Her Lost Words, page 19
I would not let her turn into a wraith. Not while I drew breath.
My watchful ministrations triumphed over the malignancy of the distemper, until finally Fanny’s fever broke. Though disfigured, she would survive.
I wrote to Gil in an exhausted hand to advise him of the news, worrying already of how other children would treat our daughter as she grew up. I informed him that we were coming to Paris. I needed him and so did Fanny.
Days passed and no response came. Word finally arrived after nearly a week.
Gil was no longer in Paris.
He’d moved to London.
CHAPTER 9
May 1816
MARY GODWIN
It may have been nearly summer, but snow was falling in stubborn clumps when Mary, Percy, Claire, and little Everina finally arrived in the foothills of the divine Alps. The immensity of the snowy mountains and their eternal glaciers so staggered the imagination that it was difficult to believe they did indeed form a part of the earth. Thankfully, Percy’s monetary settlement with his father meant this trip had lacked mules, but Mary worried she’d never seen a landscape more desolate as she peered through the carriage windows. The vast expanse of snow was checkered only by gigantic black pines that frowned down upon them, as if questioning why the traveling party dared brave the unseasonable cold.
“Nature is truly a poet whose harmony holds our spirits breathless.” Percy peered out the window, wide-eyed as a child. “Would that we could dine forever on this open air, surrounded by this scene.”
His eyes sparkled with such life that Mary felt her spirits lift, even as Claire tugged her wool cloak tighter. “You can dine on all the air you want,” she scoffed. “Just don’t forget that the rest of us mere mortals prefer food with more substance.”
Byron planned to catch up with them, but the little group settled without him into the imposing Hôtel d’Angleterre outside the beating heart of Geneva. Mary felt a subtle pang of some unnamed emotion when Percy informed the proprietor that Mary was his wife, and booked them a suite of rooms on the top floor with a view of gleaming Lake Geneva. She smiled a bit to see what he’d written in Greek in the guest book under his name—Democrat, Philanthropist, and Atheist. Once the snow stopped, she wished her mother could have witnessed the blue lake sparkling with lively golden beams shot straight from the heavens and the majestic view of towering Mont Blanc, ancient queen of the primeval Alps.
It was paradise, however fleeting.
Leaving an ever more despondent Claire to her own devices and Everina in the company of her new nurse, Mary and Percy amused themselves in the evenings by rowing across the lake to view Switzerland’s wild forests that were fit for high adventure and heroic deeds, often not returning until the horned moon hung in the light of the sunset. For the first time in ages, Mary felt as happy as a new-fledged bird and hardly cared what twig she flew to so long as she could try her newfound wings.
Then one dawn, a terrible racket down in the courtyard awoke nearly every guest of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. “What in God’s name?” Percy pushed aside the bed-curtains as he fumbled into his nightclothes. Mary keenly felt the absence of him as she, too, slipped her linen nightgown on.
Poking her head out the window, Mary blinked in disbelief at the appearance of an imposing war carriage emblazoned with imperial arms and gaudy iron candleholders. The wooden flagstones of the hotel’s courtyard were meant to soften noises from incoming carriages but did nothing to ease the cacophony that erupted below. Eight Newfoundlands bounded alongside the carriage, all braying as if on a royal hunt.
“Has Napoleon himself joined us?” Percy muttered, except Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena.
Mary blinked hard, not trusting her eyes. “Is that a falcon? And peacocks? And monkeys?”
“Ho there!” A dark silhouette unfolded itself from the carriage, lifting a hand to greet them as a familiar voice boomed out. “Greetings, Shelley and Godwin! I bade farewell to the land where the gloom of my glory arose. Thus, in Geneva I am born again!”
Next to her, Percy let out a wild whoop of joy. “Byron, old fellow! It’s about time you arrived!”
Quickly donning flannel dressing gowns over their nightclothes, Mary and Percy hurried downstairs, rubbing their arms against the unseasonable cold. Their appearances would have been scandalous in England, but they had both agreed to drink deeply from the cup of life here in Geneva. What did it matter if they scandalized people abroad when they would never see any of them again?
