The Fire

The Charcoal Burners

Like all other associations, the Carbonari, or charcoal-burners, lay claim to a very high antiquity… Similar societies arose in many mountainous countries, and they surrounded themselves with that mysticism of which we have seen so many examples. Their fidelity to each other and to the society was so great that it became in Italy a proverbial expression to say ‘On the faith of a Carbonaro.’…In order to avoid all suspicion of criminal association, they employed themselves in cutting wood and making charcoal… They recognized each other by sign, by touch, and by words.

– Charles William Heckethorn, The Secret Societies of All Ages & Countries

Among the secret societies of Italy none was more comprehensive in its political objectives than that of the Carbonari. In the early 1820s they were more than just a power in the land, and boasted branches and sub-societies as far afield as Poland, France and Germany. The history of these “Charcoal-burners”, according to themselves, started in Scotland.

– Arkon Daraul, A History of Secret Societies

But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one.

– Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto X

Viareggio, Italy

August 15, 1822

It was the heat of the dog days. here under the blazing Tuscan sun, on this isolated stretch of beach along the Ligurian coast, the pebbled sands formed a griddle so intense that already now, at mid-morning, one could bake pané upon its surface. In the distance across the waters, the isles of Elba, Capraia, and little Gorgona arose like shimmering apparitions from the sea.

At the center of the crescent of beach, enfolded by its high surrounding mountains, a small group of men had assembled. Their horses could not bear the scalding sands and had been left within a nearby copse of trees.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, waited apart from the others. He’d seated himself upon a large black rock lapped by the waves – ostensibly so that his famous Romantic profile, immortalized in so many paintings, would be silhouetted to best advantage against the backdrop of the glittering sea. But in fact the hidden deformity of his feet since birth had nearly prevented Byron, this morning, from leaving his carriage at all. His pale white skin, which earned him the nickname ‘Alba,’ was shaded by a broad straw hat.

From here, unhappily, he had excellent vantage to observe each detail of the dreadful scene unfolding on the beach. Captain Roberts – master of Byron’s ship, the Bolivar, which lay at anchor in the bay – oversaw the preparations of the men. They were building a large bonfire. Byron’s aide-de-camp, Edward John Trelawney – called ‘the pirate’ for his wild, darkly handsome looks and eccentric passions – had now set up the iron cage that served as a furnace.

The half-dozen Luccan soldiers attending them had exhumed the corpse from its temporary grave – hastily dug where the body had first washed up. The cadaver scarcely resembled a human being: The face had been picked clean by fish, and the putrefied flesh was stained a dark and ghastly indigo color. Identification had been made by the familiar short jacket with the small volume of poetry in the pocket.

Now they placed the body into the furnace cage, atop the dry balsam boughs and driftwood they’d gathered from the beach. Such cadres of soldiers were a necessary presence at any such exhumation, Byron had been informed, to ensure that the proper immolation procedures were followed against the yellow fever from the Americas that was now rampaging along the coast.

Byron watched as Trelawney poured the wine and salts and oil on the cadaver. The roaring flame leapt up like a biblical pillar of God into the stark morning sky. A single seagull circled high above the flaming column, and the men tried to chase it away with cries as they flapped their shirts into the air.

The heat of the sands, inflamed by the fire, made the atmosphere around Byron seem unreal – the salts had turned the flames strange, unearthly colors; even the air was tremulous and wavy. He felt truly ill. But for a reason known only to himself, he could not leave.

Byron stared into the flames, disgusted as the corpse burst open from the intensity of the heat and its brains, pressed against the red-hot bars of the iron cage, seethed and bubbled and boiled, as if in a cauldron. It could just as well be the carcass of a sheep, he thought. What a nauseating and degrading sight. His beloved friend’s earthly reality was vaporized into white-hot ash before his very eyes.

So this was death.

We are all dead now, in one way or another, Byron thought bitterly. But Percy Shelley had drunk enough of death’s dark passions to last a lifetime, hadn’t he?

These past six years, throughout all their peregrinations, the lives of the two famous poets were inextricably entangled. Beginning with their self-imposed exiles from England – which had been undertaken in the same month and year, if not for the same reasons – and throughout their residence in Switzerland. Then Venice, which Byron had quit over two years ago; and now his grand palazzo here in nearby Pisa, which Shelley had departed only hours before his death. They’d both been stalked by death – hunted and haunted, nearly sucked down themselves into the long, cruel vortex that had begun to spin in the wake of their individual escapes from Albion.

