Byron had left some words for me in the room. They were unwritten words. I heard them, even as my imagination heard the hooves of his horses in the distance.
It just went away, he said, that love I had for you.
Yes, it was quite wonderful for a while.
But no, it doesn’t matter now what I said then, because now it has gone, and it is as if it had never been.
I tried to argue with the words, but they were implacable. They fell on me, like blows.
What are you still there? Are you still talking about my love as if it were still important?
No, I am not interested in seeing where it went, and if it will come back. I am going away. It is your fault for driving me away with all this talk of my love for you that doesn’t exist.
What about your love? Well, that is your problem, isn’t it? And you know I cannot discuss emotional problems. Anyway, I have no emotions which are to do with you.
Women look ugly when they cry.
The room became hostile. The words continued to force their way into my ears.
Now go away. I don’t love you, so you can’t even make me feel uncomfortable.
I fled, spattering the marble floors with traceless footprints. For I had become what he had made of me: nothing.
Help me, I cried aloud to Casanova. Help me, I cried to his cat, who used to carry away my tears in his fragrant coat. I hungered for the cat’s fish-breath, his muzzle thrust into my hand, his little red rag of a tongue on my fingers and his paws kneading my belly. Help me, I cried to my work. Help me, I cried to the minarets of Tepelene. And days later, I was still begging, help me, mutely, to motherly women in the street; to men who looked like Casanova, even fleetingly; to any cat, however it fled me. Help me. A messenger came to the palace to tell us that the author of this pain now stood on the deck of a boat bound for Greece. Hiding in the marble bathhouse of the palace, I tried to rearrange my help me’s into a more effective prayer.
There are people languishing in prison who have not paid their jewellers’ accounts, but the promissory declarations and letters of love – no one ever punishes their violation! They go free, the perpetrators of those little murders, those capital offences against happiness, those crimes of lack of passion. There are many kinds of murder; the victim does not actually have to die. It kills not to know where someone is, or what is going on. To be denied information about the lover is to have the very air around you stoppered in the bottle where it grows stale and poisonous. That is another death. That was my death, in those days.
Why doesn’t one simply die when left by the person one loves? Insopportabile, we say in Italy: we cannot support pain like this. It would be kinder to be left to die. But I could not suffocate my grief. I could not breathe for the invisible kick to my stomach. But what drove me to madness was the recollection of times that were no more, and could not be, for there could be no other lover for me like Byron. I had committed a few moments of intimacy and understanding with Byron to memory, where they replayed themselves like an opium-taker’s dream, but more vividly.
I did not know anything about this kind of pain, for I had been loved properly. I caught sight of myself in the bathhouse mirror. My mouth looked like a doll’s, caught in a pout, rigid as china. I heard the door click shut behind me, and it felt like a confirmation. I was to be incarcerated with my grief. I could only contemplate another hour of it, if I could use that hour to destroy myself. I was indivisible from the pain. It already clung inside my body like a tumour.
Mouchar came to me, full of soft concerns. The ceremonial had vanished from his voice. He took my hand. ‘Cecilia, perhaps it is for the best. There are things about the English milord that you should perhaps know, or should perhaps never know. We have an expression here: “Still a goat, even if he flies.” Think on it.’
I screamed, ‘I’d rather be dead than be without him!’
But in the end I knew that I would not commit the double murder of myself and the child inside me.
I knew that I was pregnant within days of Byron’s departure, when he was still within reach of a messenger. Only once had I ventured to suggest the English Overcoats and he had dismissed the idea with a laugh. Why? I had secretly hoped that this refusal was a pledge for the future; I soon realised that it was careless contempt for the consequences of the present. Then, I too had become complicit in the carelessness. My little golden ball had remained inside its pouch.
