Thereafter, as the kind of woman hard put to openly grieve or even admit to any finality about death, Lady Stanley had at first devoted her energies to finding a monument appropriate to her late husband’s status as a “great man.” For three months she conducted a search for a monolith with which to mark the grave where Stanley’s ashes had been buried and, to that end, contracted a certain Mr. Edwards of the Art Memorial Company to scour the quarries, fields, and riverbanks of Dartmoor for a sufficiently grand stone, the kind that in the days of ancient practices would have been put up to mark the passing of a king — a druidic monolith that in its blunt majesty and permanence would fly in the face of the slight that had been rendered toward her husband by the sanctimonious powers that be. Various localities were visited — Moreton, Chagford Gidleigh, Walla Brook, Teigncombe, Castor, Hemstone, and Thornworthy — and thousands of stones were examined for their suitability; the search was a matter of such popular concern that many local farmers and their tenants joined in, with the happy result that by the summer a proper mass of granite, some twelve feet high and four feet wide and weighing six tons, had been located on a farm called Frenchbeer. Hauled to the churchyard and put up, its face bore the following inscription:
Henry Morton
Stanley
Bula Matari
1841–1904
Africa
Above the inscription was carved the symbol of life everlasting, a Christian cross.
CLEMENS IN THAT TIME
Yours has just this moment arrived — just as I was finishing a note to poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country house visit we paid in England was to Stanley. Lord! how my friends and acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days!
SAMUEL CLEMENS TO THE REVEREND TWICHELL, 1904
CLEMENS HAD BEEN SITTING on the veranda of his rented palazzo in Florence, the Villa Reale di Quarto, when he read in the late afternoon papers of Stanley’s death. By then, no bad news surprised him, for since he had taken up residence in that poorly heated and damp building, with its cavernous halls and chilly floors, few good things had happened. If there had been a high point, it had come with the singing recital that Clara had given in early April, but even then, his joy quickly vanished, for that same evening, Livy suffered a sudden heart seizure and would have died had not a subcutaneous injection of brandy revived her. Altogether, this sojourn in Italy, during which he had hoped to recapture the pleasantness of an earlier stay — one that took place some ten years before, at the Villa Viviani — had been a fiasco of discomforts. It rained continually, and daily fogs, like a “blue gloom,” enveloped the grounds so completely that their rose and holly garden — the most charming feature of the property — seemed, with its crumbling walls and arches, like a haunted cemetery. And their landlady, the Countess Massiglia, who lived in an apartment on the grounds, was a foul, proprietary, and bitter woman, seemingly bent on making their lives miserable. Despite the fact that she knew Clemens had arranged for a doctor to attend to the ailing Livy daily, she ordered her servants to keep the front gates locked so the physician would have to wait endlessly. When Clemens, complaining of bad odors that filled the lower floors, asked her to have the cesspools under the villa drained, she ignored him, and Clemens had to have his own dredgers come in. Incensed by this poor treatment, he was, in any case, already gravely distracted, for instead of helping Livy recover, that bleak and inhospitable Tuscan setting only seemed to have made her worse.
As his old friend Stanley had begun to fade in the early months of 1904, so did Livy. Various attacks of breathlessness and torpor and depression came over her, and oxygen and morphine had to be often administered. Worse was that he could rarely see her: Livy’s doctor limited his visits to two minutes a day — once again! — as if he, the love of her life, were somehow harmful to her. For those months she had remained in bed, attended by a nurse, Margaret Sherry, and by Katy Leary, their housekeeper, who had joined them from America.
Occasionally Clara went into her mother’s room to pass an hour by her side, as her presence seemed to calm her; but neither Samuel nor Jean, with her own continuing frail health and tendency toward fainting, was allowed to freely visit her. Clemens was so grieved by their separation that he would sometimes go into her room to quickly embrace her and cover her neck with kisses: Then suddenly, fearing that he would harm her, he would just as quickly leave.
To assuage his misery — and the long wait — he worked on his autobiography, dictating aloud to his secretary.
AT LAST, BY MAY, the weather became glorious; the gardens went into bloom, wisteria fell over the walls, and butterflies came lilting over the blossoms. And the palazzo itself, while never entirely warm, had, with its fireplaces burning, at least lost its constant chilliness. With the appearance of the sun and Florence gloriously vivid to the west — the duomo, the campanile, the Medici Chapels, and the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio glowing in the distant plain, and with many villas and houses vanishing in and out of the light, as if time had dissolved them — the dreariness of that setting was transformed by a peculiar Tuscan magic. (Clara had the best of the views, because from her room, she could look out at the scenery through ten-foot-high windows.) Clemens, newly invigorated and inspired by the change of weather, began to search anew for a villa near Fiesole.
Livy seemed to become better by early May, but during one of Samuel’s brief visits with her, she looked at him with haunted eyes and said: “I don’t want to die, but I will, won’t I?”
Sometimes Clemens would take long strolls along the pathways of the villa, enjoying the gardens and the beautiful decay of its moldering, ivy-covered walls. His passage meandered under arbors heavy with grapevine; or he would head out to the stable to watch his daughters ride around the estate on the gray mares that their mother had given them. But at around four, he always waited for his servant to bring the papers in from Florence, among them the London Times (always a few days old), La Stampa, and Corriere della Sera, which he would go over with an Italian dictionary in hand. But on that day — May 11, 1904—he had no need to, for even with his quite limited Italian there was no mistaking the headline: IL ESPLORATORE HENRY MORTON STANLEY È MORTO A LONDRA, IERI MATTINA.
Greatly saddened by the news, Clemens called forth his memory of first seeing Stanley, so many years before, standing by the railing of the boiler deck of the steamship — the scene coming back to him with an immediacy that confounded him. It was as if, as they had sometimes discussed, the past, as cumbersome as it was in memory, seemed only separated from the present by the thinnest of lines, and more so as one got older — a tautological folly. Like free-winging angels, exempt from the linear constrictions of time, memory did as it pleased. As he thought about his friend a few tears came to his eyes; these he brushed away. For by that time in his life so many old friends had passed on — just a week earlier he had read of the death of Antonin Dvo