As word went out among the English tourists that a “League of Incest” had sprung up across the lake, the Hotel d’Angleterre began offering cruises past Byron’s villa, complete with a spyglass. One day some sheets were drying on the balcony—“women’s petticoats,” the scandalized tourists wrote home. “No person of respectability would visit,” an English clergyman sniffed.
Which was fine with the “League” themselves, perfect—everything was perfect, except the weather. It turned out that 1816 would be called “the year without a summer.” A volcanic eruption on the other side of the world caused temperatures to fall and crops to fail all across Europe. For the five of them, she, Shelley, Byron, Claire, and the young doctor, Polidori, it meant incessant rain that kept them from sailing, and spectacular storms that occasionally stranded them overnight at Villa Diodati.
They would sit on the balcony, watching as the storms “approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of the Jura.” Storms “finer,” she wrote, than she had “ever before beheld.” Claire wasn’t yet persona non grata at the villa, and on the nights when she played and sang, Byron took her to his room.
Sometimes they sat up till dawn talking, mostly about what they were reading that summer—Schiller, Dante, Ariosto, Shakespeare, and, always, Coleridge. And then there were the new Gothic tales they were passing back and forth, with the thunder rolling and the lightning flashing all around them.
Thrilling stories of the dark and primal that yet connected with the latest scientific inquiries into the “nature of the principles of life.” Erasmus Darwin’s famous piece of vermicelli that he’d gotten to jump around in a jar, with invisible electrical forces that no one quite understood. Luigi Galvani’s “galvanism,” which had produced muscular contractions in dead frogs during an electrical storm. His nephew was said to have taken it further, using the same electrical force to cause dead human bodies to sit up, move their arms and legs, even blow out candles.
They had all, even Byron, fallen silent at that—the vision of a corpse, seated upright, blowing out a candle. She herself saw it too well—she’d had to retreat out onto the balcony, into the rain, to get away from it, fill her eyes with lightning and storm clouds. When she came back inside, Byron was reading aloud from a new French translation of German ghost stories. One featured a dead twin who came back to life on her sister’s wedding day, got to the church first, and tricked her sister’s fiancé into marrying her—the dead girl instead of the live one.
Silence. A thunderclap outside, off the lake. Someone wondered aloud what would have happened next, between the ghost and the fiancé. The story ended prematurely, they agreed. The writer was afraid to go into the bedroom.
But would we? Byron asked.
It was late. The rain was pouring down. There was no light on the horizon, no sign of it clearing the next day, or ever. They agreed to a challenge—they would each try to write a horror story. Byron turned to her—that’s where his hopes were, he said. “Mary and I will publish ours together.”
This caught her by surprise—did he mean it? Both parts—did he really think that she could do it? And was he serious about “publishing together”? To publish with Byron would be to publish indeed. But could she write something worth publishing, with or without Byron? She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t yet. Life had come between her and her pen, her birthright, as she and Shelley had both seen it. But there had been babies. Money trouble. Shelley himself. Byron. Claire.
But she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Born for something, maybe even for this. To venture into the bedroom where men feared to tread.
She smiled at Byron, “sidelong,” as they used to tease her, from under her lashes, without turning her head. “I take your challenge,” she said.
They all did, but Shelley and Byron both soon lost interest—poetry and fiction must spring from different sources, she figured. Polidori started with a two-headed woman, but then picked up the tale that Byron had dropped, called “The Vampyre,” which he later published in London, to some success. Not enough, though, to stop him from taking a fatal dose of prussic acid two years later. Poor “Polly-dolly,” as Byron used to mock him. She had liked him almost in spite of himself. He’d been brought along that summer to oversee Byron’s obsessive purges and fasts, his terror of getting fat, but Polidori was only nineteen, and, though already trained as a doctor, far too young for what one might call the cultural exigencies of the post. He’d lost patience with “milord” even before they’d gotten to the lake, and Byron, sensing rebellion, was merciless. “Polly-dolly.”
But as for the challenge, she herself was the one, of all of them, who took it most seriously, took it as her great chance. Rise to it now and publish with Byron, or fade back into womanhood. Motherhood. The girl to the side, eternally pregnant, nursing, sleeping, sick. Her life the past two years, so utterly at odds with why she’d run off with Shelley. The freedom she’d envisioned, the passion that had carried her out her own door, Godwin’s door, that midnight. She could cry now, weep bitter tears—or she could write.
She went to bed nights that summer, trying to “think of a story,” woke up mornings, trying to “think of a story.” It became a joke among them—“Have you thought of a story yet?” But she hadn’t, couldn’t, maybe wouldn’t, she was starting to fear.
