by Tanith Lee
“Their hovels are empty of food, clothing and furniture,” Laura said, “and in the church are three gold candlesticks. How can such fools hope to survive?”
Merton lit his pipe and relapsed in his shadowy chair. Sibbi sat slapping down cards before the lamp; Laura, her wormwood letters written, stood at the window gazing out at the firefly glare on the foreshore. And above? From time to time each of the three looked up at the ceiling. The poet and his pale woman were locked in some curious, stilted, yet private and unsharing communion.
My satisfaction lies only in observing my fellow exiles, Laura thought, and glanced at Sibbi with a dark little smile. “Really, dear Sibbi, you did get such a scare, didn’t you?”
Sibbi slapped down the coloured cards, commonly, as Laura had seen the market women do with fish. “I don’t know what you mean. Anyone might be taken ill in this weather.”
“Yes, of course,” Laura smiled, “and scream at the top of his lungs, and frighten little Miss Muffet into a flawless fit. Did you imagine only women are permitted to have hysterics? You will have to get accustomed to such things in this house.”
“Some sort of—of nightmare,” Merton ventured. “Dropped off myself.”
Laura showed her teeth, as sharp, predatory and feline as Sibbi’s and with no pretence. “What does Sibbi see in the cards? Good fortune, health and happiness? Or is it a soupçon of undying love?”
She leaned back against the window frame. The torches were guttering out, the howling voices blown to cindery shreds on the wind. A melancholy hollowness yawned inside her, a disembowelling ache, She suffered it, waiting, as if for a spasm of pain, until it passed. Does nothing die? she thought, her heart squeezing its bitterness like a lemon into her veins.
The shore was all darkness now. The foxy moon meanly described only the edges of the sand, the ribs of the water. Above on the tower, the awning gave a single despotic flap like the wing of a huge bird. Laura looked upward, then down, and made out a figure walking along beneath the garden wall, towards the beach and the sea. For a moment she did not question it, saw only some fragment of the night, a metaphysical shape without reference. Then, from the turn of the head, the manner of moving, she recognised Ashburn.
“Merton—look—” Merton came rumbling to the window. His pipe smoke enveloped Laura; she thrust it from her eyes. “Do you see? What can he be doing?”
“Good lord,” Merton muttered, “Good lord.”
“For heaven’s sake, go after him,” Laura cried. “In this state, he’ll walk into the sea and never realise it.”
They ran together towards the front of the house and burst out wildly onto the beach, Merton stumbling, Sibbi erupting in a frenzy of curiosity, demand and fright after them. The dreadful, enormous intimacy of the darkness swept over them, the hot dim essence of the night, which still faintly carried the arcane noises of the islanders and the smell of torch smoke.
“Oh, where is he?” Laura cried. She could not reason why she was so afraid, yet all three had caught the fear, like sickness.
“There, I see him. You stay here—” Merton set off across the sand, a blundering, great, bear-like form, shouting now: “Ashburn! Robert!”
“Oh, the unsubtle fool,” Laura moaned.
Sibbi half lay against the door biting her wedding ring, hissing over and over: “I can’t bear it, I simply won’t bear it.”
Merton plunged towards the sea, waving his arms, yelling; then abruptly stopped. Simultaneously, the seaward window of the tower opened, and the wind snatched pale handfuls of hair out upon itself as if unravelling silver wool from the head of Albertine.
“What’s wrong?” she called down, in a soft, panic-stricken voice.
“Don’t you know?” Laura screamed at her.
“Oh, please be quiet,” Albertine implored. “Don’t wake him, for God’s sake.”
Laura ran out onto the shore, stared up at the window, then towards the bone-yellow breakers of the sea smashing at Merton’s feet.
“I saw Robert walking towards the water,” Laura said. “So did Arthur.”
“But he’s sleeping,” Albertine protested. She glanced over her shoulder into the tower room. Her normally calm face betrayed itself when she looked again downwards at Laura. It was convulsed in horrified accusation and loathing and white as the face of a clock. She shrank back and closed the window after her with violent noiselessness.
