Outcasts (10 page)

“I have always preferred this room,” Claire said. She sat down on the settee next to Mary. Her rose muslin dress caught the light from the fire and cast highlights on her olive skin and dark eyes. “So much more elegant than the dining room. I have suggested to Albé that he have it redone in Empire blue. Since that was Napoleon's favorite color, he favors the idea.” Her eyes sparkled.

Mary glanced at the dusty white moldings, the faded grandeur of the green watered silk wall coverings, the white woodwork marked here and there by mildew. The entire room looked like an aging grande dame, hanging on to its memories of the cool rationality of the Enlightenment. “It would be most expensive,” she said. “But it would be very elegant, I am sure. I did not know that Napoleon's favorite color was blue.”

Claire leaned close, whispering. “I don't know that it was. I merely said it was. Albé didn't know, either, so he believed me.”

Mary was a little shocked, but not at all surprised, to learn of Claire's lie. Perhaps, she told herself, it was unimportant to someone like Byron whether his ladylove told the truth or not. She herself could not imagine lying to Shelley. “Did you bring your embroidery?” she said, changing the subject.

Claire shook her head impatiently. “No, of course not. But how can you sit here and pay no attention to what's going on out there!” She flung a hand towards the windows, which at that
moment were lit by a distant flash of lightning.

“It is too damp for me out there,” Mary said. “And you know you would not endure it for a second. You would cry when your dress was ruined by the rain.”

Claire stared at her. “Of course not. How little you know me.” She rose abruptly and walked boldly over to where the men stood. “Byron! Shall we have a game of chess? Or make it back-gammon, if you would win this time!”

Byron turned, and Mary was relieved to see the amusement in his face. She wanted Byron to love her sister, now more than ever. “What, and disgrace myself in the good doctor's eyes? He would never forgive me if I lost a game, any game, to a mere woman.”

Startled, Polidori objected. “Why, no, my lord, I would never—”

“Oh, you are an old woman, Polly-Dolly,” Byron said. His tone was so affectionate, however, that even the prickly doctor subsided.

“Let us have some news of the outside world, instead,” Shelley suggested. He picked up the newspaper lying on the sideboard.

“Yes,” Mary agreed. “What new revolutions are brewing? What new popes have fallen or arisen? What new wonders has science birth'd in the last two weeks?”

“What new plays have opened?” Polidori contributed, his gaze darting from Byron to Shelley.

“And most important of all—” Byron spanked Claire smartly on her rear, forcing a surprised gasp from Polidori. “Who is swiving whose wife in Mayfair this summer?”

“More likely, the world has come abroad to Geneva,” said Mary. “If the number of telescopes trained on this house during the luncheon hour are any indication, we are the toast of Europe. Or at least, its most favored destination for idlers, gawkers and fools.”

“What's this?” Byron said, his dimples deepening. “Something has touched a nerve in our Mary.” He turned to pour a brandy.

“My fault, I believe,” Polidori said. “I was in town last night, as you know, at Madame Odier's. Many of the guests do not know that I know you, so they spoke rather more freely than otherwise. I told Mrs. Shelley that the prevailing rumor in town presently has it that the tablecloths Fletcher and the maids hang on the balcony every morning are, er, the petticoats of her and Miss Clairmont!”

Byron threw back his head and laughed. Claire beamed and put her hand on his arm; he covered it with his own. “We must make sure to lay out some stays and corsets in the morning. Or perhaps we could hang my trousers beside them in the name of equality. What say you, Shiloh?”

Shelley laughed, and turned to gather Mary in to his amusement. Their eyes met, they smiled, and for a moment, for Mary, there were no other people in the room. Then he strode over to her, newspaper in hand. He bowed gallantly. “Dearest, you are always the light in my firmament. May I also ask you to be the light of my newspaper?”

She smiled and shifted to give him room next to her, closer to the candelabra. “What news of the fettered and corrupted world, then, my love?”

