Someone had come out onto the terrace—she opened her eyes. Jane Williams, though not really “Williams.” That is, not really married to Ned. She was married, though, but to another English officer whom she’d left behind in India, when she ran off with Ned. She and Shelley had found them “very soft society,” as he’d put it, when they’d first met, in Pisa. But the Williamses had brought some fabulous costumes with them from India, which they’d put on for Carnival, and that’s when she started to like Jane, when she saw her in a brilliant turquoise sari, eyes lined with kohl. A red dot on her forehead—the East.
She, too, had caught the spirit and got up a Turkish rig, all silks and veils, and went out into the night with them, for the first time in a long time. And life in Pisa took on a lightness, a charm with the Williamses as neighbors, not that one would have thought to share a house with them.
But then Shelley had found Ned Williams an ideal sailing partner. He brought a bit more experience, a level of expertise beyond Shelley’s own, and a sort of calm on the waters that suited. No poetry—unlike with Byron, with Williams Shelley was the poet, and Williams the clear-eyed navigator. And it was this sailing partnership—more than partnership, this linking of passions—that had tumbled them all together here this summer.
Which had been fine, even key, for Shelley, and not all bad for her, especially at first, since she liked Jane well enough, and often enjoyed her company. Until she realized that, over the summer, as she found herself increasingly laid up and helpless with a troublesome pregnancy, Shelley was becoming smitten with Jane.
Or rather, with her music—the way it often was with him. Love coming in through the ear. He’d even bought her a small guitar, beautiful, inlaid, which she took out in his boat on gentle evenings, and, propped picturesquely—again, those Indian costumes—against some pillows, sat playing languidly, sweetly, the music wafting into the very room where she herself lay bleeding in bed. One stupid song after another.
Which Shelley seemed to love. The good news being that Ned was always out there, too.
Now Jane Williams came out on the terrace, cheeks pale with two bright spots of red, as if she had a fever. Maybe she did. “I’m going to Livorno to find out—”
She, Mary, pulled herself up now, straighter. She didn’t want her to go, wanted to be left to drift here a bit longer. As it was, the mail would come in an hour or so—there was no stopping that. “We’re bound to get a letter,” she said to Jane.
But Jane insisted she could wait no longer. It had been five days—“Too long!” Jane Williams cried.
But wasn’t this limbo better than the worst of all news? And how could dumb Jane Williams not know that? Because, alla fine del giorno, as they say here, at the end of the day, despite looking exotic as a Hindu princess and playing to Shelley’s small guitar, Jane Williams was dumb.
“I’m going!” cried Jane Williams.
She, Mary, considered. There was, of course, the chance that the news might not be bad, might even be good. Jane could arrive in Pisa to find that both Shelley and Williams were fine, had been fine all along, had simply been delayed—there was much to keep them there. For starters, the Liberal, the magazine that Leigh Hunt had come to Italy to publish—and which Byron had promised to fund. Had even agreed, at one of their midnight suppers, to house Hunt and his family in his grand, half-empty Palazzo Lanfranchi.
But Byron, being Byron, was starting to pull back at the very moment that Hunt and his wife and too many children had landed on their shores at long last, which left Shelley to mediate between “the eagle and the wren,” as he called them. He being the only one who could keep Byron—the eagle—both engaged and “vegetarian,” so as not to devour Hunt, Shelley’s beloved wren.
So there was that in Pisa, as well as her own sense that had something happened, something dire, she would have known it, dreamed it, felt it.
So, “Fine,” she said to Jane Williams, “go,” and Jane went back inside and bustled around, then rushed down to the beach to get someone to row her across the bay to Lerici, to catch the coach to Livorno. But the sea was coming up again—she could hear it, pounding on the rocks, starting its rush in, under the house—and no one would take her across.