Look away from it, Shelley said to her one night, when the storms had come early and kept them at home. She picked up Virgil, and read aloud to him from Dido and Aeneas—“I will die unavenged, but let me die / Thus—thus—it is right that I go into the dark.”
She broke down in tears at that and went to bed, shaken. Dreamed intensely, though not of the star-crossed lovers in their cave, but of a young scientist standing over a hideous oversized body pieced together from corpses. Very much like Galvani’s, the one that blew out the candle, only this time the body sat up and came alive.
She screamed, and woke Shelley. It took some time for him to bring her back, to stop her shaking, but suddenly she became very still. Calm. Elated.
“I have my story,” she said.
That was in June. In July, as she sought out settings for her tale, they decided to join Byron on an outing to Chamonix, and visit the famous Mer de Glace—though he backed out at the last minute when he saw that Claire was coming. His simple avoidance of Claire was turning to aversion—bad news indeed, she realized on this trip, when she caught sight of Claire’s belly.
She’d turned, shocked, to Shelley, and saw in his eyes that he knew.
Claire must have already confided in him—how had he not told her? How had he held Claire’s secret from her, held it over and above what was between the two of them? She would never have done that to him—she kept nothing from him in those days. And there was Claire, too, who’d trusted him, not her, but it wasn’t Claire’s betrayal that she minded. It was Shelley’s.
She’d been happy on this trip—light of heart, almost carefree, both she and Shelley, or so she’d thought. In one of the hotel registers, as his profession, he’d written “atheist” in Greek, and for his next destination, “l’enfer,” hell, in French. And they’d laughed, it was a joke, obviously, though a clergyman who’d shown up later that summer had carried the tale back to England, where it created still more scandal. Further proof that they were lost.
But she hadn’t felt lost there, among the highest peaks in the Alps. Everywhere she looked was the kind of drama she’d been seeking for her “story.” The afternoon before, they had “heard a sound like the rolling of distant thunder” and seen an “avalenche rush down the ravine of the rock.” She and Shelley had watched it together, both marveling, both entranced—or had he been worrying about Claire? All along?
She leveled her glance at them both then—“Does Albé know?” she asked, using the nickname. Asserting her friendship with Byron to them both. Claire confessed that she hadn’t had the nerve, or even the chance, to tell him—recently he hadn’t let her near him. She’d been hoping that on this trip, but—
Yes, but. There’d been no Byron on this trip, since there was a Claire, and Byron could no longer abide her company. And would it remain that way? And if it did, what would become of the child? Though she knew exactly what: Shelley would have to take it on, and then the obvious assumption would attach—to them all, her, too. “The League of Incest.” She took a deep breath and sat down, hard, on the grass, on the lovely Swiss hillside—or were they in France? It was beautiful there, but she insisted they go straight back, for Shelley to confront Byron with the news.
Byron’s first reaction was to ask Shelley if the child might be his, Shelley’s. She wished she’d been there to speak out, in her own defense more even than in Shelley’s. How could Byron insinuate that she, whom he knew, whom he liked, who he believed would write a great story, would live as part of such a common mess as that? But Shelley, rather than taking offense, had simply sworn on his honor as a gentleman that there was no chance of this. The baby was Byron’s.
And then Byron, to his credit, faced “the suite,” as he put it, of his dalliance with Claire. He gave Shelley his terms: he would support the child, but have nothing further to do with Claire. The birth was to remain secret, and the child would be raised by a designee. Claire could visit occasionally as an aunt, but never as part of Byron’s household. Claire, secretly reckoning that the baby, once born, would bring Byron back to her, agreed on all counts.
Not that she had any choice. The baby wasn’t due till January, but the news had already cast its shadow over both houses. On August 4, they gathered to celebrate Shelley’s twenty-fourth birthday, by launching a hot-air balloon out over the lake, but it burned up before rising, which she tried not to take as a sign.
Because for her, she was halfway through her outline. Her “story,” Shelley told Byron, was becoming a book. Becoming more than that—her homicidal monster was dazzling her, illuminating her days. She was no longer wondering, as August came to a close, what further secrets Shelley and Claire might hold between them. She was thinking instead about the best way to tell her tale. She reread Clarissa—would letters work? An epistolary novel? There were several strands, several voices. So maybe letters?
They had to call her name twice, for Shelley’s birthday toast. She hoped afterward that she’d said good night to Byron and Polidori. She barely noticed when she went in, early, that she’d left Shelley’s birthday wine undrunk.