The settee was small enough that his shoulders rubbed against hers. Subtly, she arranged herself so that, beneath her white muslin skirts, her leg lay along his long one. In his forest green waistcoat and dark brown trousers, polished boots, and wildly disarrayed hair, he could have passed for a woodland creature himself. Dropping a warm smile on her, he opened the pages. “Ah. An item to interest our good doctor. A bookseller in Chatham announces the publication of a treatise on the diseases of India, with special reference to a recent spate of dangerous fevers in Madura, Dindigul and Tinnivelly.”

“Madura, Din-digul and Tin-ni-vel-ly! Madura, Din-digul and Tin-ni-vel-ly! Shiloh, do those syllables not sing, absolutely sing to you?” Byron said gaily. He struck a theatrical pose and his fine baritone rang out. “Ma-du-ra—”

“Din-digul and Tin-ni-vel-ly!” Claire added her soprano in a descant, laughing so hard she could hardly keep the tune.
Together, she and Byron repeated the phrase several times, varying the notes, their voices winding together like a braid of song. Mary smiled to see them happy together.

She felt Shelley stiffen beside her. “Oh, this is unfortunate,” he muttered.

Byron and Claire broke off their impromptu concert. “Bad news?”

“Richard Sheridan is ill, perhaps dying.” He turned a page. “His friends are requested to aid him.”

“Short of money, no doubt,” Byron said shortly. His face lost its happy expression, becoming closed and shut off. “He has never been the same since they released him from debtor's prison.”

Mary shuddered at the mention of the shadow that fell so near her own father. Shelley looked up and locked glances with his friend. “We should write to him. I can write my solicitors. Perhaps a subscription—”

“He would not accept it,” Mary said in her soft voice.

Byron looked at her. “You know this? How?”

“Do you not remember, how the Americans voted him twenty thousand pounds once, for trying to stop England fighting their secession? Yet he refused it. A man that proud, he will not accept charity even on his deathbed.”

“I fear you are right, dearest,” said Shelley, folding the paper back.

Byron gazed at Mary with a dark look in his eyes, as though seeing her clearly for the first time. “You know Sheridan so well?”

Claire answered first, sitting down on the opposite settee and patting it suggestively with her hand. “Indeed, yes, B. He was … is … a friend of our Papa's, is he not, Mary? He has been an admirer of Mr. Sheridan's for almost all his life.”

“Not, perhaps, as much as he used to be,” said Mary. “Remember that they quarreled rather publicly over the French Revolution.”

Byron raised an eyebrow. “I had always imagined Richard Brinsley Sheridan to be a supporter of reform,” he said. He studiously ignored Claire's obvious attempts to get him to sit beside her.

“He was,” Mary said. “He is. But he was a man without a fortune. He could not afford the luxury of political dissent, when he had a living to earn.” Her gaze met Byron's and locked, despite the hauteur creeping into Byron's expression. “Not every revolutionary is born to wealth,” she said. “Rousseau, Voltaire, Sheridan … men of principle but without means.”

“Which makes it ever more incumbent upon those of us with means to be the means of revolution,” Shelley said heartily. “What say you, my lord? Shall we form a company of charitable revolutionaries? Shall we use our money to shove the powerful and tyrannical off their thrones?”

Polidori snorted. “You cannot be serious. Why, for his lordship to fund a revolution would be a remarkable inconsistency.”

Byron looked coldly at his doctor. “I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether.” He turned to Shelley. “Even so, and though I approve your theories in theory, so to speak, I am not persuaded that they will bring us anything but misery. Do away with aristocracy? No, sir. If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.”

Claire winced. “Government by the corrupt and idle? Do you not see what is happening in the world, in England? B, how can you close your eyes to such tyranny?”

“Perhaps, as a member of the peerage, his lordship finds it inappropos to see what he is not supposed to see,” Mary said acidly.

“It is easy enough to peer through the window into the counsels of the mighty, when they lock you out,” Byron said, frowning. “I am an accident, my feral little fox. I was never supposed to be a member of the peerage.”

“How not?” said Polidori, taking out a snuffbox. At Mary's frown, he put it away again.

“I was destined for hell, and got diverted into another delivery,” said Byron. His tone was light but his frown was dark. “When my cousin got himself killed in the wars, they had no choice but to dump the peerage—and the debts—on me. Why, the damn fool
could not even wait until Waterloo to die.”

