The Stress of Her Regard

PROLOGUE: 1816

—Bring with you also … a new Sword cane …

(my last tumbled into this lake—)

—Lord Byron,

to John Cam Hobhouse, 23 June 1816

Until the squall struck, Lake Leman was so still that the two men talking in the bow of the open sailboat could safely set their wine glasses on the thwarts.

The boat’s wake stood like a ripple in glass on either side; it stretched to port far out across the lake, and on the starboard side slowly swept along the shore, and seemed in the late afternoon glare to extend right up the green foothills to move like a mirage across the craggy, snow-fretted face of the Dent d’Oche.

A servant was slumped on one of the seats reading a book, and the sailors had not had to correct their course for several minutes and appeared to be dozing, and when the two travellers’ conversation flagged, the breeze from shore brought the faint wind-chime melody of distant cowbells.

The man in the crook of the bow was staring ahead toward the east shore of the lake. Though he was only twenty-eight, his curly dark red hair was already shot with gray, and the pale skin around his eyes and mouth was scored with creases of ironic humor.

“That castle over there is Chillon,” he remarked to his younger companion, “where the Dukes of Savoy kept political prisoners in dungeons below the water level. Imagine climbing up to peer out of some barred window at all this.” He waved around at the remote white vastnesses of the Alps.

His friend pushed the fingers of one skinny hand through his thatch of fine blond hair and peered ahead. “It’s on a sort of peninsula, isn’t it? Mostly out in the lake? I imagine they’d be glad of all the surrounding water.”

Lord Byron stared at Percy Shelley, once again not sure what the young man meant. He had met him here in Switzerland less than a month ago and, though they had much in common, he didn’t feel that he knew him.

Both of them were voluntarily in exile from England. Byron had recently fled bankruptcy and a failed marriage and, though it was less well known, the scandal of having fathered a child by his half sister; four years earlier, with the publication of the long, largely autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he had become the nation’s most celebrated poet—but the society that had lionized him then reviled him now, and English tourists took delight in pointing him out when they caught glimpses of him on the streets, and the women frequently threw theatrical faints.

Shelley was far less famous, though his offenses against propriety sometimes appalled even Byron. Only twenty-four, he had already been expelled from Oxford for having written a pamphlet advocating atheism, had been disowned by his wealthy father, and had deserted his wife and two children in order to run away with the daughter of the radical London philosopher William Godwin. Godwin had not been pleased to see his daughter putting into all-too-real action his abstract arguments in favor of free love.

Byron was doubting that Shelley would really be “glad of the surrounding water.” The stone walls had to be leaky, and God knew what kinds of damp rot a man would be subject to in such a place. Was it naïveté that made Shelley say such things, or was it some spiritual, unworldly quality, such as made saints devote their lives to sitting on pillars in deserts?

And were his condemnations of religion and marriage sincere, or were they a coward’s devices to have his own way and not acknowledge blame? He certainly didn’t give much of an impression of courage.

Four nights ago Shelley and the two girls he was travelling with had visited Byron, and rainy weather had kept the party indoors. Byron was renting the Villa Diodati, a columned, vineyard-surrounded house in which Milton had been a guest two centuries earlier; and though the place seemed spacious when warm weather let guests explore the terraced gardens or lean on the railing of the wide veranda overlooking the lake, on that night an Alpine thunderstorm and a flooded ground floor had made it seem no roomier than a fisherman’s cottage.

Byron had been especially uncomfortable because Shelley had brought along not only Mary Godwin, but also her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who by a malign coincidence had been Byron’s last mistress before he fled London, and now seemed to be pregnant by him.

What with the storm clamoring beyond the window glass and the candles fluttering in the erratic drafts, the conversation had turned to ghosts and the supernatural—luckily, for it developed that Claire was easily frightened by such topics, and Byron was able to keep her wide-eyed with alarm, and silent except for an occasional horrified gasp.

Shelley was at least as credulous as Claire, but he was delighted with the stories of vampires and phantoms; and after Byron’s personal physician, a vain young man named Polidori, had told a story about a woman who’d been seen walking around with a plain skull for a head, Shelley had leaned forward and in a low voice told the company the reasons he and his now abandoned wife had fled Scotland four years earlier.

