A Fatal Likeness by Lynn Shepherd Page B

his bed at all hours of the night—that I pursued him, after that first encounter in London, and scrambled myself eight hundred miles across Europe with no other aim but to repeat it. And I cannot deny it. I wish only that I could have divined, like the Cumaean Sibyl, that the price of my few brief moments of happy passion was to be a lifetime of loss, and penitence, and sorrow. How could I have known, that night in Geneva, as I looked down from my room and saw his coach rolling slowly to the door, that my dark Fate had by then been sealed, and the seed already planted that would bear such beautiful, and yet such terrible fruit.
    Receiving no answer to my note, I made sure to be on the terrace in the morning, where I sat, as if absorbed in my book, watching all the while the movement of the boats on the lake. The water sparkled jewel-like in the sun and it seemed—then—a happy portent that the air was clear, and the white peak of Mont Blanc could be seen rising majestic above the purple mountains and the winnowing clouds. The air was fragrant with spring flowers, and the vineyards on the farther shore vivid with the young green of new leaves. So sweet a day! It was an hour or more before I caught sight of the vessel I sought. No other man could match his strength of profile, his proud and erect carriage, and even so far away I could not but recognise him. Polidori was attempting to bring them about, splashing ineffectually as the boat swung in the shallows, and showing himself thereby, at least to my eye, no better an oarsman than he was to prove a doctor. Though at that moment I blessed his ineptitude, for it gave me the few minutes I required to ensure that by the time they were nearing land, we—Shelley and Mary and I—were all walking, as if by happy accident, on the shore.
    So many have asked about that moment—that first encounter between the two finest Poets of the age—and I have read accounts of it that have made me smile, secretly, in the privacy of my heart. I confess now that the reality was but a poor match for the expectation; it was, in truth, a meeting characterised by awkwardness on all sides. Mary had not been told, then, of my secret, and knowing that he was deceiving her rendered Shelley distracted and ill-at-ease, and despite all his loud disdain for rank and money, he was quite overawed to find those detested qualities incarnated in such vigorous and celebrated flesh. And Byron did indeed draw every eye, standing there, up to his knees in the water, his deformed foot thereby concealed—as he was ever eager to do—and a red scarf tied turban-wise about his hair. I could see guests gathering on the hotel terrace and whispering behind their hands, and I guessed what they were saying—people of that sort love nothing more than to titillate themselves with gossip about subjects they profess to deplore, and Byron did not only live, as he boasted, a hundred-years’ life in the space of twenty-five, but supplied meat enough for a century’s scandal in half as many months.
    Poor Shelley, by contrast, always loathed all such impertinent public scrutiny. He writhed so inwardly under it that no doubt his ignorant observers considered him more than a little peculiar—it was not merely his strange clothes and wild hair that set them muttering, but the shrieks of demoniacal laughter he gave out whenever Byron said anything in the least entertaining—or, indeed, anything at all. As for His Lordship, I could see from the lift of his lip that he found it difficult to reconcile the dazzling works he had read, with an author who appeared little more than an ungainly youth. For my part, I said little, being content merely to wait and to watch, for Shelley’s encounter with Byron was not the only such first meeting I wished to observe: My lord had never till then been introduced to the celebrated ‘Mrs Shelley’; not, of course, that she had any right to be called so—not then. There she stood, with those