Merton came up the beach, sweat ran down his cheeks. He looked at Laura silently and passed on. Sibbi giggled wildly in the doorway. “I didn’t see,” she cried. The breakers clashed on the shore and raked the sand with their black fingers.
They had expressions suitable for everything.
They breathed closely, at midnight, like a woman on the poet’s pillow, her ocean voice sounding in the seashell of his ear. He woke and searched for her, a woman with any number of faces. But no woman lay on the narrow bed in the tower, only a girl sat asleep in a chair near the window.
He got up quietly and went to look at her, yet somehow had no fear that she would wake. Her profile, her defenceless hands and alabaster torrent of hair, all these touched him with a listless tenderness. He wanted to stroke the tired lines away from her mouth which, even in sleep, had a touch of the hungry recalcitrant childishness that generally moulds only the mouths of old women. He wanted to soothe her, go back with her to the green shades of the past. Yet he had no energy, no true impulse. He stood penitently before her, as if she were dead. He desired nothing from her, really desired nothing from any of them, and they clamoured to load him with their gifts, to fetter him with their kindness.
What do you want, then? Undying fame, the glory of the king whose monument is made of steel and lasts forever? Or does any monument last, or any hope? And does any wish of a man matter?
He left her slumped there and went down the stair from the tower. In her wasp-cell Laura would be sleeping, curled like a foetus around her hate and pain. And pretty Sibbi, probably quite content in the arms of her bear. He crossed the room where the piano stood like a beast of black mirror. He opened the veranda doors yet the garden seemed more enclosed even than the house, full of heat and shadows like lace, and the huddled leper colony of statues. He went out on to the terrace nevertheless and stood there, and the noise of the sea poured around him and on the beaches inside his brain.
He felt nothing.
He wanted nothing, expected nothing.
He did not quite expect the man who came from the side of the house, along the terrace.
A slight dark man, walking, looking out of dark eyes, carrying with him the primaeval green odour of the sea. The poet turned and looked at the man. A little white-hot shock passed through his heart, but he felt it only remotely. The man was himself.
Ashburn said quietly: “Well?”
The man who was himself gazed back at him, without recognition, without dislike, without love. His clothes, Ashburn’s clothes, were soaked, as if he had been swimming in the sea. Incredible black and purple weeds had attached themselves to his shoulders.
“How long”, the man said to him, “will you make me wait for you?”
Ashburn leaned back against the wall of the house. All the strength had gone out of him; it seemed as if his body had fainted yet left his mind conscious and alert. He laughed and shut his eyes. “I have called up my own ghost,” he said, and looked again, and the man had gone. The poet rubbed his head against the hot, hard wall and discovered, with little interest, that he was weeping. The tears tasted of the sea, teaching him.
Yet, “Don’t go,” Albertine said in the morning, as she stood on the shallow step by the royal blue water. Her eyes were fixed, not on him, but on the little boat, the young brown islander arrogantly at work on her rigging, fixed on Merton standing on the beach, smoking his pipe, nodding at the waves.
“The sea’s as calm as glass, look at it,” Ashburn said. He smiled at her, took her hand. “Do you think Merton would risk the trip otherwise, or the island boy?”
Albertine reached out and took his face fiercely between her hands.
“Don’t go, don’t leave me.”
“There are things we need from the mainland, my love, beside Laura’s vitriolic letters to be posted.”
“No,” she said. Her eyes were wide and desolate as grey marshes; her cold hands burned.
Merton came up, patted her arm. “Come now, it’s just what we all need.” He winked anxiously, indicating to her that Ashburn would benefit from an hour or so in the boat. “Sea’s like blue lead, and it’s hot enough to fry fish in that water.”
Albertine suddenly relinquished her hold on the poet. Her eyes clouded over and went blank as if she had lost her sight. “Good-bye,” she said. She turned and went back into the house.
Merton, glancing up, saw her emerge presently on the flat roof of the tower, and wait by the black telescope beneath the awning.
The two men walked towards the boat together. The village boy nodded sneeringly and let them, as a particular favour, get in, packing his brown bony limbs in position as he took the tiller. They cast off. The silken arms of the water drew them in.
