The Lady and Her Monsters (27 page)

Trelawny looked out in the distance at the completely still and calm waters and saw no sign of his friends. But suddenly, the sea turned the color of lead and became as thick as a frozen lake; then raindrops, big hearty ones, started falling from the sky and seemed to bounce off the still surface. The air rippled and thrashed, great noises were heard from the sky, and a terrible gurgle arose from the deepest recesses of the ocean. Trelawny noticed the smaller boats that had not been anchored at the harbor being tossed about like toys while fishermen staggered trying to knot their belongings. It was a fast-moving storm, one of those summer squalls that comes and goes in the span of twenty minutes.

Peace soon returned to the area. Fishing boats and schooners that had been at sea were coming back to their ports. Trelawny hoped to catch a glimpse of the
Don Juan,
thinking that perhaps Shelley and Williams had decided to turn back. But there was no sign of them. He asked those who had returned for information, but no one said they had seen signs of the boat in the open waters.

Trelawny spent the late afternoon and early evening scanning the horizon and the harbor, but as night fell a new storm arose. He returned to the
Bolivar.
The bellowing thunder, the incessant rains, and the constant worry kept him awake, and he resolved that if nothing was heard in the harbor by morning, he would return to Pisa, where Byron was. Perhaps word had come from Casa Magni that Shelley and Williams were safely there. By morning the storm had passed, but all his inquiries about his friends' whereabouts remained unanswered. A terrible feeling of dread had begun to settle upon him, and he hurriedly rode to Pisa, where he found no news from Casa Magni. On Trelawny's arrival, Byron had quickly staggered down his staircase. Trelawny described the events of the past two days, and as he spoke Byron's “lips quivered, and his voice faltered” as he too thought of the possibilities.

At Casa Magni, despair had set in.

Trelawny made his way up the Ligurian coast to Casa Magni. When he got near the city of Via Reggio, he learned that “a punt, a water-keg, and some bottles” had washed ashore and been located by locals. These items were often found on boats, so they did not immediately cause too much concern in him. For several days, parties of searchers tried to find the missing friends, but each day ended with no news. When a week had passed, their worst fears came true. Trelawny heard that two decomposing bodies had been found in the sands near Via Reggio. He rushed to them, wanting to be sure they were the corpses of his two friends.

“The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless,” he later wrote. Right away, he recognized Shelley. It was not so much because the remains were those of a lanky and slight person, but because there was a “volume of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats's poem in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away.” Edward Williams's body had washed ashore nearly three miles away. His corpse was even more mutilated than Shelley's, the only dignity remaining that of a shirt covering it and the tips of a black silk handkerchief, which Trelawny had seen many times before. Those few bits of fabric are what told Trelawny the body was Williams's. The corpse of the sailor boy who had accompanied them, Charles Vivian, was not found until three weeks later.

Trelawny quickly made his way to Casa Magni, where Mary had been awaiting news of her husband. The two stared at one another. “Is there no hope?” Mary was said to have asked. Trelawny could not bring himself to reply, in essence answering Mary's question.

It was decided that Shelley's remains would be removed from the sands of Via Reggio and interred in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Williams's remains would be returned to England. But given the length of time that had elapsed and the conditions of the corpses, quarantine laws prohibited the removal of the bodies for fear of the spread of infection. The only way to safely get them out without harming anyone was to cremate them. Oddly enough, Mary did not mind having her husband's body reduced to ashes. Trelawny took it upon himself to arrange the cremations. Williams, it was agreed, would be the first to undergo the procedure.

Trelawny had a funeral pyre built in Leghorn, where the boats had departed. He, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt, friend of Byron, were greeted there by a group of soldiers, who were holding iron instruments and shovels, already awaiting him and ready to begin the ordeal. Several feet away a crowd of onlookers had gathered.

The diggers began to shovel away the sand, until “a shapeless mass of bones and flesh” appeared. Byron was seized by the dreadful finality of the scene. “Don't repeat this with me,” he was said to have muttered. “Let my carcass rot where it falls.”

