Ken Kesey, the tangential figure of Neal Cassady is ultimately the most memorable for me. And in the lives of Byron and Shelley, and then fifty years later the lives of the Rossetti family and the Pre-Raphaelites, it’s the enduring figure of Edward John Trelawny that lingers most in my mind.
Trelawny figured peripherally in my 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard, and, as an old man, in my newest novel, the title of which has as of this writing not yet been decided on. But really the most important adventure of Trelawny’s life took place in the years between the times those books cover – specifically in 1824 and 1825, in Greece.
Joe Stefko at Charnel House was the original publisher of The Stress of Her Regard, and for the twentieth anniversary of the press he asked me if I could write something further involving Shelley and Byron; and it turned out that Trelawny was the most intriguing person in the crowd.
In order to write this story I read Trelawny’s autobiography, Adventures of a Younger Son, which for more than a hundred years was taken as factual and has only recently been revealed to be entirely a romantic fiction; and the 1940 biography Trelawny by Margaret Armstrong, written before Trelawny’s deception was discovered; and the more recent and accuratebiographies, William St. Clair’s Trelawny, The Incurable Romancer, and David Crane’s Lord Byron’s Jackal.
Somebody once said that you become what you pretend to be, and Trelawny had always pretended to be a romantic character out of one of Byron’s swashbuckling tales. In the end I admire him.
–T P.
I
May 1825
“Though here no more Apollo haunts his Grot,
And thou, the Muses’ seat, art now their grave,
Some gentle Spirit still pervades the spot,
Sighs in the gale, keeps silence in the Cave …”
– Lord Byron
“Oh, thou Parnassus!”
– from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
Canto I, LXII
Somewhere ahead in the windy darkness lay the village of Tithorea, and south of that the pass through the foothills to the crossroads where, according to legend, Oedipus killed his father. Trelawny and his young wife would reach it at dawn, and then ride east, toward Athens, directly away from Delphi and Mount Parnassus.
But it was only midnight now, and they were still in the Velitza Gorge below Parnassus, guiding their horses down the pebbly dry bed of the Kakoreme by the intermittent moonlight. It was half an hour since they had left behind the smells of tobacco smoke and roasted pigeon as they had skirted wide through the oaks around the silent tents of Ghouras’s palikars at the Chapel of St. George, and now the night wind in Trelawny’s face smelled only of sage and clay, but he still listened for the sound of pursuing hoofbeats … or for stones clattering or grinding, or women’s voices singing atonally out in the night.
The only sound now, though, was the homely thump and knock of the horses’ hooves. He glanced to his right at Tersitza – huddled in her shaggy sheepskin cape, she seemed like a child rocking in the saddle, and Trelawny recalled Byron’s words:
And then – that little girl, your warlord’s sister?–she’ll be their prey, and change to one of them – supposing that you care about the child.
Byron had said it only three months after dying in Missolonghi last year, and at the time it had not been a particularly important point – but now Tersitza was Trelawny’s wife, and Trelawny was determined to get her free of her brother’s ambitions … the ambitions which until a few months ago had been Trelawny’s too. A man had to protect his wife.
A great man?
The intruding thought was so strong that Trelawny almost glanced around at the shadows among the twisted olive trees here to see who had whispered it; but he kept his eyes on Tersitza. He wished she would glance over at him, show him that she was still there, that she still had a face.
Percy Shelley hadn’t protected his wife – his first wife, at least, Harriet. He had abandoned her in England and run off to Switzerland to wed Mary Godwin, and Harriet had in fact died a year or two later, in the Serpentine River in Hyde Park. Shelley had been a great man, though, one of the immortal poets – a true king of Parnassus! – and such men couldn’t be bound by pedestrian moralities out of old holy books. Trelawny had been proud to call Shelley his friend, and had eventually overseen the poet’s cremation and burial.