A Call To Arms Page 3

  Signora Marianna Dionigi was no dilettante, however. Ageing she might be, but she was also a painter of some distinction, an antiquary of impressive learning, and therefore unlikely to be seduced by worthless flattery. She was tall, upright. Her face, to Hervey’s mind, was a little too farded, but her features were very fine. Her dress was distinctly Italian rather than French. Above all she had kind eyes. She took Elizabeth’s arm and introduced her to the room, first in French, then in English. Elizabeth’s shot silk was perhaps a little out of place among the dresses of the foreign ladies, but it did not matter greatly, for Hervey observed that she was as handsome in essentials as any in the room, and with expert assistance might outshine at least half of them.

  For a quarter of an hour before supper began, Shelley tried in vain to engage Hervey in conversation, to draw from him some response to a question of fact, or some opinion on this or that. Perhaps, he thought, it was that Hervey watched too keenly for his sister, or that the liveliness of the company made it difficult for him to be at ease. At any rate, Shelley saw enough not to persist, and, with the utmost politeness, left him to himself as they made for the dining room. There, Hervey was relieved to find a table from which the guests helped themselves, so that he was able to slip unnoticed into the library. He had no appetite, and he could pass an hour or so pleasurably there now Elizabeth was at her ease and engaged in conversation.

  But he was not long allowed his solitude, for Signora Dionigi was an attentive hostess, and she sought him out after a while. ‘May I bring you some wine, Mr Hervey?’ she asked, in French.

  Hervey had in his hand a book of engravings of Roman antiquities. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, signora. I did not wish to appear—’

  The signora smiled the more. ‘Mr Hervey, we do not follow a formula at these gatherings. I had rather you took your pleasure in a book if it were not to be had elsewhere.’

  ‘You are very kind, signora. I am not averse to company as a rule, but …’

  ‘It is your business alone, Mr Hervey. We Romans are not nearly so constrained by obligation.’

  Now Hervey smiled, gratified by her discernment. ‘Thank you, signora. And yes, I should like a little wine, if I may.’

  The signora despatched her attendant. ‘Have you known Mr Shelley long?’ she asked, now in English.

  ‘We met only this morning, signora.’

  ‘But you admire his poetry.’

  He hesitated. ‘I am very much afraid that I have never read any of it.’

  ‘Would you like to?’

  He had expected a tone of surprise, of disapproval even. The signora was indeed the most considerate of hostesses, as well as attentive. ‘I would of course, madam.’ So obliging had been her reply that he could not have said otherwise.

  She took a small volume from the drawer of a writing desk. ‘Here, Mr Hervey. You will see what a great poet is our friend Mr Shelley. Do not hurry: he will repay proper study. Join us only if you feel inclined. That should be the way with conversazione.’

  Hervey bowed in appreciation. He truly felt disinclined to the gaiety of the room next door, and the signora had sensed it. And he did wish to read a little of Shelley’s poetry, for he had a mind that it might tell him something of the man. Their time together that morning, although short, had endeared the poet to him to an uncommon degree.

  Half an hour passed, perhaps more, during which Hervey was interrupted only by a manservant bringing him champagne. And from the first moments with Alastor – ‘the demon spirit of solitude’ – he recognized that the poetry stood comparison to any he had read. Equal, certainly, to Coleridge and Keats in the pleasure the words themselves gave, and equal in some respects even to Milton in heroic invention. He did not know how much it truly told him of the man, however. It seemed, in fact, to speak most aptly to his own condition – and so well, that he found himself reading lines aloud, twice over:

  ‘… wildly he wandered on,

  ‘Day after day a weary waste of hours,

  ‘Bearing within his life the brooding care

  ‘That ever fed on its decaying flame.’

  And he marvelled at the poet’s economy in describing what he himself could barely admit.

  ‘And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair

  ‘Sered by the autumn of strange suffering

  ‘Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand

  ‘Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;’

  He shivered, almost, as he spoke this last.

