content warning: references to miscarriages/stillbirths, child death

Polidori, Clairmont and Byron did not acknowledge her sitting there. Percy at least squeezed her hand, but the gesture had such a negligible effect on her that it might not have occurred at all. No amount of hand squeezing could melt the ice that had pervaded her since her child’s passing, but she squeezed his hand back. That seemed to placate him.

They were huddled around the fire that night, in a room composed more of shadows than light. The windows were misty with their breath and rain fell relentlessly outside. In later years, she would only have to close her eyes and remember the sound of countless tiny fingernails tapping on the window panes.

Byron was holding forth about the supernatural. Percy adored Byron and was quick on his heels with ripostes. Polidori was a doctor by trade, yet held his end of the conversation amicably. Claire Clairmont said nothing because she had nothing to say.

“In medical school we examined foetuses,” Polidori said excitedly.

Percy’s interested expression collapsed like a dead flower. He was endlessly fascinated by the theological implications of ruins, of memory, of the dead. Polidori, ever the realist, disagreed. The dead are gone. They cannot be brought back.

Undeterred, Polidori chattered on. “Notwithstanding the question of the soul, the process of gestation is quite remarkable. The womb promotes life, and is clearly an embodiment of the life-giving process—”

“I myself have carried many corpses,” said Mary.

Finally circumspect, Byron looked askance at the Shelleys. Clairmont simply drank her wine and watched.

“William will be fine,” Percy said softly, as though his breath might disturb the room.

A victim of the mould and the damp and the unceasing rain, their son had lain prone in their room for the last three days. The air was so cold that it was like breathing through gauze. Her own throat felt as though somebody had clenched a fist around it.

“Perhaps writing will provide a pleasant diversion from your troubles, madam,” Byron said, his words uncharacteristically thoughtful. She thought that perhaps Byron felt sorry for her, but when he canted his eyes maliciously and grinned at her husband, she knew then that Byron truly did not care. Far more important to him was the opportunity to bait Percy.

Even Polidori was grinning now. “A competition? Shall we perhaps expand on our conversation regarding the supernatural?”

She ignored them and stared through the window. The lake had thrown forth a blanket of mist, and Geneva slumbered like a watercolour painting beyond the cut glass.

If my son dies. She forced herself to think it, even as it caused her nails to stab her palms. That was how she thought of her body lately—a series of disconnected parts on pulleys and levers, a charnel house amalgamation of festering limbs, and organs that did not work as they should. For that had to be the cause, hadn’t it? Why else would all her children succumb to death, if there wasn’t something inside her that was deeply rotten. Deeply wrong.

If she could fashion herself a new body and be as buxom and young as the gormless Claire Clairmont, life may have been different. But she was aware that what she lacked in vitality she made up for in intelligence.

She also knew that it was this intelligence that doomed her. Percy had often commented thus. She thought too much, she worried too much, she predicted too much. “You are like the witches on the heath,” he had said. “Nothing but gloom and ominous portents.”

It was a portent, perhaps, that she glimpsed through the window. The rain cast a muted grey pallor on the darkness, making the figure appear little more than an indistinct black shadow. Only his face gleamed white as he looked up at her. The rain was falling on him, but he ignored it, standing motionless with his arms crossed over his chest. It was William, indisputably older. Even at a distance, her child’s resemblance to her father was uncanny.

She ran for the door. The figure darted ahead of her and plunged into the night. The wind lashed the rain against her legs, whistling through every gap it could find in her coat and splattering against her face.

She chased the figure through the night until she reached the shore and could see it no more. She did not know how long she stood sobbing. The cold wind hummed pensively, and once again she thought she saw something—a figure slipping through the long grass.

“No.” Her voice came as a moan. “You’re not here, you’re not—”

At the edge of the lake, she suddenly felt racked with pain. She no longer cared about anything except the empty space inside her that had formed when her children had...

Died.

She forced herself to think the word, to breathe life into the truth that haunted her. Following that truth was the roiling current of nerves, the anxiety that gripped her heart. She wished then that there was some way to safeguard her children against the world.

A hand touched her shoulder.

She turned and found herself face-to-face with her husband. He slowly wound his arms around her. His smile was brilliant.

“William woke up,” said Percy. “He’ll be alright, Mary.”

She looked out across the water. The trees, the rocks, the shoreline and the boats on the lake all wavered through a heavy mist of rain, blurring into the distant blue line where the water met the horizon. Somewhere, far away, some creature howled—its outcry long and plaintive against the black stillness of the night.

“I think,” the words tasted strange on her tongue, “I think I might have a story. For the competition.”

Percy smiled at her and took her hand. Together, they began the long walk back to the lake house.