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I could not hear Polidori’s muttered reply.
“Forgive me,” Byron said to him. “I am as unsocial as a wolf taken from the troop.” It seemed that they were not aware of my presence.
“You seem convivial enough,” Polidori replied.
“I do my best to conceal my feelings. I do not want them to be wasted on anyone other than myself.”
“You are very magnanimous.”
“I have my silent rages, though, when to the world I seem indifferent. You know that.”
“Oh, yes. I have witnessed your contortions. You go a very bright red. But some of your rages, my lord, are not so silent. Do you recall that evening in the Haymarket, when you struck that man down?”
“My dear Polidori, I always have screams and insults at my command. Did you know that I can cry at will? Watch. I will show you.” There was a silence for a few seconds.
“Bravo,” Polidori cried out. “They look like the genuine thing.”
“They are the genuine thing. I just need a reason for them.”
I did not catch the next few words between them: I think that Byron had gone over to a side-table and poured more coffee. When he came back he must have been standing, for his voice became more distinct. “You know, when I was a child, I could not bear to read out loud any poetry without disgust. Now I am unaccountably attached to the habit.”
“As long as it is your own poetry.”
“No. Not necessarily. Tell me who wrote this.” Then his voice changed to one richer and more melodious:
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
“ Milton!” I called out from behind the screen.
“What? Are you here?”
“Yes. Paradise Lost.”
LATER THAT MORNING WE set sail. Mary had expressed a desire to join us, professing herself quite well; so there were five travellers on board the Alastor, as he had named her. The chateau was some three miles distant, along the eastern shore, and as we sailed slowly towards it in a fitful breeze I recalled my childhood wanderings in the same lakeland region. Many times I had walked among the pines, or laid myself down in the scrub, in an ecstasy of communion with the world. Those happy far-off days now came before me again. “There it stands,” I said to them, leaning on the prow and pointing towards the shore. It was an old fortress of darkened stone, rising above an escarpment by the lake; there had been some upheaval here, in earlier ages of the earth, for the bank at this point was made up of rocks and boulders long since deposited. “Look at the loneliness of it,” Bysshe said.
“It will be a damned hard job to secure our mooring.” Byron stood by the prow, with the rope in his hands. “I can get no purchase on these rocks.”
“There is a landing bay there,” Polidori said. “By that outcrop of stone.”
Within a few minutes we were standing on the shore. There was a path leading from the landing stage and climbing upward to the chateau itself: I went on ahead, to introduce the party to the present residents. When I knocked, the door was opened by a young man of no very prepossessing appearance; he had a weak left eye, and the purple stain of a birthmark on his left cheek. Assuredly, one side had let down the other. I introduced myself as one of a party of travellers, among whom was a famous English lord of great family. My lord had expressed an interest in visiting the fortress. Would it be possible for our party to be admitted? He replied in French that he and his wife were caretakers and that the owner, a German businessman, was away from home. I knew at once the language he would most easily understand. I brought out my purse and offered him a French louis, which he most gratefully accepted. By this time the others had reached the door.
The young man led us into the master’s quarters, as he called them, a suite of rooms on two floors from which the windows looked out upon the lake and the Jura mountains. “We have not come to see the views,” Byron said to me. “Will you ask him to take us to the dungeons?”
The caretaker had recognised the last word and, with a glance at Byron, he beckoned us to follow him down a stone staircase. There were two floors in the lower part of the fortress. On the higher of them were three cells, side by side, each of them with a narrow window carved out of the rock. They were in such a state of preservation that the leg-irons and manacles were still embedded in the walls. Shelley seemed ready to swoon, and Mary took his hand. “It has passed,” she said.
“No. It has not passed,” he replied. “The doom is still in the air.”
Byron had entered one of the cells and was carefully examining the leg-irons. “They are rusty. What do you think, Polidori? Caused by water or by blood?”
“A witches’ brew of both, I should think.”
“And here are marks in the floor,” I said, “where the chains scraped into the stone. Do you see these grooves?”
“They are the marks of woe.” Bysshe had gone over to the last cell, and was holding onto the bars with a keen half-tremulous and half-expectant look. “I am trying to summon them up,” he said to me as I walked over. “I am trying to find them.”
“They are long gone, Bysshe. Why should they wish to stay here? Of all places?”
“Where suffering is most intense, we will find traces of it.”
“I wonder who made up this jolly crew,” Byron was exclaiming to Polidori. “Poisoners? Heretics? It is all one now. The prisoners and the gaolers have all gone down to dust. And where are you going, Mary?”
“To the lower depths. There is another staircase here.”
I followed her down the narrow stone steps, which led into an enclosed space. There were no cells here, but I experienced an indescribable sense of menace and privation at the first sight of the stone walls and the stone floor. The caretaker came down behind us. “This was the place of execution,” he said to me in French. “Do you see that?” There was a blackened wooden beam ru
“And this?” she asked. “What is this?” She pointed to a wooden trapdoor in the middle of the floor.
“The waters of the lake were higher then,” the caretaker said to me.
“I think,” I told her, “that this was a sluice gate for the bodies of the condemned.”
“Alive or dead,” he said. “The living were bound with ropes.”
“He tells me that they were dropped into the water.”
“Then this is the condemned hold.” She looked at me steadily. “Abandon hope.”
“I think,” I replied, “that we should join the others.”
We climbed the stone staircase, to find Byron and Bysshe arguing over the proper name for the manacles that fastened the prisoners to the wall. “Gyve is a verb,” Bysshe was saying.
“It is a noun,” Byron replied. “They are called gyves.” He turned to Mary. “You have been in the lower reaches?”
“I feel as if I am sleepwalking,” she said. “Sleepwalking among the dead.”
“Then we must revive you. Why not retire with Frankenstein to the upper mansion? There will surely be wine for you.”
I asked the caretaker if we might rest in the living quarters, for a short while, and he willingly assented: no doubt he was anticipating another louis. He brought us two glasses of the sweet wine of the region, and we sat by a window overlooking the vineyards of the estate. “I ca
“Byron revels in it.”
“Oh, he has a passion for excitement. He would visit Hell itself, just for the sensation of being there.”
“He may have no choice in the matter.”
“I am surprised at you, Victor.”
“I am sorry. To speak of a friend in that way.”
“No. Not that. I did not know that you believed in Hell.”
“As far as I can see, Mary, Hell is all around us. We live in a fiery world.”