A funeral pyre made of pines had been set up. Given the dryness of the wood, it caught fire soon after it was lit, the bright heat sending the crowd backward. The flames rose high, then slowly dwindled. As they did, the friends approached Williams's remains and sprinkled them with oil, wine, and frankincense.

Unable to watch this for long, Byron stripped off his clothes and plunged into the cool waters. Trelawny and Hunt followed, and they stayed in until Byron, assaulted by cramps, had to return to shore.

Wooden sticks marked the place where Shelley was temporarily buried. As they approached, they could not help but take note of the desolate beauty of the place, the quiet seashore and endless waters stretching ahead, the pure, blistering whiteness of the sands. It was the kind of solitude Shelley had always desired, the kind he valued. The area possessed such harmony it seemed almost sacrilegious to remove his flesh from beneath the sands, as if they were “vultures.” Unlike the previous cremation, when they reached Shelley's corpse no one seemed willing to offer a word, or even capable of doing so.

The diggers began their dreary work until they heard the sound of metal hitting bone and knew they had found Shelley. They removed the body from the sand, the bones not breaking as they had in Williams's case, and placed him on the pyre. They lit the fire and sprinkled wine over it, more “than he had consumed during his life,” Trelawny said. As they watched Shelley's body burn, the heat seemed to make their eyes water and waver, the wood snapping and crackling, breaking heartlessly to their ears. Again, the scene was too much for Byron to bear. He returned to his boat. As he swam out, behind him the heat quickly reduced Shelley's body to ashes. But something unusual happened: as Trelawny and Hunt stared into the flames, they noticed that Shelley's heart had not incinerated. Fittingly enough, it remained intact, a complete organ, as if still alive. Trelawny dashed toward the pyre and with his bare hands removed Shelley's heart. His own limbs were singed. In time, Shelley's heart would cause conflict between Edward John Trelawny and Mary Shelley. But for now it was a final remnant of what had been Percy Shelley.

Shelley's ashes were collected and placed in a simple box to be buried in Rome. Not long after they had all left La Spezia and returned to Pisa, the
Don Juan
was found. Captain Daniel Roberts informed Trelawny in a letter dated September 1822: “We have got fast hold of Shelley's boat, and she is now safe at anchor off Via Reggio. Everything is in her, and clearly proves that she was not capsized. I think she must have been swamped by a heavy sea. We have found in her two trunks, that of Williams, containing money and clothes; and of Shelley's, filled with books and clothes.”

But as the boat was further inspected, Captain Roberts became suspicious about what had happened. He noticed that many of the timbers were broken, as if another vessel had rammed into it. He shared his views with Trelawny in a letter he dispatched shortly after the first one: “On a close examination of Shelley's boat, we find many of the timbers on the stairboard quarter broken, which makes me think for certain that she must have been run down by some of the feluccas in the squall.” A felucca was a large sailing boat constructed of wood that often traveled the waters of the Mediterranean during the summer months. No one could be certain if one had slammed into the
Don Juan,
but Trelawny recalled that his many inquiries had gone unanswered on the day of the storm, and many of the sailors had been reluctant to talk to him about what they had seen, if anything, along their journey. They had adamantly refused to admit they had noticed the boat or Trelawny's friends, which made him think something more might have occurred. Mary Shelley, in time, also came to believe that there had been more to the accident than was discovered.

T
he group that gathered on the shores of the Gulf of La Spezia disbanded after Shelley's death. Trelawny, who in a certain way had instigated the direction their summer would take, left the area. If he ever thought himself guilty for what had occurred, he never said so. On the contrary, he felt that part of Shelley's demise and unhappiness fell squarely on Mary. Trelawny had come to believe that she had drained him. In a letter he wrote to Claire on December 28, he made his feelings, perhaps unjustly, known, with the same acidity with which William Godwin had shared his: “As to Mary Shelley, you are welcome to her. She was the Poet's wife as bad a one as he c'd have found . . . She was conventional in everything.”