There was the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, six years ago, when Shelley ran off to the Continent with the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, now his wife. Then the suicide of Mary’s half sister, Fanny, who’d been left behind in London with their cruel stepmother when the lovers had escaped. This blow was followed by the death of Percy and Mary’s little son, William. And just last February, the death in Rome from consumption of Shelley’s friend and poetic idol, ‘Adonais’ – the young John Keats.

Byron himself was still reeling from the death, only months ago, of his five-year-old daughter, Allegra – his ‘natural’ child by Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire. A few weeks before Shelley’s death by drowning, he’d told Byron that he’d witnessed an apparition: Percy had imagined he’d seen Byron’s little dead daughter beckoning to him from the sea, beckoning him to join her beneath the waves. And now this ghastly end for poor Shelley himself:

First the death by water; then the death by fire.

Despite the suffocating heat, Byron felt a terrible chill as he replayed in his mind the scene of his friend’s last hours.

In the late afternoon of July 8, Shelley had departed Byron’s grand Palazzo Lanfranchi at Pisa and had raced to his small boat, the Ariel, moored just down the coast. Against all advice or common sense, with no warning to anyone, Shelley had cast off at once and had sailed into the darkening belly of a coming storm. Why? thought Byron. Unless he was being pursued. But by whom? And to what end?

Yet in hindsight, this seemed the only plausible explanation – as Byron had now understood for the first time, only this morning. Byron had suddenly seen, in a flash of comprehension, something he should have seen at once: Percy Shelley’s mysterious death by drowning was no accident. It had to do with something – or was sought by someone – aboard that ship. Byron now had no doubt that when the Ariel was raised from her watery grave, as she soon would be, they’d see that she had been rammed by a felucca or some other large craft, intent upon boarding her. But he also guessed that whatever had been sought had not been found.

For, as Byron had realized only this morning, Percy Shelley – a man who’d never believed in immortality – might have managed to send one last message from beyond the grave.

Byron turned toward the sea so that the others, preoccupied by the fire, would not notice when he surreptitiously fished from his wallet the thin volume that he’d managed to keep hold of: Shelley’s copy of John Keats’s last poems, published not long before Keats’s death in Rome.

This waterlogged book had been found on the body, just as Shelley had left it: shoved within the pocket of his short, ill-fitting schoolboy’s jacket. It was still turned open and marked at Shelley’s favorite poem by Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion,’ about the mythological battle between the Titans and those new gods, led by Zeus, who were soon to replace them. After the famous mythological battle, which every schoolboy knew, only Hyperion, the sun god and last of the Titans, still survives.

This was a poem that Byron had never much cared for – and that Keats himself hadn’t even liked enough to finish. But it seemed to Byron significant that Percy had taken pains to keep it on his person, even at his death. He had surely marked this one passage for a reason:

Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;

His flaming robes streamed out behind his heels,

And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire…

On he flared…

At this premature end to a poem that was destined always to remain unfinished, the sun god seems to set himself aflame and whisk into oblivion in a ball of his own incandescence – rather like a phoenix. Rather like poor Percy, immolated there upon the pyre.

But most critical was something that none of the others seemed to have noticed when the book was found: At just the spot where Keats had laid down his pen, Shelley had taken his own up, and had carefully drawn a small mark at the side of the page – a kind of intaglio, with something printed inside. The ink was badly faded from the long exposure to the salt seawater, but Byron was sure he could still make it out by closer examination. That was why he had brought it here with him this morning.

Ripping the page loose from the book, Byron slipped the volume away again and carefully studied the small drawing his friend had made at the edge. Shelley had drawn a triangle, which enclosed three tiny circles or balls, each in a different colored ink.

Byron knew these colors well, for several reasons. First, they were his own – the colors of his matrilineal Scots family heraldry, which went back to before the time of the Norman Conquest. Though that was merely an accident of birth, it hadn’t helped his sojourn in Italy that Lord Byron had always displayed these colors proudly upon his enormous carriage, a vehicle patterned after that of the deposed, deceased emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. For as Byron should know better than anyone, in secret or in esoteric parlance these particular colors signified far more.

