Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land Read online

  Ali permitted himself to be taken—he offered no resistance. His head was high, tho’ his face was deathly pale. With painful care the tricorn remounted his little nag; his fellow directed some six or eight of the company to take up the corse—which with much reluctance they did, tying it like a shot roe-deer to a pole, and carrying it over their shoulders: and so they went from that place of death, a solemn cortege, the Laird bound in his ropes, the son bound in his, and by torchlight they wound their way downward. At the end of the path from the tower they parted, some to carry the great relict to lie in his Hall, there to be duly examined—mourned too, it may be, by his dogs at the least; others to go with the son to the town on the harbour below, where he would be clapped—he was let to know—in irons. When, after a walk of some length—the Moon now low over the black sea—they achieved the Town, it appeared that some had hurried on ahead, to wake the Magistrate: for that personage was at the doors to the Tolbooth—as the Scotch denominate their guardhouse, which here was the courthouse too.

  The doors were opened at the Magistrate’s command, and Ali was brought in; lights were lit that did not dispel the ancient gloom, and the Magistrate, taking from a serviceable and homely hook a shabby robe, which he donned, mounted the Bench, and looking with an air solemn and charged with grave responsibility upon all those gathered before him, demanded of the Officer his evidence. It was brief enough; that gentleman recounted how he had received intelligence of something afoot upon the hill; how he had gathered a force about him sufficient, as he calculated, to the occasion; how they had mounted the track, &c., &c., and there was the Laird laid by the feet, and the young Laird above him, armed. All eyes turned upon Ali.

  ‘You had intelligence?’ quoth the Magistrate.

  ‘I did, please your Honour. That a crame of dreadfullest wickedness was in process at that moment in the place denominated the Old Watchtower upon the hill of the forest.’

  ‘And your intelligence, as you judged it, was good?’

  ‘It was as good as gold, your Honour.’

  ‘I would beg to know,’ Ali now said—and the Magistrate, and the generality who looked in at the doors, stood shocked, as though they had not known him capable of human speech—‘I would beg to know, of your worships and honours, how it could be that I could conceive to perpetrate this deed, and at the same time, to send this—this—intelligence of it—to these Officers.’

  ‘Make not light of this matter, Sir!’ retorted the Magistrate. ‘You are here charged with a horrid parricide! It may be, Sir, that in the lands from which you have sprung, this amounts to no more than a misdemeanour—it may, for aught I know, be common—yet in this land it is very unnatural indeed—and will be treated with all due severity—I warrant you!—and punished to the full extent of the law!’

  ‘I have done nothing,’ Ali said, ‘and it shall be proven so.’ Thus spake he—and yet his voice trembled to say so.

  ‘Fifteen good men and true, and the King’s Bench, shall be the arbiter of that,’ said the Magistrate—for a Scotch jury is fifteen men, though south of the Cheviots it is thought that twelve suffice, being the number of the Apostles and not therefore to be exceeded; in the North, the more the merrier. The Magistrate lifted the curved ataghan which Ali had delivered up to his captors. ‘And if this not be a case prima facie I know not what may be.’

  ‘I would beg the return of my property,’ said Ali, and stood with as great a dignity as his bound arms would allow.

  ‘No, Sir, your weapon was material in a high crime, and thus will become a deodand to the King. Prove your innocence, and you may apply to him for it again.’ He let fall the sword, and summoned the officers. ‘Make fast the prisoner!’ he said. ‘Lock him up in yonder cell, and see that shackles be put upon his legs!’

  The two minions of the Law, the small and the tall, put hands upon him. ‘Wait,’ said Ali. ‘If there is to be a trial, I ask to be granted liberty till then.’

  ‘Liberty,’ pronounced the Magistrate, as though unfamiliar with the word, and considering what it might signify. ‘And into whose recognizance do you ask that this court release you?’

  ‘Why, into my own,’ Ali said. ‘You shall have my word of honour.’

  The Magistrate’s face betrayed what he thought of this offer, and after chewing on it for a moment as though he liked not the taste of it, he asked what other surety the accused could provide; to which Ali responded that his word ought certainly to be sufficient, but if it were not, he would provide what surety the court liked, in lands or bonds. Upon hearing this the Magistrate squeezed the podium from which he spoke, and glared down upon the hapless young man who stood unbowed before him. ‘If,’ said he, ‘this crime be proved upon ye, as I have nae doot it will be, then all your lands and goods will be forfeit, forasmuch as ye may not profit by a murder—the Law, I say, is clear upon the point. And thus if ever these lands and goods was truly yours, or you had any certain claim upon them—the which permit me to question—ye hae none such now to pledge.

  ‘And so bear him awa’,’ he concluded, ‘and let him think upon his deed, and upon the Law’s Majesty!’

  For the Law has undoubted Majesty—and that Majesty is not diminished when we observe the Law’s wig askew, or its waistcoat misbuttoned; nor in that we have seen the Law drunk at the Fair, or upon the public road; nor by our knowledge that the Law has profited, in a small way, from the traffic in Contraband so prevalent upon those rocky coasts: not diminished, when it has the power absolute, our guilt or its absence notwithstanding, to close an ironbound door upon us, and turn the key, and pocket it!

