The next day she wrote Byron a terrible letter, which he returned to Shelley complaining of Claire’s harshness towards him, and begging Shelley to let her know he would allow her to make any arrangements she liked for the burial of their child.
She replied with a sombre irony that for the future she left everything to him, and that all she asked was a portrait of Allegra and a piece of her hair. Byron became surprisingly pliable, sent almost at once a very pretty miniature and a dark curl. Claire took leave of her friends at Casa Magni, and went back to Florence to live amongst strangers, who, knowing nothing of her grief, could do nothing to revive it.
Byron decided to have his daughter buried in England, in the church of Harrow-on-the-Hill, where he had been at school, and to place on the wall above the grave a marble tablet with the words:
TO THE MEMORY OF ALLEGRA DAUGHTER OF GEORGE GORDON LORD BYRON DIED AT BAGNA-CAVALLO, THE 20TH APRIL, 1822. AGED FIVE YEARS AND SIX MONTHS.
I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me. II Sam. xii. 23.
But the Rector of Harrow and the church-wardens considered it immoral to admit into their church the body of an illegitimate child, more particularly if the epitaph disclosed the name of the father. Allegra was therefore buried outside the church, and with no inscription, which was of course the proper thing to do.
Lord Byron, who had never set foot inside the convent of Bagna-Cavallo while Allegra was alive, went to visit it some time after the child’s death, for now his regrets lent it a romantic and sentimental interest, inspired him with a fine meditation on death and on himself: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”
Shelley was charmed with Casa Magni. He liked the wild solitude of the place, the forest behind the house, the rocky and wooded bays and the fisherman’s poor villages.
But Mary felt lost and unhappy. Again pregnant, anxious, irritable, she would have much preferred to live in a city near a good doctor. She thought the peasantry uncouth and hateful, their _Genovese_ jargon disgusted her as much as the dialect of Tuscany had pleased her. The presence of Jane Williams, so appreciated by her at Pisa, began to get on her nerves. Housekeeping in common is for women the acid test. There were stupid quarrels over servants and frying pans. Shelley spoke too warmly of Jane’s perfection, and wrote her too divine serenades.