The half-dozen Luccan soldiers attending them had exhumed the corpse from its temporary grave – hastily dug where the body had first washed up. The cadaver scarcely resembled a human being: The face had been picked clean by fish, and the putrefied flesh was stained a dark and ghastly indigo color. Identification had been made by the familiar short jacket with the small volume of poetry in the pocket.
Now they placed the body into the furnace cage, atop the dry balsam boughs and driftwood they’d gathered from the beach. Such cadres of soldiers were a necessary presence at any such exhumation, Byron had been informed, to ensure that the proper immolation procedures were followed against the yellow fever from the Americas that was now rampaging along the coast.
Byron watched as Trelawney poured the wine and salts and oil on the cadaver. The roaring flame leapt up like a biblical pillar of God into the stark morning sky. A single seagull circled high above the flaming column, and the men tried to chase it away with cries as they flapped their shirts into the air.
The heat of the sands, inflamed by the fire, made the atmosphere around Byron seem unreal – the salts had turned the flames strange, unearthly colors; even the air was tremulous and wavy. He felt truly ill. But for a reason known only to himself, he could not leave.
Byron stared into the flames, disgusted as the corpse burst open from the intensity of the heat and its brains, pressed against the red-hot bars of the iron cage, seethed and bubbled and boiled, as if in a cauldron. It could just as well be the carcass of a sheep, he thought. What a nauseating and degrading sight. His beloved friend’s earthly reality was vaporized into white-hot ash before his very eyes.
So this was death.
We are all dead now, in one way or another, Byron thought bitterly. But Percy Shelley had drunk enough of death’s dark passions to last a lifetime, hadn’t he?
These past six years, throughout all their peregrinations, the lives of the two famous poets were inextricably entangled. Beginning with their self-imposed exiles from England – which had been undertaken in the same month and year, if not for the same reasons – and throughout their residence in Switzerland. Then Venice, which Byron had quit over two years ago; and now his grand palazzo here in nearby Pisa, which Shelley had departed only hours before his death. They’d both been stalked by death – hunted and haunted, nearly sucked down themselves into the long, cruel vortex that had begun to spin in the wake of their individual escapes from Albion.
There was the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, six years ago, when Shelley ran off to the Continent with the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, now his wife. Then the suicide of Mary’s half sister, Fanny, who’d been left behind in London with their cruel stepmother when the lovers had escaped. This blow was followed by the death of Percy and Mary’s little son, William. And just last February, the death in Rome from consumption of Shelley’s friend and poetic idol, ‘Adonais’ – the young John Keats.
Byron himself was still reeling from the death, only months ago, of his five-year-old daughter, Allegra – his ‘natural’ child by Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire. A few weeks before Shelley’s death by drowning, he’d told Byron that he’d witnessed an apparition: Percy had imagined he’d seen Byron’s little dead daughter beckoning to him from the sea, beckoning him to join her beneath the waves. And now this ghastly end for poor Shelley himself:
First the death by water; then the death by fire.
Despite the suffocating heat, Byron felt a terrible chill as he replayed in his mind the scene of his friend’s last hours.
In the late afternoon of July 8, Shelley had departed Byron’s grand Palazzo Lanfranchi at Pisa and had raced to his small boat, the Ariel, moored just down the coast. Against all advice or common sense, with no warning to anyone, Shelley had cast off at once and had sailed into the darkening belly of a coming storm. Why? thought Byron. Unless he was being pursued. But by whom? And to what end?
Yet in hindsight, this seemed the only plausible explanation – as Byron had now understood for the first time, only this morning. Byron had suddenly seen, in a flash of comprehension, something he should have seen at once: Percy Shelley’s mysterious death by drowning was no accident. It had to do with something – or was sought by someone – aboard that ship. Byron now had no doubt that when the Ariel was raised from her watery grave, as she soon would be, they’d see that she had been rammed by a felucca or some other large craft, intent upon boarding her. But he also guessed that whatever had been sought had not been found.
For, as Byron had realized only this morning, Percy Shelley – a man who’d never believed in immortality – might have managed to send one last message from beyond the grave.
Byron turned toward the sea so that the others, preoccupied by the fire, would not notice when he surreptitiously fished from his wallet the thin volume that he’d managed to keep hold of: Shelley’s copy of John Keats’s last poems, published not long before Keats’s death in Rome.
This waterlogged book had been found on the body, just as Shelley had left it: shoved within the pocket of his short, ill-fitting schoolboy’s jacket. It was still turned open and marked at Shelley’s favorite poem by Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion,’ about the mythological battle between the Titans and those new gods, led by Zeus, who were soon to replace them. After the famous mythological battle, which every schoolboy knew, only Hyperion, the sun god and last of the Titans, still survives.
This was a poem that Byron had never much cared for – and that Keats himself hadn’t even liked enough to finish. But it seemed to Byron significant that Percy had taken pains to keep it on his person, even at his death. He had surely marked this one passage for a reason:
Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;
His flaming robes streamed out behind his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire…
On he flared…
At this premature end to a poem that was destined always to remain unfinished, the sun god seems to set himself aflame and whisk into oblivion in a ball of his own incandescence – rather like a phoenix. Rather like poor Percy, immolated there upon the pyre.
But most critical was something that none of the others seemed to have noticed when the book was found: At just the spot where Keats had laid down his pen, Shelley had taken his own up, and had carefully drawn a small mark at the side of the page – a kind of intaglio, with something printed inside. The ink was badly faded from the long exposure to the salt seawater, but Byron was sure he could still make it out by closer examination. That was why he had brought it here with him this morning.
Ripping the page loose from the book, Byron slipped the volume away again and carefully studied the small drawing his friend had made at the edge. Shelley had drawn a triangle, which enclosed three tiny circles or balls, each in a different colored ink.
Byron knew these colors well, for several reasons. First, they were his own – the colors of his matrilineal Scots family heraldry, which went back to before the time of the Norman Conquest. Though that was merely an accident of birth, it hadn’t helped his sojourn in Italy that Lord Byron had always displayed these colors proudly upon his enormous carriage, a vehicle patterned after that of the deposed, deceased emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. For as Byron should know better than anyone, in secret or in esoteric parlance these particular colors signified far more.
The three spheres that Shelley had drawn in the triangle were colored black, blue, and red. The black stood for coal, which signified ‘Faith.’ Blue symbolized smoke, meaning ‘Hope.’ And red was flame, for ‘Charity.’ Together, the three colors represented the life cycle of fire. And further – depicted as they were here, within a triangle, the universal symbol for ‘Fire’ – they stood for the