The Stress of Her Regard (31 page)

Maybe, he thought now, maybe if I had jumped out of the gondola on the trip from Fusina to Venice, when Clara was at least still alive—drowned myself then, even as late as that—my dreadful sister would have died too, and Clara wouldn't have had to die. But no, by then she'd already been bitten.

He looked again at his abraded left hand.

The coffin had been shut last night, when he had stolen down to the spare room where the landlord had told them to put it, but Shelley had lifted the lid and taken Clara's cooled little wrist in his hand. There had been no pulse, but he had felt a patient vitality there, and he knew what sort of "resurrection of the dead" would await her if he didn't take the ancient precaution.

It hadn't taken him long, even trembling as he was and blinded with tears.

When he had finished, he had closed the coffin again, and despite being an atheist he prayed, to whatever benevolent power there might be, that no one would open it—or at least no one unburdened by an awareness of the truths behind superstitions.

He threw Byron's iron-headed hammer into the canal; the wooden stake, which had so ravaged his hands and had so much more horribly ravaged little Clara's body, he left imbedded in her chest.

. . . This consumption is a disease particularly fond of
people who write such good verses as you have
done . . . I do not think that young and amiable poets
are at all bound to gratify its taste; they have entered
into no bond with the Muses to that effect. . . .

—Percy Bysshe Shelley,
to John Keats, 27 July 1820

I fear much there is something operating on his mind—at
least so it appears to me—he either feels that he is now
living at the expence of some one else or something of
that kind.

—Dr. James Clark, Keats's physician in Rome

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him
how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my
sister—who walks about my imagination like a ghost—
she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even
in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.

—John Keats,
to Charles Brown, 30 November 1820

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

—John Keats,
epitaph for himself

Even on this chilly day there were a dozen artists, mostly English tourists, who had set up easels in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the wide marble stairs that terraced the Pincian Hill below the twin bell towers of the Trinita dei Monte church. As Michael Crawford strode across the piazza toward the tile-roofed rooming house that was Number 26, his boots scattered piles of the little yellow husks that littered the pavements wherever the lower classes of Rome gathered, and he looked with sour amusement at the loungers eating plates of the boiled beans that had shed the husks.

These weren't precisely beggars—they stood here in hopes of being asked to model for paintings. In order to solicit such employment they liked to assume, as if by accident, poses they thought they were particularly suited for: here, leaning against the stairway coping, a hollow-cheeked, bearded young man rolled his eyes heavenward and mumbled under his breath, clearly hoping to be asked to pose as some suffering saint or perhaps even Christ; while over by the Bernini fountain a woman in a blue shawl clutched an infant to her breast and made beatifically magnanimous gestures with her free arm; the weather was evidently too chilly for any appearance by the sun-basking representatives of the
dolce far niente
, the "sweet to do nothing" life, but saints and madonnas and even entire Holy Families stood in shivering clusters along the shallow gray slopes of the steps.

For a moment Crawford was whimsically tempted to drop his bag and stand idly here himself, just to be able to see, when an artist finally did ask him to pose, what sort of character the artist might think he represented. A Hippocrates? A Medici poisoner?

But he quickened his pace, for even in Rome winter could be deadly to victims of consumption, and the man he was going to see was supposedly very far gone with that disease; and the man's nurse, for whom Crawford had been given some medicine that was now in a vial in his coat pocket, was apparently suffering from a nervous disorder that made her a danger to both herself and her patient.

Though Crawford's step was still light and he was only forty years old, his hair was almost completely gray. He had been working as a doctor again for two years now, largely on retainer for a man named Werner von Aargau, and the retainer work had, during the last twenty-six months, taken him all over Europe. He was glad to be back in Rome again.

He had met von Aargau in Venice, in the winter of 1818. Crawford, nearly destitute in those days, had been doing some late night drinking by lamplight in a canal-side café when he'd been startled to his feet by the nearby screech and clang of swordplay, and when he had flung down his drink and rushed along the canal bank a dozen yards, he had come upon a young man sprawled on the ancient pavement beside a dropped sword, his shirt soaked with blood.

Over the diminishing drumbeat of fleeing footsteps Crawford had been able to hear the young man's rasping breath, and so he had crouched down and used the sword to cut a bandage from the victim's silk jacket and tie it tightly over the cut in his belly; Crawford had then run back to the café and enlisted help to drag the semiconscious body back there, and when they had got the young man stretched out on the floor beside one of the tables, he had stitched up the wound with a skewer and kitchen twine.

The young man had regained consciousness as Crawford and a couple of volunteers were boating him to the nearest hospital, and when he learned who had stitched him up he had weakly dug a purse from his pocket and insisted that Crawford accept it; and when Crawford looked into it, later in the evening, it had proven to contain a dozen gold
louis d'or
.

Thinking to use up the money sparingly, Crawford had spent a little of it to hire a cheap room and buy a plate of hot pasta in unfresh oil, but the next morning a footman had knocked at his door and summoned him to the hospital. Crawford never did find out how the footman had known where to find him.

To Crawford's astonishment the young man whom he had stitched up only the night before had been cheerfully sitting up in the hospital bed, apparently lucid and unfevered; and when Crawford had haltingly begun to express his gratitude for the money, the young man had interrupted to say that no amount of money could repay the debt he owed Crawford for having saved his life—and that he had a proposal of employment, if Crawford happened to need such.

Crawford had looked down at his own shabby clothes, then looked up with a wry smile and asked what sort of work it might be.

The young man had proved to be one Werner von Aargau, a wealthy humanitarian and patron of the arts. He explained to Crawford that he not only
funded
artists and politicians and religious leaders, but got the finest medical care for them too when they needed it, and he asked Crawford if he'd like to work for him as a surgeon, since his skills in that area were clearly so great.