  ‘Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone—’

  But it was Shelley himself who spoke the culminating lines:

  ‘As in a furnace burning secretly,

  ‘From his dark eyes alone.’

  Hervey looked up.

  ‘You approve of my philosophy, Captain Hervey?’ asked the poet, smiling with some pride.

  ‘I am no longer captain, as I explained this morning. And I should have to read much more before I were able to make any worthy remark.’ Even as he spoke, Hervey heard the stuffed shirt and inwardly he groaned.

  But Shelley seemed only diverted by his reserve, and by what he considered to be further evidence of sensibility. ‘Come with me tomorrow,’ he said, on an impulse. ‘To my favourite place in all of Rome.’

  Hervey was intrigued. ‘Where?’

  ‘The place I hide from the world, and work.’

  Shelley’s eagerness could compel. Indeed, Hervey did not imagine he had met a more compelling man. ‘I must make sure my sister will be content in my absence, but for myself I should say that I would deem it an honour.’

  That compelling way also took Hervey into the music room, where he saw that Elizabeth was very agreeably engaged and smiling. And, he told himself, if Elizabeth could be so diverted, then perhaps his previous withdrawal was needless as well as selfish.

  Next morning, Hervey left his lodgings in Via Babuino a little before a quarter to nine to walk by way of the Piazza di Spagna and Via Frattina to the Via del Corso. All along Frattina the sun was full in his eyes, and his progress was slow. As a rule he found Frattina an easier street to negotiate at this hour than Condotti or Borgognona, with their shops and stalls and hawkers; but even by this route he could advance but slowly this morning, so that he had to step out along the Corso to make his appointment on time. Only when he collided at full tilt with a ribbon-seller did it occur to him that he was not bound by any military obligation to be so exactly punctual. He caught but little of what the woman said, except that some of the ribbons, having fallen to the ground, were ruined. He stumbled in French and his few words of Italian to make amends, watched by a growing number of passers-by, and soon found himself with a good number of the fallen ribbons in exchange for more scudi than he supposed was strictly necessary. The immediate outcome was that he reached the Palazzo Verospi at ten minutes past nine, his hands and pockets full of brightly coloured streamers.

  Shelley greeted him with an eager smile and an extravagant handshake. ‘I was afeard you would come very precisely on your hour as a military man and find me ill-prepared, for I could not lay hands on my notebook. But now I have it and we may leave at once. What do you intend with those ribbons?’

  Hervey explained their provenance. ‘I thought I might take them for my sister. She was complaining of a want of colour in her wardrobe.’

  ‘How Italians do love ribbons!’ declared Shelley, taking a broad yellow and white one and draping it across his chest to resemble some papal order. ‘More so even than the French. I heard tell that Napoleon was a little too Italian in his love of them.’

  ‘Bonaparte?’ The imperial name was still unutterable to Hervey. ‘Perhaps; I could not safely say.’

  ‘I should not imagine you to be so easily seduced.’

  Hervey frowned.

  ‘You were very dull last night. Not a word of Waterloo did you utter within my hearing. Shall you be dull again today?’

  Hervey could not find it in him to bridle against the remark. ‘It
is not my intention.’

  ‘Good. Then let us be away.’

  ‘Perhaps I may leave some of these for your wife?’ said Hervey, taking another handful of ribbons from a pocket.

  Shelley seemed dismissive. ‘You may, but it will be some days before she is in humour to be gay.’

  Hervey laid them on a table, without remark. He had not been so self-absorbed at the signora’s not to have heard the speculation there. The Shelleys had had a turbulent time in Naples, it seemed, and the precise status of their travelling companion was evidently of some moment. ‘Where do we go?’

  ‘To the Baths of Caracalla. I’ll warrant you never saw such a place in your life.’

  The wager just permitted for Hervey to have seen them already, but in truth he had not yet explored them, seeing them only distantly and very indistinctly from the Palatine. It had been his intention to engage a guide and go there with Elizabeth in a day or so. He would not spoil Shelley’s enthusiasm in the sharing of a secret, however, and he therefore made no reply.

