The Fire (23 page)

He held up an eggshell in front of my face.

‘And now the egg has hatched. But like that harvest gleaned from the mountain of Montglane, it has now risen like a phoenix from the ashes,’ he finished.

I let the mixed metaphor go by the wayside. ‘But why me?’ I repeated, though it took as much effort as I could muster to remain calm. This was too close to home.

‘Because, my dear firebird,’ said Rodo, ‘whether you want it or not, you yourself have risen – from that moment two weeks ago – along with that chess set. I know what is the date of your birthday, you see, and so do these others – October 4, exactly opposite your mother’s birthday
boum,
announcing her own.

‘That is what has placed you into this danger. That is what has convinced them they must examine you tonight, that they believe they know who you really are.’

That expression again. But this time, it drove the fear of God into me, like a stake through my heart.

‘Who am I?’ I repeated.

‘I do not know,’ said my boss, looking far from crazy. ‘All I know is what others believe. And they believe that
you
are the new White Queen.’

Shelley’s ashes were later conveyed to Rome and buried where they now lie on the slope of the Protestant cemetery under the shadow of the great grey pyramid of Caius Cestius – that place of pilgrimage for English-speaking people from all over the world for more than a hundred years.

– Isabel C. Clarke,
Shelley and Byron

Pyramid of Caius Cestius: A massive sepulchral monument of brick and stone, at Rome, 114 feet high, incrusted with white marble. Each side of the base measures 90 feet… The pyramid is of the time of Augustus.

–
The Century Dictionary

The mausoleum of Caius Cestius…inspired eighteenth-century garden pyramids including those at the Désert de Retz and Parc Monçeau, as well as the Masonic pyramid that appears on the American dollar bill.

– Diana Ketcham,
Le Désert de Retz

Cimetero Acattolico degli Inglesi, Roma

(Protestant Cemetery of the English, Rome)

January 21, 1823

The ‘English Maria’ stood in the bitter fog beside the stone wall, in the shadow of the enormous, two-thousand-year-old Egyptian pyramid tomb of the Roman senator Caius Cestius. Attired in her plain gray traveling dress and cape, she watched – a little apart from the other mourners, whom she scarcely knew – as the small urn was placed into its shallow grave.

How appropriate, she thought, that Percy Shelley’s ashes should be laid here in this ancient, sacred spot, on this special day. The author of
Prometheus Unbound
had been the quintessential Poet of Fire, had he not? And today, January 21, was Maria’s favorite holy day, the feast of Saint Agnes, the saint who could not be killed by fire. Even now, Maria’s eyes were watering, not from the cold but from the many brushfires that had been lit here on the Aventine Hill to honor the ancient martyr, their smoke mingling with the dank fog from the Tiber below. In England last night, on Saint Agnes’s Eve, young girls would have gone to bed hungry, fasting in hopes of a dreamed glimpse of their future husbands, as in the popular romantic poem by John Keats.

But, though Maria herself had long lived in England and knew their customs, she was not English, even if she’d been known as
pittrice Inglese,
an ‘English paintress,’ from age seventeen when she was inducted into the Accademia del Disegno at Florence. She was, in fact, a native Italian – born in Livorno more than sixty years ago – who felt more at home here in Italy than she ever would in England, the land of her parents’ birth.

And though she had not been back to this sacred spot in more than thirty years, Maria knew, perhaps better than anyone, the mystery that lay beneath the ‘English’ topsoil here on this southernmost hill just outside the gate of
ancient Rome. For here in Rome, where Saint Agnes had been martyred, where her feast day would soon be celebrated, lay a mystery far older than either the bones of the saint or the pyramid tomb of Caius Cestius – a mystery perhaps more ancient than Rome itself.

This spot on the Aventine Hill, where Caius Cestius had built his ostentatious pyramid in the time of Jesus and the emperor Augustus, had been a sacred place from the earliest times. It lay just at the edge of the Pomerium, the ‘apple line,’ an ancient though invisible boundary just outside the city walls, beyond which the
auspicia urbana,
the official divination to protect the city, could not take place. The
auspicia – avis specio,
‘watching the birds’ – could only be conducted by the established collegium of priests skilled in studying omens from the sky, whether thunder and lightning, the movements of clouds, or the patterns and cries of birds. But beyond the Pomerium, a different power had held sway.

