.
“Is George expected to join us here?” I asked Shelley that evening, as I sat with Clara on my lap in George’s comfortable drawing-room. Shelley was lying on the sofa, and Claire played untidy fragments on the piano.
I watched Shelley’s face. He tried not to allow his expression to change. “You know he cannot come, my dear.”
“And yet he insists on allowing us the use of his servants, his larder and his cellar! His kindness is truly extraordinary!”
“Quite so,” said Shelley.
There was awkwardness in his voice. He was betrayed. I seized upon it.
“George extended his invitation several weeks ago, when you were ill, did he not?” I asked. Claire stopped playing. Shelley sat up.
“But unbeknown to George,” I went on, “you and Claire decided to come here alone.” I kept my voice low, for Clara’s sake. “You only sent for your wife and children when you could no longer pretend that we had been ‘delayed’, or whatever excuse you gave him. He thinks we have all been here the whole time, does he not?”
“My dear, you mistake everything,” he protested.
“I mistake nothing. You subjected our baby to a journey she was too ill to make, in order to conceal from George that you were living alone with the woman he too has seduced and discarded. I shall never again believe anything you say.”
Claire had the good sense to remain silent. But Shelley, incapable of admitting defeat, tried to defend himself.
“What proof do you have of this, Mary? Have you –”
He stopped, his face freezing. Clara had begun to convulse so violently that she almost fell to the floor. Her rigid little body jerked uncontrollably. It was so pitiful, Claire ran out of the room with her hands over her face.
Shelley collected his wits. “Get your cloak,” he commanded me. “We must take her to Venice, to George’s English doctor. He will save her.”
We took her to Venice, but the doctor never saw her. As I waited alone in a hotel for Shelley to bring him, Clara had one last seizure and died in my arms.
THE ACT OF CREATION
Rome, 8 June
My dearest Papa,
Of all the letters I have written or received in my life, this one bears the hardest news.
Our darling William, your namesake, your only grandson and our last remaining child, last evening surrendered to death. Weep, Papa, and be assured I weep too, whatever hour of the day or night this reaches you!
William is to be buried in the Protestant cemetery here in Rome. As soon as we can, we are going to remove ourselves to another part of Italy – I know not where. But I am determined that my next child, which I expect in November, shall be born away from the pestilence that killed my precious boy. If only I could come home to England!
Papa, I am more wretched than I know how to express. I shall send our new address as soon as I am able. Until then, God be with you, as he is evidently not with me.
I signed my name and blotted the ink. I folded the letter and sealed it, and wrote my father’s address and blotted it again. I left it on the table in the hall of our lofty Roman apartment, for Milly to post. Then I went into the drawing-room and opened the glass doors to the balcony.
I was alone. Earlier that afternoon, Shelley, Claire, Milly and I had set off for the Protestant chapel where William’s body had been taken. But my nerve had broken before we left the apartment building. As I sank to the floor in the lobby, Shelley had stopped my fall and carried me to a chair, where Claire had fanned me while Milly, grave-faced, waited in the doorway. When I had recovered a little, Shelley and Claire had decided that I was unequal to the task of saying farewell to my son, and should stay at home, writing the letters necessary after a death.
“You may still attend the chapel in the morning, Mary,” Claire had told me, folding up her fan, “and pray for William then.”
The street looked a very long way below. The carriages, the narrow bodies of horses and the stumpy, foreshortened passers-by looked like toys. It was early evening. The shadows were lengthening, though the air was still very warm. I was clad in black, with a veil around my shoulders with which to cover my head in the street. I had bought these clothes last year, for Clara’s funeral.
Looking down was making me dizzy. Instead I gripped the rail and looked up. The Italian sky reached upwards for ever, with the astonishing clarity of light only Mediterranean skies possess. The coming of evening had done little to dim it.
I thought of that night in Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati, when the sight of the sunset and the storm clouds over the lake had so troubled me and yet inspired me with the fervour of the storyteller.
“I know you have a story to tell,” George had said that night, “and one day, like the ancient mariner, you will be compelled to tell it.”
I went in and wandered restlessly around the room. Some fire was in me. Some desire for I knew not what.
Shelley had left a pile of books on the table. They were all well-known to me – I had packed and unpacked them a hundred times. Among them I spied the green cover of his collection of poems by Coleridge. That same Mr Coleridge who had sat in my father’s drawing-room and recited The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the tale of a man condemned by a curse to tell his tragic story to any listener. Claire had slept on the sofa while I had listened, entranced.
I opened the book and read the first lines of the poem. My heart leapt at the sight of the familiar words. Already fraught with memories, they were invested now with a new power of the story over the storyteller.
I put the book down. Standing there in that lonely room I was aware of the presence of something powerful. Present and past grief, fear for the future, love, jealousy and the desire to mend my spirit swirled together like a torrent. I yearned for peace, for escape. But like the cursed ancient mariner, as George had foretold, I would never be free until I had rid my soul of the tale it had nurtured for so long.
Deep inside me another life stirred. My new baby was making its first fluttering movements. I pressed my hand to my belly, overcome with love as I had been at this moment with all my other children. But this time, fearful for the child’s future as I had never been before.