  Indeed, Hervey said little throughout their approach march, but it was not dullness that made him silent, only that the poet was a most zealous guide, and there was little to say beyond an appreciative word here or an interrogatory one there. They tramped the Forum, skirted the Colosseum, briefly traced the line of the ruined walls of Romulus, explored the Circus Maximus for a while, where Shelley was keen to hear Hervey’s opinion of the turning circles and speeds of the chariots that had once raced there, and then followed the stream called Acqua Crabra for half a mile until they reached the object of their excursion. They came on it curiously abruptly, though the baths were as massive as any structure in the city.

  ‘Now, Hervey, what think you? Tell me your thoughts ere I tell you mine!’

  Hervey’s immediate thoughts were of India. The jungled ruins of the great Terme of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – known as Caracalla, for he favoured that Gaulish mantle above the Roman toga – looked for all the world like the palace at Chintalpore overrun by the forest. He could therefore picture what must have been in this place, rather than seeing merely crumbling brick and tangled bines. ‘Nature is remorseless, I should say.’

  It was a prosaic response perhaps, but Shelley was heartened by it and expressed his approval freely. ‘Nature is the ultimate barbarian, Hervey. The Goths cut the aqueducts which gave the baths their spirit, and others stripped the place of its marble, but it is Nature that overwhelms it in the end – crushes and devours it like an enormous serpent. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely, though.’

  Hervey nodded slowly.

  ‘It thrills me more than I can say. Indeed, it is a scene which overpowers expression.’

  But Hervey was not so transported that he did not see the paradox. ‘If it overpowers expression, why does a poet seek inspiration here? Is there not other seclusion where you might summon the muse?’

  Shelley smiled. ‘Captain Hervey, you would have me believe your heart is of stone, or lead – no, not lead, for that is the soldier’s precious metal! Come; there’s a winding staircase here like a mountain path. We can reach the summit of these towers. And so wonderfully overgrown with myrtle is it that you will have no thoughts but of the wilderness.’ He rushed ahead.

  Hervey followed as if it were indeed a mountain path, having a care to place a hand at all times on something which might save him were the stones beneath his feet to expire after their sixteen long centuries of trampling. Shelley climbed carelessly, however, like a boy who knows the boughs of a great oak well and wishes to display that knowledge to another; except that Hervey was certain there was no such intention in his guide, for a man less affected in his fervour he could scarcely imagine.

  All about them was Nature reclaiming – a thick entanglement of myrtle and bay and white-flowering laurustinus, of wild fig and countless nameless plants which the four winds had sown. High above circled buzzards, as if patrolling the Via Appia, sentinels to the two friends’ solitude. And below them flapped hooded crows, which brought to Hervey’s mind a happy boyhood at Horningsham, its jackdaws and their prankish flight. There were indeed special places, and this he would readily concede was one.

  Shelley sat in an arch, a hundred feet and more above the ground, and took a black leather notebook from his pocket.

  ‘Shall you write?’ asked Hervey, wondering whether he should explore elsewhere in the ruins to give the poet his peace. ‘I mean, shall you compose something as we sit?’

  ‘No, not at once,’ replied Shelley, removing the seal from an ink bottle. ‘I shall sketch a little first. I like to compose the place when later I contemplate the lines.’

  Hervey settled on the other side of the arch and took out his own leather-bound volume, much smaller.

  Now Shelley was curious. ‘What is that?’

  ‘My prayer book.’

  ‘And what will you find there?’

  ‘I had it with me throughout the war.’

  ‘So you find consolation?’

  ‘I generally try to read the offices of a morning and evening.’

  ‘Do you, indeed? Are you bent on ordination?’

  Hervey simply smiled. ‘It has been a habit for so long …’

  Shelley made careful pen strokes, looking up occasionally at the arch. ‘Tell me something of yourself, Hervey. Who are your people?’

