In the aftermath of twenty-five years of French revolution, terror, and conquest that had nearly shattered all of Europe, there was only one rumor more frightful than rumors of war. And that was the rumor of internal insurrection, of a movement from within – one that might demand independence from all external overlords, from all imposed rule of any kind.
During these past two years, George Gordon, Lord Byron, had shared the same roof with his married Venetian mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, a girl half his age who’d been exiled from Venice, along with her brother, her cousin, and her father – but minus the cuckolded husband.
These were the notorious Gambas – the ‘Gambitti,’ as they were called in the popular press – highly placed members of the Carbonaria, the very group that had sworn eternal enmity to all forms of tyranny – though it had failed in its attempted coup, during last year’s Carnival, to drive the Austrian rulers from Northern Italy. Instead, the Gambas themselves had been exiled from three Italian cities in succession. And Byron had followed them to each new encampment.
This was the reason why Byron’s every contact, whether in person or in writing, was now being assiduously tracked by, and reported to, the official overlords of all three parts of Italy: the Austrian Habsburgs in the north, the Spanish Bourbons in the south, and the Vatican itself in the central Papal States.
Lord Byron was the secret capo of the Cacciatori Mericani – ‘The Americans,’ as the popular, populist branch of the underground society was known. He’d financed from his own private funds the weapons, shot, and powder of the recent abortive Carbonari insurrection – and more.
He’d supplied his friend Ali Pasha the new secret weapon to use in his rebellion against the Turks – the repeating rifle – which Byron had had designed for him in America.
And Byron was now funding the Hetairia ton Philikon, or Friendly Society – a secret group that supported the thrust to drive the Ottoman Turks from Greece.
Lord Byron was surely everything that the imperialist dragons had most cause to fear – an implacable foe of tyrants and their reigns. The powers understood that he was exactly the ferment such an insurrection wanted. And he was rich enough that, if necessary, he could also water it from his own well.
But in the past year all three of these nascent insurrections had been brutally repressed, severed at the jugular – sometimes literally. Indeed, after Ali Pasha’s death seven months ago, it was told, he’d been buried at two different locations: his body at Janina, his head at Constantinople. Seven months. Why had it taken him so long to see it? Not until this morning.
It was nearly seven months since Ali Pasha’s death, and still no word, no sign…At first, Byron had assumed there’d been a change in plan. After all, much had changed in the past two years while Ali was isolated at Janina. But the pasha had always vowed that if he were ever at risk, he would find Byron by any means, via his Secret Service – which was, after all, the vastest and most powerful such organization ever forged in history.
If this were to prove impossible, then in the pasha’s final hours on earth, he would destroy himself inside the great fortress of Demir Kule – along with his treasure, his followers, and even the beloved and beautiful Vasiliki – before letting anything fall prey to the Turks.
But now Ali Pasha was dead, and by all reports the fortress of Demir Kule had been seized intact. Despite Byron’s repeated attempts to discover any news of the fate of Vasiliki or the others who’d been taken to Constantinople, there was as yet no word. Nor had Byron received the object that was intended to be protected by himself and by the Carbonaria.
Percy’s book of poems seemed to hold the only clue. If Byron had read correctly, only half of his message was contained in the triangle he’d drawn. The other part was the poem itself: the passage Percy had marked in Keats’s ‘Fall of Hyperion.’ Putting those two clues together, the full message would read:
The old Solar God will be destroyed by a far more dangerous flame – an eternal flame.
If this was correct, then Byron had grasped at once that it was he himself who had most to fear. He must act, and quickly. For if Ali Pasha was dead without the promised bombast – if there was no word from survivors who’d been closest to him – Vasiliki, his advisers, his Secret Service, the Bektashi sheikhs – if Percy Shelley had been pursued from Byron’s Pisan palazzo and driven into that storm, to his death – all this could mean just one thing: Everyone believed that the chess piece had reached its appointed destination, that Byron had received it – everyone, that is, except whoever had escaped from Janina.
And what had become of the missing Black Queen?
Byron needed to get away and think, and to lay a plan before the others arrived aboard his ship with Percy’s ashes. It might already be too late.
Byron crumpled in his hand the page containing the message. Adopting his customary expression of detached disdain, he rose from his seat and limped painfully across the hot sands to where Trelawney still tended the fire. The dark, wild features of the ‘Cockney Corsair’ were blackened further by soot from the blaze, and with those flashing white teeth and trailing mustachios, the man appeared more than slightly mad. Byron shuddered as he tossed the crumpled paper indifferently into the flame. He made sure that the paper had caught and burned before turning to speak to the others.
‘Don’t repeat this farce with me,’ he said. ‘Let my carcass rot where it falls. This Pagan Paean to a dead poet, I confess, has quite undone me – I need a bit of a sea change, to cleanse my mental image of this horror.’
He went back to the shore – and with a quick nod toward Captain Roberts to confirm their prior agreement to meet afterward on the ship, Byron tossed his wide-brimmed hat aside, stripped off his shirt, and dove into the sea, cutting through the waves with strong and powerful strokes. The water was warm as blood already at mid-morning; the sun scalded ‘Alba’s’ fair skin. He knew it would be a short mile swim to the Bolivar – nothing to a man who’d already swum the Hellespont, but a long enough one that it would let him clear his mind to think. But though the rhythm of his strokes, the salt water lapping over his shoulders, helped to calm his agitation, his thoughts kept returning to one thing: No matter how he tried – and wildly improbable though it might seem – there was only one person Byron could think of to whom Percy Shelley’s message might refer, one individual who might hold the critical clue to the fate of Ali Pasha’s missing treasure. Byron himself had never met her, but her reputation preceded her.
She was Italian by birth – a wealthy widow. Beside her vast riches, Lord Byron knew that his own considerable fortune would pale by comparison. She had once been world renowned, though she now was living in semi-isolation here in Rome. But in her youth, it was said that she’d bravely fought on horseback with guns for the liberation of her land from foreign powers – just as Byron and the Charcoal Burners were essaying to do right now.
Despite this woman’s personal contributions to the cause of freedom, however, it was she who’d given birth to the world’s last Titan-like ‘solar god’ – as Keats had described it: Her son was an imperial tyrant whose short-lived reign had terrorized all of Europe, and then swiftly burned itself out. Like Percy Shelley. In the end, this woman’s son had succeeded only in replanting the virulent seed of monarchy back into the world in force. He’d died barely one year ago, in anguish and obscurity.
As Byron felt the sun burning into his naked skin, he strove harder through the teeming waters to reach his ship. If he was right, he knew he had little time to lose in order to set his plan in motion.
And it was no small irony to Byron that, had this son of the Roman widow lived, today, August 15, would have been his birthday – a day commemorated throughout Europe, in his behalf, those past fifteen years until his death.
The woman whom Lord