once had Byron courted a woman, and he had no intention of ever doing so again. Mary Anne, beautiful Mary Anne Chaworth, his kinswoman Mary. The first time he saw her he was just thirteen and she fifteen. His face back then was still smooth as a girl’s, although several years had passed since he spent his first night as a man with his nanny, May. When they met for the first time, Mary Anne was taller than he. She was as beautiful as a goddess: slender and dark-haired, with budding breasts and curvy hips. She was his sun and moon and morning star, and for her he was apparently a tiresome little snot of a cousin.
Over the next two years they saw each other only infrequently and for brief periods. By his fifteenth birthday, though, things had changed. Then Byron was markedly taller, dark sideburns framed his face, and Mary looked at him differently. Meetings at a halfway point between Newstead and Annesley became a matter of course. They talked and were silent, laughed and cried over England, pouted and then reconciled. She didn’t call him George, the way his mother did, or Byron like his friends, but rather used his middle name, Gordon. In turn, he thought up a nickname for her by combining her two given names into one: Marian. Lady Marian, as in the tales of Robin Hood. She was the first woman in whose company he didn’t feel embarrassed about his limp, and she was the first who didn’t ask him constantly whether his leg hurt, whether it annoyed him, or whether he was born that way or had hurt himself in childhood. The wonderful Mary Anne could slow her pace and stay beside him when they went on walks, so that he didn’t have to strain, but she did it naturally and unaffectedly, as if she always walked that way.
Byron knew that she was engaged, but he never made mention of it. Engagements are a formality, he thought, but our love is a constant fire. Sometimes they kissed, on the banks of the river or under leafy boughs, passionately, fitfully, and abruptly. At times Mary Anne would simply push him away without a sound, but often she gave herself to him with the ardour of a lover who awaits her suitor after a year of separation. Her willfulness inspired him; never, neither before this nor later, had he experienced the same degree of excitement with a woman as when his lips approached hers. Coolness alternated with volcanic eruptions of desire; her lips would come close, as would the heavens for a great sinner, or they might open wide, like an unlocked chest harboring a legendary treasure.
For two whole years, he lived for the meetings halfway between Newstead and Annesley, and then one day at dusk, he asked his kinswoman for her hand. He was seventeen, and to his mind, a mature man. He would soon enter into his inheritance, and he was ready to marry his beloved. He had never considered that she might reject him and actually give herself to her fiancé. He simply could not have imagined that she would choose this John Masters, of whom they had together so often made sport – over him Byron, in the flesh. ‘You know, Byron, that John and I are engaged’- those were her words. And Byron thought bitterly: I’m no longer Gordon, and he is no longer that mad and preposterous Masters, but rather John. ‘So does this engagement mean anything next to what we had together?’ he asked, and she shot back: ‘Does what we had mean anything compared to an engagement?’ That’s when he knew that it was over. He tried once more to kiss her, but he regretted it immediately, even though she didn’t push him away. Her lips, earlier so sweet and fresh, reminded him now of uncooked meat.
For days and months afterwards, it was as if he had lost his bearings. He didn’t dare tell anyone what had befallen him. It was only the next year, when he and Augusta had grown close, that he could tell someone of that great love. ‘When I recognized the hopelessness of this love, little sister,’ he told her, ‘I felt I was completely alone on the wide open surface of the deep blue sea.’
After Mary Anne he only indulged in embraces of convenience, rapid, frequent, and casual. But he supposed he would never again experience with a woman that swelling in his breast, when his heart threatened to burst; never more would his hands shake as they approached a woman’s face; never again would his lips go dry just before the sweetest moistening. Never more would things be as beautiful again as they had been halfway between Newstead and Annesley. Never again… right up until Sintra. Sintra stood beyond compare: the most beautiful place on the globe.
He would write to his mother a letter with the following words: for me, the words the most beautiful now mean the most beautiful after Portuguese Sintra. Yes, Sintra was beyond compare. Its beauty surpassed everything that one could conceive of or explain. And that girl! When he first saw her, he thought he had before him the fifteen-year old Mary Anne once more, the way she had been when they met for the first time, or even more beautiful. She wore a spotless dress of white linen, with her dark brown, half-African face, and her small nose with the wide nostrils that imparted a sense of immediacy, and her worldly eyes full of health and merriment. She greeted him with words he could not understand, and quite bashfully, but in her voice and movements was something more than a usual greeting, although he knew not what it was. Her body rocked gently back and forth and she smiled at him, looking directly into his eyes, all the while wetting her dry lips with her tongue. Nothing is more arousing than lips like those. They had something of the world of plants and minerals about them. Irregular, like fruit accidentally split open, they showed what hot, dark, sweet blood comprised the inside of the mature little body. Only in the corners of the mouth were her sculpted lips drawn tight, as in a woman of the Caucasian race, but even these corners disappeared into indeterminate shadows, like the petioles of a leaf. They looked at each other for a long time, and Byron sank into her topaz pupils. They circled around each other, but nothing else happened. Voices crashed into their trance-like state, and Byron turned away, almost at a run.
This brief encounter made more of an impression on him than anything since Mary Anne. Over and over he thought about the girl from Sintra, and in his mind he called her “little creature.” This obsession was not always the most pleasant of things, and he attempted to get rid of it by hurling himself into the arms of Lady Spencer Smith, the Circe of our enchanted island. She was a fascinating woman, the daughter of the Austrian ambassador in Istanbul, who combined the elegance of the West with the Eros of the East in her person. But it didn’t work. As the voluptuous woman came noisily to her climax, Byron’s thoughts were in Sintra. Coincidentally, at the same time all of Yannina was booming with hundreds of gun-shots, and all the members of his retinue pressed themselves against the walls like frightened animals.
* * *
Long after night had fallen, the door squeaked quietly. Byron was sitting alone at the table in the light of an oil lamp. Isak very nearly tripped over his own feet as he entered. It seemed he has had something stronger than coffee to drink, Byron mused.
‘You are awake, my lord,’ Isak said, almost light-heartedly. ‘I thought you’d be asleep.
‘I was hoping to write a few letters,’ replied the Englishman, ‘but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’
Isak joined him at the table.
‘How was the wedding?’ Byron asked.
‘It was a wedding like any other, my lord. A wedding like any other.’ He fell into a brief silence, and then asked softly, ‘You are young, my lord, yet you are not married?’
Byron shook his head, and, in this fraction of a second a thought ran through his mind. Outside of Albania, he mused, I will never again meet this Isak anywhere; therefore there’s no reason not to be as honest with him as I am with myself.
‘I have not married,’ said Byron, ‘although four years ago I hoped to do so.’
Then he looked him straight in the eye and told him, rapidly, as if he feared he might change his mind, the whole story of Mary Anne and the girl from Sintra. Isak knew how to listen: he interjected not a single word, and his facial gestures showed that he was listening intently. When Byron concluded, Isak merely sighed. They sat there without conversing for a few moments before Isak spoke.
‘You know, my lord,’ he said, ‘this is really a beautiful story: painful for you, perhaps, but beautiful. You truly loved that woman, and this is not often the case. That’s why women love you, too; they sense that you are capable of love. The fact that she whom you loved did not return your love is, if I may be so bold as to assert, of perhaps less importance. It is you yourself who have found love.’
With that suggestive whisper, Isak