The ship clove the waves gracefully, with a gull-like motion, her sails opening like flowers to the wind. The island and the red house dwindled behind them, and the smoking hills.
“Cooler here,” Merton said. He knocked the dottle from his pipe as if relieved to be rid of it. “Feel better now, I expect, old chap?”
The poet smiled as he lay against the side of the boat, ineffably relaxed. The sea and sky seemed all one colour, one ebony blue. He was aware of a lightness within himself, an inner silence. All the busy organs of the body had ceased, the ticking clocks, all unwound, all at peace, no heart beat, no beat in the belly or loins, no chatter in the brain. The sky appeared to thread itself between sail and mast like sapphire cotton through a needle. The heat was almost comforting, a soporific laudanum summer breath sighed into the motionless bellows of his lungs. He smiled at Merton, he smiled compassionately. He felt himself regarding a man who is unaware that in his flesh the advanced symptoms of an incurable illness have manifested themselves. Should I tell him? No, poor creature, let him be. Let him go on in impossible hope.
“Do you swim?” Ashburn asked.
“Swim? Why yes, you know I do, unlike yourself.”
The poet turned to the brown boy with the same smiling compassion. “And you?”
“I? I swim like dolphin.” He glared at them, however, with the kingly eyes of a shark.
“What’s all this worry about swimming?” Merton said, lighting the pipe. “Afraid we’ll capsise or something?”
“Look,” Ashburn said, softly.
Merton looked. He saw a strange, mysterious phenomenon, a bank of nacreous fog, afloat like a great galleon and bearing down on them.
“Good God.”
“Yes,” Ashburn said, “a good God, who sends his people rain.”
With an abrupt entirety as if a grey glove had seized the ship, the fog closed over them and they lost each other in it.
“Turn back for shore!” Merton shouted. No one apparently heard him. The boat swung drunkenly sideways. The drums of his ears seemed to stretch tight; there was a growling in the air. The sky and sea tilted to meet each other, and slammed together as thunder shattered the ocean into a broken plate. A lightning appeared to strike to the vitals of the boat itself: wood splintered, a terrifying unreasonable sound. Merton fell to his knees; he could hear the boy screaming about a rock in the sea.
“Ashburn, where are you?” he cried, groping with his hands through the greyness, but the wind rushed into his throat, and the world leaned sideways and flung him into its salty mouth, and gulped him down.
Albertine was still waiting at the telescope. She had watched the ship bob on the leaden sea, she had watched the fog rise like a hand from the floor of the ocean and gather the vessel into itself.
Soon the sky broke up. Explosions of thunder and dazzling lightnings divided the landscape between them. Viscous rain began to fall, at first like great gems, opals or diamonds, then in a boiling sheet of white fire that flamed across the house, the shore, the sea in impenetrable gusts. From the village the islanders came running, shouting, opening their arms to the storm. Albertine, her hair flattened to her skull and shoulders, the colour of the rain itself, stared through the one-eyed thing towards the abstracted ocean.
The storm was brief; it failed and fled away shrieking over the land trailing its torn plumes. The sky cleared, the sea, the shore, even the distant coast became visible. Nothing stood between the island and the coast. The ship had vanished.
The black tongue of the telescope licked to left and right, probing with its cold cyclopean glass, but not for long.
Soon, Albertine drew away from it. Her clothes and her hair ran water as if she had come from the sea. Yellow water dripped from the slag-bellied awning. As if across miles of desert, she could hear the voice of a frenzied woman in the house below her feet. “Poor Sibbi,” she whispered, as if comforting herself. “Poor Laura.” She did not cry, only frowned a little, striving to comprehend the perfection of her knowledge, the completeness of the event which had befallen her. She rocked her grief in her arms like a sleeping child.
When she turned down the stairway into the tower room, she saw the poet at his desk, the manuscripts, the open books set out before him. He looked up at her, not with a lover’s face or the face even of an enemy, but merely with the soulless look of something which is only spirit. She held her grief in her arms and watched the poet’s ghost fade like water in the air of the room, until only the room, the shadows remained, and the unfinished poem, spread like the white wings of a dead pigeon on the desk.
