Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (41 page)

A month later Byron was as unrelenting as ever. Claire, convinced that she would never be allowed to see her daughter again, now asked Mary and Shelley to help her kidnap Allegra from the convent. They were horrified by the suggestion and by the danger to which Claire’s request exposed them. Their response, which was clearly co-ordinated in such a way as to compel Claire to recognise the folly of her idea, illustrates the extent to which the issue of Allegra’s future had begun to damage their relationship with Byron. Mary’s letter focused on the practical difficulties of taking Allegra from the convent without her father’s permission. High walls, she wrote, made it impossible to remove her without alerting the nuns, and Byron’s fortune made him a dangerous enemy:

What then would you do having A. on the outside of the convent walls? Would you go to America?  the money we have not, nor does this seem to be your idea. You probably wish to secrete yourself. But LB would use any means to find you out – and the story he might make up . . . with money at command – above all on the spot to put energy into every pursuit, would he not find you? If he did not he comes upon Shelley – he taxes him; Shelley must either own it or tell a lie. In either case he is open to be called on by LB to answer for his conduct – and a duel – I need not enter upon that topic, your own imagination may fill up the picture.
³¹

Mary’s depiction of Byron as a vengeful pursuer trampling on his enemies with whom Shelley would be compelled to duel was in marked contrast to the glowing accounts of
Cain
sent to Maria Gisborne before Christmas. Shelley shared his wife’s horror of the ‘thoughtless violence’ of Claire’s plans
³²
and insisted in a postscript to Mary’s letter that Byron’s virulent dislike of Claire hampered his ability to negotiate on her behalf. ‘Lord Byron is obstinate and
awake
about Allegra’ he reported. ‘The idea of contending with him in Italy, and defended by his enormous fortune, is vain.’
³³
By the end of March, Shelley and Mary were feeling suffocated by Byron’s presence in Pisa.  His wealth, his implacable resentment of Claire, his cynical, brilliant poetry and his dominance of the group they had created combined to make his company thoroughly oppressive. But the knowledge that the dependent Hunts were now inching their way towards Italy gave the Shelleys little room for manoeuvre. It was unthinkable that Hunt should arrive to find that the journal he had come to Italy to edit had already collapsed in a welter of acrimony over a five year old child.

Byron’s attitude to the Shelleys during this period is harder to divine. His surviving letters do not suggest he viewed them as negatively as their correspondence indicates, although Trelawny recalled that Byron felt a degree of ambivalence about their influence over their mutual friends. ‘I am for making a man of the world of you’, Byron is reported to have told him, adding, ‘they will mould you into a Frankenstein monster.’
³⁴
Trelawny recounted this conversation in his
Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
, the memoir he published in 1858. In some respects,
Recollections
is as unreliable a testimony as his fictional
Adventures of a Younger Son
, and its long accounts of conversations need to be treated with a good deal of caution. Nevertheless, Trelawny was skilled at evoking time and place, and his memoir gives some idea of the tensions which dominated the activities of the ‘Crew’ during the spring of 1822. He recalled, for example, looking for Shelley at Mary’s behest, and finding him in the woods, scribbling away under a tree with volumes of Shakespeare and Sophocles by his side:

He started up, snatched up his scattered books and papers, thrust them into his hat and jacket pockets, sighing, ‘Poor Mary!  her’s is a sad fate . . . she can’t bear solitude, nor I society – the quick coupled with the dead.’