The fact of my pregnancy was very different from the vagrant idea of it. I retched and vomited continuously and not just in the mornings. Mouchar came to me with a healer woman, who burned bitter herbs under my nose. The vomiting continued. I wondered how to tell him the truth. Then, suddenly understanding, he arrived in my room with a gnarled, kindly midwife, who opened a leather sack of fearsome instruments and spread them out upon the bed beside me. In his subtle way, Mouchar let me know I had a choice.
At the sight of the silver tools, an animal whimper of horror escaped from me. This was how we all knew that I had chosen to keep the baby. A look passed between me and the midwife, and she shrugged her shoulders. Your blood has spoken, she seemed to say. We must listen to the blood and consent to what it tells us. She gave me a smile that promised that she would be back to tend me in eight month’s time. In the meantime, the women of the palace would look after me.
Mouchar asked, ‘Shall I send a messenger to him now, Cecilia?’
I shook my head and my tears flew around the room. I knew how Byron had paid off the maid who bore his child. I had no desire to tell him about the baby. I had learnt how he transacted love and it was not for me, or my child. Mouchar unfurled his own silk hand-kerchief and held it to my nose. I longed to weep against his shoulder but I did not wish to frighten him away with the ferocity of my grief. I felt that if I received tenderness from a human being now I would become as wild as an animal and that I might hurt someone.
I would need some years before the broken things inside me stopped hurting when I moved. But I had art, and that would not hurt me. And by then I was starting to fall in love with the creature growing inside me. When you love with that power, you don’t need logic. As my belly grew, my thoughts diminished. I stopped working. I became incurious, passive. I rested from being myself, preparing to create a new life. I did not want my womb cancered with misery. So I taught myself to wonder about nothing, except how my baby would look.
I was dimly aware that trouble was afoot in Albania. Ali Pasha’s old enemies, Ibrahim Pasha and the Pasha of Sutari, encircled Tepelene, and the smell of blood was in the air. There was murder and cutting of throats in the mountains all around. The Pasha himself was with his men, in their encampments.
The only dramas that punctuated my day were the arrivals of merchants and envoys from Greece and Turkey, for they brought the stories which I fed on, of Byron and Hobhouse and their progress through the East. I sat for hours in the window-sill that I had once shared with Byron. I looked out on Albania, waiting for riders to come with news of my lover. It occurred to me, one long, idle day, that even if I did not paint, I was in the process of giving Byron a portrait of himself for immortality. This portrait of him would be made of his own flesh, and mine.
Part Three
Chapter 1
L’amor se cazza in tuti i busi.
Love inserts itself in every hole.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I know this all now because Love made me a spy. My obsession with Angelica Kauffman had taught me the honest ways and clean-handed work of research. But Love made me a shameful, shameless thief of information. Love made me a secret reader of other people’s letters. Love taught me to refine my French and to speak English well enough to read the scurrilous English newspapers. Love taught me to make friends of English clients who might have information about him, and who might be relied on to keep it flowing to me, even after they left Venice and returned to London. Love taught me to charm his friends, Hobhouse and Mary Shelley, when I met them later, and to forage
for their confidences about him. Love taught me to take a comment from Hobhouse or a comical phrase from his manservant Fletcher, add it to a sigh of Mary Shelley’s and stitch it to a line in Byron’s poetry or the draft of a note I stole from his desk. And from this, I could assemble a piece of Byron’s history in my mind in the same way that I could assemble someone’s life on canvas with only their face to give me clues.
But what kind of love is this, which is so greedy and so needy? Which feeds not on caresses but second-hand stories and gossip from the street? Which muses alone for quiet hours and acts stealthily in the night? It is an unrequited love, of course, a love that is not satisfied in the ways that demand satisfaction.
Hobhouse would tell me much later – and I believed him – that he for one had not wanted to abandon me at Tepelene, at least not furtively. ‘“Do the decent thing with Cecilia,” I said to Byron, “Let her know that we are leaving at least, man!”’ But Hobhouse had been rewarded with a Vathek-like stare.
‘Perhaps he felt guilty?’ I wondered. ‘Perhaps he regretted it? Was he miserable after he left Tepelene?’ I asked.