Shelley said, “That hardly makes you a revolutionary, though.”

“No, merely an outsider, which is worse. To the
ton
, I am an upstart, a hanger-on, an oddity and a monster. The last time I attended a ball, they stared at me in horrified fascination, as if I were an exhibit in a raree-show.” Byron bit off his speech suddenly, turning away.

“His lordship does not demur his title enough to forswear his state,” muttered Polidori. Mary looked sharply at him. It wasn't that she disliked his opinions—far from it—but that he was so cowardly about them. He would only mutter them, not speak them aloud as Shelley. But then, she thought, what poor man has the luxury of free speech? Even as the thought crossed her mind, an image of her impoverished father came into her mind, steadfastly writing his revolutionary tracts despite government censure. She smiled at the thought.

“And what amuses my Dormouse?” said Shelley in her ear. He rattled the paper, holding it up as a screen between the two of them and the rest of the company, which was getting up a quarrel.

I love my father, and you, and all free thinkers, she wanted to say. What she said was, “Do something quickly, lest open war break out in Byron's best drawing room.”

“And I am a man of peace,” he said. He patted Mary's hand and opened the paper. “I say, Byron, shall we go for a sail on the night tides?”

Byron, interrupted in mid-tirade against Polidori, paused. He lifted an eyebrow. “You are careless of your life, Shiloh, but I value mine. Have you not heard the thunder all evening?”

“Oh, but how magnificent, to bare our breasts to the storm, to feel its full fury on our faces and know that Nature's most powerful forces are arrayed against us!” Shelley cried.

Byron shook his head. “Not even for the opportunity to see Mary's breast bared to the storm. There is too much danger of lightning.”

“Danger? I should say opportunity! Why, we can even advance the progress of science,” Shelley said.

Mary looked up in alarm.What had started as a diversion threatened to turn into something more dangerous. “Shelley—”

But Shelley shook the paper practically in Byron's face. “See here, where a fellow in Milan claims that all this un-summer-like weather—cold, storms, all of it—is the consequence of introducing Franklin's lightning rods into Europe! Can you imagine a thing so absurd!”

Polidori shrugged. “But it makes sense to me, Mr. Shelley. If I put up a lightning rod, am I not inviting lightning? Why be surprised if we experience more of it?”

“Hah. I perceive that you are unfamiliar with the works of Dr. Franklin. He actually discerned that the inclement summer of 1783 was caused by a volcanic eruption in Japan! It was not lightning that brought storms, nor the lightning rods that brought the lightning! The dust from the eruption entered the air and shielded us from the sun's rays.”

Polidori shook his head. “I do not wish to be impolite, but surely that is nonsense! How could a volcano in Japan affect weather in Boston?”

“It would have been in Philadelphia, actually. But do you not see the majesty of it? The magnificence of it? Byron, surely you can see how stupendous an idea it is, that Nature erupts on one side of the world and causes rain on the other side!”

Byron shrugged and picked up a poker to jab at the fire. “I am not so enamored of Dame Nature as to assert that she works so subtly. Come, we must have a game of whist or chess.”

But Shelley threw down the paper and strode up and down the room, his gaze on his feet and his hands in his hair. “I have it! Byron, it is splendid! We can use this very storm to disprove this Milano! Let us set up the Leyden jar and draw down some of the electrical fluid! It will show that Franklin's rods are not the cause of all this intemperance.”

Polidori looked alarmed. “What? There is no electricity in lightning! Lightning is fire, not an electrical fluid.”

“No, doctor, it is surely formed from the same substance as the etheric upper atmosphere,” Shelley said. “My teachers, my
books, they agree that the etheric fluid is surely converted by some subtle means into electrical fluid. I have myself felt it!”

Polidori and Byron both looked at him. “You have felt it?” Byron sounded curious.

“Oh, yes,” Shelley said. He stopped in front of Byron, his hands waving wildly. “When I was at Oxford, I used to conduct electrical researches. There is one device—I can build it again in no time!—whereby a wheel is turned, and electrical fluid is generated out of thin air! And by touching a rod, it may be conveyed to the person. I have used it to thrill my sisters, and on one occasion made my sister's long hair rise up into the air!”