Trelawny’s description then shifts to Mary, ‘her clear grey eyes and thoughtful brow expressing the love she could not speak. To stop Shelley’s self-reproaches, or to hide her own emotions, she began in a bantering tone, chiding and coaxing him.’
³⁵

Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
paints a picture
of an unfocused group, unsure of its future and its purpose. The Shelleys and the Williamses decided to spend the summer by the sea, in order to use the boat being built for Shelley in Livorno. Byron also had thoughts of retreating to the countryside for the summer, but it gradually became apparent that neither he nor Shelley wished to put themselves in the same place for a prolonged period. Shelley, Mary, Edward and Jane made various trips to the Bay of Lerici to look for suitable houses, but could find none that they liked. Meanwhile, the Corsair Crew continued in the routine established the winter before, riding out with Byron to shoot outside the city walls, and dining once a week at the Palazzo Lanfranchi. At one dinner Shelley and Byron made a bet that whoever came into their inheritance first would pay the other £1,000.  A few weeks later, Byron’s mother-in-law, Lady Noel, died, leaving him a substantial portion of her vast estate. But Byron did not pay Shelley the money he owed him, a failure which contributed to a further deterioration in Shelley’s opinion of his friend.

On 24 March the first of two events took place which would shake the seemingly calm co-existence of the group. Byron, Shelley, Pietro Gamba, Trelawny and John Taaffe rode out as usual to practise shooting at the farm. They were joined by Captain Hay, a Byronic acolyte who had arrived in Pisa earlier in the year. Mary and Teresa Guiccioli had watched the shooting from Teresa’s carriage, and were following the horsemen back into Pisa. When they were just outside the city walls an Italian dragoon by the name of Masi came up behind them at a gallop, and in his haste disrupted the English party, knocking Taaffe to the ground. Affronted by this, Shelley and the others gave chase, and there was an angry confrontation. In the ensuing confusion, Shelley’s face was cut by Masi’s sword and he was thrown from his horse, as was Captain Hay. Masi then disappeared back into the city, but was confronted shortly afterwards by Byron and his servants. Byron apparently intended to challenge him to a duel but, as a crowd gathered, one of his servants stabbed the dragoon in the back. Masi was carried away, believed by all who had seen his inert form to be at death’s door.

Edward’s diary contains a vivid description of the return of the Corsair Crew to the building in which he and the Shelleys had apartments. Trelawny raced ahead to tell him and Jane of the day’s events, so the Williamses knew something of the background when ‘Lord B. came in – the Countess [Teresa] fainting on his arm – S. sick from the blow – Lord B. and the young Count [Pietro Gamba] foaming with rage – Mrs S. looking philosophically upon this interesting scene – and Jane and I wondering what the Devil was to come next.’
³⁶
Teresa had hysterics, but luckily she had been taken home by the time Taaffe arrived with ‘a long face saying that the Dragoon could not live out the night’.
³⁷

The severity of Masi’s injuries put paid to any hope the group had that the fuss caused by their fracas would subside. The Pisan authorities were already unhappy with the presence of such prominent exiles as the Gambas in their midst: it was partly for this reason that Byron was refused permission to practise shooting within the city walls. Over the next few weeks the police took long statements from Mary, Teresa, Edward and the others, and Byron’s servants were arrested. Pisa hummed with gossip about the incident, and the group found themselves pointed at every time they stirred from their houses. In the end Masi recovered, but the episode transformed Pisa into an uncomfortable place for Byron, the Gambas and their friends. They were questioned continually and fell out over differences in their accounts. Particular animus was directed towards John Taaffe, whom the others felt had made cowardly reports to the police. The authorities took their revenge for the trouble caused by banishing Byron’s servant, Tita, from the city.

On 9 April, three weeks after the fight with Masi, Claire wrote once more to Mary about Allegra. Her wild kidnap plans had now given way to straightforward anxiety: ‘I fear she is sick,’
³⁸
she insisted. Four days after Claire wrote this letter Byron received news that Allegra was unwell. The information came from his banker in Ravenna, Pellegrino Ghigi, who was in charge of the little girl’s expenses and who, on hearing of her illness, travelled to the convent at Bagnacavallo to find her tucked up in a tiny bed, attended by three doctors and all the nuns. She had suffered multiple attacks of ‘little slow fevers’, and had been bled three times by a doctor who feared she was exhibiting the symptoms of tuberculosis. In fact, Allegra had contracted typhus, and on 20 April she died, ‘after a convulsive catarrhal attack’.
³⁹
She was five years old. At no stage during her brief illness do Byron and Teresa appear to have considered travelling to Ravenna to see her, and nor did they inform either Claire or Shelley of her condition.

