The Stress of Her Regard (48 page)

"I don't like it," said Trelawny. "And I'm going to pace you in the
Bolivar
and you can't prevent me. If you get into trouble, at least I'll be able to fish the two of you out of the water."

Shelley's face regained its animation when he saw Crawford. "There you are," Shelley said, picking up the iron case and crossing to him and taking his arm. "I've got to talk to you." He led Crawford across the tile floor to a far corner. Crawford tried to get in the first word, but Shelley overrode him.

"Listen," Shelley said, shoving the iron case into Crawford's hand, "you've got to leave
now
. I want to be setting sail this afternoon, but you've got to be in Spezia, and all prepared, when I do. Also, this weather will become very bad—I've waited for it—and I don't want
you
to run into trouble." His smile was both frightened and bitter. "This coming storm is all for me."

"And the Vivian boy too, I gather," said Crawford angrily, setting the case down. "Doesn't he count? I won't permit you—"

"Oh, shut up, please, of course he's not going. I've already paid him off and told him to get out of Livorno. No, I'm going alone—I can work the
Don Juan
solo, at least well enough to get myself killed—but if Trelawny knew it, I think he would physically prevent me. As it is he's insisting on escorting me, but I've hidden his port clearance papers, so he'll spend the night here, like it or not."

Then Shelley reached into his jacket and pulled out a little vial of bright red blood. "I drew this only an hour ago," he said, "and I put a little vinegar in it, as I've seen cooks do, to keep it from clotting. It'll be a powerful proxy for me. Now remember, in addition to being my proxy, it's also to let me know when you're ready—so do remember not to dump all of it out for the lure."

Trying not to gag, Crawford put the vial into his coat pocket; somehow, of all the things he would have to do today, the use of Shelley's blood was the thing he was dreading most. He picked up the case again.

"I've got you a passenger," he said, a little wildly. "Someone who wants to accompany you on your . . . cruise." He waved to des Loges, who had been standing by the front door and now came hobbling toward them, a repulsive grin curdling his ancient face.

Shelley gaped at the old man and then turned to Crawford furiously. "Haven't you understood
anything
? I can't be taking passengers! What does this derelict imagine—"

Crawford overrode him: "Percy Shelley, I'd like you to meet Francois Villon."

Shelley's voice trailed off, and for several seconds Crawford could see the effort it cost him to think—then finally Shelley smiled, with something of his old alertness. "Really? It's really Villon, the poet, he's an in-law? And wants to . . . go . . . with me?"

Crawford nodded. "It is," he said flatly, "and he does."

Des Loges had by now hobbled up to them, and Shelley slowly reached out and shook his hand. "It will be," he said slowly in modern French, "an honor to have you aboard."

Des Loges bobbed his head. "It is an honor," he said softly in his barbaric accent, "to sail with Perseus."

Shelley blinked at the old man, then pointed at him excitedly. "You . . . you were in Venice, weren't you? When I was there with Byron in '18. You called me Perseus then, too."

"Because you had come to have dealings with the Graiae," des Loges said. "And today, still true to your name, you mean to slay a Medusa!" He looked out the window at the hot sky. "lt looks like a good day for doomed men to go sailing."

Crawford waved for silence, for Edward Williams had stepped away from Trelawny and was approaching them.

Williams stopped beside Shelley. It was obviously painful for him to be up and around in the daylight, but he forced a smile as he took Shelley's arm.

"I-I'm sailing w-with you, Percy," he stammered. "Don't try to talk me out of it. She's d-dead, really dead, Allegra is . . . and I really . . . think . . . I can hold this resolve . . . until nightfall, and not try to find another lover. If I keep thinking about Jane, and our children, I think I can." His smile was desperate but oddly youthful too, and for a moment he looked the way Keats had looked in London in 1816.

"Ed," said Shelley, "I can't take you. Go with Trelawny on the
Bolivar
, and—"

Williams smiled bleakly. "That wouldn't . . . do me any good, would it?" he said quietly. "The
Bolivar's
not going to sink."

