Midnight

by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)

  But without him? If he didn’t come back? She didn’t know, couldn’t see it. Without him, none of it made any sense. Maybe she could have been happy if she’d never met him. In a house in the country, married to someone smart, like Peacock or Hazlitt, living the kind of life Marianne Hunt lived, with friends and children and dogs. She wouldn’t have written Frankenstein, or Mathilda, but maybe she’d have taken up her mother’s cause. Social justice. Women’s rights.

  Without Shelley. A worthy life, interesting even. But outside “the still cave of the witch, Poesy.” No one’s “Child of light and love.”

  There was some noise below, some shouts and splashes, that meant the arrival of the boat with the mail. She took hold of the sofa, carefully, carefully. She could hear Jane Williams, already out on the rocks to meet it. Her stomach heaved and her heart seemed to almost stop, but she steadied herself, and went over to the arches and looked out.

  XII.

  Jane Williams came running out onto the terrace. “A letter—”

  “From him?” she asked her.

  Jane Williams was very white. The fever spots were back on her cheeks. “No, for him.”

  From Hunt, but addressed to Shelley, how could that be? Shelley was there, with him—why would Hunt be writing to Shelley?

  Jane handed her the letter and she ripped it open. It was dated Tuesday, the ninth. Today was Friday, the twelfth.

  “Pray let us know how you got home the other day with Williams, for I fear you must have been out in the bad weather and we are anxious.”

  But what could that mean—“how you got home”? The “bad weather”? Then Shelley had left? “The other day”—when? Monday, if the letter was written Tuesday? Then where was he?

  She dropped the letter. Jane Williams grabbed it, started sobbing—“Then it’s all over!” Claire came running out onto the terrace.

  They were talking, crying, but for a moment she didn’t hear them. She was remembering a bit of a poem he’d written, not long before:

  Many a green isle needs must be

  In the deep wide sea of Misery.

  But how did it go from there?

  Ay, many flowering islands lie

  In the waters of wide Agony.

  Had he found one? He loved this place, it couldn’t have betrayed him. He had written, not long ago, on the back of one of her letters to the Gisbornes, “We drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until the earth appears another world . . . and if the past and future could be obliterated the present would content me so well that I could say w Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.’ ”

  She could see him now, in his striped jacket, his long soft curling hair, sailing off from Livorno, to a fair wind, waving to Hunt. Alive.

  “No, it’s not all over,” she said to Jane Williams. They had to get to Pisa—not to Hunt, a man of bad news, she could see now, but to Byron. Byron was a man of good news, strictly. “Oh, Shelley went—” somewhere, he would tell her. To attend to something. The bank, the magazine.

  She walked, carefully, to her room, swept up a few things. Claire would stay with the children, Jane Williams’s two and her little Percy. Not poetic like the lost Willmouse, but nearly three and alive that day.

  The bay was rough, but someone would row them across. Then a carriage to Pisa. She would be all right, if she concentrated and sat as still as one could over these roads. What mattered was to get to Byron. And even at midnight, he would be awake, drinking, dining, and he would tell her why it was all right. The details.

  That’s what it had been about with him, all along—for Byron to give her this good news today, she was thinking, as she went carefully down the steps and, clutching at Jane’s arm, climbed with her into the unsteady little boat.

  XIII.

  It was midnight as they brushed past Byron’s servants and climbed his stairs. He rose, staring, from his table, and stood, wordless. Afterward he described her face as “pale as marble, & terror impressed on her brow.” It was Teresa who rushed to her side.

  “Where’s Shelley?” she asked her in Italian, but Teresa didn’t know. Byron pulled himself together then, and tried to calm her, tried to get her to lie down, wait for Shelley there, but she refused. Refused, too, to let him wake Hunt—she knew Hunt’s news, didn’t have to hear it again, nor would she take a bite of food or a sip of wine. Once she realized that even Byron had no good news to give her, she turned and made her way, somehow, with Jane Williams, back down the grand stairs. They didn’t speak, just climbed back into the carriage and told the driver to take them to Livorno, where they dozed in their clothes and waited.

