The trusting innocence of the child was a shocking reproach to him, was like a hook turning in his side; she deserved a normal life, normal parents. There can’t be a God, he thought, if a child like this can be fathered by a man like me.
Byron’s letter was all Shelley ate that night.
Byron’s follow-up letter was waiting for Shelley in Padua, and after reading it he immediately bundled Claire into a carriage back to Este, for Byron said the gambit was still possible. Bewildered, Claire asked about the doctor they had supposedly come to see, and Shelley hastily told her that they had missed him, but would undoubtedly catch him when she returned with Mary and the children.
When Claire had gone, he went to the Palazzo della Ragione and walked alone through its great hall, appreciating the way its vast dimensions dwarfed him; for he couldn’t, now, justify the eighteen days he had wasted at the villa in Este, and he wanted Percy Shelley to seem insignificant, a background character, a figure in a crowd, whose errors couldn’t possibly have serious consequences.
Two days later Mary and Claire and the children arrived in Padua, at eight-thirty in the morning.
Little Clara was sicker, her mouth and eyes twitching in a way Shelley recognized—his first child by Mary, a girl who had not even lived long enough to be named, had shown similar symptoms just before dying, four years earlier.
Over the exhausted Mary’s objections he insisted that the Paduan doctor had turned out to be no good, and that they must press on immediately to Venice. The weather had not cleared up—they were standing in the square in front of the church of Saint Anthony, and rain had darkened and shined Donatello’s equestrian statue of Gattamelata—and the children were crying.
For an hour they waited under a narrow awning for the coach that would take them to the coastal town of Fusina, where they could get a boat to Venice; at last they saw the coach come shaking across the flagstones of the square toward them and when it had squealed to a stop and Mary had climbed aboard, Shelley picked up Clara to hand her in.
As he hefted the infant in front of himself he looked closely at her, and noticed two inflamed puncture marks on her throat.
So much, he thought bitterly, for Byron’s idea that sanctified ground might be a protection against the nephelim—or perhaps the French had somehow neutralized the ground of the Capuchin monastery when they had knocked down the walls. The French, too, he recalled, had badly wanted to take Venice.
At the malodorous Fusina docks he found that their travel permits were not among the luggage, though Mary swore she had packed them. The customs guards told Shelley that he and his family wouldn’t be able to cross to Venice without the papers, but Shelley selected one of the guards and took him some distance away across the puddled pavement and talked to him for a few minutes in the shadow of an old stone warehouse; and when they returned, the suddenly paler guard said, gruffly, that they could cross after all.
The handkerchief with which the officer wiped his forehead as they strode past him was artistically spotted with old, dried blood.
During the long gondola ride Clara’s convulsions grew worse, and Shelley’s thin face was stiff as he stared alternately down at the child and up at the setting sun visible through the breaking rain clouds, for Byron had told him that the procedure had to be done at night.
When their gondolier poled them to a stop at the wave-lapped steps of a Venice inn, Shelley climbed right into another gondola and went to find Byron; the sun was low and glinting redly off of the nail-heads in the faces of the wooden mazzes atop the blue-and-white-striped mooring poles in front of the Palazzo Mocenigo when he disembarked, and Fletcher took him quickly upstairs to where Byron waited in the billiard room. Allegra was with him, but Shelley didn’t see Margarita Cogni.
“I may have waited too long,” Shelley said, his voice tight with controlled emotion. “Clara’s nearly dead.”
“It’s still not too late,” Byron told him. “They haven’t … bestowed the eye on the Graiae yet.” He waved tensely toward the window. “Meet me at sunset on the Piazza—I’ll have Allegra with me, and you have Clara, at least; that will do, I think, if she’s the only one getting the special attention. And then be ready to hide in some church somewhere until we can find a ship to take us all to America.”
“A church?” said Shelley incredulously. “No, I won’t-you may see nothing wrong with expressing … implicit allegiance to the Church, but I’m not going to let Clara and William grow up with blinders on. Even just as a gesture—”
“Listen to me,” said Byron, loudly enough to override him. “It won’t be a gesture, and you may well not be able to raise your children at all if you don’t do it. There’s evidently some truth to the idea that churches are sanctuary—it seems to have something to do with the salt in the holy water, and the stained glass, and the gold patens they hold under the chins of the people who line up to receive Communion.”
Shelley looked unconvinced. “The patens? Those are the little disks with handles, aren’t they? What good are they supposed to do?”
Byron shrugged. “Well,” he said, “the story today is that those metal disks are to catch any crumbs, but they’re very highly polished, and Father Pasquale hinted to me one time that they were originally used to make sure that each communicant could cast a reflection.”
When Shelley got back to the inn, Mary was sitting on a gaudy couch in the entry hall, and Clara was thrashing in her lap; and even as he crossed the stone floor toward them he saw the baby subside and go limp. He ran the last few steps, and lifted the body from Mary’s arms.
Claire and some man Shelley didn’t know were standing nearby, and the man now stepped forward and explained in Italian that he was a doctor. Shelley let him examine Clara while he held her, and after a moment the doctor said quietly that the child had expired.
The silence that followed seemed to shake the air in the hall all the way up to the arched and painted ceiling; Shelley asked the man to repeat what he had said, more slowly. The man did, and Shelley shook his head and demanded to hear it again; the dialogue was repeated several times, while the doctor grew visibly less patient, until finally Shelley couldn’t pretend any longer that the man might have said something else. Still holding the dead child, he sat down heavily beside Mary.
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, he thought crazily, met his own image walking in the garden.
Chilly air swept through the hall a few minutes later when the canal-side door was opened, but Shelley didn’t look up; Richard Hoppner, the English Consul, had to cross the room, glance at the doctor for a confirming nod, and then crouch by Shelley and call his name a couple of times before Shelley even realized that he was there.
“I can handle all the details, Mr. Shelley,” Hoppner said gently. “Why don’t you leave your daughter with us, and you and Mrs. Shelley can go to your room; I’m sure the doctor here can give you something for your nerves.”
Shelley’s mind was an aching vacuum—until he remembered something Byron had said during their ride on the Lido, a month and a day ago: Evidently you can even restore life to a freshly perished corpse, if the sun hasn’t yet shone on it…; and then his thin lips curled into a desperate smile.