Hobhouse tried to be both tactful and honest but it was impossible to be both. He settled for silence, from which I knew the truth – that Byron had barely given me another thought, and that kindly, honest Hobhouse felt badly about it. All these years later, when everything is clearer to me, I marvel at the unshakeable decency of the man, and still try to understand why he allied himself to Byron. Was it just an instinct to not, for once, be boring? Was he in love with Byron like the rest of us? He too would one day know what it was to be abused and left by Byron. But on this occasion he had left with him.
What I know now, as a result of my spying, is this: sated with comfort, with palace life, and with me, Byron had renewed his desire for an intoxicating adventure. Perhaps he also feared the consequences of staying longer. I was not the only creature in Tepelene who clung to him. Nor was I the most demanding. Ali Pasha’s velvety attentions had become so enclosing as to be threatening. When he heard of Byron’s resolve, the Pasha, though disappointed to lose his beautiful young lord, offered him guides and an armed escort for the onward journey. All this had been negotiated, in the most extravagant and flourishing French, while I stood in my studio, cleaning my brushes two nights before.
On the morning of their departure the Pasha rose early to bid farewell to his guests, and the harems of both sexes were summoned, twittering under their veils, their jewels scintillating in the dawn light, to support their lord in his moment of loss. The little princesses were left alone in their beds, untended by their maids and midwives, who leant over the serried balconies to watch this strange leave-taking.
One of the midwives told me how Ali Pasha and Byron stood alone for a moment in the echoing courtyard. The light was as yet cold, but it gilded the bells on the horses and the chestnut curls of the English milord. It was a long time since Byron had seen the dawn but that day he had pressing reasons to be gone before the sun rose. The Pasha whispered something in his delicate ear. Byron pulled away and swallowed visibly. But he drew back to the Pasha and held out both his arms. Their last embrace seemed to be passionate to the point of pain. Breaking free, Byron limped to his horse.
All this happened while I lay sleeping, or trying to sleep in my room at the other side of the palace. While I soothed myself thinking that nothing worse could happen to me than to be abandoned by Byron for a night, the horses had been caparisoned, fowls slaughtered and boiled, sticky puddings wrapped in muslin and servant boys instructed how best to serve the English milord. While I rose and washed my face in rose-petal water at a marble bowl, on the other side of the palace Byron’s horse stood steaming at the mouth and nosing the mare who was to carry Hobhouse. When I returned to my bed and lay there, schooling myself to forgive him for his night’s absence, Byron was prancing out of the Pasha’s courtyard with a sheaf of my portraits in his saddlebag.
By the time I was awakened by the little princess with the news of Byron’s departure, the rest of the palace had gone back to bed, Ali Pasha with three of the harem boys and a dangerous pout. And when I lay on Byron’s bed, filling my mouth with his linen, he was already far away in the tufted olive-green hills.
However, I do now know every detail of what happened next, not only from the lips of Hobhouse himself but from his book. When the worthy Hobhouse wrote his Travels In Albania And Other Provinces Of Turkey, in 1809 & 1810, he had no idea how much speculation he saved me. For I would be able to read between his rather pedantic lines – how well I remembered his obsession with detail! – and see the unsavoury side of every genteel romp that he described in their onward journey. Free from the cloying love he had drawn to himself in Tepelene, Byron rushed on towards new stringless experiences like a schoolboy released from lessons.
From Albania they planned to go to Greece by sea but their vessel was driven ashore in a tempest. They thought they would perish. Hobhouse would describe the gnashing of the waves and the death rattle of the timbers, and Byron’s excitement. ‘He seemed not to care whether we lived or died. He just stood on the deck in the moonlight, while the waves crashed around him. He kept saying to me, “This is life, Hob, this is really it.”’
In the event, they were rescued by the Suliotes, barbarous subjects of the Pasha, and brought to their camp. ‘We sat around the night fire watching them roast a goat, dance, and sing. When Byron offered them a few coins, the chief answered him, to his delight, “I wish you to love me, not to pay me.”’