Beyond this line lay the Horrea, the granaries that fed all of Rome. And here on the Aventine, too, was the most famous temple to the cult of the goddess of grain, Ceres. Her name, Ker, meant growth, and she shared her temple here with Liber and Libera, god and goddess of freedom, virility, the juice of life. They were equal to the more ancient Janus and Janna, god of the two faces, for which the town of Janina in Albania, site of one of her earliest shrines, had been named. But here, Ceres’ two great festivals lay outside the boundaries of establishment control: the
feriae sementiuae,
the sowing festivals, which commenced with burning the old fields’ stubble with enormous fires in the month named for Janus; and the harvesting or reaping festival, Cerialia, which took place in the month named for the emperor Augustus, whose birth name, Octavian, meant ‘the Eighth.’

The fires lit to Ceres in the first month, the ancients believed, would portend what they reaped in the eighth. QUOD
SEVERIS METES, it was written above her temple:
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

The mystery behind this was so deep and ancient that it ran in the blood itself: There was no need of auspices performed under the law by church and state or official prognostications; it was performed outside the gate, outside the city.

It was an Eternal Order.

Maria knew that on this day the memory of the past and the divination of the future were somehow linked, as they had been for thousands of years. For today – Saint Agnes’s Day, January 21 – was the day of Divination by Fire. And here in Rome, the Eternal City, it might also prove to be the day when the secret that Percy Shelley took to his watery grave six months ago – the secret of that order – would rise from his ashes.

At least that is what Maria’s friend and patron, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, intended to find out. That is why he and his sister, Letizia Bonaparte, had summoned her here today. After more than thirty years, the Anglo-Italian artist Maria Hadfield Cosway had come home for good.

Palazzo Falconieri

Roma

Through me mankind ceased to foresee death…

Blind hopes I made to dwell in them…

And more than all I gave them fire.

– Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound

George Gordon, Lord Byron, painfully paced the drawing room of Cardinal Joseph Fesch’s Palazzo Falconieri. Despite his private wealth, Byron felt out of place here in this lavish mausoleum to a dead emperor. For though the cardinal’s
nephew, Napoleon Bonaparte, was gone these past two years, the wealth he’d lavished on his relations had remained scarcely hidden here. The damascened walls of this room were no exception, plastered from end to end with the paintings of the finest masters of Europe, and more were stacked upon the floors, including works of the cardinal’s longtime protégée, the painter Madame Cosway, at whose request they’d all been peremptorily called here today. Overtly, at least.

The note had taken some time to reach him, for it had been directed at first to Pisa. On the morning he’d received it at his new villa at Genoa – Casa Saluzzo, overlooking Portofino and the sea – Byron had hastily departed before he’d even had time to settle in. He’d abandoned his ménage of lover, family, and unwanted guests, and his menagerie of animals – monkeys, peacocks, dogs, and exotic birds – all scarcely unloaded from his flotilla of boats from Pisa.

For it was clear something important had happened. Or was about to.

Ignoring his fevers and the pains that endlessly pierced his intestines, like those that plagued Prometheus, Byron rode so hard this past week in order to arrive here at Rome that he’d had little time even to bathe or to shave at those dreadful inns where he and his valet, Fletcher, had put up. He realized that he must look a sight by now, but in the circumstance it scarcely mattered.

Now, having been ushered into the palazzo and proffered a crystal cup of the cardinal’s excellent claret to settle his stomach, Byron for the first time looked about at the gorgeously appointed drawing room, and in the same instant realized that he not only
felt
out of place, he
smelled
out of place! He was still attired in his riding habit and covered with dust from the road: a close-cropped blue military jacket, mud-splashed boots, and the long, full nankeen cotton pantaloons that covered his deformed foot. With a sigh, he
set down the glass of ruby-colored claret and unwound the turbaned scarf he habitually wore outdoors to protect his fair skin from the sun. Much as he longed to leave right now, to send round for Fletcher, to find a place to bathe and change, he knew it was impossible.

Because time was of the essence. And how much of it did he really have?

When Byron was quite young, a soothsayer had predicted that he would not survive his thirty-sixth year, a date that had seemed an eternity away. Yet tomorrow, January 22, Byron would turn thirty-five. In just a few months, he would leave Italy for Greece to fight in and to finance that very War of Independence that his friend, Ali Pasha, had sacrificed his life to launch.