This peculiar account of the last days and night of the poet, Shelley is closely based on actual of what took place. Most biographies concerning him carry references, and many of them much more than that.
My choice of (fictional) name for him comes phonetically from the story by Henry James:
The Aspern Papers.
To meet oneself is, apparently, usually Bad News. You are either dead, or soon will be.
Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest
From an idea dreamed by John Kaiine during an afternoon catnap.
The sea! The sea!
Xenophon: Anabasis. IV vii.
1
It seemed as if only one second after the double blow was struck, the storm came up in answer out of the ocean. Of course, it did not happen quite in that way. But Ymil, who had briefly turned his back on the argument and was staring out to starboard, said and believed that, directly following the sound of the leather glove slapping the fine blond cheeks, a bubble of sable cloud rose there on the horizon’s curve. And the first kick of the sea unbalanced the ship.
Until then the voyage had been tranquil and pleasant, in itself. They were bound for the Levant. Blue skies canopied blue water with emerald margins and frills of lacy foam. Suns were born and died in splendour. Scents of oleanders and olive trees drifted from the edges of the land. The nights dripped heavily with stars.
But from the very first, those two had formed a dislike for each other.
Surely any intelligent man realised it was unsensible to take, let alone so overtly, against a fellow passenger on a voyage of more than two or three days. Apparently, neither could help it. And both, one saw, were arrogant.
Vendrei was the worst, however, and he had seemed to be the one to start the feud openly. It was he also, in those last moments before the tempest arrived, who offered the duellist’s invitation. He had been idly slapping one of his elegant gloves against his sumptuous boot. Then, rising suddenly, he had slapped the glove instead once, twice, across Zephyrin’s face. “Do you know what that means, you damned gutter-rat?”
And pale fair Zephyrin, now with two cheeks pink as a Paris fondant, smiled thinly and replied, “Oh yes. Do you?”
After which, Ymil insisted, the ship rumbled and arched her sp
ine, and storm-breath coughed vulgarly in the sails .
What had been carelessly noted before—that no land was by then visible anywhere—now seemed of consequence. And so it was to be.
For in less than five minutes more, the sky turned black, the vessel was racing sidelong, masts and yards leaning and cracking and screeching, things crashing below-decks, the groans, bellows and shouts of crew and passengers already lost in tumult.
Less than twenty minutes more and the ship, partly dismasted and having struck some unseen and unseeable obstacle, reeled headlong in the maelstrom and began to go down.
All on deck had been swept off into the water. Here they whirled and spilled about among the terrible, smothering sheets of the waves.
Ymil lost consciousness, expecting to awaken dead. But when he did regain his senses he found that he, with a small group of others, had fetched up alive on an unidentified shore.
Whether this was the hem of mainland or isle he did not know, as nor did any of them.
They huddled on the sand as the storm dissolved in distance, its mission fulfilled. There was no sign of the foundered ship, not even so much as a broken spar, barrel or shred of canvas. Only the repaired lace of the foam followed them to the beach.
Sunset had gone by in a mask of weather.
Night was constructing itself brick by brick.
2
Prince Mhikal Vendrei had come aboard at the Mediterranean port with the seamless modesty of a flamboyant man. His luggage was meagre and soon stowed in the better part of the passengers’ quarters. He was a very beautiful picture, tall and slim, with a sunburst of dark gold hair, and everything augmented by silk, leather and clean linen. At his side, in a satin-cased sheath, rested the true gentleman’s final accessory, a sword of damascened steel, with a lynx engraved under the hilt. He spoke like a gentleman too, and in many languages. French he had, and several of the coiled tongues of the Eastern Steppes; it seemed from his few immaculate books he could read Latin and Greek. The local patois he had no trouble with, nor even the slangy argot of the sailors. He did not keep to himself, graciously appearing at meal-times, or to walk the upper deck and sea- or stargaze with the others. He flirted nicely with the rich elderly lady from Tint, as with the younger, less wealthy ladies from Athens. He played cards where desired, prayed calmly with the rest on the three saints’ days that fell during the voyage, and was virtually faultless. He even consented to being sketched by the motherless son of the merchant from Chabbit.
