The Stress of Her Regard (18 page)

Crawford raised the cup, then hesitated; he licked his lips nervously, and his forehead was suddenly chilly with sweat—but a moment later he tilted the cup up and drained it in three big swallows, and held it out for a refill.

"That's a start. You have a family? Brothers, sisters?"

Crawford shook his head.

"No? There's no twin-half, no mirror image, that you're trying to save? Then you must be split yourself—one of the ones who is 'like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.' "

Oddly, Crawford found himself remembering the raised figures on the oatcake Josephine had refused to break. He shrugged, then asked, "Are you a twin of this sister of yours?"

Byron seemed suddenly ill at ease; he answered with an air of duty, as if he owed some degree of honesty to Crawford. "Well, almost closer than that—it's all my own fault, but it's why Lord Grey is so jealous. These things
are
jealous, you know—they don't want you to love any being but themselves, not even yourself. That must be why they attack families—our families are extensions of us." He shook his head somberly. "Poor Augusta. I've
got
to get free of this creature."

Though it was just the sort of thing they had come to the Continent to see, few of the English tourists who were clustered on the couches in the lobby of the Hotel d'Angleterre had succeeded in getting a glimpse of the infamous Lord Byron or his friend Shelley, who habitually listed his occupation as "atheist" in hotel registers. Rumor had it that the two men were living carnally with two sisters in a house across the lake, but hired boat excursions and rented telescopes had all failed to make the private lives of the pair accessible to the public.

So Polidori found an audience when, over a restorative bottle of mineral water, he began describing how badly his former employer had treated him. Most of his listeners wanted stories to bring home about the daughters of William Godwin, but one young woman pushed through the crowd that jostled around the young physician to ask for more details about the drunk who had caused Polidori to lose his job this morning.

"That was the craziest thing I ever saw Lord Byron do," declared Polidori, shaking his head. "This man claimed to be a doctor when we first saw him three weeks ago, a Navy doctor, but
I
got a look at his
passport
. His real name is Michael Aickman, and he's—" Polidori paused for effect. "—a
veterinarian
."

Laughter and bemused head-shakings followed this, and then one old fellow revived the laughter by opining that an animal doctor was perhaps the most
appropriate
attendant for such as Byron and Shelley; but the girl who had asked the question turned away, abrupt as a weathervane in a sudden gale, and walked stiffly to the opposite side of the lobby—she sat down on a bench and, in a quick series of tiny releases and catches, lowered her head into her hands.

After several minutes of deep breathing, Josephine Carmody was able to raise her head.

It had been a shock to learn that Michael Crawford was so close—this had to be him, she had tracked him as far as this city—and the shock had now knocked her back, for the first time in nearly two months, into her Josephine personality.

For most of the fifty-seven days since Julia's murder, she had been the woman-shaped machine, thoughtlessly and automatically following Crawford's trail east across France to Switzerland. The machine could sleep in ditches, and eat disgusting food, and earn money by opening its hydraulically powered legs to the occasional well-to-do man who found it attractive, without worrying about what it was doing, or why.

A few times she had been Julia, and that had not been too bad. When she'd been Julia she had had to use her money, any money there might have been, to check into hotels and get cleaned up and buy clothes. Always she had inquired at the desk if there were any messages from her husband, Michael Crawford—and always she was told that there were not any, and she decided to press on and meet him "at a later point in our itinerary."

Sometimes when she was Julia she would write cheery notes home to her mother, who had always been a prey to melancholy, and was particularly sad now that her only daughter was married and moving away from home. Julia's father had told her that her mother blamed herself for the death of Julia's twin sister, who had died at birth. Julia thought this was awfully sensitive and motherly of the old darling, but at the same time unrealistic. Why, the whole thing might have turned out so much worse! The second twin could very easily have been born
alive
, but at the expense of Julia's mother's life!

It was the Julia personality that she hoped eventually to occupy for the rest of her life, as soon as Josephine or the machine had succeeded in killing Michael Crawford.