“Dopo,” they told her, later, and Jane Williams limped back, bedraggled, wilted—but couldn’t this also explain why Shelley and Williams hadn’t come back this morning? First detained by something, Byron and Hunt. And now the impassable seas. A high swell.
And the fact that she would have known.
. . .
Though would she have? Was there still that connection? There was much that had come between them since those first euphoric days, when they fled England, and walked across war-torn France, all the way to Switzerland. It seemed incredible now, but they were young then—Shelley was twenty-one, she sixteen, Claire fifteen—and powered by the elation of their defiance. “With my heart full of youth and my beloved by my side,” as he would put it, they read her mother’s books, and started work together on a story called “The Assassins,” set in their idea of Beirut. They even kept a joint journal in those days.
But by the time the August winds had started blowing chill off the Alps, Shelley had run out of money, and they had to retreat back to England the cheapest way possible. This entailed first a crowded slow boat down the Rhine, which took them past a crumbling old castle said to have belonged to an aristocratic alchemist called Frankenstein. She didn’t note this in her journal, but it clearly stayed with her.
Once they got to the Channel, Shelley had to beg passage across, promising to pay immediately upon arrival in London. The ship’s captain agreed, but sent a man, armed with a cudgel, to dog them all the way to the bank in London. Almost comical at first, though when they got there, Shelley discovered that Harriet had withdrawn all his money, and the man wanted to haul him to prison, then and there. But he begged for time, and then led them from one friend to the next, with no results and the captain’s man close behind them with his stick. Finally, Shelley had the carriage pull up at Harriet’s father’s house.
With the man stationed outside the front door, and her and Claire huddled in the carriage down the street, blinds drawn, Shelley went inside, for what seemed a very long time—too long, she remembered thinking. If Harriet denied him, he would go to prison—but how could Harriet not deny him? What answer could there be for him from Harriet, except a well-deserved no?
She’d never brought herself to ask him about the scene inside the house that day, what he could possibly have dredged up to say to his pregnant, deserted wife. When he finally came out with the money, all she’d felt was a vast relief, but later came to see that it told of Harriet’s hopes.
Of which Shelley had to disabuse her once again—his and Mary’s “spirits,” he wrote to Harriet soon after, “are united. We met with passion, she has resigned all for me.”
Which proved to be truer than she had expected. “Mary has committed a crime,” her own father wrote to them. Though still willing to hound Shelley for money, he adamantly refused to see her. Her old friends shunned her as well, even her beloved Isabella Baxter. She had married, and her husband judged Mary unfit company. Her letters to Isabella were sent back unopened.
Painful, that, but it was the rejection by her father that caught her off guard, he being the man who had famously written that “the institution of marriage is a system of fraud, the worst of all laws.” Who’d gone so far as to assert that in his vision of utopia, “it will [not] be known . . . who is the father of each individual child,” because “such knowledge will be of no importance.”
She’d grown up on those words, and now? Just words, easy enough to write? She found the position he’d taken against her irreconcilable with the father she knew, or at least had read. She wrote out her argument, citing his texts, the texts of her mother. Even went and cried out to him, under his window. He sent down Fanny, who wouldn’t even look at her. Kept her eyes on the ground—she must have been instructed.
She herself turned and walked away from much that day. Couldn’t stop her heart from bleeding over the man who’d been everything to her till Shelley, father and mother, teacher, guiding light. But in place of the man, she put his books, and all the books she and Shelley were reading then—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Diogenes. She was learning Greek and was distracted, too, by life itself—money, for starters. When Shelley’s father learned of their elopement, he took steps to cut him off completely, and now they found themselves unable to pay any of the bills that started falling due, one after another, till they could get no further credit anywhere in London, not even for a bag of tea.
In the lunatic days that followed, Shelley left her and Claire lodged in dark little rooms, while he hid out with various friends, barely sleeping, with a string of bailiffs and bill collectors on his trail. Sundays were the only time he could stay with her without fear of arrest, it being illegal to haul in debtors on the Lord’s Day. During the rest of the week, they were forced to snatch moments, passing notes at prearranged spots—dingy inns, the steps of St. Paul’s. “Adieu,” read one she still kept, “remember love at vespers.”