“You don’t travel light, do you?” Mary asked Byron once they were in the courtyard. The menagerie of dogs and monkeys and birds had been joined by cats—five of them, by Mary’s count—a badger, and a goat with a broken leg.
“Well, I did leave behind the bear. I daresay the poor chap will miss our daily walks, but he’ll manage.” Byron ruffled the goat’s floppy ears. The animal responded by chewing some unlucky flowers from a stone urn. The hotelier’s frown softened only slightly as Byron passed him a thick stack of banknotes. “I never travel without my companions. They’re my only constant friends.”
Mary was struck by the loneliness of this, especially when she took in the haggard lines of Byron’s face and the tired flop of his thick hair. She recalled hearing that he had kept a tame bear when he was at Cambridge, mostly to spite the authorities who had forbidden allowing dogs in student dormitories. There being no statute against bears, Byron had prevailed and considered applying for a college fellowship for the bear. Did this man’s audacity know no bounds? Was his loneliness the price of such audacity?
Despite Byron’s weariness, his eyes brightened temporarily as he read Percy’s bold line in the guest register: “Democrat, Philanthropist, and Atheist. Daring, eh, Shelley? You’ll set proper British tongues wagging all the way from Switzerland.”
Mary wasn’t sure whether Byron spoke in pride or warning, but Percy grew an inch taller as they followed England’s most infamous poet inside. “The shoe fits.”
“Claire is eager to spend time with you.” Mary’s nudge was an attempt at smoothing things over with Claire. If only Byron would indulge her sister, perhaps they could all find happiness.
“I’m beyond exhausted.” Byron punctuated that statement by signing into the guest register and adding a flourish under his age written there, 100. “But I hope the three of us can take breakfast together in the morning.”
The three of us. Mary suddenly realized this would not be the happy journey Claire had envisioned. Mary had suspected as much, but Claire was going to be crestfallen.
After exchanging brief bows and curtsies, Byron wended his way to his room. His limp was more pronounced than it had been before, possibly a result of the long journey.
“Where is he?” Claire chose that moment to fly downstairs in a flurry of candy floss pink ruffles, her hair still loosely plaited for bed. “Where is Lord Byron?”
Mary and Percy exchanged a glance. “The poor man is bone-tired after traveling,” Percy explained. “We’ll see one another in the morning.”
Mary averted her eyes as Claire’s eyes filled with tears. “Of course,” her sister managed to say as she wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sure it’s been a long day for him.”
As Mary and Percy made their way back to bed, she could only hope this expedition was the start of something new, for all of them. This trip to Switzerland was a perfect opportunity to seek out new experiences, to stretch oneself.
Mary was determined not to squander a moment of it.
* * *
• • •
A day of nothing can be a gift.
A week of nothing itches under one’s skin, each day adding to a trail of nit bites.
A month of nothing? A prison of boredom.
What had been an idyll turned into dead dullness. The Swiss sun rose each morning and by midafternoon their quartet escaped the cramped hotel to seek out the same bland amusements: eating identical meals as those from the day before, rereading the same books, and stretching like indolent cats in the endless sunshine. The only break in the monotony came when Claire sang to them, a new local ballad every night, usually about shepherds, love, flocks, and the sons of kings who fell in love with beautiful shepherdesses. Even Byron was entranced when Claire began her sweet trilling, but their talented songbird was reaching the end of her vast repertoire.
“I shall go mad if I have to stay one more night at this bloody hotel,” announced Byron one evening over dinner.