  Hervey placed the marker at the open page, though he did not close the book. ‘My father is Archdeacon of Sarum.’

  ‘Archdeacon of Sarum,’ said Shelley, not looking up this time. ‘That is a preferment which speaks volumes.’

  ‘Ordinarily, perhaps, but in my father’s case it does not. He is only very recently translated thus from an exceedingly poor country living. I beg you do not think us fattened by tithes and extensive glebe.’

  Shelley chuckled, still intent only upon the arch and his sketchbook. ‘I am glad he was not so poor that you could not come to Rome.’

  ‘That expense was my own,’ said Hervey, mildly insistent.

  ‘The spoils of war?’

  ‘Only in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Everything is but the manner of its speaking, Hervey.’

  ‘I was lately in India and was rewarded for service to one of its princes.’

  ‘India? A vast plundering-house for the Honourable Company!’

  Hervey would not be drawn.

  ‘And we know there is a sister of spirit and education,’ said Shelley, sketching still. ‘Who else?’

  ‘I had an older brother in holy orders. He died five years ago.’

  ‘I am sorry for it. How did he die?’

  Perhaps it was Shelley’s concentration on the pen strokes that made him so direct, Hervey supposed, but it startled him nevertheless. ‘He died of a winter ague in Oxford.’

  ‘Fellow of which college?’

  Hervey hesitated. ‘He was curate of a parish thereabouts. A poor one, I understand.’

  Shelley stopped his sketching momentarily to look across at his companion. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘He was a truly good man.’

  But Shelley would not allow the mood to be sombre beyond the moment. ‘And no female has secured this sensible military man and his fortune?’

  Coming so soon after mention of John Hervey, it was as if a spent ball had struck him square in the breast, knocking out the wind. It did not matter that he knew it must come at some time. ‘I was bereaved of my wife but a year ago.’

  Shelley looked up again, his expression horrified. ‘You too? My dear fellow, my dear dear fellow …’ He placed his hand on Hervey’s forearm, squeezing hard to impart his sympathy.

  Hervey knew of Shelley’s circumstances, for Elizabeth had told him. Harriet, Shelley’s estranged wife, had taken her own life scarcely two years before. The circumstances could not have been more different from his own, and yet he was not inclined to imagine another’s heartache was less than his. But although he might concede that, he was not yet inclined to entr
ust this man with his grief. He made no response.

  ‘Now I see the cause of last night’s melancholy, and the distance generally in your air. I pray you would tell me more of it.’

  Shelley had laid aside his book, and he now looked him in the eye with a directness which spoke of candour. Hervey saw in that instant that if he did not now trust his grief to this man, he might never do so to any. He closed his prayer book, took a deep figurative breath, and began his story. He told of the earliest days, of Henrietta in the schoolroom, of his first going on campaign, of his returns and his fumbling courtship, of their becoming wed, and their short-lived bliss, and of the fruit of that passionate union. He told how he had struggled for half a year with his conscience respecting a craven and vindictive commanding officer and the obligation of loyalty to a superior. And then he related the circumstances and manner of Henrietta’s dying: a cold, lonely affair – terrifying, knowing, above all needless. In the course of not one half of one hour, Hervey supposed he had spoken of more with this man than with any living soul.

  When he was finished, Shelley, who had sat throughout with arms clasped about his knees like a rapt schoolboy hearing some dorrying tale, gazed silently into Hervey’s eyes and saw what was left unsaid – yet which he knew must not remain so. ‘And your love’s cold grave is of your bringing, you believe.’

  ‘It is. I could own to no other’s accountability.’

  ‘Not even your craven commanding officer? His guilt seems amply proven.’

  ‘And that is the opinion of everyone. At his court martial he was censured for it, though there was no culpability in law. His destruction has given me no relief, though.’

  Shelley looked out across the Roman plain. Countless thousands must have died by the hand of others there, and might do so again: why was a single life worth repining over? ‘I would read you some fragments of verse I am composing when you have the inclination to hear them.’