  When dawn broke, they went out looking for Trelawny. He told them he’d started off in Byron’s Bolivar, to accompany Shelley back on Monday, but had been stopped by Italian customs agents for lack of papers. Shelley and Williams hadn’t wanted to wait and had sailed on without him. Trelawny knew nothing more, except where to find Roberts.

  Roberts, the boat builder, told them that he’d been following the boat through his spyglass as it sailed from Livorno. As he was watching, he saw a storm move in with great rapidity and break over the boat, and when it cleared, “There was no boat on the sea.”

  Jane Williams started sobbing then, but she held Roberts’s gaze. “Meaning what?” she asked him point-blank. He was silent. She was coming to distrust him anyway. Wasn’t he the one who’d rigged the extra sails? Made the boat “tippy”?

  And just because he couldn’t see Shelley’s boat, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, somewhere. Trelawny agreed—he claimed to know of someone whose boat had caught an offshore current near here and been carried to Corsica. Which Roberts quickly agreed might have happened to Shelley.

  And this was what got her and Jane Williams back home. Trelawny accompanied them, and stayed on a few days, to help her bat away each bit of bad news, as “the calamity,” as she would put it, began to “break over us in pieces.” First came word that the boat’s dinghy had been found, five miles out to sea.

  But, “Jettisoned on the way to Corsica,” she could still say, and Trelawny could agree.

  Then a water cask was reported to have washed up—did anyone ever throw their water overboard? Maybe, or maybe it had washed over. It was possible, Trelawny agreed, but decided to head back to Livorno then, to see if there was anything more to learn.

  A day passed, another—good, she thought, the longer the better. Corsica was far. Jane Williams had taken to her bed, but she stayed up, waiting. As far as she was concerned, no news was good news. As long as they heard nothing, Shelley was still alive.

  Trelawny did come back, though, finally. Climbed the stairs in silence, with each footstep tolling like the dead bell. He came out onto the terrace. Jane Williams and Claire were already weeping, but she sat silent and waited. Let him speak. Let him say it.

  He didn’t for a while, and then said too much. They found Williams first, knew him by his boots.

  His boots? Why his boots? What about Williams’s nice face, his mustache? she only just stopped herself from saying. Because that, too, was breaking over her in pieces, what happens to a body after ten days in the water.

  She didn’t say, And Shelley? Just sat for one last moment with the thought that Williams had washed overboard with the water casks while Shelley was being carried to Corsica, or one of his “green isles.” So she didn’t ask, just sat and watched Trelawny. She’d found him handsome at first, even waltzed rather madly with him once in Pisa. How could that have been?

  “Shelley,” he said, and she felt her ears close, though still she heard, from a distance. Something about Viareggio, the beach there, just up the coast. Something about washing up. Something about a striped jacket. She took a breath.

  “There must have been other striped jackets out sailing on a summer’s day near Viareggio,” she said. Other Englishmen.

  Afterward Trelawny described the way she’d looked at him, with “her large gr
ay eyes.” Funny, some called them gray, some hazel. She herself would never know. You can’t know the color of your own eyes, not really.

  “Other striped jackets,” she repeated.

  “Not with Sophocles and Keats in the pocket.”

  And there it was. Shelley.

  She suddenly remembered the wave that had broken over this house in one of Shelley’s dreams. The way it had come roaring in, to carry them all away. Towering, unstoppable.

  She took a breath. Another. He was right, the wave had come, but she was still breathing, and little Percy was asleep in his cot.

  “Which Keats?” she asked.

  “Lamia,” said Trelawny. Keats’s last book. You couldn’t get it yet in Italy. Hunt had promised to bring it from London, and he must have. She’d heard it was about a woman turned into a monster, a snake. Had Shelley read it? Another woman in the shape of a monster—the opposite of Coleridge’s Geraldine, a monster in the shape of a woman.

