The Stress of Her Regard (17 page)

—John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

. . . seals—necklaces—balls & I know not
what—formed of Chrystals—Agates—and other stones—
all of stones from Mont Blanc
bought & brought by me on &
from the spot—expressly for you to divide among
yourself and the children . . .

—
Lord Byron,
to Augusta Leigh,
8 September 1816

Lord Byron didn't appreciate having to be up early and having to be in a carriage with Dr. Polidori; either burden alone, he felt, he could have taken, indeed often
had
taken, in stride—but both at once today was asking too much. He really couldn't be held to blame if he lost his temper.

Byron's gigantic travelling carriage was making poor headway through the traffic around Geneva's north gate; the carriage had been built in England, copied from the celebrated one of Napoleon's that had been captured at Genappe, and it contained a bed and a table and silverware . . . but it was an unwieldy vehicle for maneuvering through crowds.

The young physician didn't seem to mind the delay, though. Polidori had done a lot of strenuous exercises before they had set out, making a show of his disciplined gasping, and now he was squinting at the distant mountains visible against the blue sky behind the gables and spires of the town, and he was whispering under his breath.

Byron couldn't stand it. He knew that it was some wretched bit of the physician's own verse that he was reciting. Why did the man have to have literary ambitions?

Mostly because the physician disapproved, Byron poured himself another glass of Fendant wine.

Sure enough, Polidori glanced over at him and frowned. "That's your fifth glass of wine today, my lord, and you've only been up for a couple of hours!" He cleared his throat. "It has been . . . medically and mathematically proven, that wine, in excessive amounts, has . . . catastrophic effects in the . . . digestive sphere—"

"When I meet a man with a
digestive sphere
, Pollydolly, I'll send him straight to you. What
I've
got is a stomach, and it's partial to drink." He held the wine up to the sunlight and admired the way the sun made an amber smoldering in the glass. "Liquor's an old friend of mine, and it's never betrayed my trust."

Polidori shrugged sulkily and resumed staring out the window; his lower lip was sticking out more than usual, but at least he had stopped his
sotto voce
recitations.

Byron grinned sourly, remembering an exchange he'd had with the envious young physician four months ago, when the two of them had been travelling up the Rhine. "After all," Polidori had said, "what is there that you can do that I cannot?" Byron had grinned and stretched languorously. "Why, since you force me to say," he had answered, "I think there are three things." Of course Polidori had hotly demanded to know what they could be. "Well," Byron had replied, "I can swim across this river . . . and I can snuff out a candle with a pistol ball at a distance of twenty paces . . . and I can write a poem of which fourteen thousand copies sell in one day."

That had been fun; especially since Polidori had been unable to argue. Byron demonstrably
had
done all those things—except swim the Rhine, but he was known to be a powerful swimmer, who had once swum across the mile of treacherous sea between Sestos and Abydos in Turkey—and Polidori couldn't even claim to be able to do one of them. That dialogue, like this morning's, had sent the young physician into a sulk.

The crowd had finally opened up in front of them, and Byron's driver was able to whip up the horses and get the carriage out through the gate.

"Finally,"
snapped Polidori, shifting awkwardly on his seat as if to imply that the carriage's construction ought to have provided passengers with more room.

Just to annoy the young man further, Byron leaned forward and opened the communication panel. "Stop a moment, would you please, Maurice," he called to the driver. He was about to say that he wanted to let the horses rest for a while; but then, glancing out the window, he saw an arm and the back of a head showing like nearly submerged reefs above the sea of daisies along the side of the road.

"What
now
, my lord?" sighed Polidori.

"It's some physician you are," Byron told him sternly. "People are dying by the side of the road, and all you can be bothered to do is recite poetry and tell me about digestive trapezohedrons."

Polidori was aware that he was missing something. He blinked out of one of the windows in what would have been, if aimed in the right direction, a brave show of alertness. ". . . People dying?" he mumbled.

Byron was already out of the carriage and limping across the grassy shoulder. "Over here, you moron. Exercise your arts on this poor—" He paused, for he had rolled the limp body over, and he recognized the face.

