July is never what June is. It’s high summer, true, but without that promise. No longer offering infinite, lengthening days. Shelley approached Godwin on the sixth of July. He offered him £1,000, which, God knew, her father needed, but also asked for her hand. Godwin, shocked and incensed, barred him from the house and ordered her to her room. He did not, however, refuse—was incapable of refusing—Shelley’s money.
Two days later, Godwin called her out and confronted her under her mother’s portrait. Shelley was a “seducer,” he told her. If he’d really loved her, he wouldn’t have asked her to become “an outcast.”
She had given herself freely, she answered.
If so, countered Godwin, then she had encouraged him to do what the unspeakable Imlay had done to her mother. She, Mary, his pride, his great hope, was bringing infamy on the family—Godwin was shouting now. Infamy, and would she send her own father to debtors’ prison as well? Since how could he continue to take money from a blackguard who was ruining his daughter?
That was the only argument that could have succeeded with her, and it did. She had read her Corinne—she knew about romantic letters of renunciation. She would write Shelley, give him up, she told her father, and retreated to her room, ill and in tears.
Shelley was forbidden access to the household. But a few days later, a porter from the street came into Godwin’s bookshop and slipped her a copy of Queen Mab, with a letter, written hastily in pencil: “You see, Mary, I have not forgotten you.”
She slid the book under her clothes, next to her skin, and took the first chance to escape back to her room. “This book is sacred to me,” she wrote inside. On July 13, Shelley went to Harriet, to put his situation to her in plain English. He was still her friend, he told her, but no longer her lover. There had never been between them, as she must agree, the “all-sufficing passion” to which he was now subject. He could never live with someone who didn’t “feel poetry and understand philosophy,” as Mary did. Surely she could see the logic of that?
Harriet was silent, and Shelley left, thinking that she was reconciled. Whereas, she was simply stunned, and once she caught her breath, she went to the Godwins in tears and begged them to keep Mary from Shelley. To this they agreed wholeheartedly, but what it turned out they couldn’t do was keep Shelley from Mary. On July 19, when Godwin was out, Shelley pushed past Mrs. Godwin, rushed upstairs, and burst into the schoolroom with a pistol and a bottle of laudanum. Mary could take the poison, he told her, and he would shoot himself then and there, and they would be together in death, where no one could part them.
She ran to him in horror, and begged him to be calm, to wait, she was his, she would always be his, she swore to him, tears running down her cheeks. He finally left but—but then what, exactly? It was hard now to sort through the chaos of the next few days. Did they see each other in that eternal stretch, that interim, or live through go-betweens, secret messages? All she could remember was that he somehow got word to her: if she could slip out of the house at four in the morning on the twenty-eighth of July, he would be waiting at the corner with a coach to speed them to Dover, where they would catch the first boat across the Channel and be free.
And then—even now, she found herself drawing her hand across her eyes so she didn’t have to see it, though she did see it, clearly. One of those Maniac’s moments, as Shelley would call it in his poem “Julian and Maddalo,” when mischief is set inexorably afoot. As she was slipping into her black silk dress that dawn, her stepsister awoke and begged to come along. One definitive No! or, better, knowing her capacity for “spoiling the tea,” some temporizing—We’ll send for you—and her own life would have, could have, had more of the dream that shone before her eyes that morning.
But she didn’t say no—why? Because she was trembling and thought she might not mind the company of the girl who had been helpful to them, lied for them, covered for them? Because she was distracted, overexcited, in love with all the world? Quidquid id est, as Virgil was saying the very day Shelley first came to her schoolroom, for whatever reason, instead of no she had said yes—one small word whispered in a dark hour, and never to be unsaid. No matter how many “If only’s” she’d thrown up against it since that day.
If only she’d slipped out of her father’s door alone—but she didn’t, she slipped out with Jane Clairmont, who soon changed her name to the more romantic “Claire.” As if a change of name could change a fate, or a fateful slash through her own life. Though that morning she had no sense of what it boded, to have her fifteen-year-old, black-haired, black-eyed anti-double running by her side down the still-dark street to the corner, where Shelley was waiting with his carriage. If he was surprised to see two girls instead of one, he made no objection. On the contrary, community had been part of his greater quest all along, ever since his father had barred him from his own home for “atheism,” when he was just eighteen.
So perhaps in one more girl, he saw the sisters he’d lost. He helped them in, the driver whipped the horses, and they started off on a seemingly endless drive to Dover, eleven hours on the hottest day of the year.
She was sick along the way. Despite fearing pursuit by Godwin, they had to stop a few times for her to rest in the shade. Was she already pregnant? The baby was born—early—in February. So probably yes, though she had no idea then of that. Just knew she was sick enough when they finally arrived at Dover to need a swim, to seek relief for her aching head and heaving stomach in the icy water there.
And then there was no proper ship in the harbor to take them across, so Shelley hired an open boat. It was a terrible crossing—a storm came up, she was sick, and lay with her head on Shelley’s knees, falling in and out of sleep, of dreams, until, finally, he kissed her.
“Mary, look,” he said. “The sun rises over France!”