The Stress of Her Regard (25 page)

The summer was gone, along with a lot else—but since climbing the Wengern it all seemed to have taken place in someone else's life, someone Crawford had known and felt sorry for a long time ago. He was reminded of Shelley's story about having cut his encysted sister out of his side, and he felt as though he had now done something similar.

Maybe, he thought with a smile, Josephine only pulled part of me back up from that abyss I jumped into—maybe some part of Michael Crawford did go plummeting away into those cloudy canyons.

The lake current was taking the boat in close to the north shore, almost into the shade of the overhanging pine branches, and when the little vessel rounded the point of a low, wooded promontory, Crawford saw several men on the shore running away from a large boulder that sat in the shallows. Smoke seemed to hover behind it. One of the men glanced at the boat, and then flailed to a stop.
"Frauen!"
he yelled to his companions,
"im boot!"

"Women in the boat, they say," remarked Hobhouse, who was lounging on a thwart at the stern end.

Byron lifted his oar out of the water and squinted at them. "Of course there are women in the boat," he said. "Did he think we'd be rowing it ourselves?"

Crawford pointed at Byron's oar. "Well, you are, after all." He looked ahead again. The boat was bearing down on the boulder, and smoke was definitely curling up from behind it.

The men on the shore were yelling urgently to the people in the boat.

Crawford didn't understand what they'd said, but Byron and the boatwomen evidently had—they all began working the oars furiously to put distance between the boat and the shore; and they had managed to slant sharply out away from it when the boulder abruptly became a cloud of flying stone fragments, and a resounding
crack
punched a wall of air and hard spray against the boat and its passengers; splinters flew as rock bits clipped the rails, and when Crawford had cuffed the spray out of his eyes he saw a cloud of smoke unfolding above a patch of choppy, foamy water where the boulder had sat. He turned to the port side and saw rings appearing farther and farther out on the lake as rock pieces went skipping away across the flat water. In the distance the Jungfrau looked on impassively.

Byron and Hobhouse were on their feet, and they both shouted furious curses until the men on the shore had run away into the woods.

"Damn me!" Byron said, sitting down and pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket. "No one's hurt? Pure luck—those idiots could have killed us."

The women were talking excitedly among themselves, but they seemed to have recovered from the shock, and soon resumed their rowing.

"I think it was bad luck that they saw you rowing," said Crawford. "It made them think we were by ourselves, unaccompanied by any innocent locals."

Hobhouse groaned. "You really should be writing novels, Aickman! Why do all of Byron's physicians feel called on to indulge so in—in
morbid fancies
? Those men were just careless louts trying to get an obstruction off their beach without going to the trouble of hauling it away! Look, if they had wanted to
murder
us, why didn't they simply
shoot
us? Or, if they had their hearts set on actually blowing us up, why not simply pitch a bomb at us? Why go to the trouble of dragging a big damned rock down to the water and blowing
it
up when we're nearby?"

"Maybe because it
was
a rock," said Crawford. "That is to say, because it was a
rock
. Things that can protect you, that can . . . oh, say, raise a shadow to prevent you from drinking poisoned brandy," he went on, glancing at Byron, "might not have the power to block or deflect pieces of one of the sentient stones, one of the
living
ones. Maybe they can't interfere with
family
. Is this making sense?"

"Oh, yes, excellent sense," said Hobhouse nervously. "Do take my hat, old fellow. And maybe a nap would be a good idea—after all, yesterday was a strenuous—"

"Hush a moment, Hobby." Byron leaned forward. "Go on, Aickman. Let's say that is the only way they could have killed someone with such protections. Why would they
want
to do it? If someone wanted to stop us from going to the mountain, that's one thing; but why try to kill any of us
now
? We would pose no further threat to them. We have no more connection with these things."

Crawford reluctantly let his gaze go back to the Jungfrau. "Maybe that's not altogether true," he said softly.