“There is nothing here to fire the imagination,” Percy agreed before spearing a roasted potato from Mary’s plate, twirling melted Gruyère cheese around it, and popping it into his mouth with a flourish. Mary had to agree—while she enjoyed the countryside, the walled city of Geneva contained no public building to attract the eye, merely uneven narrow streets and ramshackle buildings piled atop stilts along the waterline. “ ’Tis pleasant, sure enough, but poetry and art cannot feed on pleasant. Hence the reason why I’ve rented a chalet,” Percy proclaimed proudly. “The Maison Chapuis on the opposite side of the lake. And the villa behind it—Diodati—is available, Byron, with more than enough space for your circus to spread out. We can even lease a sailboat and moor it in the little harbor in front of the house. Perhaps I can learn to swim, now that we’ll finally be safe from all the prying eyes.”
Their impromptu decampment added to the red-hot embers of gossip that swirled about them. Word of Percy’s incendiary guest book entry had reached Britain’s shores, so he was now denounced as an atheist, revolutionary, and even being a lover of men, compliments of the etymology of philanthropist. And Percy wasn’t the only target—the most recent tattle claimed that the snowy sheets set to dry on Villa Diodati’s porch were the Godwin sisters’ petticoats, abandoned as Byron took his turns in bed with each of them. There were even rumors that Percy was now sleeping with Claire as well as her sister, which, given the amount of time she spent with both of them, Mary knew to be false. Mary knew she’d brought much of this upon herself, but she fretted that she’d never be able to face London—or her father—again.
Percy’s plans for a sailboat were scuttled as the weather became foul, the afternoon winds akin to autumn’s gusts as the skies turned gray and churned the quicksilver waters of the lake. News of red snow falling in Italy and a distant volcanic eruption set newspapers to calling this the year without summer. One mid-June evening, incessant rain poured down and lightning ripped apart the heavens, stranding the entire group at Byron’s rented Villa Diodati. The wet, uncongenial weather and a ribald discussion on the nature of souls had dissolved into an argument between Claire and Byron, which left a red-faced Claire tripping over her words before she stomped upstairs to lie down. Mary was still constantly amazed at how awkwardly tongue-tied Claire became in his presence despite having scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize Lord Byron—as he liked to characterize their nocturnal amusements.
This left only a pensive trio—and Byron’s motley collection of dogs—seated before the fire. Mary craved the comfort of their own chalet, where Everina was safely ensconced with her nurse, but it was impossible to venture out with the rain lashing like incessant whips.
“If God did not create human beings,” Shelley argued over the dying crackle of the hearth and the howling wind, “is there not a possibility that humans created the idea of God?”
“I find that idea terribly frightful.” Mary loved these philosophical debates that set her mind to whirring. “I don’t believe humans are quite capable of such powerful—nor such positive—creations. Why, just examine the war and death and destruction that humans have visited upon one another in recent decades.”
“So, you believe in God, then?” Byron asked. Percy looked at her expectantly, so Mary suddenly felt as if her answer were very important.
She prodded the fading fire with the iron poker and tilted her chin. “I believe in something purer than humanity. The fear lodged in so many human hearts causes us to do evil.” Those who gossip about us, she wanted to add as an example. Or even my own father and stepmother. “I marvel at the perfection of my daughter’s tiny hands or the beauty of an unfurling rose, and I know that nature is superior to mankind.”
Byron nodded. “I, too, embrace the principle that nature is the generative force of the universe.”
“But think of all humans are capable of. Can nature create a perfect poem? Or the beauty of a painting or sculpture?” Percy leapt from his chair, more enthusiastic than Mary had seen him during the prior languorous weeks. “Women already create life—why not mankind? Just recently I read of how Dr. Darwin applied an electrical charge to a damp strand of vermicelli and, by some extraordinary means, was able to animate it. It moved on its own.”
Mary smiled. Of course science had jolted her beloved from his lassitude.
“My mother dined once with Dr. Darwin, you know,” she said as she fed the fire and watched it surge with fresh life. “I believe they shared the same publisher in Joseph Johnson. But, having created life once myself, I can say firstly that I had no part in the design. And secondly, the creation of a human is far more intricate than a strand of vermicelli.”
Byron laughed. “I believe this round goes to you, Mary.”
