Polidori opened his mouth to speak again, but Byron stopped him with a curt “Shut up.”
“Yes, Pollydolly,” said Mary, “do wait until the story’s over.”
Polidori sat back, pursing his lips.
“And,” said Shelley, “we weren’t in bed half an hour before I heard something downstairs. I went down to investigate, and saw a figure quitting the house through a window. It attacked me, and I managed to shoot it … in the shoulder.”
Byron frowned at Shelley’s poor marksmanship.
“And the thing reeled back and stood over me and said, ‘You would shoot me? By God I will be revenged! I will murder your wife. I will rape your sister.’ And then it fled.”
A pen and inkwell and paper lay on a table near his chair, and Shelley snatched up the pen, dipped it, and quickly sketched a figure. “This is what my assailant looked like,” he said, holding the paper near the candle.
Byron’s first thought was that the man couldn’t draw any better than a child. The figure he’d drawn was a monstrosity, a barrel-chested, keg-legged thing with hands like tree branches and a head like an African mask.
Claire couldn’t look at it, and even Polidori was clearly upset. “It—it’s not any kind of human figure at all!” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know, Polidori,” said Byron, squinting at the thing. “I think it’s a prototypical man. God originally made Adam out of clay, didn’t He? This fellow looks as if he were made out of a Sussex hillside.”
“You presume!” said Shelley, a little wildly. “How can you be certain this isn’t made of Adam’s rib?”
Byron grinned. “What, Eve is it? If Milton ever glimpsed that with his sightless eyes, I hope it wasn’t during his visit here—or if it was, that she isn’t around tonight.”
For the first time during the evening Shelley himself looked nervous. “No,” he said quickly, glancing out the window. “No, I doubt …” He let the sentence hang and sat back in his chair.
Belatedly afraid that all this Adam and Eve talk might lead the conversation into more domestic channels, Byron hastily stood up and crossed to a bookshelf and pulled down a small book. “Coleridge’s latest,” he said, returning to his chair. “There are three poems here, but I think ‘Christabel’ suits us best tonight.”
He began to read the poem aloud, and by the time he had read to the point when the girl Christabel brings the strange woman Geraldine home from the woods, he had everyone’s attention. Then in the poem Geraldine sinks down, “belike through pain,” when they reach the door into the castle of Christabel’s widowed father, and Christabel has to lift her up and carry her over the threshold. Shelley nodded. “There always has to be some token of invitation. They can’t enter without having been asked.”
“Did you ask the clay-woman into your house in Scotland?” asked Polidori.
“I didn’t have to,” replied Shelley with surprising bitterness. He turned away, toward the window. “My—someone else had invited it into my presence two decades previous.”
After a pause Byron resumed his reading, and recited Coleridge’s description of Geraldine exposing her withered breast as she disrobes for bed—
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!
—And Shelley screamed and jackknifed up out of his chair and in three frantic strides was out of the room, knocking over a chair but managing to grab a lit candle as he blundered past the table.
Claire screamed too, and Polidori yelped and raised his hands like a cornered boxer, and Byron put down the book and glanced sharply at the window Shelley had been looking out of. Nothing was visible on the rain-lashed veranda.
“Go see if he’s well, Polidori,” Byron said.
The young doctor went into the next room for his bag, then followed Shelley. Byron refilled his wine glass and sat down, then looked at Mary with raised eyebrows.
She laughed nervously and then quoted Lady Macbeth: “'My lord is often thus, and hath been from his youth.'”
Byron grinned, a little haggardly. “No doubt ‘the fit is momentary; upon a thought he will again be well.'”
Mary finished the quote. “'If you much note him, you shall offend him and extend his passion.'”
Byron looked around the long room. “So where did he see ‘Banquo’s ghost'? I’m a fair noticer of spirits, but I didn’t see anything.” “He—” Mary began, then halted. “But look, here he is.”
Shelley had walked back into the room, looking both scared and sheepish. His face and hair were wet, indicating that Polidori had splashed water on him, and he reeked of ether. “It was … just a fancy that took momentary hold of me,” he said. “Like a waking nightmare. I’m sorry.”
“Something about …” began Polidori; Shelley shot him a warning look, but perhaps the young doctor didn’t notice, for he went on. “… about a woman with—you said—eyes in her breasts.”
Shelley’s squint of astonishment lasted only a moment, but Byron had noticed it; then Shelley had concealed it, and was nodding. “Right, that was it,” he agreed. “A hallucination, as I said.”
Byron was intrigued, but regard for his obviously ill-at-ease friend made him decide not to pursue whatever it was that Shelley had really said and Polidori had misunderstood.
He winked at Shelley and then changed the subject. “I really think we should each write a ghost story!” he said cheerfully. “Let’s see if we can’t do something with this mud-person who’s been following poor Shelley about.”
Everyone eventually managed to laugh.
A shadow passed over Chillon’s blunt towers and across the miles of lake between the grim edifice and the boat, and Byron shifted around in his seat by the bow to look north; a cloud had blotted half the sky since he had last scanned that side.
“It looks as if we’d better put in at St. Gingoux,” he said, pointing. His servant closed his book and tucked it away in a pocket.
Shelley stood up and leaned on the rail. “A storm, is it?”
“Best to assume so. I’ll wake the damned sailors—what’s wrong?” he demanded, for Shelley had leaped back from the rail and was scrabbling through the pile of their baggage.
“I need an eisener breche!” yelled Shelley—and a moment later he leaped to his feet with Byron’s sword cane in his fist. “Over your head, look out!”
Half thinking that Shelley had gone absolutely mad at last, Byron sprang up onto the yard-wide section of rail around the bowsprit and calculated how long a jump it would take to land him near the mast-hung haversack, which in addition to wine bottles contained two loaded pistols; but the urgency in Shelley’s voice made him nevertheless risk a quick look overhead.
The advancing cloud was knotted and lumpy, and one section of it looked very much like a naked woman rushing straight down out of the sky at the boat. Byron was about to laugh in relief and say something sarcastic to Shelley, but then he saw that the woman-form was not part of the distant cloud, or at least wasn’t anymore, but was a patch of vapor much smaller than he had at first thought—and much closer.