The narration consisted more of hints and atmospheric details than of any actual story, but Shelley’s obvious conviction—his long-fingered hands trembling in the candlelight and his big eyes glittering through the disordered halo of his curly hair—made even the sensible Mary Godwin cast an occasional uneasy glance at the rain-streaked windows.

It seemed that at about the same time that the Shelleys had arrived in Scotland, a young farm maid named Mary Jones had been found hacked to death with what the authorities guessed must have been sheep shears. “The culprit,” Shelley whispered, “was supposed to have been a giant, and the locals called it ‘the King of the Mountains.'”

“'It'?” wailed Claire.

Byron shot Shelley a look of gratitude, for he assumed that Shelley too was frightening Claire in order to keep her off the subject of her pregnancy; but the young man was at the moment entirely unaware of him. Byron realized that Shelley simply enjoyed scaring people.

Byron was still grateful.

“They captured a man,” Shelley went on, “one Thomas Edwards—and blamed the crime on him, and eventually hanged him … but I knew he was only a scapegoat. We—”

Polidori sat back in his chair and, in his usual nervously pugnacious way, quavered, “How did you know?”

Shelley frowned and began talking more rapidly, as if the conversation had suddenly become too personal: “Why, I—I knew through my researches—I’d been very ill the year before, in London, with hallucinations, and terrible pains in my side … uh, so I had lots of time for study. I was investigating electricity, the precession of the equinoxes … and the Old Testament, Genesis …” He shook his head impatiently, and Byron got the impression that, despite the apparent irrationality of the answer, the question had surprised some truth out of him. “At any rate,” Shelley continued, “on the twenty-sixth of February—that was a Friday—I knew to take a pair of loaded pistols to bed with me.”

Polidori opened his mouth to speak again, but Byron stopped him with a curt “Shut up.”

“Yes, Pollydolly,” said Mary, “do wait until the story’s over.”

Polidori sat back, pursing his lips.

“And,” said Shelley, “we weren’t in bed half an hour before I heard something downstairs. I went down to investigate, and saw a figure quitting the house through a window. It attacked me, and I managed to shoot it … in the shoulder.”

Byron frowned at Shelley’s poor marksmanship.

“And the thing reeled back and stood over me and said, ‘You would shoot me? By God I will be revenged! I will murder your wife. I will rape your sister.’ And then it fled.”

A pen and inkwell and paper lay on a table near his chair, and Shelley snatched up the pen, dipped it, and quickly sketched a figure. “This is what my assailant looked like,” he said, holding the paper near the candle.

Byron’s first thought was that the man couldn’t draw any better than a child. The figure he’d drawn was a monstrosity, a barrel-chested, keg-legged thing with hands like tree branches and a head like an African mask.

Claire couldn’t look at it, and even Polidori was clearly upset. “It—it’s not any kind of human figure at all!” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know, Polidori,” said Byron, squinting at the thing. “I think it’s a prototypical man. God originally made Adam out of clay, didn’t He? This fellow looks as if he were made out of a Sussex hillside.”

“You presume!” said Shelley, a little wildly. “How can you be certain this isn’t made of Adam’s rib?”

Byron grinned. “What, Eve is it? If Milton ever glimpsed that with his sightless eyes, I hope it wasn’t during his visit here—or if it was, that she isn’t around tonight.”

For the first time during the evening Shelley himself looked nervous. “No,” he said quickly, glancing out the window. “No, I doubt …” He let the sentence hang and sat back in his chair.

Belatedly afraid that all this Adam and Eve talk might lead the conversation into more domestic channels, Byron hastily stood up and crossed to a bookshelf and pulled down a small book. “Coleridge’s latest,” he said, returning to his chair. “There are three poems here, but I think ‘Christabel’ suits us best tonight.”

He began to read the poem aloud, and by the time he had read to the point when the girl Christabel brings the strange woman Geraldine home from the woods, he had everyone’s attention. Then in the poem Geraldine sinks down, “belike through pain,” when they reach the door into the castle of Christabel’s widowed father, and Christabel has to lift her up and carry her over the threshold. Shelley nodded. “There always has to be some token of invitation. They can’t enter without having been asked.”

“Did you ask the clay-woman into your house in Scotland?” asked Polidori.

“I didn’t have to,” replied Shelley with surprising bitterness. He turned away, toward the window. “My—someone else had invited it into my presence two decades previous.”