The three spheres that Shelley had drawn in the triangle were colored black, blue, and red. The black stood for coal, which signified ‘Faith.’ Blue symbolized smoke, meaning ‘Hope.’ And red was flame, for ‘Charity.’ Together, the three colors represented the life cycle of fire. And further – depicted as they were here, within a triangle, the universal symbol for ‘Fire’ – they stood for the destruction by fire of the old world as prophesied by Saint John in the Book of Revelation, and the coming of a new world order.

This very symbol – these tricolored orbs within an equilateral triangle – had also been chosen as the secret insignia of an underground group that intended to carry out that same revolution, at least here in Italy. They called themselves the Carbonari – the Charcoal Burners.

In the aftermath of twenty-five years of French revolution, terror, and conquest that had nearly shattered all of Europe, there was only one rumor more frightful than rumors of war. And that was the rumor of internal insurrection, of a movement from within – one that might demand independence from all external overlords, from all imposed rule of any kind.

During these past two years, George Gordon, Lord Byron, had shared the same roof with his married Venetian mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, a girl half his age who’d been exiled from Venice, along with her brother, her cousin, and her father – but minus the cuckolded husband.

These were the notorious Gambas – the ‘Gambitti,’ as they were called in the popular press – highly placed members of the Carbonaria, the very group that had sworn eternal enmity to all forms of tyranny – though it had failed in its attempted coup, during last year’s Carnival, to drive the Austrian rulers from Northern Italy. Instead, the Gambas themselves had been exiled from three Italian cities in succession. And Byron had followed them to each new encampment.

This was the reason why Byron’s every contact, whether in person or in writing, was now being assiduously tracked by, and reported to, the official overlords of all three parts of Italy: the Austrian Habsburgs in the north, the Spanish Bourbons in the south, and the Vatican itself in the central Papal States.

Lord Byron was the secret capo of the Cacciatori Mericani – ‘The Americans,’ as the popular, populist branch of the underground society was known. He’d financed from his own private funds the weapons, shot, and powder of the recent abortive Carbonari insurrection – and more.

He’d supplied his friend Ali Pasha the new secret weapon to use in his rebellion against the Turks – the repeating rifle – which Byron had had designed for him in America.

And Byron was now funding the Hetairia ton Philikon, or Friendly Society – a secret group that supported the thrust to drive the Ottoman Turks from Greece.

Lord Byron was surely everything that the imperialist dragons had most cause to fear – an implacable foe of tyrants and their reigns. The powers understood that he was exactly the ferment such an insurrection wanted. And he was rich enough that, if necessary, he could also water it from his own well.

But in the past year all three of these nascent insurrections had been brutally repressed, severed at the jugular – sometimes literally. Indeed, after Ali Pasha’s death seven months ago, it was told, he’d been buried at two different locations: his body at Janina, his head at Constantinople. Seven months. Why had it taken him so long to see it? Not until this morning.

It was nearly seven months since Ali Pasha’s death, and still no word, no sign…At first, Byron had assumed there’d been a change in plan. After all, much had changed in the past two years while Ali was isolated at Janina. But the pasha had always vowed that if he were ever at risk, he would find Byron by any means, via his Secret Service – which was, after all, the vastest and most powerful such organization ever forged in history.

If this were to prove impossible, then in the pasha’s final hours on earth, he would destroy himself inside the great fortress of Demir Kule – along with his treasure, his followers, and even the beloved and beautiful Vasiliki – before letting anything fall prey to the Turks.

But now Ali Pasha was dead, and by all reports the fortress of Demir Kule had been seized intact. Despite Byron’s repeated attempts to discover any news of the fate of Vasiliki or the others who’d been taken to Constantinople, there was as yet no word. Nor had Byron received the object that was intended to be protected by himself and by the Carbonaria.

Percy’s book of poems seemed to hold the only clue. If Byron had read correctly, only half of his message was contained in the triangle he’d drawn. The other part was the poem itself: the passage Percy had marked in Keats’s ‘Fall of Hyperion.’ Putting those two clues together, the full message would read:

The old Solar God will be destroyed by a far more dangerous flame – an eternal flame.

If this was correct, then Byron had grasped at once that it was he himself who had most to fear. He must act, and quickly. For if Ali Pasha was dead without the promised bombast – if there was no word from survivors who’d been closest to him – Vasiliki, his advisers, his Secret Service, the Bektashi sheikhs – if Percy Shelley had been pursued from Byron’s Pisan palazzo and driven into that storm, to his death – all this could mean just one thing: Everyone believed that the chess piece had reached its appointed destination, that Byron had received it – everyone, that is, except whoever had escaped from Janina.

