While their lovers were away on the trip round the lake, Mary and Claire were left to amuse themselves. They had baby William to look after but this still left Mary plenty of time to pursue her own interests. She seems to have continued to work through what was clearly a long list of books in French and Italian, but also to have begun writing Frankenstein. In addition, she carried on making fair copies of Byron's verse (there is a version of canto 3 of Childe Harold in her hand). Claire was also heavily involved in this copying, a task for which at the time she was an eager volunteer but which in retrospect, and from our present point of view, inevitably looks like exploitation. It is a sad irony that she seems to have done more copying the more her relationship with Byron deteriorated. ‘It would make me happy to finish Chillon for you,’ she wrote to him in the middle of July. ‘It is said that you expressed yourself decisively last Evening that it is impossible to see you at Diodati; If you will trust it down here I will take the greatest possible care of it … Let me have Chillon then, pray do.’ Both women regarded it as a privilege to be the first to see verses by a poet they admired greatly; but for Claire, copying also seems to have represented a sadly unavailing method for keeping up a connection which Byron was clearly anxious to break. His not wanting to see her at Diodati any longer would have been the result of a dawning awareness of the gossip which was beginning to circulate in the area, some of it very wild indeed. A certain Lord Glenbervie, for example, who arrived in Sécheron in July, reported that Byron was ‘now living on the Savoy side of the lake with that woman, who it seems proves to be a Mrs Shelley, wife to the man who keeps the Mount coffee house’ (it was Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, whose father owned a coffee house); and friends of George Leigh, the husband of Byron's sister, told him that while they were in Geneva they had heard that Augusta was with her brother there, disguised as a page.