Byron shook his head and picked up his oar. "I don't believe it—and I
won't
believe it, watch me. I don't mean to seem to speak
ex cathedra
, but I think you have to concede that, in these matters, I have a good deal more—"

Crawford was scared, and it made him irritable. "More like
ex catheter
, actually. "

Byron barked one hard syllable of laughter, but his eyes were bright with resentment. "Hobhouse is right," he said. "I have unfortunate taste in doctors." He resumed his seat beside the prettiest rower, and began animatedly talking to her in German.

Hobhouse gave Crawford an amused look that was not without sympathy. "I think you've lost a job," he said.

Crawford sat down and reached over the gunwale to trail the fingers of his four-fingered hand in the cold water. "I hope I've lost a lot more than that," he said.

The sunlight had begun to slant in through the window from the west, and Mary Godwin put down her pen, stretched back in her chair and looked out the window at the housefronts and gardens and fence-walking cats along Abbey Churchyard Lane.

Their unconventional household—herself, Shelley, their nearly eleven-month-old son William, and the ever more obviously pregnant Claire—had been back in England for just a little more than three months; and often, especially at times like this when she had spent a few hours rewriting her novel, she was startled to look up and see the low Welsh mountains on the horizon beyond the Bristol Channel instead of the snowy majesties of the Alps.

Shelley had seemed nervous during the crossing from Le Havre to London, though it had been an uneventful trip—the only annoyance had been when the London customs officer had leafed through every page of the manuscript of Lord Byron's third canto of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
, evidently supposing that Shelley was trying to smuggle lace into the country between the sheets of paper. Shelley had been entrusted with delivering the manuscript to Byron's publisher, and he didn't want anything to happen to it.

She waved a page of her own manuscript in the air now to dry the ink. She was apparently the only one to have taken up the challenge Byron had tossed out on that rainy evening almost exactly six months ago, when she and Claire and Polidori and Shelley and Byron had been sitting in the big upstairs room at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Leman, after Shelley had had that nervous seizure and run out of the room.

"I really think we should each write a ghost story," Byron had said when Shelley had returned and the awkward moment had passed. "Let's see if we can't do something with this mud-person who's been following poor Shelley around."

She'd had a nightmare shortly afterward—a figure had seemed to be standing over her bed, and at first she had thought it was Shelley, for it had resembled him closely; but it had not been him, and when she had reared up in horror it had disappeared.

She had used the vision as the basis of a novel; it was the story of a student of natural science who assembled a man out of lifeless parts, and who then managed by scientific means to endow the thing with unnatural life.

Shelley had been very interested in the tale; he encouraged her to write it out, and to freely use incidents from his own life to amplify it. She'd taken him at his word, and the story had become almost a biography of Shelley, and a chronicling of his fear of being pursued by some kind of double of himself, a sort of dreaded twin that was destined to kill everyone he loved.

Shelley had even suggested the name of the protagonist, a German word meaning something like
the stone whose travel-toll is paid in advance
. She had wanted to use a more English-sounding name, but it had seemed important to Shelley, and so she had obediently called the protagonist Frankenstein.

The story took place in the Swiss locales Mary and he had lived in, and the name of the protagonist's infant brother, slain by the monster, was William, the same as the son Mary had had by Shelley; the areas of science involved in the monster's vivification were ones Shelley was familiar with, and the books the monster read were those Shelley had been reading at the time.

And, based on Shelley's description of the intruder he'd wounded in his house in Scotland in 1813, she wrote a scene in which the monster's face is seen leering through the window of an inn at its creator, who later tries unsuccessfully to shoot it; though here Shelley had showed some hesitation, and made her omit certain details. The physical description of the monster couldn't actually be that of the thing Shelley had shot in his parlor on that occasion—Mary remembered the drawing of it that he'd done from memory, that night in Switzerland, and how much it had upset Claire and Polidori—and for some reason she couldn't mention the fact that Shelley had pulled a muscle in his side, at the scar under his ribs, during the encounter.

She hoped the book would be published, but it seemed already to have fulfilled its main purpose, which was to draw out and dispell Shelley's outlandish fears. He was much calmer now that he was back in England and she'd written the story out—it almost seemed that she had taken the fears one by one from Shelley's head and transferred them to the novel.