  NOTES FOR THE 2ND CHAPTER

  bastinado: In response to my inquiry, Mr John Cam Hobhouse, now Lord Broughton, who accompanied Byron on his youthful journeys, informed me that Byron’s account of this revolting and unlikely practice is indeed quite accurate, and reflects in detail a scene witnessed by himself and Lord Byron when in Turkey.

  a company of women: Mr Thomas Moore in his Life of the poet, prints a letter of Byron’s to his mother from Albania, in which he reports exactly this sight, of women breaking stone upon the public highway, treated as beasts of burden, and made to labour while their men enjoyed war & the chase. As but a very young man, he could censure it, but was unconscious enough then of injustice to note that this ‘is no great hardship in so delightful a climate’, a sentiment which the women themselves might be imagined to answer, and the author himself later to regret.

  indeed it could swim: Lord Byron is correct that horses can swim well, and will sometimes do so merely for delight. I know this of my own experience. After a long childhood illness which prevented me from riding, indeed from walking except with aids, when well again I became a passionate and perhaps even a reckless equestrienne, and more than once rode my favourite mount into the sea, to its evident enjoyment.

  Theseus’ bull: Reference is to the vengeful bull from the sea, summoned by the incest of Phædra with her adopted son. It is of course the son, Hippolytus, who is destroyed by the bull, and not Theseus—a rare slip for Ld. B., who was well versed in classical reference. I note it because I am not myself well versed, and am glad to have noticed this.

  Missologi: The Greek town of Missolonghi was where Lord Byron breathed his last, a martyr to the cause of Greek freedom. It is strange that he in his fiction should place his characters so close to this fateful place. There is a mystery in coincidence that, in centuries hence, may be reduced, by tools we as yet know not of, to mathematical description.

  From: “Smith”

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Question

  Hi. It’s Alexandra (your daughter). I have a question that I can’t think of anybody else to ask—I mean anybody else who might be able to answer. So is this you?

  PS I know it’s been a long time.

  From: [email protected]

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:Question

&nb
sp; Alexandra—

  How wonderful, how really wonderful to hear from you, after so long.

  People usually say “after so long” in order to reproach their correspondent; but I know that it’s me and not you who’s been so long in writing. I could give the usual excuses—that I didn’t know your address—that I’m goddamned busy so much of the time, and so far away from everything, etc. But of course I could have found your address—after all you found mine; I could even have asked your mother for it, though that would have meant first finding hers, which since you turned eighteen and my legal relations with her pretty much ceased, I haven’t kept track of; and of course I’m never too busy, not too busy to do what I want. Anyway now that I’ve begun again I’ll go on. That’s a promise.

  So yes this is me. Now what’s your question? And how are you, and how have you been?

  Love

  Lee

  PS What is strongwomanstory.org? I suppose I should know how to look for it on the Web, but so much time spent in places that often didn’t have phones or typewriters let alone computers and Internet connections has made me both shy and arrogant in the face of the World Wide anything.

  From: “Smith”

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE:Re:Question

  Okay—

  I know you’re very busy, and I don’t want to take up a lot of your time. The question is this. Did Lord Byron ever write a novel? I went online and to the library and it was hard to find out for sure. Like if he didn’t it would be proving a negative, or something. I mean it obviously wasn’t a big part of his work, or I would see it listed, right? I’ll explain why I need to know when I know. That sounds snotty, huh?

  To see the site I work for just put the URL—that’s strongwoman story.org—into the SEARCH box on Google or whatever you use. Or just in the address box up top and press ENTER. You don’t have to use http:// and all that. Then just CLICK on stuff; you won’t get hurt, or get sick; the worst that could happen is you’ll get lost, or bored.

  Alexandra

  From: [email protected]

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:RE:Re:Question

  Alexandra:

  Well—that worked—eventually. Congratulations, I think. You are the editor, I see by the credits; I don’t think I know what that means in Web terms. More like a film editor or more like a text editor? I looked at some of the pages. I admit I hadn’t ever heard of most of the women, which I guess is the point. The facsimiles of autograph writings were the best part. I couldn’t tell if looking at it all made me feel closer to you, or farther away.

  To your question. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve thought about Byron. I don’t have any reference works with me here. Pretty soon I’ll be heading on from this very isolated place with the rest of the crew for some R&R in Tokyo; there they have plenty of reference works in English (their libraries are full of them—as many as in the best American university libraries). But off the top of my head I cannot imagine what you’re referring to. Lord Byron never wrote a novel. He never even completed any stories in prose. His sometime friend Edward Trelawney urged him to write a novel, and Byron said that well he would have if Walter Scott hadn’t already written his, and that in any case a man shouldn’t write a novel until he was 40—an age which as you may know he never reached.