  She got to her feet then, and felt the blood, suppressed till now, starting to trickle down her leg. It would be horrifying to Trelawny—a monster in the shape of a woman. The locals had doused Shelley in quicklime where he’d washed up, Trelawny was saying, and buried him in the sand, because of the plague.

  But they would dig him up, he and Hunt and Byron, and burn him, and then she could bury his ashes in Rome, beside Willmouse. Which would be good, Trelawny seemed to be saying. Byron had offered to take it in hand.

  She nodded, she must have. Didn’t say anything, because what was there left to say? Shelley had told her that he’d seen Allegra one night here, soon after she’d died, naked, coming out of the waves.

  He had been horrified, but she was prepared. A monster in the shape of a woman, or was she a woman in the shape of a monster? Either way, she was ready to meet him, however he came. The sun was setting, and eventually, she knew, Trelawny would stop talking and go to bed—somewhere. Claire would see to it.

  She, however, would stay on the terrace, and keep watch.

  JOAN OF ARC IN CHAINS

  I.

  The cemetery in Rouen outside the cathedral was crowded, so crowded you could hardly move. It was May 24, 1431. They’d come to burn Joan of Arc.

  “Joan, do you submit . . .” a preacher was droning on the platform. She was standing in chains, toward the front, but gazing not at him but at the executioner, nearby with his cart. Now she turned and looked at him for the first time.

  “What?” she asked, in a whisper. She had always spoken loud and bold before.

  “Do you submit,” he repeated. Not bothering to make it a question—she wouldn’t submit, everyone knew it. It was simply part of the formula for burning.

  But she turned to him. “Can I?” she said.

  He looked up—“What?” Heads turned. A silence spread through the crowd.

  Jean Massieu, the young priest closest to her, rushed over and grabbed her hand.

  “Can I submit?” She searched his eyes. She couldn’t burn. She knew it only now. “Can I live?”

  She was nineteen. Massieu was almost as young as she was.

  “Yes,” he said.

  . . .

  The faces around her were shocked, all of them. It was true that they’d been asking her that same question for months, they’d even asked her yesterday. And yesterday she’d answered, as she always had, “Even if you brought me to the stake and tied me there, and the fire was lit, and I was in the fire, I would never deny my deeds and my saints!”

  But that was yesterday, when she’d been safe in her cell, and today she was standing on a platform in a cemetery, with a black-hooded man at her feet. Waiting to put her in his cart and take her to the stake, right then, that morning, and suddenly none of it made sense anymore.

  She was surprised herself. She’d thought till now that she loved her saints more than life. But her saints had promised that they would save her. “Saved,” they’d said, all through her captivity, never “burned.”

  She looked up. She hadn’t seen the sun in five months. It was May, her favorite month. A beautiful day in May, though if a storm were to come up, suddenly, with thunder and lightning and the kind of rain that would make burning impossible, she could take it as a sign.

  As her miracle—Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret had said it might be like that. Maybe you’ll be saved by a miracle, they’d whispered.

  But the sky was clear, it wasn’t going to rain. The heavens wouldn’t open, and the fire could burn. Burn her feet first, and then her legs, her virgin body, untouched, till now.

  Maybe by a great victory—they’d said that, too. Be brave, daughter of God, you’ll be saved. She scanned the crowd. Enough people for a great victory, but the only ones armed were the English soldiers, her enemies.

  Still, if the French townspeople picked up their hoes and sticks, and used their dogs—but they wouldn’t. They weren’t looking at her that way. When men are ready to fight for you, they fasten on your face with open eyes, hungry, excited. No one was looking at her like that today.

  Except maybe the henchman, in the blackest hood she’d ever seen. The black of death, and he was already thinking she was his. He’d woken up that morning and put on that hood for her. Brought out his cart, thinking she’d say, “I’ll never submit!” and then he’d have her.