And what had become of the missing Black Queen?

Byron needed to get away and think, and to lay a plan before the others arrived aboard his ship with Percy’s ashes. It might already be too late.

Byron crumpled in his hand the page containing the message. Adopting his customary expression of detached disdain, he rose from his seat and limped painfully across the hot sands to where Trelawney still tended the fire. The dark, wild features of the ‘Cockney Corsair’ were blackened further by soot from the blaze, and with those flashing white teeth and trailing mustachios, the man appeared more than slightly mad. Byron shuddered as he tossed the crumpled paper indifferently into the flame. He made sure that the paper had caught and burned before turning to speak to the others.

‘Don’t repeat this farce with me,’ he said. ‘Let my carcass rot where it falls. This Pagan Paean to a dead poet, I confess, has quite undone me – I need a bit of a sea change, to cleanse my mental image of this horror.’

He went back to the shore – and with a quick nod toward Captain Roberts to confirm their prior agreement to meet afterward on the ship, Byron tossed his wide-brimmed hat aside, stripped off his shirt, and dove into the sea, cutting through the waves with strong and powerful strokes. The water was warm as blood already at mid-morning; the sun scalded ‘Alba’s’ fair skin. He knew it would be a short mile swim to the Bolivar – nothing to a man who’d already swum the Hellespont, but a long enough one that it would let him clear his mind to think. But though the rhythm of his strokes, the salt water lapping over his shoulders, helped to calm his agitation, his thoughts kept returning to one thing: No matter how he tried – and wildly improbable though it might seem – there was only one person Byron could think of to whom Percy Shelley’s message might refer, one individual who might hold the critical clue to the fate of Ali Pasha’s missing treasure. Byron himself had never met her, but her reputation preceded her.

She was Italian by birth – a wealthy widow. Beside her vast riches, Lord Byron knew that his own considerable fortune would pale by comparison. She had once been world renowned, though she now was living in semi-isolation here in Rome. But in her youth, it was said that she’d bravely fought on horseback with guns for the liberation of her land from foreign powers – just as Byron and the Charcoal Burners were essaying to do right now.

Despite this woman’s personal contributions to the cause of freedom, however, it was she who’d given birth to the world’s last Titan-like ‘solar god’ – as Keats had described it: Her son was an imperial tyrant whose short-lived reign had terrorized all of Europe, and then swiftly burned itself out. Like Percy Shelley. In the end, this woman’s son had succeeded only in replanting the virulent seed of monarchy back into the world in force. He’d died barely one year ago, in anguish and obscurity.

As Byron felt the sun burning into his naked skin, he strove harder through the teeming waters to reach his ship. If he was right, he knew he had little time to lose in order to set his plan in motion.

And it was no small irony to Byron that, had this son of the Roman widow lived, today, August 15, would have been his birthday – a day commemorated throughout Europe, in his behalf, those past fifteen years until his death.

The woman whom Lord Byron believed might hold the key to locating the missing Black Queen of Ali Pasha was Napoleon’s mother: Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte.

Palazzo Rinuccini, Rome

September 8, 1822

Here [in Italy] there are as yet but the sparks of the volcano, but the ground is hot and the air sultry…there is a great commotion in people’s minds, which will lead to nobody knows what… The “king-times” are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.

– Lord Byron

It was a warm and balmy morning, but Madame Mère had arranged to have all the fires flickering in the hearths throughout the palazzo, candles lit in each room. The costly Aubusson carpets had all been brushed, the Canova sculptures of her famous children had all been dusted. Madame’s servants were attired in their finest green-and-gold livery and her brother, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, would soon arrive from his nearby Palazzo Falconieri to help greet the guests to whom she always opened her home on this one day each year. For today was an important day in the holy calendar, a day that Madame Mère had vowed she would never ignore and always honor: the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.

She’d been performing this ritual for more than fifty years – ever since she had taken her vow to the Virgin. After all, hadn’t her favorite son been born on the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven? That weak little baby whose birth had come so suddenly and unexpectedly early, when she – young Letizia, only age eighteen – had already lost two previous infants. So she’d made a vow on that day to Our Lady that she would always honor Her birth without fail, and that she would consecrate her children to the Blessed Virgin.