And she did remember, making love on a Sunday as the evening sun came through a small window in the dark room where she was staying. But what she remembered, too, was the first inkling of the despair creeping in, a dawning of the uncertainty that would stalk the background of her life with him from then on. The question she was asking to this day: When is Shelley coming back?
Although then, that fall in London, 1814, it was more straightforward, but nonetheless hard: he was in hiding, and she was indeed the outcast her father had predicted, which had, at the time, evoked boldness and freedom, but meant in practice no friends. No one to talk to, or write to, or visit. She conjured courage, ironically, from her father’s memoir of her mother, which told of Mary Wollstonecraft’s fortitude in the face of social ostracism over her affair with Imlay.
But her mother was in her thirties by then, and had cultivated an inner strength, slowly and surely, in the process of living her life, the sort of fortitude that she, her daughter, had to summon out of the air, off the printed page. She was seventeen then. Pregnant.
And sick in bed much of the time, though at least with Cicero for company. Shelley had given her a copy of Paradoxa Stoicorum, a quaint defense of the Stoics’ so-called laws, like “All fools are mad.” Sometimes she laughed out loud, and wondered if Shelley had possibly laughed right then as well, since he was reading it “with her,” he wrote.
His letters always buoyed her, but there came a day when she and Claire had to sell a watch Shelley had left them, for food. They both were starting to grow desperate during those weeks of real poverty in London, and Claire was about to peel off, go back to Skinner Street. She told her mother she’d had enough of the adventure by then, and her mother, greatly relieved, was helping her to rent some rooms where she could teach music, or was it French?
Both, maybe, and there was that moment when Claire almost set her own life aright, when she still could have escaped relatively unscathed. Tarnished a bit by a madcap adventure, but always under the influence of her older stepsister, Mary, on whom the blame could be, and was, firmly placed.
But it was then, too, right then, that Shelley managed a détente with his father, who agreed to pay his debts and even advance him some funds. This allowed him to come back and live with her—and Claire, who, though about to leave, hadn’t left. Claire, who was not pregnant, not sick.
And that’s when it started, Claire’s first push for Shelley. Her stepsister didn’t touch his face or kiss his lips, but she saw her eyes on his face and his lips, and when she herself fell helplessly into bed, early, exhausted, Claire would sit up late at night with Shelley. Listening to ghost stories, giving herself “hysterics,” only to rush screaming into their room in the middle of the night.
And that’s when she started hating Claire, recognizing her “horror” tricks for the escapades that they were. Claire was sixteen then, and excited, even fevered, to be in Shelley’s constant company, his magnetic field, one might say. She herself was sleeping so much they called her “the Dormouse,” but still she saw, or rather felt, the electric excitement of a growing familiarity between them, waking up in the same house, down the hall from each other—not in the same bed, but still too close. And then would come the daily rounds, all that had to be seen to and done in the city, and though Shelley would kiss her and call her his sweet Dormouse, his great love, what was that compared to what fell to the unpregnant, unsleepy Claire, ready and waiting each day, to head out, “hopping about the town with Shelley”?
And on top of that, those “horror scenes” at night, when Claire just wouldn’t leave well enough alone. That’s what she hated most. That she conceded to her stepsister the days, but she took the nights—tried to, wanted to. Wanted Shelley.
Who was hers, he swore, and she was his “beloved,” but that didn’t keep the days from darkening that autumn. They saw practically no one but Shelley’s few loyal old friends. No one else would receive them: she was pregnant with his child, Harriet was pregnant with his child—unanswerable, indefensible. Brought to a close only with the birth of Harriet’s baby in October, a boy they’d named Charles, Harriet’s sister wrote to Shelley, his “son and heir.” A freighted word, given her own status as interloper, with a child soon to come into the world heir to no one and nothing.
