The Stress of Her Regard (33 page)

The door behind them was pulled open then, and when he turned around Crawford was astonished to see that Keats had got out of his bed and was standing in the doorway.

"My brother," Keats whispered, then fell.

Crawford and Severn leaped forward and caught him, and then carried him back to his bed.

"You told us," Crawford told him softly, "how Tom died of consumption."

Keats shook his head impatiently. "My other brother, George—
he's
well enough, I trust—I talked him into going to America—I even had to lend him the money to do it—and he's over there now, with the whole Atlantic lying between him and my . . . Godmother, devilmother . . . and my brother Edward died when I was only six . . . but
my sister
, Fanny, she's only seventeen! And she's in England! Christ, can't you understand? I—" He broke into a booming cough, and seemed to lose consciousness again; but a moment later he opened his eyes and stared at Severn and, through bloody lips, said, "I'm sorry, Joseph. I know it would be nice to get out of Clark's debt. But this . . . Aickman fellow has got to leave. Don't ever let him come back."

Crawford leaned over the bed. "You want to die, is that what you're saying?"

Keats rolled his head to the wall. "No, you idiot, I don't
want
to die. Christ . . ."

Severn took Crawford roughly by the arm and forcibly marched him out of the room, through the front room and into the hall. Crawford was too surprised to resist, for Severn hadn't seemed to be at all forceful.

"He's engaged to a girl in England," Severn said harshly, "and he knows he'll never see her again. She writes letters, but he can't bear to read them anymore. He won't even let me open them." There were tears in his eyes, and he cuffed them away impatiently.

"And his new book is finally getting the kind of attention he's hoped for all his life. And he's not some . . . some
ascetic recluse
, he's—he was—a vigorous, healthy young man, and he's in
Rome
, but he can't even go out and
look
at it. And
you
think he
wants
to die."

Crawford started to speak, but Severn pushed him hard, and he took several drunken steps backward down the hall.

"If I see you here again, I'll—," Severn began, then just shook his head helplessly and re-entered the apartment and shut the door behind him.

Crawford swore, not least because he'd left his flask inside, then turned and walked back toward the stairs.

Blood made terrible ink; Crawford's fingertip was a slashed ruin by the time he had stabbed the pen nib into it often enough to scrawl the note to his Austrian bosses. Finally he put the pen down and sucked on his finger as he read the note.

He won't cooperate; nor will the nurse. Sorry.

By the time he had found and pocketed the special whistle von Aargau had given him, the blood had dried on the paper. He was supposed to leave the note in the hand of any piece of statuary—not difficult anywhere in Italy, and very easy in Rome. He walked down the stairs from his rooms over Navona Square—just a dozen blocks from Keats's place—and, still sucking his finger, stared around at the three wide fountains in the long square.

The fountain of Neptune was closest, so he walked over to it and looked speculatively at the stone figures arranged across its wide pool. Neptune himself was too busy shoving a spear down into some sort of octopus—his hands were just fists around the shaft of the spear—but there was a pair of marble cherubs who seemed to be tormenting a wild-eyed marble horse nearby, and there was room under the hand of one of them for the note, if he folded it tightly.

He folded it up, then stepped over the coping, splashed his way to the horse, and stuck the bit of paper under the stone fingers.

It chilled him a little to be putting something into a statue's hand, but he thrust out of his mind the long-ago memory of another statue in the back yard of a Sussex inn.

He looked up as he waded back to the fountain's coping, wondering if anyone might wonder what he'd been up to and try to pry the note out, but only one old woman seemed to have noticed his action, and she was crossing herself and hurrying away.

Very well, he told himself as he clambered out, his trouser legs flopping wetly around his ankles, the note's in place, now all you've got to do is let von Aargau's people know there's a note to be picked up. God knows how they'll receive my signal, or be able to tell
which
stone hand in the city is holding the note, but that's their job.

He unpocketed the whistle and started to raise it to his lips, but then it occurred to him that he was already a bit conspicuous in his wet pants, and that standing in the middle of the square puffing on a little whistle
too
would make him seem to be some sort of third-rate street performer.

He hurried into the shade of a narrow alley, and then puffed at the whistle in the
four-two-three
pattern von Aargau had described to him. As von Aargau had told him to expect, it produced no audible sound. He blew the signal pattern again.

Sand and tiny pieces of gravel were sprinkling down into the alley and, looking up even as he blew the pattern one more time, he saw that a flock of pigeons that had been nesting under the ancient tile eaves were scrambling out and scattering noisily away into the sky; and church bells had begun ringing in random cacophony all over the city—but a moment later all sounds were masked in the hiss of a sudden downpour of rain, and in moments the pavements and stone building fronts were all dark. He put the whistle away and hurried out from under the overhanging eaves into the abruptly rain-swept square.

Before he could cross the twenty yards back to his building he heard a clatter of hooves on pavement and, squinting to his left, northward, he saw a dozen men on horseback ride into the square and jerk their mounts to a halt.

Though they were nearly a hundred yards away, Crawford could see that they were staring intently at everyone and asking quick questions of the people nearby—but the old woman who had seen Crawford wade into the fountain was gone, and in the rain Crawford's wet trousers apparently raised no suspicions, for he got to his front door without being stopped.

He had glanced at the stone cherub as he passed it, and he'd thought he'd seen a faint wash of blood streaking the neck of the stone horse. More than ever the cherubs seemed to be torturing it.

Back up in his room he threw off his wet coat—and noticed that it
clunked
when it hit the back of a chair. He picked it up again and felt in the pockets, and a moment later he had dug out from among the folds of his handkerchief the vial of medicine he had been supposed to give to Josephine.

He sat down in the chair with the vial in his hand and stared out of the rain-streaked window at the lead-colored afternoon sky.

