‘You know Vathek, my Lord?’
‘It is my Bible. You know the book, too?’ He looked at me appraisingly. ‘Do you know it well?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I painted the writer.’
Byron slapped his knees. With a flourish, he produced his own copy of Vathek from his pocket. He interrupted Hobhouse.
‘Damn me! She knew William Beckford! She even painted him.’ He turned to me. ‘When he was in Venice?’
I nodded.
Hobhouse asked, ‘Wasn’t that before lathek was published. I believe the first edition was in—’
I interrupted him. I did not want to think of the unimaginable stretch of time that had passed since those days. I said, ‘It certainly had not yet been published at that time. In fact, I believe I was the first person to hear the story. He read to me from the handwritten manuscript. He wanted me to paint him beside it.’
‘You heard Vathek in his own voice?’
I remember Byron’s flushed agitation when I said, ‘Yes.’ He all but touched me in his urgency to extract information from me now. He leant close to me, as if to read on my face memories I could not recount fast enough. With my every word his smile grew broader. He twitched with a schoolboy’s uncontainable excitement. I could see the questions crowding into his mouth.
The first one that came out was: ‘Is it true that he wrote it in just three days?’
‘Three nights, so he said, and he had the pallor of one who would abuse himself in that way.’
‘Carathis, and Alboufaki, and Nouronihar – they were all there, then?’
I assured him that they were. Byron quoted favourite passages by heart until we were both gasping with laughter. Another thought occurred to him. He asked me, ‘Did Beckford love Venice?’
‘Yes, he adored it, but it was painful for him.’ I told Byron and Hobhouse about the young Cornaro, and about my portrait of Beckford, and the poor reception it had received.
‘I would love to see that portrait. And to have been in Venice with Beckford, when he was young and beautiful. Damn me, I can picture you, painting him. I can see him posing, dreaming. He was a beautiful young man, I’m sure, wasn’t he?’
‘I am afraid not.’
‘But you made him so.’
‘I am afraid not.’
This was not what Byron wanted to hear. His lower lip jutted a little. I changed the subject. I asked him why he loved Vathek so much, and how he himself had come across it.
‘Ah, Madame Cecilia,’ he replied with a mock sigh, ‘that would be telling. Vathek really is the story of my life as a man.’
A light ticklesome rain had started to fall. Under the slender portico we drew a little closer together to avoid the straying droplets. The rain quickly settled into a delicate, regular thrum and sent soft moist breaths from the paving stones up towards our faces. I found my toes tapping inside my slippers in a sympathetic rhythm.
Byron settled back in the cushions, and started to talk. Again, he mimicked voices, mimed gestures. He talked without stopping. Occasionally Hobhouse looked up, startled, at the sound of certain names, and shook his head gently at Byron, who took no notice. Eventually the palace went to sleep around us. Even Hobhouse and Mouchar crept off, while Byron and I sat enclosed in his story. It was the early hours of the morning before Byron answered my question: ‘Why have you come to Albania?’ The answer, you see, was to be found in Vathek, and many other things beside. He was right: his history soon took a dark turning. I was astounded at Byron’s impudent acts, committed without a thought to the consequences, as if people who loved him were made of stone. I was disturbed at the way he laughed about it. If he has modelled himself upon Vathek then he must be pleased with his work, I thought.
But I was more horrified at the abuse Byron had received, and even more so at the way he now described it. I must admit that sometimes I myself laughed at the black humour of his account. It was a nervous laugh, the way we Venetians laugh at the grotesque gargoyles that loom out of the dark at the water’s edge. In the light of lamp, we smile at their mocking, brutish faces, but underneath our cloaks our hearts are beating like little birds. We have seen death, the grotesque humour of it. It is a joke against us.
So when Byron talked of himself, I saw the grinning gargoyles of Venice in front of my eyes. The deeds done against him were ugly, worse than ugly, but the fact that he could describe them as if they were a puppet show – that is what made me frightened of him. I remember thinking, Is this what he wants, to frighten me?
The story, like Vathek, started innocently enough.
