Work Text:
Fragments from a romance.
They meet in May on the shore of Lake Geneva, where Byron’s boat has pulled up on the gravel within sight of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. He has left Polidori loafing in the boat, the physician having bored himself into wheezy submission.
Shelley wears a vivid blue coat, cut a little longer than is commonplace it flares out beyond his hips to skirt his knees and nips in at a high waist so he looks a finely tailored trio with the women. Only the inkblots on his cuffs, the creases all along his arms and the hint of unravelling at the shoulders cast an air of slight misuse and immaculate soiling about him.
Byron is stung by irritation at this creature being a friend of Claire Clairmont. He glances over his shoulder for Polidori, who snoozes still. Claire steps forwards to greet him, pink and rustling and blocking his view of most of Shelley. He frowns. Just beyond Claire’s muslin-wrapped shoulder, below the fringe jiggling from her parasol, Percy Bysshe Shelley, not yet introduced, smirks, his expression unmistakable, bold for a second then, before Byron could do more than blink at him, gone.
*
He watches them in the candlelight, Polidori scraping at his page, Mary with her head bent, her cheeks blooming a red several shades beyond decorous, her lip caught in her teeth as her hand dashes over one sheet, then the next. She’s not what he’d call an ornamental woman, her dress is simple, her hair smooth until the wreath of curls at her nape. She wears a single ribbon at her throat. He catches Shelley’s eye — he has also given up scribbling to look softly at Mary, then at Byron. Something of his expression for his wife lingers as he looks at Byron, as if he sees no cause to alter it and a tightness seizes Byron’s throat. He imagines there will be thunder now, but the storm hangs suspended, prickling the air around them.
*
Gone three in the morning, some one or thing knocks against the door. Byron finds him outside in the passageway clinging to the nearly toppled table, one of those useless affairs with legs like a feeble vine, its vase spilled and somehow whole on the runner. Either Shelley or the table or calamitously both look about to snap and tumble to the floor. He stares at Byron, eyes huge and blinking away... what? Surely not sleep? Byron takes his arm and draws him, confused, suspicious, yielding, through the door.
Shelley says he can’t explain it, mumbles about his boyhood, about shame and Eton and waking in the dark somewhere he shouldn’t dare to be. He says he dreams himself awake and then, and perhaps now, he isn’t sure.
Byron makes him drink a tot of whiskey, coaxes him into his bed and pulls the eiderdown snug around him. A slender hand emerges from the bedding. “I think I’m certain, but…”
“Hush,” says Byron. He slides Shelley’s fingers under the pillow, leaves his own hand to hover as Shelley falls into sleep.
*
Shelley shuts the door behind him with if not quite a slam, a definite slap and stalks across the room. He sprawls on Byron’s chaise and says, “Claire accuses me of writing about her.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Of her and you, and she says I always court disaster.” His eyes are luminous and his mouth twists at the edge. “She believes I wish something of the kind for her.” He looks as if he is waiting for Byron to curse and stamp, perhaps throw some dramatic object at the door before the pair of them roar with laughter at the folly of it all.
Byron gives him a smile designed to say nothing. “I write about everyone,” he says.
Shelley stretches out, crosses his ankles on top of a sheaf of Byron’s papers and says, “I do that too.” His eyes look at Byron, playful and treasonous and Byron feels his favourite flush of joy and dread when Shelley says, “I wrote to Hunt. I told him all about you.”
*
The storm comes close to tipping their boat, to sending Shelley drifting like a heroine to the bottom of Lake Geneva and to flinging Byron bellowing after him. Byron strips off his coat for the fall, wrestles with the wind while Shelley crosses his arms and stands, gazing at the waves until Byron abandons the sail to shake him by the shoulders. He peels the coat from Shelley’s body and shouts at him.
Shelley screams back, tells him to go, to save himself and Byron retreats to the main-sheet. He calculates the steps from there to Shelley, chooses in advance the moment when, feeling the boards shudder a certain way beneath him, he will run.
When they reach shore, he still holds the coat bundled under his left arm. Unrolling it, he feels a book in the pocket and he slides it halfway out. Rousseau, he has no doubt. He half regrets putting the novel into Shelley’s hands. The touch of it, wet and beginning to warp already, the binding ruined, it makes him a little ill. Rousseau’s Julie — delicate, languorous in her descent, caressed by weeds and worshipful fishes. Her lover, sick at heart, plunging after. He’d feel blind. He’d feel limbless. He hates the ghastly book.
Shelley, pale to the point of jaundice, stands before him, his hands on his coat. Byron lets the book fall back into the pocket as the coat pulls free. He grabs his wrist and finds that neither man can speak. Shelley shakes off his touch and wanders away, his gait wide and tremulous as if he were still on the boat. As if they were still in the boat, together. Byron pushes his hand out into the air, as if to steady himself on the skiff's timbers and Shelley breaks into a slow, ragged run up the rise from the beach to the villa.
*
It’s late, again. A knock at the door and Byron lifts his pen, turns his gaze to the ceiling and waits for him, counts the space for the knock that won’t precede his plunge into the room. Waiting, he considers telling him he is mad, or quite on the way to it. He’ll say it with all the seriousness and sobriety he can muster, imagines the joy in Shelley’s eyes at his diagnosis, the breathless way his blood rushes to his cheeks and his eyes, his eyes disarm Byron as he laughs, “I am. I am —”
“Dreadfully so. Tryingly so,” Byron interjects.
Shelley tosses his hair from his eyes to stare at him, he licks his tongue over his lips and nods. “Mad.”
When at last he opens the door he stands, shivering and white as a saint.
*
The second morning at the shore near Viareggio he can scarcely bear it. Hunt lingers at the carriage, his coat hauled up around his ears, his face streaked, his whole person sodden and immovable. On the beach, Trelawny and Shenley prepare the kindling.
He detests Trelawny's soft tutting and sighing as he arranges the pyre, the resolute look on his face, his dry eyes as he sprinkles spices on the leaves. As if he calls himself Shelley’s oldest, finest friend. Prig and ass Byron snarls sotto voce into the wind. He could tear at him, at his blank face, at his solemn duty. The brute revels in this, the laying of boughs around a blackened face. Byron screws his eyes shut and breathes slowly through his teeth. Looking again, he keeps his focus on the hair, on the dark curls still plastered damp and messy to his cheeks, his brow. Stuck with fever-sweat to the nape of his neck, a span the breadth of a hand laid to still and cool him as his breath shudders the small bones of his spine. A hand, patient and still, desperately so but for the thumb he lets brush at the closest fronds of his hair.
There was the time he ached and babbled in Byron’s bed, undone by nephritis and laudanum, his skin boiling as he turned and looked almost into Byron’s eyes. Their shirts had been cast on the floor and he let Byron loosen his underbritches. His eyes were pain-dark and otherwordly and he ducked his face and sobbed into Byron’s hand, his mouth blurred, a shudder on the skin of Byron’s palm. Byron couldn’t bear to touch him anywhere else, the pain consumed so much of him. He did nothing more than stroke his fingers along his chin as Shelley said something that sounded like yes.
Byron wheels around and runs three, four steps towards the sea and retches.
He doesn’t turn back. He walks across the sand like his limbs have become marble, or solid salt down to the bones, too heavy to run. He leaves the men and the road and the beaten-down sea grass behind him, the thin shrieks of gulls too high to see the blue of Shelley's eyes.
The sea is flat, placid enough to mock them all and the white of the sky is all that's left above him, a great eye rolling back as he stumbles into the dainty froth of surf. His breath sears his throat and he dives.