They could not rest until they knew what had happened. Making the two-hour journey on to Livorno by carriage, they dozed at an inn until the first sign of light, when they went in search of Trelawny [a friend of Shelley's] and Roberts. Captain Roberts was reassuring; he swore he had seen the Don Juan's top-sails being lowered some ten miles out. (Neither Mary nor Jane questioned how, even with the aid of a telescope, he had managed this miracle of vision when everybody agreed that there had been a storm haze over the sea. The added top-sails were weighing heavily on Roberts's conscience by this time.)
By nine on the same morning, the two women were on their way back to Lerici under Trelawny's escort. Mary, as the carriage rolled through the shallow water of the river Magra, had to struggle to hide her emotions from Jane: "I thought I should have gone into convulsions . . . looking down the river I saw the two great lights burning at the foce - A voice from within me seemed to cry aloud that is his grave." Five days later, on 18 July, Trelawny left to make further searches; Mary, astonishingly, was still hoping for good news: "I was very ill but as evening came on I said to Jane - `If anything had been found on the coast Trelawny would have returned to let us know. He has not returned so I hope'."
The bad news had already come, although Mary did not know it. Claire, instructed by Trelawny to open his post in his absence, had read a letter in which Daniel Roberts said that two bodies, not yet formally identified, had been found. Acting as messenger was beyond her; she wrote a pathetic note to Leigh Hunt on 19 July, asking for advice and ending, helplessly: "I know not what further to add, except that their case is desperate in every respect, and Death would be the greatest kindness to us all."
Claire was saved by Trelawny's return that evening. The corpses mentioned by Roberts had been those of Edward Elleker Williams and Charles Vivian; Trelawny himself had been shown a third body. He was able to identify Shelley only by the copy of Keats's poems which was still in the pocket of his jacket. By his own account, Trelawny did not need to say a word; Mary, however, remembered that he had been wonderfully graceful in breaking the news: "he launched forth into as it were an overflowing and eloquent praise of my divine Shelley - until I almost was happy that I was thus unhappy to be fed by the praise of him, and to dwell on the eulogy that his loss thus drew forth from his friend." In this almost ecstatic state, she found the strength to write to her father. "I have some of his friends about me who worship him - they all agree that he was an elementary being and that death does not apply to him," she wrote and hurried to forestall the sympathy Godwin might from pity feel obliged to profess. " . . . I am not however so desolate as you might think. He is ever with me, encouraging me to become wise and good, that I may be worthy to join him."
The following morning, the widows and Claire packed up their belongings and returned, with Trelawny accompanying them, to their former lodgings in Pisa. Tearfully, the arrangements for burial were discussed. Neither Mary nor Jane could contemplate leaving their husbands in the quicklime graves on the shore where the three bodies had been hastily buried to conform with the quarantine regulations. Jane wanted to take Edward's remains to England; Mary wanted Shelley to lie near their little son William in the Protestant cemetery at Rome.
This, in Mary's experience, was their friend's finest hour. At a time when she and Jane Williams were paralysed by their loss and by the horror of their situation, Trelawny took control. He ordered an iron rack on which to burn the bodies, gathered and laid the wood and thoughtfully produced frankincense to disguise the smell. Williams, identifiable only by a handkerchief and a boot, was dealt with on 15 August. The following day, Hunt and Byron drove down to the shore in a carriage to observe Shelley's last rites, in the company of officials and a fascinated group of young fishermen. The corpse, now putrid and stained blue by the lime, was dug up and placed on the iron grid while Trelawny improvised a suitably pagan prayer. Everybody agreed that the ceremony was entirely appropriate for a poet who had already begun to seem to them like one of the spirits of his poems, a transcendent, not quite human power. It was all of a piece with Shelley's transformation from bone to spirit that the flame ascending into a blue sky should have quivered with almost unearthly radiance. There were no chemists among the awed observers to tell Trelawny that quicklime, when heated to incandescence, produces a flame of exceptional luminosity.
This was the moment at which Trelawny converted himself into a keeper of the shrine, an earnest defender of the man he had known for less than six months but towards whom he now felt a veneration which would in time rival and threaten Mary's own dedicated love. The fault was partly hers. How could Trelawny not feel that a special link had been forged between himself and her husband when she allowed him, after supervising the cremation, to arrange and even help to dig the final burial plot in Rome? Writing to her on 27 April 1823, Trelawny reported on the laurels and cypresses he had planted around the grave and on the fact that, beside it, he had dug another, on Shelley's left "so that, when I die, there is only to lift up my coverlet and roll me into it". Mary might, he told her, have a place on the other side, "if you like".
Nothing, to a romantic mind like Trelawny's, could have carried more significance than his being charged with the care of Shelley's remains. Placing himself beside his friend in the cemetery was an act of uncommon assertiveness. Mary, who had left all arrangements to him, was in no position to challenge it.
Godwin, while Mary Wollstonecraft was being buried, had sat in James Marshall's rooms, concentrating all his thoughts on a letter of thanks to his friend Anthony Carlisle. Mary, while Hunt, Byron and Trelawny burnt the bodies on a scrubby, desolate stretch of shoreland, wrote the justly celebrated letter to Maria Gisborne from which come many of her words in this chapter. "They are now about this fearful office," she wrote on 15 August, the day on which Williams was cremated, "- and I live." Staying away, she spared herself little. Trelawny's horribly detailed account of the fish-eaten body of Williams - "dreadfully mutilated - both legs separating on our attempting to move it - the hands & one foot had been entirely eaten - with all the flesh of the face" - was copied into her journal; she could not, it seems, bring herself to write out Trelawny's description of the cremations.
Mary's torment had begun the moment she heard that Shelley's body had been found; nothing now could be undone. Contrition was useless; she was left to scald herself with the memory of every angry word she had said, every time she had turned away, every time she had expressed cynicism or doubt. What use was there in telling herself that she had been driven by her need to protect their child? Percy thrived; Shelley, who had grown healthy enough that summer to surprise young Thornton Hunt with his fleshy cheeks and increased girth, was dead. For comfort, she was forced to turn to the poem he had written in the summer of 1821. " `Adonais' is not Keats's it is his own elegy," she told Mrs Gisborne; reading it again, she drew some solace from the image of Shelley
" . . . made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above."
As his bones shrivelled to ashes on the shore, Mary's relationship with Shelley was already being judged. No precious relic was brought back for her from the funeral pyre. This was the age in which, without photographs to be fondly framed and cherished, fragments of the dead were invested with the value of talismans. Byron's choice, the skull, fell to pieces in the flames. Trelawny burned his hands in seizing a fragment of jawbone; Hunt took another. The heart, or the part of the remains which seemed most like a heart, had failed to burn, while exuding a viscous liquid. Trelawny snatched it out; Hunt requested and received this rather special relic of his friend. When Mary asked if she might have the heart herself, Hunt refused to surrender it. At some point shortly after this, Mary remembered them sitting together in a coach and quarrelling bitterly; it took a reproachful letter from Jane Williams to Hunt to compel a surrender. The heart was rediscovered after Mary Shelley's death. Wrapped in silk between the pages of "Adonais", it had lain inside her travelling-desk for almost thirty years.
Victoria White reviews Miranda Seymour's Mary Shelley in this week's books pages