Hobhouse recalled, ‘Byron asked me how much he should love the hairy chief. I advised him to calm himself. We were not yet out of the Pasha’s territories.’
The sea had rejected them. They decided now to go by land to Greece, a magnificent but bandit-infested ride through the mountains. At last they reached the plains and stopped in a small town with the haunting name of Missolonghi. It cast the shadow of its church spire on the edge of a vast sea lake. They were in Greece, at last, and bound for the East. Byron was alive with excitement, Hobhouse told me. ‘He barely slept, would wake me at all hours and talk wildly of nothing at all.’
Athens, Cape Sunium, Smyrna, Constantinople … the journey turned even the sensible Hobhouse into a species of poet, travelling in the realm of his own senses as much as in this exotic new world. He described how they voyaged on amid the delicious perfumes of orange, citron and jasmine flowers. Windblown fragments of thyme and the sharp prickle of rosemary dilated their nostrils. The blood of the bougainvillaea dripped into their hair in the gardens of white-painted tavernas in the ports. Everything was alight with sensuality; at night, on the ship, they both heard unmistakable shufflings in neighbouring cabins. As they travelled along the Mediterranean coasts, they watched the sun drop into the arms of the olive trees every night. Merely to breathe was prodigiously fine poetry.
‘And was Byron writing poetry?’ I would ask Hobhouse one day. Love poetry? The poetry of love, regret and loss? I wondered silently.
‘No, he was being a poet. There is a difference, you know’.
I knew. Instead of poetry, Byron made graffiti. He was much given to it. Hobhouse told me how Byron inscribed his name on a column at the monastery of the Panagia at Delphi and on the temple of Cape Sunium. At school, he had left his mark on wood and stone. I remembered my palette, on which he had etched his name. And I had tried to think this a shy declaration of love! The day Byron left Albania I had thrown the palette from the palace walls. I was afraid that in my obsession I might make it a votive object. He had left me nothing else that was tangible to worship.
And I was afraid that it would make bad portraits, that the paint I scooped from its surface would be tainted with the pain which he had caused me.
If Byron thought about me at all during this period, it was not manifest. I received no letter, no message and no payment for my paintings. He was not, it seemed, even curious about what had happened to me. He knew nothing of my uncontainable pain, of my sorrowful days an
d darker nights while his child grew inside me.
In Athens, Byron and Hobhouse saw the Parthenon, and witnessed the looting of her stones by Lord Elgin. Hobhouse told me how the Greeks suffered to see their marbles carried away, some even refused to load the crates onto the boat that was to take them to England. ‘They believed that the statues contained spirits wailing in lament,’ he explained, laboriously. The Greek workmen stood rapt on the quay, listening to the cries of the stones sentenced to exile. Byron stood with them. I wonder if he thought of me, looking at those other portraits wrought of ancient marble. I doubt it.
Hobhouse stumbled over the next part of the story. In fact, I already knew by the time he told me about it. An Albanian merchant, self-important and trussed up with gossip, had brought tales of Byron to the Palace of Tepelene, where everyone, from the Pasha to the serving girls, was eager to hear about the progress of the beautiful English milord in his onward journey.
Even now I find it hard to tell it, because this is how I was replaced. I bear Byron’s next lover no ill-will, but I still burn for the fact that within weeks of leaving me, Byron fell in Greek love with a beautiful French boy, Nicolo Giraud. It seems that Nicolo’s firm, sweet charms dispelled any lingering wisps of Byron’s feelings for me. Nicolo, who was bilingual, completed the Italian lessons I had begun. By the time I next saw Byron we were able to talk entirely in my native tongue. This always gave me pain, for I was never able to forget how it had happened. I preferred to talk French or English with him.
No, Hobhouse would never talk to me of Nicolo, and perhaps he had reasons of his own for that too. I tried to question him later, and he begged me, ‘Do not ask, please, Cecilia.’