Nor was there any way out for any of them, Harriet, either, divorce being close to impossible. And then there was their shared and adamant philosophical stance, hers and Shelley’s, against marriage, against allowing church and state into one’s private life.
Which was what kept her warm that winter, that resistance, them against the world. Godwin maintained his stony silence, and prohibited Fanny from coming around as well. Looking back, she could almost forgive him. When the word had gotten out—the married atheist Shelley had run off with both of Godwin’s “daughters,” leaving a pregnant wife behind—Godwin, too, had been dragged through the mud, along with his whole life’s work. Which was seen as leading directly to the calamity that had befallen both girls, in one fell swoop. Logical, the Tory press pointed out, if you read Godwin.
Not that anyone was reading Godwin anymore. This, too, was remarked upon in the press.
Her own baby, a girl, was born on February 22, 1815—a “six-months baby,” the doctor called her. Said she wouldn’t live, and packed up his bag. Still, they tried. Didn’t name her, but they fed her, even started loving her, and she hung on for ten days, but on the eleventh, they woke to find her twisted up and dead in her cot.
Fanny broke Godwin protocol then and came to see them in the rain. Kind and sisterly, but then she turned and caught Fanny gazing with longing on Shelley. So—Fanny, too. Not just Claire.
Not that Fanny was another Claire. Fanny was shy and loyal, she would never come screaming through the house in the night for Shelley like Claire did. But still, she kept him up talking till three that morning. Till finally he mumbled an excuse and fled to bed.
She tried to remember if Fanny slept there that night. Or was she left to slip out alone, with no one to notice, or even wonder, if she got home safely or not?
Fanny.
That April, she, Mary, and Shelley determined to move away from London, some place by a river, or in the woods, it didn’t matter where, so long as it was, in her words, “absentia Clariae.” She wrote it in Latin—it had come to her that way. More authoritative, closer to neutral, though to her it was nothing close to neutral, and Shelley seemed to agree. Then.
They took a house in Bishopsgate, near Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock, close enough to the Thames so they could keep a small boat. She wrote of “regeneration,” took it as the start of the life they would live now, the two of them, boating, reading, studying. They even ventured into London to visit an animal show, where they fell in love with a “very pretty antelope”—and glimpsed her father across the park. He pointedly turned away, but wrote to a friend that he found Shelley “so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked.” Fanny said that her hand shook when he had her copy out the letter for him.
Cruel of Godwin, really, to make her copy it. Both parts—the “wicked,” which Fanny knew to be false, and “so beautiful,” which she knew to be true.
So true—because he was beautiful that summer, everything was beautiful then. Claire had gone to Ireland, where with any luck she would stay forever. Longer.
And then came the further great news that Shelley had gotten a windfall—his grandfather had died and left him some money. He had to go down to London to see to that. He would be back shortly, he promised as he kissed her and left.
She was pregnant again. Had not yet turned eighteen.
Days passed, one and then another, until it was the twenty-eighth of July. One year to the day since they’d run off together. Their “anniversary,” they both called it, him, too, not just her. She was sure that Shelley would come back to mark the day. She waited, kept watch, jumped up at every noise outside, every possible sound of arrival.
But the clock chimed heartlessly on, noon, afternoon, dusk. At midnight, she picked up her pen in tears.
“Dearest best Shelley, pray come to me—pray pray do not stay away from me,” she found herself writing. Knew she shouldn’t, but what was keeping him? Claire wasn’t answering her either, there’d been no response all week to the letters she’d sent to Ireland. Was she in Ireland? If not, where was she?
Shelley had just written a beautiful homage to Coleridge:
Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope
On the false earth’s inconstancy?
“Pray,” she couldn’t stop herself from writing at the end. Using a nickname, to lighten.
“Pray,” she wrote, “is Clary with you?”