“A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom,” prompted her listener, evidently expecting that the title of the pamphlet, once seen, should be engraved upon her memory.
“I thought to myself that the writer of the pamphlet—you, that is— might be able to undertake the work of re-writing my husband’s sermons. Your prose was so direct, yet so passionate, and as well, you published anonymously. I thought you might not object to having your words printed under another man’s name.”
“Had I published the pamphlet under my own name, madam, I should have gone to prison for sedition. I distributed copies only to a few of my closest friends and associates. Mr. Longdill was very careless in leaving it about, even in his office.” The man began to laugh again. “He wanted a copy of everything I had written so that—in his words—’he might know the worst.’“
“You were imprudent to have published the work without the protection of someone powerful in the government. What is your name?” Mary suddenly thought to ask. “I think we never learnt each other’s names. I asked Mr. Longdill if he knew the author of the pamphlet, and he said, in fact, you were in the adjoining room!”
“Yes, I recall,” exclaimed the man. “I lived in Marlow at the time--hence, my pen name, ‘The Hermit of Marlow’-- I was in town that day, revising my reply to the Courts of Chancery, and Longdill came in and said a lady wanted to meet me, on a matter of some delicacy. You never told me your name, either.”
“True. What a difference it makes to be sitting upon an hillside in Tuscany, rather than in a solicitor’s office in the heart of London! There, I should not have told you my name for the world, not unless you had accepted my proposition. But what does it signify now.” And Mary gave her name of ‘Mary Crawford.’
“Mary!” exclaimed the man, shaking his head. “No, I cannot think of you as Mary. I always bestow special names on all my friends. If I am a faun, you must be a nymph. What say you to Egregia? Or Arethusa?”
“‘Mrs. Crawford’ will be perfectly adequate, I think.”
The man nodded agreeably, as though he had not noticed the rebuke in her voice. “My name is Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley.”
“How do you do, Mr. Shelley.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Crawford.”
“Percy Shelley... now, I recollect, I have seen your name before,” mused Mary. “In Chamonix. Mount Blanc. We—that is, my husband and I—came across your signature in the guest register.”
“And your husband, being the learned, pious, divine that he is, read the Greek inscription I added?”
Mary nodded. “I asked him what it meant, and he said, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley, Democrat, Lover of Mankind, Atheist.’ He said he had heard of you before, and that you had a fine disregard for public opinion, and must therefore have inured yourself to the consequences.”
Shelley brightened. “He had heard of me? From that insulting notice in the Quarterly Review or had he actually read something of my work?”
“Indeed, I did not ask him.”
Shelley’s smile faded again. “It matters not. I am beyond caring what the world says of me.”
He stirred in his seat and began ripping the heads off a patch of wild grass which grew at his side. “This much I do not seek to conceal from myself—I am an outcast from human society, my name is execrated by the powerful, and they have prejudiced the very beings I sought to help, against me.”
“Oh....” was all Mary could say. She had been on the point of laughing at him for his self-importance, then realised, with astonishment, that she had been thinking exactly the same thoughts about herself, hardly a moment before. She, too, was an outcast, unjustly shut out from the world.
Her strange companion came out of his brief reverie, shook his head and exclaimed, “—but, again, how extraordinary it is that we should first meet at old Longdill’s office, then you should follow me across the Channel—”
“I? Follow you? I think not,” protested Mary, but Shelley did not hear her.
“—and trace my wandering steps to Switzerland, along the same road, staying at the same lodgings, and now, here in this quiet village, to meet again? Am I your lodestar? Are we in the hands of Fate? Did I, in refusing to assist you, temporarily thwart an inescapable destiny?”
“You are presumptuous, Mr. Shelley!” Mary began, then reconsidered. “Well, that would certainly be the conventional, the properest thing, for me to say. Since you profess indifference to the opinion of the world, my remonstrances will count for little. I think it is not so very extraordinary that our paths should cross. It should not be a matter of astonishment that Englishmen abroad will be found in Paris, or at Mount Blanc and Lake Como. Even in this little village I have seen a number of familiar faces, travellers I recognise from Pisa and Florence.”
Shelley laughed. “Your countenance tells me you silently add— ‘though, thank heaven, I was under no necessity of acknowledging the acquaintance!’ You know, Mrs. Crawford, I first ventured across France when the ashes were still cooling from the late war. Nowadays, you cannot take ten steps in Europe without encountering an Englishman, can you? And the most ignorant, tiresome, venal, insufferable specimens of Englishmen—I can see you agree with me entirely!”
“To