The creation of life is a wonderful and unfathomable thing, to be sure. But death is swift. In my first baby’s case, too swift even for her to be given a name. For Clara, before she had even learnt to walk. And for my dear William, who only a month ago had sat for his portrait with the merriest smile you ever saw…
These thoughts brought tears, but I controlled them. The fire in my heart had not abated. Indeed, memories were fanning its flames. George was right. The time had come for me to spill my soul before the world, and tell my story of the act of creation of the living from the dead. How could I fail to be fascinated with the idea that some day, death could be conquered, and that the anguish our mortality imposes upon those who survive us will be banished for ever?
The deepening blue of the sky beckoned me out to the balcony again. I gazed up in despair and wonder. And as I did so, the ending of the tale came to me.
My mother. My firstborn. Fanny. Harriet. Clara. William. All these lives had ended, innocent though they were. And if innocents die, I reasoned, how could I let a guilty man live? I had long pondered on this, but now I made my decision. My scientist, whose desire to play God led him to create a monster, must indeed be punished for his arrogance by death. I would send him to the place where so many people I loved had gone. Like them, he would die in misery. Not from disease or by his own hand, but because my conscience could not let him live.
Creatures did kill their creators. I had dreamt that I had murdered my own mother. If a woman could be destroyed by a child, why could not a man create a being that ultimately destroyed him?
My heart bursting, I returned to the drawing-room. I sat down once more at the writing-desk and drew a piece of paper towards me. Then, in a fever, I seized a pen and began to write.
RESURFACING
Grief, and the betrayal I could not forgive, made me lash out at the person I should have cherished. “You are the instrument of our poor children’s deaths!” I declared.
My power to cause Shelley pain was great. And, suffering as I was from my own pain, I did not shrink from using that power. “If you were strong, a man who knows what is right and what is wrong, they would be living still!”
His face was like a mask. Bloodless, stiff, without expression. But I was unmoved. This time he could not calm me with laudanum.
“If only you had not made me bring Clara to Padua, to cover your deception of George, she would yet be alive! If only you had not insisted we come to Rome, where the disease which killed William flourishes, he would yet be alive!”
Shelley did not move, but his cheeks suddenly reddened and his eyes shone with tears. I saw this, but I did not stop.
“Two children from the same family do not die within a year of each other unless there is adult selfishness, or neglect, or corruption,” I told him. “Ianthe and Charles, Harriet’s children, remain with their grandparents, perfectly well. But my children are dead because you have murdered them!”
He leapt out of his chair and, reaching into the pocket of his breeches, produced his penknife.
“Kill me, then, Mary!” he demanded. In his face there was a madness which, in all his moments of madness, I had never beheld. “Kill me now! If your hatred and your will are strong enough, take this knife and kill me!”
I sat down trembling. “My will is strong,” I told him. “But having been the cause of my mother’s death I have no desire to be the cause of anyone else’s.”
“Yet you will kill me, with or without this knife,” he said testily, putting it back in his pocket. “You will starve me of your love, until I die.”
Before me stood the man for whom I had abandoned my girlhood, my family and my reputation. But the task of rebuilding our happiness seemed as daunting as scaling the icy wall of a mountain.
And it was as an icy wall that Shelley appeared. He and I could not share our grief; he had withdrawn his love because he considered m
y response to our children’s deaths cold. But my coldness was born of despair. No one would comfort me – not even my father, who begged me repeatedly to leave Shelley and come back to England, and certainly not Claire, whose only child yet lived.
She did not know this loss, greater than any other. Only Shelley knew it, but he refused to mourn with me. He folded up his feelings as he might a poem scrawled on a piece of paper, and hid them away. Neither I nor anyone else could touch them. So we suffered alone, apart and in silence.
Meanwhile, reckless, idle, deceitful Claire at last secured a post as a governess.
“A delightful family,” she announced. “Two adorable little girls, and a house full of servants, overlooking the bay at Livorno.”
“Delightful,” I echoed.
I was relieved that she was leaving, though I might have wished her farther away from Pisa, where we had now returned, than Livorno. For years I had had good reason to despise her, though I had tolerated her presence for the sake of the affection we had known in girlhood. But her part in poor Clara’s death had torn a hole in our sisterly companionship larger than either of us could mend.
“Will you escort me there, Shelley?” she asked sweetly. “Please?”
“Of course,” he agreed. “But I must come straight back. Mary’s confinement is near.”
I watched them exchange the kind of glance I had seen so often. How I longed to tell Claire the truth: that if Shelley had made love to her under our own roof, even in our own bed, I would have tolerated this in exchange for my daughter’s life. But the way she had conspired with him to save her own face, despite the danger to her little namesake Clara, had hardened my heart against her for ever.
“Must you go at all, my dear Claire?” Shelley asked. “After all, with the new baby…”
“Yes, she must,” I declared.
Since William’s death my tolerance of Shelley’s desire for both my sister and myself, his beloved two-headed goddess, had evaporated. Fearing the fury in my voice, he gave in.
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