How in hell had
Josephine
wound up there—and calling herself
Julia
? Obviously she hadn't followed him, for she'd been attending Keats for at least several days before Crawford had even got the order to go over there. And, even more obviously, it was clear that she and Crawford had not been there for the same reason.

And why, he wondered, does she want Keats to die?

More to the point, why does
Keats
want to die? He was worried about his little sister—does he think his survival would mean his sister's death?

Would
it mean that? He recalled that Byron and Shelley—and Keats, too, back in London—had had some such idea about the families of the nephelim's prey.

Crawford shifted uncomfortably in the chair and wished he hadn't left his flask at Keats's place, for he didn't want to think clearly, or remember clearly, right now. None of these questions were his problems anyway—he was only trying to save someone who would otherwise die. Where was the ethical problem in that? Perhaps he should go downstairs and get a bottle to bring back up here.

The thought reminded him of the vial he still had in his hand, and he held it up to the lamplight, which glowed red through the milky fluid within. He remembered that von Aargau's representative had told him to give it to the nurse in some strong-tasting medium like stew or hot spiced punch and, because her nervous ailment made her needlessly suspicious, not to let her know he was giving it to her.

He pulled out the cork and sniffed the stuff. The harsh, acidic smell was distantly familiar, and reminded him of the first hospital he had ever worked at—something to do with the syphilitic ward. Did Josephine have syphilis? That disease could certainly affect her mind adversely. Perhaps this was the explanation of all her weird behavior.

He smelled it again. The memory was circling in his head like a fly, always seeming on the point of alighting. Something to do with his having got in trouble, having mixed something wrong . . .

And then he had it, and his belly went cold and, just for one moment of weakness, he wished he had got that bottle of liquor and had drunk himself insensible and not ever opened this vial.

The vial contained quicksilver dissolved in acid mineral spirits, a virulent poison which was sometimes accidentally produced by careless medical students when mercury was being prepared for use on syphilitics in hospitals.

Von Aargau had sent him there to kill Josephine.

But he's my employer, one part of his mind instantly pointed out, it's through him that I'm able to care for all the foundling infants in Rome—if I break with him I'll lose the position and have to go back to being a mediocre veterinarian, once more trying to work up the nerve to borrow money from Byron; and, realistically, quite a number of those infants will die without my care, and
Josephine
is hardly a creature with potential, hardly anybody's idea of a
tabula rosa
, a blank slate—hell, she's a slate that's had bad math scrawled on it and then been waxed so that nothing can ever be written on it again. I've treated
sheep
that had more of a right to live.

He started to recork the vial, intending to put it back in his pocket to await a future decision, but found he couldn't do it. Was he really even willing to
consider
giving her the poison?

This would be his first murder by
action
rather than by inaction, wouldn't it?

But, he asked himself plaintively, is saving
Josephine
worth losing the position at Santo Spirito? Somebody else, sure, Keats, his damned sister, the next person to walk across the square, in fact,
but Josephine?
All those infants who'll need my help, who'll die without me, just so that this . . . wretched construct named Josephine can lurch a few more unhappy miles and years before giving in wearily to death?

Of course, by the time I lie down to die, at the age of seventy or so, all the children I'll have delivered and cared for will have grown up to become coarse, brutish adults; and hell, Josephine herself was a baby once—her mother died giving birth to her.

This . . . protectiveness you feel toward newborns, this value you see in them—at what point, exactly, does it all wear off?

When is it that a person stops qualifying for life, according to your definition?

Josephine certainly didn't acknowledge it when she saved your life on the Wengern Alp.

His heart pounding at the prospect of all the questions he'd now no longer be able to evade, Crawford crossed slowly to the window, opened it, stared down at the gray street for a moment and then carefully poured the liquid in a long, separating stream into a puddle under a rain gutter. He considered throwing the vial itself across the pavement into the fountain of Neptune, but decided that it would probably fall short—and if it didn't, that it might hit that poor stone horse.

The thought of the horse reminded him of the note he'd left under the cherub's hand. Had von Aargau's people had time to find it yet? If so, they might very well be on their way to do what Crawford had failed to do.

He threw on his wet coat, ran out of the room and down the stairs, leaving the window and the door open, and sprinted across the rain-slick stones and then cleared the three-foot-tall coping of the fountain in a flying leap. His legs twisted out from under him when he hit the water, and he wound up more swimming than wading as he floundered to the horse.

The note was gone.

Von Aargau's people wouldn't be able to deal with Keats until dark, but killing Josephine could be done at any time.

For one falsely hopeful moment he hoped that the rain would have washed the blood-letters away . . . but then he remembered how efficient von Aargau's organization was when it came to dealing with blood.

Where had Josephine said she lived? St. Paul's Home—that was in the Via Palestro. Crawford knew the place, for it was where the hospital hired most of its nurses. It was at the east end of the city, more than twice as far away from here as Keats's place.

The jets of water from the fountain's mechanism were being torn to bits by the hammering rain as he climbed out onto the pavement again, and he had to squint to see as he began running, miserably, east.

As he jolted along through the rain he thought about this last case von Aargau had assigned him. Every previous pseudo-consumption patient had been a powerful pro-Austrian politician or writer; why should von Aargau want to save Keats, an obscure poet whose political sympathies, assuming he had any at all, were probably more in line with the Carbonari's? In fact, how had von Aargau even come to
hear
of Keats? Lots of tubercular patients came to Rome hoping to stave off death.

It made no sense . . . unless von Aargau—through his employee, Crawford—was representing the only figure in the conflict who was being thwarted: the lamia herself. And of course the lamia would just as soon see Josephine dead, since Josephine was abetting Keats in his resistance to the lamia's will.

The thought brought Crawford to a wheezing stop in a narrow street, and he leaned against a lamppost to catch his breath and order his thoughts.