  On the other hand, he did of course begin one. It’s one of the most famous scenes in English literature. It was at the Villa Diodati that Byron rented in Geneva. Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Byron all sitting around on a dark and stormy night and Mary speaks up and says Let’s each write a ghost story! And they do. And Mary’s is Frankenstein. Shelley never got far with his, and the few pages that Byron began of a vampire novel he later handed to the other member of the party, a certain Dr. Polidori—who without Byron’s knowledge expanded the pages into a huge novel of his own—one of the first vampire novels in English—and published it anonymously, while letting everybody think it was by Byron. Polidori also named his main character, the vampire, after the main character in a spite novel by Caroline Lamb, who was one of Byron’s old lovers; the hero of her novel is a monster of wickedness who is recognizably based on Byron—you getting all this?—which nettled Byron no end—I mean Polidori’s behavior and Caroline’s too. Not no end, though, really: except for real slights to his honor, or real betrayals, Byron couldn’t hold a grudge; he ended by laughing it all off.

  I’m amazed that you’ve wandered into this old territory of mine. I remember that your mother’s first words to me—very nearly—were I never liked him. I’d just broken the ice with her at a faculty party—god how many years since I’ve entered one of those—and mentioned my Byron studies. I said Well, of course you don’t like him. You don’t know him. I may need to say the same to you—no?

  So I’d love to hear more, about why this question has come up—I’m guessing it has something to do with Ada—and more about you too, and I promise to answer any questions promptly, or send them on to a person who can, if I can actually remember who those people were—I keep up very few of the old academic contacts.

  I love you, Alex.

  Lee

  From: “Smith”

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Secret

  I don’t know if what I do should even be called “editor.” I got into this because I (almost) got a degree in History of Science, and I used to work on a project to publish all the correspondence of a scientific society of the 18th c., and so I learned to read a lot of old handwriting on bad photocopies. The people who funded the Strong Woman site in the first place aren’t really historians of science, or historians at all, and one of the ideas they had was instead of just taking letters and documents out of books, they’d go back to the originals in the archives, and retranscribe them—in case there had been errors, or suppressions, you know—and put up facsimiles, which was unnecessary really of course but actually in the end kind of cool, because you get to see the writings, and diagrams and equations and stuff they actually put down, and sometimes crossed out—I love when they cross things out—and crammed into margins, and some of them are obsessively neat and some of them are wild and messy.

  So I’m the one who finds and reads these letters and things, and I also learned the Web basics, and so I put it up too, and other stuff, and I write some of the commentaries. But there’s a team.

  Yes it’s something to do with Ada. I’m in England and I’m doing research on her for the site, to upgrade the biography and include some new things. Some new documents have been uncovered, and we are thinking about what they might be. One of the things is some pages of notes, by Ada, and the story of how she acquired the manuscript of a novel he wrote; she says she’s going to write notes for this novel too, and there they are. There’s no manuscript of a novel though—but there’s one page that might be from it. Only one page. If you take a phrase out of it and go search the online Byron texts you don’t find it (I’ve tried). So what is it and where did it go, if it was really an “it” at all. Any thoughts? I’m attaching the one page of text that’s turned up. I scanned it so you can look at it. It’s hard to read, but you can.

  The papers came to the site privately, and nobody wants publicity yet. So.

  Alexandra

  Attached: Onepage.doc

  man—no matter—I am myself just as ignorant of those vast lands in many ways, an ignorance I delight in, for I have done with the world I am not ignorant of. Perhaps we shall go to the undiscovered West, and down the Mississippi, as Lord Edward Fitzgerald did—the only pure hero I have ever known, or known of—and like him look even farther, to the South, to Darien, the Brazils, the Orinoco—I know not.

  And so farewell. I am not so foolish as to think America is a Physician, or a Priest—I know that all diseases are not cured there, nor all sins forgiven. And yet on this morning I feel as one who has nightlong i
n a dream struggled with an enemy, and has waked at last, to find his arms are empty

  From: [email protected]

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Page

  Alex—

  This is certainly striking, and I’m not really the one to ask, but you certainly ought to be wondering if it’s a forgery, especially considering the mysterious provenance you mention; discoveries like this usually are trumpeted to the world, and the subsequent publicity drives the price up—like the million-dollar trunkful of Melville letters and papers that was discovered in an old barn in the Berkshires or somewhere a few years ago. So the first thing to do is get it authenticated, and I’m certainly not the man for that. Certainly it seems impossible that the MS. of a Byron novel has been lying in an archive somewhere unnoticed.

  It is strange though. America. In the last years of his life, before the Greek adventure was decided on, Byron talked often of going to America: South America most often—he didn’t make a big distinction—and start a new life as a planter. George Washington was one of the few historical figures he admired without irony; but another was the Fitzgerald this page mentions.

  Could I get a look at the notes Ada wrote, if you scan them too? It doesn’t damage them to do that, does it? These are highly valuable papers, as I’m sure you’re aware, if they are what they seem to be. What if they really are? Well then wow. Are you going to go to the Lovelace archives and see if you can find out about this? It seems impossible that there’s an entire novel by Byron lying around somewhere in her papers that’s been overlooked, but we can hope.

  Now I have two (immediate) questions for you. One is: Why did you think of me when you needed this question answered? There are a lot more knowledgeable people around than me. The other question is why you call yourself “Smith” in the address line of your letters—is that just some Internet thing?