Crawford had told him that he was only legally qualified to practice veterinary medicine, and hadn't made a success of that—he'd come to Venice, in fact, only to try to borrow money from an acquaintance he hadn't seen in a couple of years, and he'd been wasting the evening in that café only because he'd parted from the acquaintance on bad terms, and wanted to blunt his pride with drink before approaching the man.

Von Aargau had assured him that his skills were first-rate, and that he could be provided with impeccably forged medical credentials, and—since von Aargau would call on him only infrequently—that he could build and maintain a medical practice all of his own, in whatever specialty he would like to pursue.

That had made up Crawford's mind for him.

Crawford hadn't felt that he had the right to ask about the nature of the quarrel that had led to their meeting; but, before accepting von Aargau's offer, he
had
worked up the nerve to ask him how often swordsmen tried to kill him in the middle of the night.

Von Aargau had laughed and assured him that it was infrequent—but when Crawford had stitched him up on the blood-puddled café floor, he had noticed a broad scar below the young man's ribs, and he knew that the canal-side assassin's blade had not been the first to violate the integrity of von Aargau's hide.

Later he learned that von Aargau was obscurely but powerfully connected with the new Austrian government of Venice, and that he was particularly hated and feared by the Carbonari, an ancient, secret society that was currently striving to drive out Italy's foreign masters. Von Aargau warned Crawford that he'd be regarded by these people as an agent of the Austrians himself, even though he'd only be doing medical work; he would be wise, von Aargau had said, to avoid neighborhoods where the post-mounted wooden heads called
mazzes
were to be found, for the
mazze
was virtually the Carbonari flag.

This didn't deter Crawford, and within a month he had a post at the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome, on the bank of the Tiber between the imposing dome of St. Peter's on one side and the fortifications of the Castel Sant'Angelo on the other.

He took an apartment on the far side of the river, a couple of rooms overlooking the fountain of Neptune in Navona Square, and every morning that he wasn't on an assignment for von Aargau he would walk through narrow streets to the Ponte Sant'Angelo and cross that bridge, always a little happier if there were other pedestrians on the bridge too, for then he didn't feel so outnumbered by the tall stone angels that topped pedestals every few yards along the stone balustrade on either side.

The Hospital was actually a collection of hospitals, each devoted to a different sort of sufferer; Crawford worked in the foundling hospital, caring for the infants that were delivered anonymously through a little wall grate that was opened when a bell was rung outside on the street. The infants always arrived at night, and Crawford never saw any of the reluctant parents who rang the bell, and sometimes when he was giddy with exhaustion it seemed to him that no one was ever out there when the bell rang and the babies appeared in the basket, that the infants were put in the basket by the city itself, perhaps in the person of one of the stone angels from the bridge.

He didn't see von Aargau after leaving Venice, but every month or two someone representing the wealthy young man would call on him at his apartment. Crawford frequently worked more than ten hours at a time, but these messengers would never visit him at the hospital, preferring to wait in the street outside his apartment even if it was cold or raining; once he had asked one of them about it, and the man had explained that they weren't comfortable on the Vatican side of the river.

The assignments they brought him were always for the same ailment—a pseudo-tuberculosis that von Aargau insisted be treated with garlic and holy water and closed windows . . . and often laudanum, to make sure the patient would sleep through the night.

Of course Crawford was aware of the implications of the treatment—and he hadn't failed to note the paired puncture marks on the bodies of many of these special patients. But he had long ago come to accept the fact that his life would never again remotely resemble what it had been before that night, four and a half years ago, when he had put his wedding ring onto the finger of a statue in the back yard of a Kentish inn; and at least this arrangement permitted him to do the only thing in life that still seemed to have any value: caring for the newly born, the little helpless people who had not yet had the chance to act, to fall from grace.

* * *

Number 26 was at the south end of the Piazza di Spagna, and Crawford stepped through the archway of the old house and climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, where he stepped out into the hall and began counting the room doors as he walked along the worn wooden floor; he'd been told that his new patient had the two corner rooms, overlooking the piazza. Piano music—something by Haydn—rippled softly on the still air.

He found the right door and knocked on it, and as he waited for a response he reviewed what he'd been told of this case.

The patient was a young Englishman, a poet, and he suffered from consumption—but it was a sort of consumption that called for a course of treatment exactly the opposite of what von Aargau usually recommended. In this case
no
garlic was to be administered, or even permitted into the room, and any religious paraphernalia was to be
thrown out
, and the windows were to be left
open
at night.

Crawford knew very well that in any civilized medical college von Aargau's methods would be cause for derision and expulsion—conceivably even imprisonment—but he had seen dying patients recover because of them.

The piano music had stopped the instant he had knocked, and now furniture creaked and thumped on the other side of the door for several seconds. Finally the door was unbolted and, when it was pulled open by a harassed-looking young man, Crawford guessed from the present haphazard placement of several of the chairs that they had been braced against the door moments earlier.

Crawford was puzzled until he noticed the piano—certainly rented—that stood in the far corner of the room. Italian law required that every piece of furniture in a room occupied by a consumptive be burned after the invalid had died, and so these people couldn't risk having the landlady burst in unannounced and catch the sick man in this expensively furnished room.

"Si?"
the young man quavered, speaking with a thick English accent.
"Cosa vuole?"

"English is fine with me," said Crawford, stepping around him into the room. "I'm Michael Aickman, a doctor. I've been sent to look at a young man named John Keats—I gather he's to be found through here," he said, crossing to the inner door.