And Shelley seemed comfortable without them—"Maybe she
did
stay over there with Aickman," he had said recently while half asleep, and Mary got the clear impression that the "she" he'd referred to was the thing that he feared.

Mary hoped that the worst of their problems were now behind them, and that they'd soon be buying a house to raise children in.

She heard Shelley put a book down in the next room, and then she heard him yawn. "Mary," he called, "where's that letter from Hookham?"

Mary frowned slightly as she put the sheet of paper down and stood up, for while Hookham was Shelley's publisher, this letter was probably in answer to the inquiry Shelley had made a month ago about the situation of Harriet, Shelley's wife. Mary was determined to get Shelley to divorce Harriet and marry
her
, and she hoped the woman wouldn't have got herself or the two children into some situation Shelley would feel called on to help out with.

"It's on the mantel, Percy," she said cautiously. Soon she heard paper tear, and wondered if she should go into the sitting room and wait expectantly while he read it, but then she decided that she shouldn't seem to care.

She hoped that the news, whatever it might be, wouldn't drag Shelley back to London—the city never seemed to have a good influence on him. Only yesterday he had returned from a visit to the London suburb cottage of one Leigh Hunt, a mildly revolutionary poet and editor, and the visit had apparently almost caused Shelley to suffer a relapse back into his fear of supernatural enemies—for he had met there, he said, a young poet who was "clearly marked by the attentions of the same breed of antediluvian devils" who had supposedly harried Shelley back and forth across the map.

"You can see it in his face," Shelley had told her, "and even more clearly in his verse. And it's too bad, for he's as modest and affable a fellow as I've ever met, and he celebrated his twenty-first birthday only a month and a half ago. He has none of the pose and morbidness that neff—that this crowd usually affects. I advised him to postpone publishing his verse; I think the advice offended him, but every year that he can avoid drawing the attention of . . . certain segments of society . . . will be a blessing."

Mary tried now to remember what the name of the young poet had been. She remembered that Hunt had nicknamed him, to Shelley's considerable disgust, "Junkets."

John Keats, that's what the name was.

She heard Shelley shout in the next room, and ran in to see him sprawled across the couch, the letter clutched in his hand.

"What is it, Percy?" she asked quickly.

"Harriet's dead," he whispered.

"Dead?" Out of love for him, Mary made a determined effort to share his grief. "Was she sick? How are the children?"

"She wasn't
sick
," said Shelley, his lips pulled back from his teeth. He stood up and crossed to the mantel and picked up a piece of smoked glass that had been sitting there since they'd gone out to view a recent solar eclipse. "She was
killed
—as her murderess promised me she would be . . . that was four years ago, almost, in Scotland. God damn it, I didn't do enough—not nearly enough—to protect her."

"Murderess?"
said Mary. She'd been wondering how to tactfully take the piece of glass away from him, but this last statement had jolted her.

"Or murderer, if you'd rather," said Shelley impatiently. "I—" He wasn't able to finish, and for a moment Mary thought it was rage, rather than grief, that choked him.
"And she was pregnant when they found her body!"

Mary couldn't help being glad to hear it, for Shelley had been separated from Harriet for more than a year. "Well," she ventured, "you
have
always said she was of weak character. . . ."

Shelley stared at her. "What? Oh, you mean she'd been unfaithful. You don't understand any of this, do you? Mary,
she undoubtedly thought it was I
.
You
should be able to grasp that,
you
thought it was I who was standing over—" He shook his head and clasped the piece of glass in his fist.

Suddenly Mary was afraid that she did understand, and she was frightened. She remembered his strange fears, and all at once they didn't seem so ludicrous. "Percy, are you saying that—this thing you're afraid of—"

Shelley wasn't listening. "And her body was found floating in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. The
Serpentine
! Was
that
damned . . .
joke
. . . necessary? She—he, it—can't really have thought that I'd have failed to recognize its handiwork without this . . . this
hint
."