His death had to come first, of course, for she could hardly inhabit a world that also contained the man who had . . . who had done something that it was impossible for her to think about, something to negate Julia's very existence.
A bed soaked in blood, piled with terrible fleshy ruin . . .

She flailed her mind away from the inadmissible image.

When Crawford was killed and erased from the world, she would be able to relax and be Julia. She knew she could do it—hadn't she had lots of practice?

She touched the lump under her dress that was the pistol, and smiled jerkily. She stood up all in one movement and marched out of the lobby with a precision a soldier might have envied . . . though several men looked after her uneasily, and one small boy burst into tears as she went scissoring past him.

It wasn't until night fell that Crawford began to miss the cold woman.

At first he wasn't sure what was bothering him—he thought it might be the measured thudding of Byron's foil tip against the wooden silhouette on the wall of the dining room, but when Crawford took his wine out onto the balcony and stared down the slope at the darkening lake, it seemed to be the birds and the wind in the orchard that had him on edge. He drained his glass and went back inside for the bottle, but when he had refilled the glass and emptied it twice he knew that it wasn't drunkenness he wanted. And he wasn't hungry, and he wasn't any more worried than usual about his situation.

He was leaning against the railing with increasing pressure, and he wondered if his problem could be simple sexual deprivation . . . and then he knew what it was that was missing. He missed
her
, and the orgasmic amnesia that had for three weeks freed him from his intolerable memories of a boat in heavy surf, and of a burning house, and of an unthinkably mutilated body in a bed.

But she was gone, and had forbidden him to follow her . . . and he didn't want to follow her, anyway. He swore to himself that he didn't.

For the first time in quite a while he thought of Julia, and of how totally he had failed to avenge her—he had, for God's sake, gone to bed with her murderer, and then told Shelley that he wasn't particularly sorry about the way things had worked out.

Rain began spotting the rail and coldly tapping the backs of his hands; he shoved them into his coat pockets, and the fingers of his right hand curled around some small, gritty object. A sudden wind blew the wet hair back from his forehead as he pulled the thing out and turned it over in his palm, but it wasn't until lightning flared distantly out over the lake that he recognized the ancient, rusted nail he had pulled out of the wooden face nine days ago. The nail's head proved to be broad and flat enough for it to stand on the rail with its point toward the sky.

He held his right hand out flat, as though about to lay it on a Bible for the taking of an oath, and then he lowered it until the cold point dented his palm.

He pressed down very slowly, and felt his skin painfully stretch and then abruptly part; and by the time another person's hand slapped his forearm from below, knocking Crawford's hand up and sending the nail spinning away into the darkness, he had been able to feel the iron probing between the metacarpal bones.

He turned and saw Byron behind him, silhouetted against the yellow glow of the windows. Byron had tucked the fencing foil under his arm, and the bell-guard and grip bobbed in front of him now as though he'd been run through.

"No, my friend, believe me, patience is all that's required," Byron said softly, taking Crawford's left elbow and leading him toward the doors. "I can assure you that if you'll only wait, the world will flay you much more thoroughly than you ever could yourself."

Back inside, Byron tossed the foil onto a couch and poured wine into two fresh glasses. A couple of dogs wandered into the high-ceilinged room, followed after a moment by one of Byron's tame monkeys; neither man paid them any attention, and the animals began tossing couch pillows around.

"What were you punishing yourself for?" Byron asked Crawford in a conversational tone as he handed him a glass.

Crawford took it in his right hand, and blood quickly slicked the base and ran unnoticed down his sleeve. He considered the question as he drank. "Deaths I did nothing to prevent," he said finally.

Byron grinned, but in such a fellow-soldierly way that Crawford couldn't take offense. "People close to you?"

"Brother . . . wife . . . and wife." Crawford took a deep, ragged breath. "I tell you, seeing that thing, that vampire, recede . . . is like watching a tide recede from some evil waterfront. All the horrible old skeletons and wrecks and deformed creatures are exposed to the sun and the air, and you would rather have drowned in the high tide—than lived to see these terrible things again."

"You're a fugitive?"