Percy merely lifted his glass in salute, his gaze upon her warmer than an afternoon sunburst. “Indeed.”
The conversation tapered off until Byron took to reading aloud from a dusty volume of ghost stories—translated from the original German into French—that he’d found in his rented villa. Mary’s mind wandered—she preferred the local tale of a priest and his mistress who had died in an avalanche while fleeing persecution and whose plaintive voices were still heard on stormy nights, calling for succor from nearby peasants—until Byron suddenly halted midsentence.
“I’ve just had the most marvelous idea.” The ensuing explosion of dust and noise as Byron threw the book to the wooden floorboard was loud enough to match the thunder outside. It certainly startled the Newfoundland who’d been dozing in front of the hearth. Tippet, was it? Or Teague? Difficult to tell all his dogs apart. “We must have a competition!”
Percy looked up from his papers. From where she sat, Mary could make out his ministrations—no poem this time, only sketches of boats in all shapes and sizes. She wondered what he thought about then, her Elfin Knight who could pass whole days alone on the lake in a little boat, watching the clouds and listening to the rippling of the crystal clear waves. “What manner of competition?”
“A writing competition. One of original ghost stories to put this dreary drivel to shame.” Byron nudged the offending volume with the toe of his boot. “We shall each write something new and infinitely terrible. Then we shall select a winner.”
Leave it to Lord Byron to choose a contest he believed he could win.
“I’m afraid your competition is rigged.” Mary didn’t care to insult Byron, but neither did she wish for Percy to plummet deeper down a sinkhole of doubt. He and Byron were friends, yet there was a constant undercurrent of rivalry that ran between them. Poor Percy had been plagued with doubt about his poetry since Byron had joined them this summer. Hence the sailboats tonight instead of stanzas. “For I am no writer.”
“Well, we can’t have a competition of beauty, dearest Mary, for you’d trounce us all. And you’ve already proven you can win any debate.” Byron began pacing. Mary bit her tongue, annoyed that Byron discounted her. True, she was no writer, but still, it would be polite not to dismiss her so soundly.
“What do you say?” Byron spoke to Percy now. “Original stories, each based upon a supernatural idea?”
“Well . . .” Percy rubbed the back of his neck; Mary could see shadowy fissures of doubt streaking into his brain and splintering his confidence. Lord Byron might be a renowned poet, but Mary had fallen in love with Percy Shelley. And he’d hooked her with his words.
“We’ll do it,” Mary answered. The statement came as a bit of a shock, both to her and to Percy, if his wide eyes were any gauge.
“Excellent!” Byron whirled to the desk against the wall. After much opening and slamming of drawers, he retrieved blank pages of paper and two reservoir pens, one of which he kept and the other he handed to Shelley. Patting his jacket pockets, he withdrew a nub of a pencil. “I’m afraid I’m out of pens, Mary, but fortunately, I always carry a pencil. One never knows when inspiration will strike.”
The pencil he handed her may as well have been an asp. What on earth had she just agreed to?
“Isn’t a woman writer already a brand of monster?” It was a critique she’d read once about her mother’s works. Honestly, who was she to join a writing competition against Percy Shelley and Lord Byron? As the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, Mary had thought of writing as a child before quickly discounting the idea, understanding that nothing she wrote could ever compare with her parents’ works. Why was she now asking to be insulted? “I doubt I can conjure anything worth reading.”
Byron shook his pen at her. “I demand an original story from you, Lady Godwin.”
She refused to allow the nickname to sway her. “My skills are slender indeed.”
Percy nudged her foot with his. “Mary, you are your mother’s daughter. Your veins probably run with ink; you just haven’t discovered it yet.”
Armed with Byron’s pencil, Mary stared at the pristine paper placed before her. One story, meant to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart. A silly scary story that would never be read outside of this villa. She could do this. Her mother had written scads of stories, entire novels, even.
Five minutes later, Percy had started scrawling something.
Ten minutes beyond that, and Byron’s pen was flying across his page.