Young Byron lived in Aberdeen with the smell of the sea in his nostrils. He dreamt of exotic voyages. That escape was as yet denied, so instead he became inseparable from his books, which took him worlds away from everyday life and away from his intolerable mother. He read while he ate, while he reposed. There was something about the sight of a book that fended off his mother. She would not scream at him if he was reading.
At first it was harmless. Byron read the histories of Rome and Greece and Turkey. He dreamt of a troop of Byron’s Blacks – a fearsome platoon in black uniforms, mounted upon black horses. These imaginary cavaliers would, he told me, ‘perform prodigies of valour’. Byron loved the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the great and eccentric traveller, who had lived in the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice (I nodded at this, but he did not notice) and in Constantinople. He also adored The Thousand and One Nights.
But most of all, Byron loved Vathek. He loved it all, the irascible temper and voluptuary excess of the eponymous hero, the malevolent flesh-eating mother, the fearsome camel, Alboufaki, the alluring Carbuncle of the Giamschid, and the grim living death endured by the pre-adamite sultans in the tragic Halls of Eblis. Byron spent hours absorbed in Beckford’s little book, repeating the phrases, imagining the charms of Nouronihar, Vathek’s lady-love, and the amiable stranglings performed by the mute grinning one eyed Negresses of Queen Carathis. Love and cruelty, satire and pleasure, it seemed to me, had become deliciously mixed in the little Byron’s head, as they had been in young Beckford’s.
‘Why can I not have a camel, Mama?’ was his constant refrain in those days, he told me. He refused to dignify his small dog with the name Alboufaki. Lady Byron’s reasonable demurs were met with a horrible stare. For Byron now practised to acquire Vathek’s incandescent glare, in which one eye would become so terrible that no one could behold it, and any wretch caught in it would faint and expire. This did not, in fact, happen, when little Byron unleashed it, but he frightened the chambermaids dreadfully.
Vathek yielded to more palpable experiences, though the book was never forgotten. At nine, Byron fell in love with his cousin, Mary Duff.
‘Really in love?’ I asked.
‘With all my heart.’ He opened his eyes wide and pressed one small hand upon his breast.
The passion was pure and child-like until Byron was seduced by his nurse, May Gray.
‘Seduced?’
‘Ravished.’
Nurse Gray put him to bed every night after beating him thoroughly for the day’s misdeeds. She did not spare his crippled leg. Indeed she beat it harder than the other one. She was probably the last woman Byron ever begged for mercy, he told me with an unfathomable smile. He re-enacted the scene for me, taking both roles. First he was the cringing little boy, the last sweet remnant of his innocent self.
‘Nurse Gray, please dinna hurt me!’
Then he became the stringy young woman with her staring eyes all askew and her hard hands all over him.
‘You have blasphemed against Our Lord in word and deed, you deserve no less. Look at ye! You are cloven in the foot like Black Beelzebub himself. Yer gimp foot is his sign.’
‘Dinna hit me there! I am bleeding, look. My nose is dripping with blood. I shall tell my mother.’
‘And d’ye think she will care? She will rejoice in her parlour to hear that Lucifer is being beaten out of ye at last. The more she hears ye cry, the more sh
e likes it. Look, in your drawers, at the wee Prince of Darkness who lurks there.’
Nurse Gray had struck him a blow that sent him sprawling on his bed. Then she reached into his drawers and took the small Devil himself in her hand. She was not gentle, but even so, the little pink agent of Satan began to stiffen and shrug off its tiny foreskin.
‘You see, the Devil!’ she shrieked. ‘Begone, Devil!’ She kneeled and the little Devil disappeared into her mouth.
The little boy lay upon the mattress, choking on the blood surging from his nose. As she straddled him and lifted her skirts, Nurse Gray delivered a fiery Bible lesson. She continued to beat him, flailing her arms, striking first one side of his head, and then the other. He could not see – some merciful dark membrane had descended over his eyes, like a cat’s. The little fiend was sucked up into a dark, hairy place. Perhaps it would never return? How would he make water again if he lived? He swallowed gulps of his blood and tried to breathe.
