| Bath
can be a
frustrating
place for
Shelley seekers:
there seemed
to be a surprising
unwillingness
to acknowledge
the Shelleys'
presence.
We were looking
for two sites:
5 Abbey Churchyard,
where Mary
and Percy
had stayed
in 1816,
and 12 New
Bond Street,
where Claire
Clairmont,
pregnant
with Byron’s
daughter
Allegra, had
lived. |
|
The next stop was the Bath public library, where we were
once again assured that neither Shelley nor Mary had ever
set foot in the town. We did discover that Abbey Churchyard
was, despite the assurances of the tourist board that
no such street existed, easily visible from their front
door. Yet there was no record of a number 5. We were about
to leave to ask at the police department, when a library
patron who had overheard my inquiries timidly approached
us and explained that she had recently read something
about the Bath/Shelley connection. It seems that the novelist
Peter Lovesey had recently completed The Vault
(London: Little, Brown, 1999), a murder mystery set in
Bath, whose plot relied heavily upon the Shelley residence
(it’s a pretty good mystery novel, by the way).
We
raced to
the nearest
bookstore,
bought
a copy,
and sure
enough,
there were
references
to the
Shelley
party and
to pictures
of the
Abbey Churchyard
residence.
Armed with
this new
evidence—which
proved to
be a good
deal more
compelling
than my
worn copy
of Holmes,
at least
as far
as the librarians
were concerned—we
returned
to the
library
and were
able to
track
down contemporary
lithographs
of the
site.
The three-story
building,
once attached
to the
pump room
and across
from the
Abbey
itself,
had been
demolished
in the
nineteenth
century
to make
room for
an extension
of the
pump room.
I have
combined
a lithograph
and a
modern
shot to
provide
some sense
of what
the place
might
have looked
like.
|
)
)
)
)
)
)