The previous evening’s storm had blown away, leaving the sky starkly blue behind the pillared and balconied palaces of green and pink stone that walled the broad waterway, and Shelley had blinked at the needles of sunlight reflected from the gold trim and gleaming black hulls of the gondolas that were ranked like slim cabriolets in front of the Byzantine structures.
Dozens of the narrow craft were moored to striped poles that stood up in the water a few yards out from the palace walls, and several times Shelley noticed wooden heads—mazzes—at the tops of the poles; once he was even close enough to see the gleam of a nail-head in one of the crudely carved faces. Shelley had heard that the mazzes now represented opposition to the Austrian rulers of Italy. It’s still resistance to the Hapsburgs, he thought.
The gondola passed under the ornate, roofed bridge that was the Rialto, and soon afterward the gondolier began trying to point out the palace Byron was renting, on the left ahead.
The Palazzo Mocenigo was actually several big houses which had at one time been united by one long, neoclassical façade of gray stone. No one was visible on the balconies or at the huge triple windows of the palace as the gondola glided across the water toward it, and when the gondolier had poled them in under the shadow of the palace, and brought the craft to a rocking stop at the puddled stone steps, Shelley couldn’t see anyone in the dimness beyond the open arches of the ground floor.
He stepped out, paid the gondolier, and was looking back out across the wide face of the canal when, simultaneously, the gondola he’d just quitted emerged into the sunlight with a flash of gold, and the door on the landing behind him was echoingly unbolted.
The person who pulled the door open was Byron’s English valet, Fletcher, and he remembered Shelley as a frequent visitor at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland; his master, he told Shelley now, had only awakened a little while ago and was in his bath, but would certainly be glad to see him when he emerged. He held the door open so that Shelley could enter.
The ground floor of the palace was damp and unfurnished, and it smelled of the sea and of the many sizeable cages that were stacked against the back wall; stepping around a couple of locally useless carriages in the dimness, Fletcher led him to an ascending marble stairway, and by the sunlight slanting down from above, Shelley was able to see the animals in the cages … monkeys, birds and foxes. He knew that if he had brought Claire, she would have theatrically insisted on searching the cages for Allegra.
Upstairs, Fletcher left him in a wide, high-ceilinged billiard room on the second floor, and went to tell Byron he was here; and as soon as Shelley had leaned back against the billiard table, a little girl wandered into the room from the direction Fletcher had taken.
Shelley recognized Allegra instantly, though she had grown taller even in just these last four months, and was beginning to show the Byronic dark hair and piercing eyes—and when he took some billiard balls from the table and, smiling, crouched down to roll them one by one across the threadbare rug to her, she smiled back, clearly recognizing her old playmate; and for several minutes they amused themselves by rolling the balls back and forth.
Claire had given birth to her while they were all living back in England, at a time when that country had begun to weigh on Shelley: only a month before her birth he had learned of the suicide of Harriet, his first wife; and two years before that, his first child by Mary had died of some sort of convulsion near London. The infant Allegra had for a while been more company to him than Mary or Claire, and he had missed her during these last four months.
“Shelley!” came a delighted call from another room, and when he looked up he saw Byron striding toward him from an inner archway. The man wore a colorful silk robe, and jewels glinted in the brooch at his throat and the rings on his fingers.
Shelley got to his feet, being careful not to let surprise show in his smile—
for Byron had put on weight in the two years since Shelley had seen him in Switzerland, and his hair was longer and grayer; he looked, Shelley thought, like an aging dandy, making up in finery for what he had lost in youth.
Byron seemed to know his thoughts. “You should have seen me last year,” he said cheerfully, “before I’d met this Cogni girl; she’s my—what, housekeeper now, and she’s thinning me down fast.” He peered past Shelley. “Claire’s not with you, I hope to God?”
“No, no!” Shelley assured him. “I’m just—”
A tall woman appeared in the archway then, and Shelley paused. She stared suspiciously at him, and he blinked and stepped back, but after a moment she appeared to make up her mind favorably about him, and smiled.
“Here’s Margarita now,” said Byron, a little nervously. He turned to her and, in fluent Venetian Italian, explained that Shelley was a friend of his, and that she was not to turn the dogs on him or throw him into the canal.
She bowed, and said to Shelley, “Benedetto te, e la terra ehe ti fara.”
“Uh,” said Shelley, “grazie.” He squinted at her, and wished the curtains were not drawn across the tall windows at the far side of the room.
Little Allegra was standing behind Shelley’s leg now, gripping it tight enough to hurt, and after a moment he looked down at her and noticed how wide her eyes were, and how pale she was.
Her grip loosened when Margarita turned around and disappeared back into the depths of the house.
“Where’s Mary?” Byron asked. “Have you all moved out to this coast? You were staying at that spa, last I heard, near Livorno.”
“Mary’s still there. No, I came here to talk to you about…” He touched Allegra’s dark curls. “… about our children. There was something you said in a letter—”
Byron held up a pudgy hand. “Uh,” he said, “wait.” He turned away and walked to the curtained window, and when he turned back Shelley could see that he was frowning and chewing his knuckles. “I think I remember the letter. I don’t think I still believe—still find mildly interesting, that is, I never believed—the things I wrote about. I told you to destroy it—did you?”
“Yes, of course. In fact I’m here in person only because you told me I wasn’t to write to you here about it. But whether you still credit the story or not, my daughter Clara is sick, and if those Armenian—”
“Hush!” Byron interrupted, glancing quickly toward the archway. Shelley thought there was exasperation, but a little fear, too, in the look. The smile he turned on Shelley a moment later seemed forced. “I’ve got horses stabled on the Lido, and I often go riding in the afternoons. Want to come along?”
“Very well,” answered Shelley after a pause. Then, “Are we bringing Allegra?”
“No,” said Byron irritably. “She’s—there’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
Shelley glanced down at Allegra; she looked unhappy, but not extremely so. “If you say so,” he said.
The warm morning breeze was from the mainland, and from Shelley’s sunny hilltop vantage point the priest’s Latin was just a low, intermittent murmur, like the droning of bees in a far field.
Mary was looking up the slope at him now, and even from this distance he thought he could read anger in her expression.
Don’t blame me, he thought unhappily. I did everything I could to avoid this, everything short of sacrificing my own life.
I suppose I should have done that. I suppose I should have. But I did a lot nonetheless—far more than even you, the authoress of Frankenstein, could ever know, or believe.