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 gray 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.