  They all thought that. She looked across the platform at her judges, the French priests, and English captains, her enemies, sitting there waiting—like cats, she thought, and she was their mouse. She’d never been afraid of them before. “You tell me to beware,” she’d taunted them, all through her trial, “beware yourselves! For I shall be saved, and you will all be brought low!”

  They’d come to watch her burn alive this morning. The worst of all deaths—had they never believed her, then? All the times she swore to them that Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine would save her? It seemed impossible, it made no sense—nothing did, suddenly.

  Where were her saints? Go, daughter of God, we are with you—where, Saint Catherine? Be brave, daughter of God, you will be saved—when, Saint Margaret?

  It had to be right now. She passed her hand over her face. Her face. Her hand. “I shall be saved.” They must have believed her, her captors. They’d locked her in their deepest dungeon, surrounded her night and day with their fiercest guards, and still kept her chained hand and foot—which she took as a tribute.

  “As you like,” she’d told them, “and still I shall be saved!”

  . . .

  Burning was the worst death. To be put alive into the fire, and wait while it rose, getting hot first, while you try desperately to get away, but you are tied fast, you can’t move, only toss your head back and forth, and then your feet burn, but you are still alive, for more burning.

  “I can’t burn—” She turned to Massieu, the young priest.

  “Just submit!” he whispered back.

  Submit—that meant standing here today, in front of them all, and admitting that they, her enemies, were right, and she’d been wrong. Agreeing that everything, her life, her deeds, her saints, had come from the devil. Her Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret were, she’d have to say, devils who had led her to the sin of insubordination, and to the stake.

  But they had, in a way, led her to the stake, and it was diabolical here.

  “Yes, maybe . . .” She looked into Massieu’s eyes. They looked kind. Sympathetic. She hadn’t noticed it before, but then, she hadn’t been looking for sympathy.

  “Will they take me out of the dungeon? Will they put me in a Church prison, with a woman guard?” She’d been in a state dungeon till now. The Church’s prisons were said to be “gentler.”

  “Yes, yes, right away, they have to, that’s the law!” swore Massieu, who would spend the rest of his life telling the tale, in tears.

  “Submit to the Church now, Joan,” he urged her, “and you’ll be the Church’s prisoner.”

  Bishop Pierre Cauchon, on the opposite platform, was watching this consultati
on, with an unease that was turning to fury. It was all he could do to keep from snatching up a dagger and stabbing them both through the heart. What was wrong with that idiot Massieu? Advising her like that—didn’t he know that the English would burn Joan of Arc over the dead bodies of every French priest in Normandy? If not today, then tomorrow or the next day, and why drag it out?

  He glanced sideways at the English cardinal, Henry Winchester, and the English captain, Richard Warwick. No longer at ease, no longer chatting. Picking it up that something was not quite right. Even the English soldiers had started looking from side to side, hands tightening on their pikes. They’d come out this morning for a celebration, but now the smiles were passing from their faces to the French crowd. Who had assembled—dutifully—to see Joan of Arc burn, but were just as happy, Cauchon knew, to watch her trounce the English one last time.

  She scanned the sky, and the crowded churchyard. No miracle in sight, no great victory. As opposed to the hooded man, who was right there before her.

  It wasn’t supposed to end like this today. She suddenly knew it.

  “I submit.” She turned back to Massieu. “I submit.” It was simple, once she’d said it. Louder now: “I submit!” She smiled for the first time in the year since she’d been captured. Suddenly everything fell into place. She wasn’t going to burn. “I submit.” No thunder, no earthquake. On the contrary, everything was firm again. She was no longer hanging by a thread over the fire. A new life was starting. She stood there smiling. She was alive.

  . . .

  The English soldiers turned to each other. “Look how she mocks us, the witch! She’s laughing at us!”

  Cauchon turned to Winchester—“What should I do?” Not that he didn’t know perfectly well what had to be done. They were burning her on a technicality, not as a witch but as a heretic, and a heretic had, technically, one chance to submit.