After a pause Byron resumed his reading, and recited Coleridge’s description of Geraldine exposing her withered breast as she disrobes for bed—

Behold! her bosom and half her side—

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

—And Shelley screamed and jackknifed up out of his chair and in three frantic strides was out of the room, knocking over a chair but managing to grab a lit candle as he blundered past the table.

Claire screamed too, and Polidori yelped and raised his hands like a cornered boxer, and Byron put down the book and glanced sharply at the window Shelley had been looking out of. Nothing was visible on the rain-lashed veranda.

“Go see if he’s well, Polidori,” Byron said.

The young doctor went into the next room for his bag, then followed Shelley. Byron refilled his wine glass and sat down, then looked at Mary with raised eyebrows.

She laughed nervously and then quoted Lady Macbeth: “'My lord is often thus, and hath been from his youth.'”

Byron grinned, a little haggardly. “No doubt ‘the fit is momentary; upon a thought he will again be well.'”

Mary finished the quote. “'If you much note him, you shall offend him and extend his passion.'”

Byron looked around the long room. “So where did he see ‘Banquo’s ghost'? I’m a fair noticer of spirits, but I didn’t see anything.” “He—” Mary began, then halted. “But look, here he is.”

Shelley had walked back into the room, looking both scared and sheepish. His face and hair were wet, indicating that Polidori had splashed water on him, and he reeked of ether. “It was … just a fancy that took momentary hold of me,” he said. “Like a waking nightmare. I’m sorry.”

“Something about …” began Polidori; Shelley shot him a warning look, but perhaps the young doctor didn’t notice, for he went on. “… about a woman with—you said—eyes in her breasts.”

Shelley’s squint of astonishment lasted only a moment, but Byron had noticed it; then Shelley had concealed it, and was nodding. “Right, that was it,” he agreed. “A hallucination, as I said.”

Byron was intrigued, but regard for his obviously ill-at-ease friend made him decide not to pursue whatever it was that Shelley had really said and Polidori had misunderstood.

He winked at Shelley and then changed the subject. “I really think we should each write a ghost story!” he said cheerfully. “Let’s see if we can’t do something with this mud-person who’s been following poor Shelley about.”

Everyone eventually managed to laugh.

A shadow passed over Chillon’s blunt towers and across the miles of lake between the grim edifice and the boat, and Byron shifted around in his seat by the bow to look north; a cloud had blotted half the sky since he had last scanned that side.

“It looks as if we’d better put in at St. Gingoux,” he said, pointing. His servant closed his book and tucked it away in a pocket.

Shelley stood up and leaned on the rail. “A storm, is it?”

“Best to assume so. I’ll wake the damned sailors—what’s wrong?” he demanded, for Shelley had leaped back from the rail and was scrabbling through the pile of their baggage.

“I need an eisener breche!” yelled Shelley—and a moment later he leaped to his feet with Byron’s sword cane in his fist. “Over your head, look out!”

Half thinking that Shelley had gone absolutely mad at last, Byron sprang up onto the yard-wide section of rail around the bowsprit and calculated how long a jump it would take to land him near the mast-hung haversack, which in addition to wine bottles contained two loaded pistols; but the urgency in Shelley’s voice made him nevertheless risk a quick look overhead.

The advancing cloud was knotted and lumpy, and one section of it looked very much like a naked woman rushing straight down out of the sky at the boat. Byron was about to laugh in relief and say something sarcastic to Shelley, but then he saw that the woman-form was not part of the distant cloud, or at least wasn’t anymore, but was a patch of vapor much smaller than he had at first thought—and much closer.

Then he met her furious gaze, and he sprang for the pistols.

The boat rocked as the cloud figure collided with it, and Shelley and the boatmen yelled; when Byron rolled up into a crouch with a pistol in his hand he saw Shelley swing the bared sword at the woman-shaped cloud, which hung now just above the rail, and though the blade stopped so abruptly that the top half of it snapped right off, the cloud seemed to recoil and lose some of its shape. There was blood on Shelley’s cheek and in his hair, and Byron aimed the pistol into the center of the cloud and pulled the trigger.

The sharp explosion of the charge set his ears ringing, but he could hear Shelley shout, “Good—lead conducts electricity well enough—silver or gold’s better!”