Byron told me that when he reached his first climax, he fainted, perhaps in ecstasy, perhaps in terror, perhaps in pain. Certainly, ever after, he said, hellfire and orgasm were confused in his brain, which was already teeming with Vathek-style eroticism. I asked him what had happened to Nurse Gray. The ululations of her own climax had brought the other servants running. When she had gone away, tied in a strange garment, I believe that she took with her any latent capacity for sexual tenderness that the bad Byron blood might have allowed him.
When Byron was ten years old, the Wicked Lord finally expired in Gibraltar. George Gordon, Lord Byron, became the sixth baron of Newstead. The first sign that the old Lord Byron was dead was a mass evacuation of the cockroaches from Newstead Abbey. The floor was black with departing insects. When the new little Lord Byron was told of his elevation to the peerhood, he ran to the mirror to see if there was any difference in his face.
Sadly, there was no difference in his leg. His mother wanted to make the new Lord Byron perfect. In proud silence he endured torturing treatments, wooden casts tightened to agony. Only once did he throw the hateful brace in a pond. To show weakness to his mother would be to fail. He would not do that.
Byron and his mother had taken possession of Newstead Abbey later that year. Infected by Vathek, he craved Gothic and grandeur. The ruined Abbey, the gargoyles crouching in the fountains and the vast haunted house all delighted him. But as the new century crept in, Lady Byron sent her son away to Harrow, which he described to me as a wondrous hot-bed of tantrums, masturbation and sodomy. Byron himself cultivated a ring of handsome stripling nobles. These were passionate, jealous relationships, especially with Lords Clare and Delawarr, the latter a sweet boy, almost too beautiful for his sex. Byron told me proudly that his fascinating influence was felt to be excessive by the headmaster, and at one point he was asked to leave the school.
But he could not bear to go back to his fat, bad-tempered, ridiculous mother. It was still a violent relationship. She would chase him around the house. When she had him pinned against the wall, when she seemed about to strike the fatal blow, Byron learnt to smile at her, full-lipped and charming, and say, ‘If you love me, you will show it now.’ Catherine would burst into tears. He had won.
He blamed her for his deformity for was he not crippled because she had muddled his birth, just as she muddled everything? He had attributed the withered leg to excessive and vain corseting during her pregnancy, and then some false delicacy in labour, that prevented him from making his full entrance to the world.
He had found another reason to hate her. His image of himself was plagued not just by lameness but by the unromantic plumpness he inherited from his mother, which reminded him hatefully of her when he looked in the mirror. At just five feet and eight inches, Byron weighed fourteen stone. With a drastic diet, and a regime of sweating inside seven waistcoats, he recreated himself as the ethereal Adonis I had first beheld that evening in the Pasha’s reception chamber. This was the beginning, I understood, of his continuous struggle to elevate his personal beauty above that of common humanity. Often he failed and flesh clung to him, ‘like damned tallow,’ he said, but he would always start again with the purgative teas and provisionless days.
At fifteen he fell in love again, this time with his Newstead neighbour Mary Chaworth, the descendant of the man whom the cockroach-loving Wicked Lord Byron had killed. (In her home, he imagined the ancestral portraits glaring at him.) It ended unhappily. Mary loved another and would not take him seriously. He heard her words repeated back to him: Do you think I should care anything for that lame boy?
The frail young god with the embarrassing mother was afraid of women in those distant days. He snorted with laughter as he told me how when he saw them he would count slowly under his breath to keep calm. There was only one woman who did not intimidate him – his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, the daughter of Mad Jack’s first marriage. Augusta, four years older than Byron, had been brought up separately. She was twenty when they met, a brief but warm encounter. They started a correspondence but it would be years before they saw each other again.
Byron arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1805 with his public persona more or less complete. He kept three horses, two menservants, a carriage and, eventually, a bear. Although he had one of the most sumptuous allowances at Cambridge, thanks to his mother’s parsimony at home, his debts mounted to epic proportions.