So did Polidori, who came stumping up then. "Why, it's just that false doctor who nearly gave Shelley pneumonia! Did I tell you I made some inquiries, and found out that he's actually a
veterinarian
? I expect he's just drunk. There's no—"

Byron had looked closely at the wasted face, though, and was remembering how close he had come to a similar disaster in his youth—and he remembered too the protective carnellian-quartz heart a friend had subsequently given him, and the strangely crystalline skull he himself had later dug up at his family estate and had made into a goblet.

"Lift him inside," Byron said softly.

"What, a drunk?" protested Polidori. "On your famous upholstery? Let's just leave word—"

"I said get him inside!"
Byron roared. "And pour some wine into that amethyst cup that's packed in the same case with my pistols! And then," he went on gently, putting his hand on the startled young physician's shoulder, "calculate how much I owe you. Your services are no longer required."

For a moment Polidori was speechless. Then,
"What?"
he sputtered. "Are you mad, m'lord? A
veterinarian
? Not even a surgeon, as he claimed that day, but an
animal doctor
?
To replace me
, a graduate of
Edinburgh University
? Five glasses of wine in a morning, no
wonder
you're talking this way! As your physician, I'm afraid I must—"

Byron had certainly not intended to hire this unconscious person as Polidori's replacement, but the young man's denunciation of such a course made him perversely seize upon it. "I have," he said in his coldest tone, easily overriding Polidori's shrill protests, "no further right as an
employer
to ask you to do anything; but as a fellow
human being
I'm asking you to help me carry my new personal doctor into my carriage."

Though choking with rage and perhaps weeping, Polidori complied, and in a few moments Michael Crawford was sleepily spilling wine down his throat and his muddy shirt-front while sitting on the leather upholstery of Byron's carriage. Soon the vehicle was under way again, and Polidori was walking shakily back toward the gates of the city of Geneva.

Crawford expected the wine to hit him hard, what with his empty stomach and weakened constitution—but instead it seemed to clear his head and restore some of his strength. He emptied the cup, and Byron refilled it.

"I told you to come to me for help, if you needed it," Byron said.

"Thank you—but I didn't need any until last night."

Byron stared at him, and Crawford knew he was considering his thin face and fever-bright eyes. "Really." Byron sighed and leaned back, replacing the bottle in the sloshing ice bucket on the floor. "What happened last night?"

Crawford looked speculatively at Byron, noting for the first time Byron's own symptoms—the pale skin, the intense eyes. "I lost my—" What, he couldn't precisely say
wife
; protector? Lover?

But Byron was nodding knowingly. "Not for long, you haven't," he said, "unless you climbed one of these mountains between then and now. How long has it been since . . . 'melancholy marked you for her own'?"

"Since . . . ? Oh. A month or so."

"Huh." Byron refilled his own more mundane glass with a not-quite-steady hand. "You must have been bitten hard, to get here so quickly. I've been their prey since I was fifteen."

Crawford raised his eyebrows, reflecting that these poets tended to have drawn the deadly attentions of their vampires very young—Keats had fallen into the power of his at birth, and Shelley had been consecrated to them before he had even emerged from his mother's womb!

Byron was staring at him. "Yes, that is young. It took me a long time to get here." He drank some more of his wine and squinted out his window at the lake.

"I do owe you help," he said quietly, perhaps to himself; then he sighed and turned to Crawford. "My family estate was some kind of focus for the things—there are such places even in England, ask Shelley sometime—and one of them made his tenancy legal by actually renting the place. Hah! Lord Grey de Ruthyn, he called himself. He liked me, and wanted me to live there with him—my mother thought that was
prestigious
, and made me go, and he knocked on the door of my room the first night I spent there. Like a lunatic I invited him in . . . but it was my mother's fault too."

He frowned and lifted the bottle out of the bucket again, then stared at the dripping label. "Of course she paid for it later," he remarked, "as the families of people like us generally do. Did you know that? And Lord Grey has been . . . attending to me ever since, in one form or other, one sex or the other."