Shelley braced his tall, narrow frame against the rail, and with the broken sword aimed a real tree-felling stroke at the thing. The now turbulent cloud recoiled again, no longer resembling a woman at all. Shelley swung again, and the blade struck the wooden rail a glancing blow; Byron thought his friend had missed his target, but when a moment later Shelley hit the rail again, straight down this time, he realized that he had intended to chop free a wooden splinter.

Shelley let go of the broken sword—it tumbled over the side—and with his thin hands pried up the splinter. “Give me your other pistol!”

Byron dug it out of the fallen sack and tossed it to him. Shelley jammed the wooden splinter into the barrel and as Byron shouted at him to stop, aimed the weirdly bayonetted gun into the cloud and fired.

The cloud burst apart, with an acid smell like fresh-broken stone. Shelley slumped back onto the seat. After a moment he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and began blotting his bleeding forehead.

“You’re damned lucky,” was all Byron could think of to say. His heart was pounding, and he shoved his hands into his pockets so Shelley wouldn’t see them trembling. “Jam a gun barrel like that again and it’ll blow your hand off.”

“Necessary risk—wood’s about the worst conductor.” Shelley pushed himself back up and stared anxiously at the sky. “Have the boatmen get us in, fast.”

“What, you think we’re likely to see another?” Byron turned back to the ashen boatmen. “Get us in to shore—bougez nous dans le rivage plus près! Vite, very goddamn vite!”

Facing Shelley again, he forced himself to speak levelly. “What was that thing? And what … did … it … goddamn … want?”

Shelley had wiped the blood off, and now folded his handkerchief carefully and put it back in his pocket. He apparently had no scruples about being seen to tremble, but his eyes were steady as he met Byron’s glare. “It wanted the same thing the tourists in Geneva want, when they point me out to each other. A look at something perverse.” He waved to keep Byron silent. “As to what it was—you could call it a lamia. Where better to meet one than on Lake Leman?”

Byron stepped back, dispelling the mood of challenge. “I never thought about the name of this lake. A leman, a mistress.” He laughed unsteadily. “You’ve got her in a temper.”

Shelley relaxed too, and leaned on the rail. “It’s not the lake—the lake’s just named after her kind. Hell, the lake’s more an ally.”

The man at the tiller had tacked them more squarely into the offshore breeze, and the castle of Chillon swung around to the portside. The wine glasses had fallen and shattered when the cloud-thing impacted with the boat, so Byron picked up the bottle, pulled the cork with his teeth, and took a deep gulp. He passed it to Shelley and then asked, “So if wood’s the worst conductor, why did it work? You said—”

Shelley took a drink and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I think it has to be …an extreme, electrically. I think they’re like pond fish—equally vulnerable to either rapids or stagnation.” He grinned crookedly and had another pull at the wine. “Silver bullets and wooden stakes, right?”

“Good Christ, what are we talking about here? It sounds like vampires and werewolves.”

Shelley shrugged. “Not a … coincidence. Anyway, silver’s the best electrical conductor, and wood’s about the worst. Silver’s generally been too expensive for the kind of people who are credulous of the old stories, so they’ve traditionally had to make do with iron stakes. Eisener brechen, the stakes are called—it’s a very old term that means ‘iron gap,’ sort of, or ‘iron breach’ or ‘iron violation,’ though brechen can also refer to the refraction of light, or even to adultery. Evidently in some archaic context those things were all somewhat synonymous—odd thought, hm? In fact, it was an eisener breche that I was calling for at your house four nights ago. Polidori, the idiot, thought I had said ‘eyes in her breasts.'” Shelley laughed. “When I came to myself again, I had no choice but to go along with his foolish misunderstanding. Mary thought I had gone mad, but it was better than letting her know what I’d really said.”

“Why were you calling for one that night? Was this creature we saw today outside my window that night?”

“It, or one very like it.”

Byron started to say something, but paused, staring back north across the water. A sheenless wave of agitation was sweeping toward them. “The sail, desserrez la voile!” he yelled at the sailors; then, “Hang on to something,” he added tensely to Shelley.