For several moments Shelley stared at his friend's wasted face, and then his answering smile was sad and gentle. "Well," he said, "now that I consider it, I can't think of a pilot I'd rather have on this trip." He turned to Crawford and extended his hand. "Go," he said. "Now, while you can still do this for all of us."

As Crawford took Shelley's hand he was thinking about the first time he'd seen him, unconscious in a street in Geneva six years earlier. Aware of the losses Shelley had suffered since then, and of the gray hair and limp and scars he himself had acquired, and of Josephine's lost eye and twisted hand—and of all the deaths and suffering—Crawford was choked, at a loss for an adequate parting statement.

"I wish," he managed to say as he hefted the iron case, "we'd got to know each other better."

Shelley smiled, and when Crawford released his hand he further disarranged his hair. "There's hardly anyone left here to get to know anymore—so go." He reached across and tapped the lump in Crawford's coat that was the vial of blood. "Tell Mary I send my . . . love."

Crawford used some more of Shelley's money to hire the fastest-looking boat he could find in the harbor, and when he and Josephine were aboard, and the single-masted sloop was coursing northward across the clear blue water, he limped through the spray and wind to the bow and stood staring ahead, toward what, one way or the other, would be the culmination of these last six years of his life.

He was still far from sure that he would be able to do what he had promised: the procedure that would save Josephine—and, incidentally, save Mary Shelley and her young son—but which would also bar him forever from the sort of longevity that des Loges and Werner von Aargau had been enjoying for the last several centuries. He could probably become a mere
victim
again, if he searched long enough for a nephelim predator to destructively love him, but he would certainly never again have the chance to actually
marry into the family
.

It was all very well for everybody to expect this of him. Des Loges had had centuries of the easy life already; Shelley had seen nearly all of his children die, and still had one to save; and Josephine had never had membership in the family even offered to her.

He took the vial of Shelley's blood out of his pocket and thought about how easy it would be to simply drop it over the side, into the ocean.

He glanced back at Josephine, who was sitting against the mast with her eyes closed, mumbling—certainly the good old multiplication tables again. Sweat gleamed on her forehead. He tried to see her as an annoyance, as an odious responsibility he'd somehow accidentally been burdened with, and something in the empty sky seemed to help him think it—all at once Josephine seemed too physically hot and organic, and perishable like some kind of stuff for sale in the open air markets, where one had to wave away the buzzing clouds of flies to see what the merchandise looked like, be it vegetable or meat.

But though some power was helping him to see her as a temporary bit of noxious growth—some kind of mushroom that would appear fat on a lawn in the morning and be burst and spoiled by dusk—something in his mind, something more force-full, was making him see her in different contexts: he saw her helpless at sea, while he looked on without acting; trapped in a burning building while he drank nearby; crushed in a bed in which he slept, and went on sleeping.

And then he remembered her pulling Byron and himself back from the abyss on the peak of the Wengern, and kissing him with a mouth full of glass and garlic in a Roman street, and pulling him out of the sea and massaging his leg with tortured hands, and he remembered the beach on which they had first made love, the day of Mary's miscarriage.

And, unhappily, he put the vial back into his pocket.

At a little after one in the afternoon the boat hove to and lowered its sails, and Crawford and Josephine climbed over the gunwale and waded to shore, a few hundred yards south of the Casa Magni; the trip had only taken about five hours.

The sun glared bright as static lightning in the burned purple sky.

"She'll be weak," Crawford told Josephine harshly as he dragged a stick through the hot white sand, drawing a wide pentagram, "since it's daytime. She'll come, though, because she'll imagine that Shelley and I are in danger, and she—" His throat narrowed, and he had to stop before going on. "—she loves us." He had shed his jacket, but still the sweat ran down his face and soaked his shirt.

Josephine didn't say anything. She was standing at the top of the beach slope, just in front of the trees, and it occurred to Crawford that the spot where they had first made love must be somewhere nearby. He couldn't be bothered now to try to figure out where it had been.

