A Call to Arms

Elizabeth Hervey kept her journal indefatigably, certain that no one in her lifetime should read it but mindful that God knew her heart and, consequently, the truth of her entries. She took pleasure in her writing, and pride, too, for it allowed her the exercise of free thought as well as literary enterprise. However, the discovery that Shelley’s wife was an author, with work already published, had at first shaken her confidence. She felt somehow intimidated that not ten minutes’ walk from the Hervey lodgings sat a woman younger than her with far greater accomplishments. But Mary Shelley was a sick woman — of that, Elizabeth was certain. They had formed an attachment at once, rather as her brother had with Mary’s husband, but women’s matters perforce drew women into greater intimacy, and more quickly, than men. Elizabeth knew about sickness. She had seen a lifetime’s fill of it in the Warminster workhouse and, against her father’s will, in the hovels of the fencing crib that was Warminster Common. And she knew that Mary’s sickness was as much of the spirit as of the body. Mary had lost children (Elizabeth was not sure whether one or two), her infant son was far from well, and her husband had treated her with such indifference on occasions that Elizabeth wondered what love there might truly be between them. And then yesterday, while Shelley and Hervey rambled once more about the Terme and their womenfolk took tea together, Mary had told Elizabeth she was pregnant, that she had been so since February and had not yet told her husband.

This morning, after a breakfast of oranges and very sweet chocolate, Elizabeth sat at the open window of her sitting room, with its pleasant aspect on the garden slopes of the Pincio, and made her longest journal entry in a month. After recording her fears for Mary’s condition, she gave her opinion that her husband was, nevertheless, a very engaging man whose manners belie all that I had previously read or supposed, and whose regard for Matthew in his bereavement is evident and genuine, for they share something in this respect, I believe, though Matthew’s is infinitely more noble. Matthew for his part takes strength in their fellowship, and it is notable how freely he discourses on all manner of things that are novel and radical, for Mr Shelley is as eloquent in his speech in radical affairs as he is on the page, and he is very practised in the latter as we have known these several past years. It is a strange twist of fate that the two should meet and become intimates, and it could not have happened in England, where our relative positions would first have precluded it and then disallowed it. Perhaps it is one of the benefits of foreign travel, as is often said there are many, that one is propelled into intercourse with those whose society would otherwise be denied. Yet Matthew is far still from wholly sloughing off the melancholy, and I do so fear that our coming here will ultimately be to no purpose other than as a temporary amelioration.

Hervey knocked at the door. Elizabeth rose and went to it. ‘Ah, brother! Have you changed your mind? Are you not meeting Mr Shelley, then?’

‘Yes, but later. I came to see how you were. We hardly had an opportunity to speak yesterday.’

‘I am very well. You know it. Mary Shelley is engaging company.’

‘So you do not mind my spending so little time with you at present?’

‘I had not accounted it, Matthew. We are here on indefinite vacation, as you have said. Allow me to address these letters I wrote last evening, and then I shall be all attention.’

Hervey sat and contemplated his sister as she attended to her familial duties. Her defiant good spirits had been his support for so many years, unsung, unrecognized even, that he marvelled at her constancy. And not only that. Henrietta had been her companion long before she had been his. Elizabeth’s only companion. Her society since then had been the aged, the sick, the poor and the infirm. He, her brother, had shown scant regard for her bereavement. She held herself ready to assume whatever duties he asked of her in respect of his infant daughter, or indeed of himself. A brother had no right to expect such devotion, the more so when it went uncherished. ‘Shall we go to the opera tonight?’

Elizabeth turned. ‘Why, Matthew! You have not once suggested we go to the opera since we came here. I should like nothing more. Are the Shelleys to go too?’

‘I was not intending that we ask them.’

When Elizabeth showed surprise, her eyebrows arched so much that the eyes themselves seemed to grow larger. They had always been kind, but Hervey could also see they were eyes that might attract. And now that she had given up her ringlets, she ought to make men’s heads at least pause, if not quite turn — as indeed he had observed at Signora Dionigi’s conversazione. What suitors she had had in Wiltshire, truly, he was not sure, for in spite of his mother’s lamenting that Elizabeth had willed herself into her unmarried state, there was no objective evidence that there had been any actual proposals. One way or another, he had better have a care of his sister.

‘Matthew?’

‘Oh, I … I beg your pardon. I was quite preoccupied.’

‘I asked what is the opera this evening.’

‘That I don’t remember, save that the composer is Italian.’

Elizabeth frowned. ‘I had not imagined otherwise. But you are very good to me to commit yourself to an entertainment about which you know nothing.’

Hervey nodded. Perhaps he had made a beginning.

‘And now you shall spend the day climbing the ruins of the baths again?’

‘No, not today. I’m meeting Shelley in an hour, but then I intend visiting the English College. I don’t suppose he will agree to come with me.’

‘I have resolved to move from the Corso,’ Shelley announced.

Hervey sipped more of his cooling white wine, diluted and made frizzante by water from a sulphur spring near the city walls. ‘For what reason? I think your arrangements there are admirable.’

‘They are. But I confess to being out of sorts with the place ever since that business in the post office.’

Hervey sighed, and not without sympathy, although it had been the assault that had effected their introduction. ‘I still turn over in my mind what could so animate a man to strike another without warning. Was it really dislike of your philosophy? Does such a thing move rational men to common assault?’

It was Shelley’s turn to sigh. ‘The magistrate was not inclined to examine his mental state, so we cannot be sure. In England, you know, we were subject to such social hatred as was impossible to bear.’

Hervey shook his head. ‘You know that I dispute every bit of that part of your philosophy, yet I could never harry a man for it. Tolerance is the English virtue, is it not?’

Shelley smiled. ‘You and I are so very far separated, indeed, that I marvel we do sit here peaceably.’

‘I hope it would be so in England, too.’

Shelley’s expression changed to one of grim determination. ‘I shall never go back to England!’

Hervey looked shocked. ‘You must never say that! You cannot have so poor an opinion of your country.’

‘For as long as there’s a crowned head, I shall never set foot there!’

‘But—’

‘Nor a church established!’

‘There is no institution on earth that can claim to be without fault, Shelley!’

‘The Church of England is not so much without fault as without God! And certainly her religion is without Christ!’

Hervey frowned. ‘Now you are being … controversial.’

‘Am I? Am I indeed? You forget I was first at Eton and then at Oxford!’

Hervey prolonged his frown. ‘There is a little more to the world than those places, Shelley!’

‘I speak of institutions, and I count the Church in England no less corrupt than that here in Rome.’

Hervey would not respond. There seemed little point in addressing so vehement an opinion at the present.

‘You are a queer fellow, Hervey. You would call me a godless revolutionary, and yet you choose to hazard your soul in my company.’

‘I would call you more, but only to your face! But if you own to godlessness then the other sins are merely consequential.’

‘Christ alive! I half believe you mean it. What makes you so sure of your religion? You’ve had cause enough for a whole charterhouse to doubt it.’