It was Teresa who first heard the news from Bagnacavallo, and it was she who had to tell Byron of his daughter’s death. In her memoir of Byron she was defensive about his treatment of Allegra: ‘undoubtedly Lord Byron’s behaviour towards this little girl had always been that of an affectionate father; but owing to his abhorrence of undue sentimentality, his paternal love would not have been thought to be so profound.’
⁴⁰
Byron was similarly defensive in his communications with Shelley.  ‘I do not know that I have anything to reproach in my conduct’, he wrote, ‘and certainly nothing in my feelings and intentions towards the dead.’ But, he continued, the memory of Shelley’s representations about the unsuitability of leaving Allegra in Romagna vivid in his mind, ‘it is a moment when we are apt to think that, if this or that had been done, such event might have been prevented.’
⁴¹

Claire was the last person to be told of Allegra’s death.  Quite by chance, she was in Pisa when news reached the Shelleys of the catastrophe. They were frightened that she would hear what had happened by accident, and felt it was imperative that she should be far away from Byron before they broke the news. Plans for the summer therefore took on a new urgency. On 23 April – the same day that Teresa told Shelley what had happened – Mary and Claire departed for the Bay of Lerici in the company of Edward and Jane. In their haste to get Claire away from Pisa they left before securing lodgings and had to settle for a bleak house – the Casa Magni – perched right on the coast, at the foot of dark wooded hills. The Casa Magni did not have extensive living quarters and the Shelleys were obliged to share it with Edward and Jane, who could find no lodgings of their own. Mary later wrote that she hated the villa and the strange, desolate beauty of its surroundings. It was a difficult house to run: provisions were hard to find in the poverty-stricken villages nearby, and the Shelley and Williams servants occupied themselves in a never-ending turf war. The ground floor of the house was uninhabitable, so the Shelleys and the Williamses lived in cramped conditions on the first floor, which had a balcony overlooking the sea. Claire was unimpressed with the whole arrangement. She did not want to travel to the coast, and was put out that Shelley and Mary, having exiled her from their Pisan circle, now insisted that she accompany Mary to Lerici rather than return to the life she had made for herself in Florence. On 2 May, almost two weeks after Allegra’s death, the household at Casa Magni was settling into ‘a kind of disorderly order’,
⁴²
when Claire walked into a hushed conference in Jane’s room, convened to discuss how best to break the news to her. The same instincts which had led her to write to Mary of her fears for Allegra’s health led her to guess the purpose of their meeting.

Allegra’s death proved Claire right. Byron was an inattentive father; the convent’s marshy environment a disastrously unsafe place for a small child. But this was of little consolation. In the first agony of her grief she wrote one last letter to Byron, a murderous indictment of his negligence, in which she reminded him of her constant warnings about the dangers posed to Allegra’s health by the Romagna climate, and accused him of culpability in their daughter’s death. Byron was a great hoarder of correspondence, but he was sufficiently shocked by Claire’s accusations to send her letter to Shelley, and to deny the responsibility she attributed to him. Neither Claire nor Byron’s letters have survived, so we have to construct their contents from the drafts of earlier letters Claire planned to send to Byron, from her subsequent conviction that he killed her daughter, from diary entries she made before Allegra’s death, and from Shelley’s response to Byron’s protestations of his innocence. Claire wrote her letter, Shelley assured Byron, immediately after the first shock of the news. ‘I had no idea that her letter was written in that temper’, he continued, apologetically. ‘I think I need not assure you, that whatever mine or Mary’s ideas might have been respecting the system of education you intended to adopt, we sympathise too much in your loss, & appreciate too well your feelings, to have allowed such a letter to be sent to you had we suspected its contents.’
⁴³