It was at Cambridge, Byron told me with studied carelessness, that he started to meet people. He mentioned John Edelston, a pale slender chorister two years younger than himself. In his second year at Cambridge, he published his first book of poetry, Hours of Idleness. This fact, more than the bear and other eccentricities, attracted interesting friends, like the estimable Hobhouse. But the book was pilloried. Byron was wounded by what he saw as the gratuitous venom of the reviews. He had comforted himself, thoroughly, he assured me, with laudanum and sensuality.
‘There was a great deal of very good chastity to be got cheaply at Cambridge in those days,’ he leered. He gambled little; he hated to lose money, he told me.
He took his seat in the House of Lords – for just a few minutes. I deduced that Byron felt humiliated and excluded by the formal proceedings. He would not think of taking it up as a regular pastime. A fortnight later, Byron published his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a fierce satire on those who had abused or neglected his earlier work. It was, he informed me, a raging success.
But he was feeling vulnerable. People, he told me with a little shark-like retraction of the lips, were jealous. Far too many stories, dangerous stories, were being spun. Malicious things were being said that could damage him rather than promote him. Somehow the story had got abroad about a wretched maid who had miscarried in a family hotel in Bond Street and another who had been paid off, having actually borne a child.
He felt trapped by his wretched circumstances. He could not live with his mother; he could not afford to live in style in London. There seemed no way to achieve the grandeur he had promised himself in this small island of England, where he was just a young backwater peer, becalmed and sinking in his debts. It was time to leave, he had decided.
His guardian, Hanson — ‘Old Spooney, slow as death’ – had struggled to come up with the money for a long trip abroad. Byron had flayed him with increasing urgency, hinting at scandal if the funds were not found quickly. But in the end it was his gambling friend Scrope Davies who had lent him the money to travel.
It was time to follow Beckford, time to live like Vathek.
‘And so you came to Albania?’ I asked, stretching my legs, which had been curled under me all this time. Some time, in the course of the story, the rain had stopped and was replaced by a clammy warmth. My hot, tired head was alive with information. I felt precious, the repository of an extraordinary confidence. I felt privileged beyond the gods, but also, in a strange way, tainted.
‘If only it had been that simple,’ he said.
The dawn was starting to lighten the stones of the
terrace. Byron suddenly rose.
‘I cannot stay here with you any longer, Cecilia.’
‘Why not?
‘You know too much now.’
‘Why did you choose to tell me?’
I felt an unaccustomed desperation. As Byron turned to leave me, I found it impossible to let him go. A compliment was due to me. I needed some acknowledgement of the intimacy we had shared. I was still at a loss, wondering if he had chosen me to hear his story because he wanted to become close to me. Was it because he was intent upon securing, at all costs, my rapt attention? Was it the truth, or had he, over-stimulated and insomniac after his journey, merely amused himself with a fanciful biography to beguile the time? He had asked me nothing more about myself. Obviously he did not yet know about Casanova. I wondered how long it would take him to find out. Hours, I thought.
In the meantime, I needed to know why I had received these extraordinary confessions. By laying his life at my feet in this unabashed way, he had in fact placed me in a strange, supplicatory position, which made me feel nauseated with anxiety. I was anxious because I already wanted, too much, to have been the subject of the storytelling style of seduction: the telling of such tales as weave invisible nets of desire around the listener, who finds herself longing to become not just a part of the story but its object. You see, whether it was idly or artfully done, it was well done. I was caught.
But Byron did not answer my question. He smiled, picked up his pistols and limped back into the palace. Two servants appeared from nowhere to escort him to his apartments, while I, transparent with exhaustion and something more tormenting, crept back to mine, where I lay, with my eyes wide open, on the silken bed.
Chapter 4
El petegolo xe na spia senza paga.
The gossip is an unpaid spy.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I did not see Byron or Hobhouse the next morning, but the court was feverish with gossip about them. Everyone wanted to see Hobhouse’s dreadful hat and, more importantly, Byron’s beautiful face. It was as if an exquisite genie had been uncorked inside the palace and now floated through its corridors, convulsing its inhabitants.