He shuddered and poured some of the wine into his glass. "But now my sister, half sister, actually, has begun to show the symptoms of his attentions, and I won't have that. And Claire's fetus is mine, and even my bastards won't suffer it if I can prevent it."

"Can you prevent it?" asked Crawford. "Without dying yourself?"

"I hope to. Switzerland is dangerous—they seem to have a stronger foothold in this country than anywhere else—but I believe that at the same time, ironically,
it's possible
here to climb up out of their field of power, and throw off their yoke." He pointed at Crawford's cup. "Drinking wine from an amethyst cup is a good way to start."

Crawford remembered something Keats had told him in the Galatea. "I thought neffers liked to do that—and
they
certainly don't want to . . . throw off any yoke. They seem to be
seeking
that yoke."

"Neffers?" Byron seemed amused by the word. "I know the sort of people you mean—God knows I've been hounded by them. One of them, Lady Caroline Lamb, cut her hand at a ball I was at four years ago, and waved her bloody fingers at me, to entice me. Christ. Anyway, they misunderstand the real nature of the quartzes. Some tantalizing dreams can be induced by the uses of them, but such dreams are just . . . echoes still ringing in the remoter halls of a castle after the inhabitants are long gone. Some crystals can give more vivid echoes than others, but none of them can recall the departed tenants; in fact, such crystals tend to
repel
a living member of the nephelim. Not that there are many such left anymore."

Crawford took a deep sip of the wine, and he could feel alertness and energy trickling back into him. "Nephelim?"

"You're not a biblical scholar," Byron observed. "The nephelim were the 'giants in the earth' they had in those days, the descendants of Lilith, who sometimes laid with the sons and daughters of men—it's one of the ways they can reproduce, through human wombs. Ask Shelley about
that
, sometime, too, but catch him when he's tranquil. They're the creatures God promised to protect us from when He hung the rainbow in the sky as a sign of his covenant."

"I thought that was a promise of no more floods."

"No—did you ever read the Greek version of the flood? Deucalion and Pyrrha?" The carriage shook as it crossed an unevenness in the road, and some of the wine splashed out of Byron's glass onto his shirt front, but he didn't appear to notice.

"Sure. They were the only survivors of the flood, and the oracle told them to repopulate the earth by throwing behind them the bones of their mother; and they figured out that the mother being referred to was the earth, so they threw stones behind them as they walked across the mud," Crawford's voice was becoming more thoughtful, "and the stones they threw became humans."

The image of throwing stones had reminded him of St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, and suddenly he was sure that the phrase
loaves of St. Stephen
referred to stones—dangerous stones.

"Almost right," Byron said. "That's actually a much older story, which those primeval historians confused with their own stories about a relatively recent flood. The things that the stones turned into
looked
like people—it's mimicry—but they were this other species, the nephelim. The rainbow, I'm told, is a reference to the fact that the nature of sunlight changed sometime, God knows when, and now it's bad for them—in heavy doses it can even crystallize them, freeze them where they stand. They turn into a sort of dirty quartz. Lot's wife was one of these creatures, and that's what happened to her—it wasn't actually salt that she became a pillar of."

"So quartz crystals repel them because they're . . . bits of dead friends?"

"More than that." Visibly drunk by now, Byron waved his hand in the air as he groped for an analogy. "If you were a glass of water in which three dozen spoonfuls of sugar had been dissolved, would you—I don't know—collect rock candy?"

"Uh . . .
oh
! I get it! It might provoke the whole glassful into crystallizing."

"Exactly. I don't think it's a rig bisque . . . uh, a big risk for them, and I've heard that unless they're diminished they can change to crystal or stone and back again without any . . . with relative impunity, but it does repel them." He nodded heavily and pointed at Crawford's cup. "And wine drunk from an amethyst cup, amethyst being a quartz, is a tiny but real first step in freeing yourself. It will help clear you of the fevers those creatures induce—so drink up." Byron blinked at him owlishly. "Assuming, that is, that you
want
to be rid of the creature that did this to you."