Not ready to return to England yet, Mary moved to the outskirts of Genoa, where she rented a house called Casa Negrata. Those who had become close to her also began to disperse. She had come to believe she and Jane Williams might forge a strong friendship to bridge the gap of widowhood. But Jane would have none of that: she returned to England right away. Soon thereafter, Jane began a relationship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Percy Shelley's Oxford classmate and Mary Shelley's ambivalent friend and possible lover during her early years with Percy. By the time of Shelley's death and Jane's involvement with Hogg, Mary's own feelings for Hogg had changed. She no longer felt the kinship that had prompted her to write to him about the death of her first child. Instead, she now truly disliked him, considered him a selfish individual for wanting to capitalize on his friendship with her husband. That Jane became his lover disturbed her, though the affection she felt for the other widow overruled those feelings she had for the man. But that affection didn't last long.

Soon after Jane Williams's affair came to light, Mary also learned that Jane was badmouthing her to her closest friends and acquaintances. Along with Hogg, they were revealing secrets and details of her marriage with Shelley, of the supposed pain Mary had caused her husband, of how depressed he had been prior to his death. Mary became aware of this and felt that an irreparable break in their friendship had occurred. In the years to follow, Jane Williams asked for Mary's forgiveness, which she granted, but the warmth of their earlier relationship was gone.

William Godwin learned of his son-in-law's death not from his daughter but from a family friend, Leigh Hunt. He was irked that Mary had not written to him right away, as he suggested in the letter he quickly dispatched. But perhaps now her suffering, he said, which he learned she was taking “better than could have been imagined,” might bridge the gap that had formed between them. Godwin had also been aware of Shelley's odd feelings toward death, or, as he put it, that he had always been “in constant anticipation of the uncertainty of his life, though not in this way.”

M
ary was not the only one who felt Shelley's loss; Lord Byron did as well. He removed himself to the village of Albaro, a small collection of houses not far from where the Shelleys had lived. Casa Saluzzi was actually a voluptuous palace overlooking the Ligurian coast. As he stood on his balcony, Byron could watch the myriad of changing hues in the waters below him, hear the screeching of the seagulls as they flew above him, and stare at the boats undulating near and far. If he dared to look to his right, he could see the
Don Juan,
anchored to its post. The sight made him nauseous.

He often thought of his friend, and of Mary, of the night of Shelley's disappearance, when she had pounded on his Pisan door, “pale as marble,” looking for answers. The fear he had seen in her eyes, the horror she had displayed, was something he had not witnessed before. Nor could he forget it now. He thought about the lost persons, about Mary, and about his own end, which he believed was not that far in coming.

Like Mary's, Lord Byron's natural demeanor tended to darken to melancholy. And in a world that was out of control, he took charge of what he knew best: his regimen of eating. He returned to a strict method of dieting: few vegetables and water, cookies, no meat, and a heavy course of purgatives. In no time he lost the luster he had regained, his clothes began to hang from his bony frame, and the pallor returned to his gaunt features. He also decided he would go to Greece. London had decided to aid the Greeks in their war of independence, and Byron was to become one of their supporters. This new course of action gave him a certain amount of motivation, and preparations were soon made for the voyage.

The only cloud hovering on the horizon was that Byron, like Mary in the days leading to Shelley's death, began to experience premonitions, which caused him to believe he would not be returning from the islands. To combat that outlook, he engaged Trelawny to assist him, tempting him with the revelation of a new boat he had engaged, the
Hercules.
The name was appropriate given the Greek adventures, but quite ironic considering that Byron neither looked nor felt Herculean.

Trelawny always maintained that “it would have been difficult to find a man more unfit for such an enterprise” than Byron. Aside from having a great name and money to spare, Byron's poor health and lack of stamina made him an unlikely candidate to spend a season in the harsh mountainous regions of Greece.

After traveling through the islands, Byron settled in the small village of Missolonghi. A collection of houses “situated . . . on the verge of the most dismal swamp,” it was not a pleasant place to be, and with winter at its doorstep, the dismal rain that drenched the area and the fog that rolled in from the ocean and settled upon the rooftops and steeples only made it worse. Byron quickly fell into a state of despondency and loneliness. He restricted his diet even more, becoming thinner and thinner, waking up only to write letters, quickly losing the enthusiasm he had had for the journey.