But of course, Ali had also sacrificed something else.

Which could be the only meaning of the message.

For although the note sent to Byron by Letizia Bonaparte was patently written in response to his earlier veiled query about Shelley, the import of the message she expressed in her mélange of languages could not have been plainer:

À Signor Gordon, Lord Byron

Palazzo Lanfranchi, Lung’ Arno, Pisa

Chèr Monsieur,

Je vous invite à un vernissage de la pittrice Inglese,

Mme Maria Hadfield Cosway, date: le 21 Janvier, 1823,

lieu: Palazzo Falconieri, Roma. Nous attendons votre

réponse.

Les sujets des peintures suivi:

Siste Viator

Ecce Signum

Urbi et Orbi

Ut Supra, Ut Infra

By this, he was invited to a showing of the paintings of Madame Cosway, a woman whose reputation he knew quite well, given the fame her late husband had enjoyed as royal painter to the Prince of Wales. And she herself was protégée not only of Cardinal Fesch but also, for years in Paris, of the famous French painter, Jacques-Louis David.

It was not this invitation itself, however, but the meaning of the message that had riveted Byron’s attention and hastened his departure from Genoa. First, the ‘subjects’ of Madame’s ‘paintings’ as they were listed were hardly topics normally chosen by artists. But they were all highly meaningful when one read between the lines.

Siste Viator,
‘Stop, Traveler’: a phrase used on every roadside tomb in ancient Rome.

Ecce Signum,
‘Behold the sign’: this was followed by a small triangle.

Urbi et Orbi,
‘To the City and the World’: a motto of Rome, Eternal City.

Ut Supra, Ut Infra,
‘As Above, So Below’: a motto of alchemy.

Nor could it be coincidence that this invitation was scheduled for the same date and location as poor Percy Shelley’s burial, which, thanks to merciful God, had taken place hours before Byron reached Rome. He did not regret having missed it. Try as he might, he could not forget what he’d had to bear on the day of Shelley’s cremation, those many months past, nor the fears for his own life he’d harbored ever since.

This message was clear: ‘Stop seeking and behold what we have found: the sign, the triangle, of the famous Egyptian pyramid tomb at Rome that was adopted by the Carbonari, the Freemasons, and other such groups as a sign among brothers. It represented a new order connecting spirit and matter, the worlds of above and below.’

This was the message that Percy Shelley had tried to send
him just before he’d been killed. Now Byron understood what it meant, though it chilled him to the core. For even if Letizia Bonaparte and her cohorts knew something of the mystery, or of the missing Black Queen – as this invitation certainly suggested they did – how could they have guessed that single word? The only word that would definitely bring Byron here to Rome, if nothing else would. The word that Letizia Bonaparte had used to close her letter.

Byron’s favorite name, which he’d shared as a password with only one person on earth – Ali Pasha, who was now dead.

But just as he thought that name, he heard the door open and a soft voice spoke it to him from across the room:

‘Father, I am your daughter. Haidée.’

He had an only daughter, called Haidée, The greatest heiress of the Eastern Isles;

Besides, so very beautiful was she, Her dowry was as nothing to her smiles

– Lord Byron,
Don Juan,
Canto II, CXXVIII

Byron could not contain himself. He could not yet even think of the chess piece she must surely be carrying, for he was beside himself with joy. He was weeping, at first pressing the child to his breast, then holding her away to stare, shaking his head in disbelief, as he felt the hot tears making tracks in the dust that still coated his face.

Good Lord! She was the very image of Vasiliki, who perhaps had been only a few years older than this when Byron had fallen in love with her at Janina. She had those same silvery eyes of Vasia’s, which seemed like luminous mirrors, though Haidée also had traits of her father – the cleft chin and that pale, translucent skin that had won him the nickname ‘Alba,’ which meant ’white.’

What a blessing,
he thought. For his other daughters had been lost to him in one way or another – through death, separation, scandal, exile. Little Ada, his legitimate child by his wife Annabella, who would now be just seven years old. He’d not seen her since her birth, due to the scandal Lady Byron had put about that had driven Byron into exile these many years – the rumor that his sister Augusta’s daughter, Medora, now eight years old, was Byron’s child as well.