Crawford considered lying, but then decided that sometimes one fugitive could trust another. He nodded.

"And a genuine doctor?"

Crawford nodded again. "The veterinary story, the whole Michael Aickman identity, is . . . a pose. My real name is—"

Byron shook his head. "I don't want to know."

The monkey had snatched both of the cushions and climbed up onto the back of the couch, to the noisy outrage of the dogs. A tall, burly man strode into the room, saw the disturbance and crossed to the couch.

"Damn it, Byron, you're running a bestial pandemonium here!" he called, having to speak loudly because the monkey was protesting his attempts to take the cushions away.

"That's old news, Hobby," replied Byron. "Ask any of the tourists at the d'Angleterre." He limped back to the table and poured a third glass and held it out to the newcomer. "This is my new medical man, by the way—Michael, this is John Cam Hobhouse—John, Michael Aickman."

"Got rid of that idiot Polidori, did you? Good work." Hobhouse pried both cushions out of the monkey's grip and pitched them through the open doorway. The animals all scrambled after them in a rush, and the room was suddenly quieter. He took the glass and sat down on the couch and stared at Crawford. "Do you write poetry? Dramas?"

The question surprised Crawford, for during the past couple of months he
had
found himself composing verses in his head—it always happened at night, while he was waiting for sleep to take him, and it was always as involuntary as the jerking of a limb during a dream of falling; but he hadn't written any of the verses down, so he shook his head. "Not me."

"Thank God."

"Hobhouse has always been a steadying influence on me," said Byron. "He kept me out of scandals when we were adolescents at Cambridge, and two weeks ago he came here all the way from England just to chase Claire Clairmont away."

Hobhouse laughed. "I'm honored if my arrival had that effect."

"Hobby was even groomsman at my wedding, and it certainly wasn't
his
fault that I turned out to be marrying a modem Clytemnestra."

Crawford recalled that, in Aeschylus's
Orestia
, Clytemnestra had been the wife and murderess of Agamemnon. "Some of us just shouldn't attempt marriage," he said with a smile.

Byron looked at him sharply. After a moment he said, "I'm about ready to leave Switzerland . . . move on south to Italy. How does that sound to you?"

The idea made Crawford obscurely uncomfortable, as Byron seemed to have known it would. "I . . . don't know," Crawford said. He glanced through the window into the night.
I can't
, had been his first thought;
this is where she'll come looking for me, when she comes back.

His face reddened as he realized it, and he reminded himself that he wanted to be
rid
of her—wanted, as a matter of fact, to stay here for a while to test Byron's idea that the nephelim shackles could be shaken off in the high Alps.

"But before we go," Byron went on, "I want to take a tour of the Bernese Alps. I spent a day on Mont Blanc recently with Hobhouse and another friend, but I don't yet feel that I've really made the . . . beneficial acquaintance of these mountains." He winked at Crawford, as though to imply that there was a meaning in his words that was for Crawford alone. "Hobhouse tells me he's free to come along for the trip—are you?"

Crawford exhaled with relief. "Yes," he said, trying to sound casual.

Byron nodded. "You're wiser than Shelley. I think the only way to be quit of the sirens is to answer the call, go right up into their pre-Adamite castles, and then by the grace of God come back down alive and sane. To go back without having done that is to . . . come to terms with an illness, rather than get a cure."

Hobhouse snorted impatiently at what he clearly considered to be a snatch of poetic nonsense—but Crawford, who knew something about illness and cures, shivered and gulped his wine.

The stones are sealed across their places;
One shadow is shed on all their faces,
One blindness cast on all their eyes.

—A. C. Swinburne

The rain continued throughout the next day, and it seemed to Crawford that Byron spent most of the day limping up and down the damp stone stairs and shouting at people; the irascible lord found fault with the way the servants were packing his clothes, and he kept changing his mind about what dainties he wanted the cook to stock the travelling-basket with and, having splashed through the courtyard to the stables, he swore aloud at the grooms' perverse inability to grasp his instructions about how the horses should be harnessed.