“Maybe it is like that—maybe it’s God who imposes restrictions on us to keep us from becoming all that we’re capable of becoming, all we dream of. Certainly religion does that. Without the shackles of religion, mankind would be free to—”
Byron laughed. “You haven’t changed, Shelley. I’ll admit that it was cruel of nature to allow mankind self-awareness; death is going to sever every one of us from his memories and everything that he—uselessly—sought, and we all know it, and that’s unbearable. But it’s also the way the world works—you needn’t blame it on priests and religion. Hell, religion can at least make us believe, for a while, sometimes, that our souls are grand and immortal and perfectible.”
“You’re talking the worst kind of fatalism,” said Shelley sadly.
“And you’re talking Utopia,” answered Byron.
Shelley managed to get Byron to agree on a plan of action, and Shelley and Claire Clairmont left Venice three days later; Shelley was to return as soon as possible with his whole family: Mary, their two-and-a-half-year-old son William, and their one-year-old daughter Clara.
He wrote to Mary even before leaving Venice, telling her to bring the children with all possible haste to Byron’s hilltop villa in the mainland town of Este, where Shelley would be awaiting them. He had had to be a bit evasive in the letter, for he couldn’t tell her, especially through the Austrian-controlled mail, that he intended to take the whole family northwest to Venice in the middle of some night, awaken the blind Graiae and slip free of the attention-net of the vampiric nephelim, and then flee the Western Hemisphere forever.
Mary and both of the children arrived at Byron’s villa twelve days later, on the fifth of September, and Mary insisted on simply resting there for a week or so, relaxing in the gardens of the villa, which had been built on the site of a Capuchin monastery that had been destroyed by the French. Byron had told Shelley that consecrated ground might have certain protective properties.
The children seemed happy to get a respite from travel, and even Shelley decided that a few days of rest could do them no harm.
He was finding that he was able to write very well here, in fact; he began by doing translations of the Greek classics, and had now moved smoothly from translating the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus to actually trying to write the last play of that ancient, uncompleted trilogy.
He wrote during the long, hot days in the breezy summer house, which was reached by leaving the back of the main house and walking through a shady tunnel of vine-tangled trellises, and at night he often went out there to watch the bats fly out of the battlements of the ruined medieval fortress of Este; sometimes too, at night, he would stare out across the hundred and twenty miles at the spine of the Apennine Mountains to the south.
Those mountains had dominated the southeast corner of the sky when he and Mary and the children had recently been living near Livorno on the opposite coast, and the peaks had fascinated him then too. He had written a fragment of a poem while living there, and on many nights now he recalled it while staring south at the mountains over the monastery’s fallen walls:
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
On the dim starlight then is spread,
And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,
Shrouding …
He had taken the poem no further; he wasn’t sure what the mountain might be shrouding.
As it happened, they wound up spending eighteen days at the villa; then, one Monday afternoon late in the month, two things happened to convince Shelley that he’d better get the family on to Venice as fast as possible.
Clouds had sailed darkly up the Po Valley, and the light was leaden and dim by four o’clock; storm clouds bunched and flexed vastly in the south, like gods miraculously rendered in tortured, animate marble, and Shelley, sitting over his manuscript in the summer house, glanced up at the sky from time to time. He was hoping it wouldn’t rain for a while, for he was writing a more purely powerful sort of verse than anything he’d ever written before, and he was unwilling to stop the flow of words for any reason—not for rain, nor even to reread the verses to see if they made consistent sense.
“Ere Babylon was dust,” he found himself writing, “The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, / Met his own image walking in the garden …” And Shelley looked up and saw a figure walking in his own garden, behind a vine-choked lattice, a silhouette against the distant gray bulks of the clouds and the Apennines.
It seemed for a moment to be himself, but when it emerged from behind the arbor he saw that it was a much shorter figure—was, in fact, his infant daughter Clara.
The seeming connection between what was going on inside his head and what was going on outside had momentarily scared him, and so it was with considerable relief that he called out to Clara and pushed his chair back and got to his feet, holding out his arms to pick her up.
But she didn’t advance. In the metallic light she gave him a smile that scoured his own smile from his face, and then she walked back behind the arbor.
His heart was thumping alarmingly in his chest, but he was reaching for the door to the garden—when he heard familiar footsteps echoing in the trellised passage behind him, approaching from the direction of the house.
Suddenly glad of an excuse to put off going into the garden, he turned around and pulled open the house-side door, and saw Mary walking toward him with Clara in her arms.
“Dinner’s ready, Percy,” Mary said, “and you’ve got a letter from Byron.”
He slowly turned to look back out at the garden. There might have been a flicker of motion behind the lattice, but he turned his back on it, put his arm around Mary and escorted her back to the house, hurriedly enough to startle her.
“Where are you?” asked Byron in the letter. “The man is nearly here, I’m told, and the—Apparatus—is in Mestre, just across the lagoon. ‘If ‘twere done, ‘twere well done quickly.’ Go at once, if all this still seems sound to you, to Padua—think of some excuse—and I will write to you there and tell you if it be not too late. Destroy this letter now.”
Shelley put the letter down and looked across the dinner table at Mary. She was the only one looking at him, for Claire was busy feeding the two children; and Mary’s gaze was fearful, so he made himself speak lightly. “I’ve got to go to Padua tomorrow,” he said. “Byron has news of a doctor for Claire.” It seemed a fair excuse—Claire had been ill, and had taken her to a Paduan doctor only a week earlier. “And it seems that this medico might be able to cure little Clara’s malaise, too—be ready to follow with her when I send for you.” He glanced toward the back of the house, and then added, “And of course bring young William, too.”
Mary brought him a plate of steaming pasta and vegetables, but he seemed unaware of it, staring at little Clara as she licked some of her own puréed serving off of the spoon Claire held to her mouth, and he was thinking about the image of her that he’d seen walking in the garden. What did that mean? Had he waited too long?