Two weeks after that, Claire’s child by Byron was born, a daughter that Claire christened Allegra, and by the end of February all of them had moved to a house in the little town of Marlow, thirty miles west of London.
Here Mary’s fears began to dissipate. Shelley failed to get custody of Harriet’s children, but Mary’s son and Claire’s daughter appeared to be healthy, and she soon discovered that she was pregnant again herself; the baby, a girl, was born in September, and they named her Clara.
Even Shelley was, tentatively, beginning to relax again. He kept a skiff moored on the bank of the Thames, only a three-minute walk from the house, and frequently went rowing up and down the waterway, though he still refused to learn to swim.
It was only in his writings that he seemed to express some of his old fears. He wrote a number of poems, but devoted most of the year to writing a long political poem that he at first called Laon and Cyntha but later retitled The Revolt of Islam. Mary carefully read all his verse—she was a little alarmed by a poem called Marianne’s Dream, in which a city consisting of mountains is destroyed by fire, and marble statues come briefly to life—but there was only one stanza, in The Revolt of Islam, that really disquieted her:
Many saw
Their own lean image everywhere, it went
A ghastlier self beside them, till the awe
Of that dread sight to self-destruction sent
Those shrieking victims …
INTERLUDE: SUMMER, 1818
I wish you a good night, with a Venetian benediction,
“Benedetto te, e la terra ehe ti fara!”—"May you be
blessed, and the earth which you will make” is it not
pretty? You would think it still prettier if you had heard
it, as I did two hours ago, from the lips of a Venetian girl,
with large black eyes, a face like Faustina’s, and the figure
of a Juno—tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes
flashing, and her dark hair streaming in the moonlight—
one of those women who may be made any thing.
—Lord Byron,
19 September 1818
When he couldn’t take any more of the ceremony, Percy Shelley left the circle of people and walked away; in a few long strides he had followed his shadow to the top of a low hill, where a wind-twisted old olive tree seemed to point back south across the calm water of the lagoon toward Venice. Shelley turned his gaze in that direction, and the irregular glittering line that was the city seemed to him to be dominated by churches, from the Romanesque campanile of San Pietro di Castello in the east to, at the western end, the low walls of the Madonna dell’Orto.
Our Lady of the Kitchen Garden, he translated that last phrase mentally. A month ago Byron had told him that the church had been dedicated to San Cristoforo until 1377, when a crude statue, supposedly of the Blessed Virgin, had been found in a neighboring garden. Neither Byron nor Shelley had been in a mood to visit the place.
For a few minutes Shelley picked at the splinters and blisters he had inflicted on his left palm before dawn this morning; then he looked back down the hill toward the knot of people.
Mary and Claire were standing off to one side, near the flowers the English Consul had brought, and even from this distance Shelley could see that Claire was uneasily watching Mary, who simply stared at the ground.
He knew they’d have to be leaving Venice soon, now. Byron would be wise to leave too … but of course he wouldn’t—not with that Margarita Cogni woman living with him, and with the best poetical work of his life only begun.
This was a Friday, and it occurred to Shelley that he and Claire had arrived in Venice five weeks ago tomorrow night, looking for Claire’s baby—Allegra was nineteen months old now, and for the last four months the child had been staying in Venice with Byron, her father. Claire was desperate to see the child, and Shelley had agreed to help her. He had been looking for an excuse to visit Byron, an excuse that would look plausible to any minions of the Austrian government of Italy who might be keeping track of the extravagant English lord.
Their gondola had come in to the city from the mainland—they must have passed close by this island, though in the dark and the storm they could never have seen it—and though the string of lights that was Venice had been nearly invisible through the thrashing downpour beyond the gondola’s rain-streaked window, the water had been no choppier than it was today, for the long islands of the Lido to the east protected the lagoon from the wild Adriatic.
Pulling a long splinter from his palm now, he grinned bleakly. The lagoon’s always calm, he thought. Even though the city’s not ritually married to the sea anymore, the sea evidently still has a … soft spot for the place.
They had arrived at an inn at midnight, and even before they could go to their rooms the fat landlady, learning that they were English, felt called on to tell them about the wild countryman of theirs, an actual lord, who was living in a palace on the Canal Grande amid a menagerie of dogs and monkeys and horses and all the whores that the gondoliers could ferry to him.
Claire had turned pale, imagining her infant daughter living in the midst of this pandemonium, and for a while Shelley had thought he would have to send for some laudanum to get her to bed. At last she had gone to sleep—but before going to bed himself Shelley stood for a long time at the window, watching the dark twisting clouds.
He had known Claire as long as he had known Mary, which was to say two years before Claire had gone to London at the age of eighteen to seduce the notorious Lord Byron; that had been a project he’d helped her with, for he was instinctively unpossessive of his women … though Claire couldn’t really be said to be his. Shelley had always found her attractive, and often in their travels he had shared a bed with her and Mary, but he had so far not ever made love to her.
He certainly had no reason not to—she and Mary and he were in agreement about the unnatural laws, forced on people by the twin oppressors Church and State, concerning marriage and monogamy. And now at the age of twenty she seemed more beautiful to him than she ever had—just thinking about the way she had fallen asleep against him in the gondola, the black ringlets of her hair spilled across his shoulder and one warmly soft breast pressed against his arm, made his heart pound again and almost set him tiptoeing to her room.
Idealist though he was, he was a shrewd enough judge of women to know that she wouldn’t be alarmed or particularly reluctant.
But it would certainly complicate his situation. Experience had made her realistic, but she couldn’t help taking any such—liaison?—as at least partially a promise of getting her daughter Allegra back, and he was not by any means sure he’d be able to talk Byron into that.
It was getting late. A stagnant smell had begun drifting into the hallway on the draft from the window, and he guessed that the canals, when all the gondolas and grocers’ boats were retired for the night and no longer agitated the water into the bright choppiness so dear to painters and tourists, gave off this nocturnal evidence of their great age.
It humbled him, and he went quietly to his own room.
The next afternoon Shelley had gone alone in a low, open gondola to the palace Byron had leased. Shelley had been uneasy, for he hadn’t told Byron he was coming, and he knew Byron detested Claire and had said that if she were ever to arrive in Venice he would pack up and leave.