The wind struck the boat like an avalanche, tearing the sail and heeling the boat over to starboard until the mast was almost horizontal, and water poured solidly in over the gunwales, splashing up explosively at the thwarts and the tiller. For several seconds it seemed that the boat would roll right over—while the shrill wind tore at their rail-clutching hands and lashed spray across their faces—but then, as reluctantly as a tree root tears up out of the soil when the tree is forced over, the mast came back up, and the half-foundered boat swung ponderously around on the choppy water. One of the boatmen yanked the tiller back and forth, but it just knocked loosely in its bracket; the rudder was broken. The winds were still chorusing through the rent sail and the shrouds, and had raised a surf that was crashing on the rocks of the shore a hundred yards away.

Byron took off his coat and began pulling at his boots. “Looks like we swim for it,” he yelled over the noise.

Shelley, gripping the port rail, shook his head. “I’ve never learned how.” His face was pale, but he looked determined and oddly happy.

“Christ! And you say the lake’s your ally? Never mind, get out of your coat—I’ll get us an oar to cling to, and if you don’t struggle, I think I can maneuver us around those rocks. Get—”

Shelley had to speak loudly to be heard, but his voice was calm—"I have no intention of being saved. You’ll have enough to do to save yourself.” He looked over the far rail at the humped rocks withstanding the battering of the surf, then looked back at Byron and smiled nervously through his tangled blond hair. “I don’t fear drowning—and if you give me an oar to cling to I promise you I’ll let go of it.”

Byron stared at him for a couple of seconds, then shrugged and waded aft, bracing himself on the rail, to where his servant and one of the sailors were frantically filling buckets from the pool sloshing around their thighs, and heaving the water over the side; the other boatman was pulling at the shrouds in an effort to get what was left of the sail usefully opposed to the wind. Byron grabbed two more of the emergency buckets and tossed one toward Shelley. “In that case bail as fast as you can, if you ever want to see Mary again.”

For a moment Shelley just held onto the rail; then his shoulders slumped, and he nodded; and though he snatched the floating bucket and scrambled to help, Byron thought he looked rueful and a little ashamed, like a man who finds his own willpower to be frailer than he had supposed.

For the next several minutes the four men worked furiously, sweating and gasping as they hauled up bucketful after bucketful of water and flung it back into the lake, and the man working the sail had, by swinging the boom way out to starboard, managed to get at least a faint surge of headway in spite of the loss of the rudder. And the wind was losing its fury.

Byron risked pausing for a moment. “I—was wrong in my—estimation of your courage,” he panted. “I apologize.”

“Quite all right,” Shelley gasped, stooping to refill his bucket. He dumped it over the gunwale and then collapsed on one of the benches. “I overestimated my grasp of science.” He coughed, rackingly enough to make Byron wonder if he was consumptive. “I recently eluded one of those creatures and left it behind in England—it’s practically impossible for them to cross water, and the English Channel is a nice quantity of that—but somehow it didn’t occur to me that I might run across more of them here … much less that they’d … know me.”

He hefted his bucket. “Switzerland especially,” he went on, “I had thought, would be free of them—the higher altitude—but I think now that what drew me here to the Alps is the same … is the recognition … that this is … I don’t know. Now I don’t think I could have fled to a more perilous place.” He dragged his bucket through the water, now shin deep, and then got to his feet and hoisted the bucket up onto the rail. Before dumping it he nodded around at the Alpine peaks ringing the lake. “They do call, though, don’t they?”

The laboring boat had rounded the point, and ahead they could see the beach of St. Gingoux, and people on the shore waving to them.

Byron poured out one more bucketful of water and then tossed the bucket aside. The cloud had passed, and looking south to the Rhône Valley he could see sunlight glittering on the distant peaks of the Dents du Midi. “Yes,” he said softly. “They do call. In a certain voice, which a certain sort of person can hear … not to his benefit, I believe.” He shook his head wearily. “I wonder who else is answering that particular siren song.”

Shelley smiled and, perhaps thinking of their recent emergency, quoted from the same play his wife and Byron had been quoting four days ago. “I suppose it’s many another who is ‘like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.'”

Byron blinked at him, once again not sure what to make of what he said. “'Many another'?” he said irritably. “You mean many others, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure,” said Shelley, still smiling faintly as he watched the shoreline grow steadily closer. “But no, I think I mean each like two spent swimmers.”

A rescue boat was being rowed out toward them across the sunny water, and already some of the sailors on it were whirling weighted rope-ends overhead in wide, whistling circles. The sailors on Byron’s boat scrambled to the bow and began clapping their hands to show their readiness to catch and moor the lines.