'Heart' by Mary Shelley

1822, Viareggio, Italy

In the gloaming, they kindled the fire to burn him. That man who washed up on the shore tangled with crab bellies and skeins of bladderwrack - the face, the hands, fleshless. They said he was my husband.

They made me stay in the carriage. I decided to spy on them.

"Ladies must not attend funerals." Jane sat there with my sleeping child in her arms, judging me.

I told her, "I love my husband as meat loves salt."

She scowled. My heart writhed under my ribs with the need to kiss his sleeping eyes and fuse our bodies together once more. Even as ashes. I leapt from the carriage and walked quietly towards the setting sun.

I came as far as this dune, where the marram grass pricked up in gold curtains I could peep through. I lay in the sand to watch them, soft grains spilling inside the neck of my dress, coating my palms and chin. Byron looked in my direction. I sank lower into the sand, catching sight of the body.

Where the fine, full lips and hazel eyes had been....

Nothing.

Between the mouldy collar and the strings of brown hair gaped a hole the tinge of calf’s liver. My body grew numb, cold. Light and heat seeped from the day.

The idea of holding him seemed like a ridiculous fantasy. What was left to kiss? I longed to be snug again in the carriage with Jane and the boy, but I couldn’t move.

Instead, I watched them work as if my eyes were sewn open.

They built the pyre from limbs of driftwood, talking amongst themselves in low voices, pausing sometimes to smoke or spit in the sea. Their eyes looked away from the body with its shirt and boots and trousers soaked and salted, sun-dried.

Trelawney knelt in the damp sand to cut the laces of the sodden boots with a pocket-knife, and saw at the leather. Byron stood back the while, his face cupped in his hands. I think he was weeping. With a grunt, Trelawney wrenched the left boot off and fell back in the sand. The exposed foot was long and flat, pale and bloated.

Not my husband’s.

You will think that grief and shock have made me lose my wits. But Percy had been my bedfellow since I was seventeen. I knew him head to toe. I had kissed the fine bones of his high-arched feet. The sea might have swollen them, but it could not have lengthened them, flattened them.

I felt hope that the storm which had swept him away from me two weeks before had washed him up safely somewhere else. Perhaps on some sunny Mediterranean island where he now coaxed a fire of his own into life and waited for a passing ship to bring him back to me.

We have always been passionate with each other, never companionable. He has had many other women and there have been times when I was driven to the brink of suicide thinking he would not come back. But he always has.

I remember the first night we stole to Old Saint Pancras Churchyard, hand in hand. He was married and I barely more than a child.

The churchyard gates were locked. Percy lifted me by the waist until my fingers grasped the top of the wall. He hoisted me up, then climbed over himself. The grass was long and wet and clasped my stockings. We wove between headstones, startling moths that fluttered up like dandelion seeds.

When we reached my mother’s grave I stretched out on the slab. Percy became my husband there, while I stared up at the full, yellow moon, my legs wound around his waist, my fingers grabbing his hair. After that, nothing could have torn us asunder, save death.

I was eighteen when I miscarried our first child. A misshapen abortion haunted me, hunted me to the shores of Lake Geneva where we stayed with Byron. I dreamt that the homunculus which had once lived inside me lived again, a huge and terrible man stalking the grounds of the house, desirous of my company. I wrote feverishly, desperate to purge my mind of the horror. The monster of my nightmares took on a voice. I published Frankenstein anonymously. People assumed the work was my husband's.

So I hid behind his superior glory, riding his coattails across Europe through infamy, adultery and debt. When we washed up here in Viareggio, the Villa Magni seemed a paradise to Percy, perched in grand isolation on the sea’s edge. He and Jane’s husband, Edward, went off each day, enjoying their perfect plaything for the summer. A sailing boat.

Heavy with child, I stayed in the villa with Jane. As the summer staggered on, the villa became a dungeon. One night in June, I awoke with a sharp pain in my belly and lit the lamp. The sheets were soaked in blood. Percy was gone. I lurched up, trailing drops of blood along the floor to Jane’s room. She and Percy lay in each other’s arms and seemed embarrassed when they awoke that I had found them so entangled.

I woke in a bathtub full of ice. He could not find a doctor. Jane cradled my head and told me I would live. If I had been able to muster more strength, I would have bitten her.

Life grew darker still. My little boy was a changeling and I could not stay in the room with him. I kept to my bed and Percy kept to Jane’s. He came to me drunk sometimes, saying strange things. That he had a double who looked exactly like him and followed him everywhere. That people were trying to kill him and one man had shot at him. That there was a plot afoot.

One day, he sailed down the coast to Livorno with Edward and Captain Roberts. He was talking to Byron and Hunt about the launch of a magazine. On July 7th, he wrote to say he was setting off for home the following day. A few days later, a letter arrived for Percy from Hunt.

pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious.

The paper fell from my hands. I trembled all over.

Jane and I rushed to Livorno and then to Pisa in the hope that our husbands were still alive.

Two weeks later, three bodies washed up here and Byron came to tell me he thought it was Percy, Edward and a boatboy, that they would burn them on the beach.

I said, "Why did you not arrange a proper funeral?"

He shook his head and turned from me.

Jane told me a rumour was flying abroad that Percy wasn’t dead, but had run away. I felt too weak to hit her.

Late that night, sitting up alone with a burning candle, I remembered how Percy said he met his dopplegänger walking on the beach. It looked like the shadow of Death. Did Death have large, flat feet?

On the beach, the flames licked up high and yellow round the body that the sea had sucked. The moon rose in a darkening sky. The deed was done. Byron turned from the fire, his fingers clawing his face. As the corpse charred, Trelawny reached into the fire and snatched something out.

A heart.

They will present it to me to keep in an oak box. A half burnt heart like an eclipsed moon. It will stay with me always.

The heart they say is my husband’s.

Mary Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel-writer, best known for her Gothic novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

from Wikipedia