Outside the pentagram he put down the iron case Shelley had given him, and he crouched to open it. For a moment the reek of garlic overpowered the sea smell, and even after the breeze had taken the first redolent puff away, the smell swirled back and forth in the warm air like strands of seaweed in a tide pool.

He opened a little jar and turned to the pentagram and shook a mixture of wood shavings, shredded silver and chopped garlic into four of the five shallow grooves, leaving empty the groove that faced the sea. He set the jar down, still open, in the sand nearby. At last he straightened and stared out westward across the glittering blue gulf toward the peaks of Portovenere.

He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called "the tempestuous loveliness of terror."

Goodbye, he thought.

"Come," he called softly.

He bit his finger savagely and held it over the pentagram so that the quick drops of blood fell onto the sand within it; then he took the vial out of his pocket and uncorked it and poured half of the contents onto the spatters of his own blood. There was still an inch or so of red fluid in the glass container, and he looked hopelessly at it for several seconds while he tried to summon the nerve to do what came next.

"Screw your courage to the sticking point," he whispered to himself, and then drank the blood and tossed the empty vial into the close sea.

And then he was in two places at once. He was still on the beach and aware of the pentagram and Josephine and the hot sand under his boots, but he was also on the shifting deck of the
Don Juan
, back in the boat-crowded Livorno harbor.

"He's there," he heard himself say in Shelley's voice to the two other men on the boat with him. "Cast off."

A mirage was forming way out over Portovenere, and though there was no wind to deface the pentagram or stir Josephine's skirt, Crawford felt something massive rushing toward them across the miles of ocean.

Josephine gasped, and when he impatiently glanced at her he saw that she had clapped her hand over her glass eye. "I
saw
her," she said, her voice husky with fear. "She's coming here."

"To die," Crawford said.

He felt the deck of Shelley's boat shift under his feet and he had to resist the impulse to roll with it. "So is Shelley," he said, and he spoke loudly, because des Loge's harsh laughter on the deck of the
Don Juan
was ringing in his ears. Through Shelley's eyes he saw the low, dark clouds moving in toward Livorno from the southwest, and distantly he felt too Shelley's rigidly suppressed horror at what was soon to happen.

Then Crawford's attention was entirely on what his own eyes were seeing, for now
she
was there on the beach, standing naked in the pentagram.

She was blinking in the glare of the sun on the white sand, and before he could look at her closely he quickly crouched to pour the wood-and-sand-and-garlic along the last line, closing the geometrical figure and trapping her inside.

When it was done he stood back and then let himself look at her.

She was pearly white and smooth, and the sight of her mouth and breasts and long legs made the breath stop in his throat; and though he could see that the sunlight was hurting her terribly, her weirdly metallic eyes were looking at him with love and, already, forgiveness.

"Where is my brother?" she asked. Her voice was like a melody played on a silver violin. "Why have you called me and imprisoned me?"

Crawford made himself look away from her, and he saw the sand shifting in waves away from the pentagram. "Shelley is sailing this way," he said tensely. "There's a storm . . ."

He heard her bare feet shift in the sand as she turned to look south. She whispered a sound that was half sigh and half sob, and he knew she was dreading the tortures of the long flight south to save Shelley. "You don't want him to die," she said. "Release me so that I can save him."

"No," Crawford said, trying to sound resolute. "This is his plan. He wants me to do this."

The woman turned back toward him, and he found himself helplessly meeting her inhuman gaze. "Do you want him to die?"

"I won't stop him."

"Did he tell you," she asked him, "that it will kill me too?"

Her eyes seemed prodigiously deep, and were as dark as a cool moonless night on a Mediterranean island. "Yes," he whispered.

"Do you want
me
to die?"

He felt Josephine's hot hand take his; he wanted to shake it off irritably, but he forced himself to clasp it, even though he knew that he was clasping death—his own soon enough, and Shelley's and the lamia's today. He tried to think about Percy Florence Shelley, and Mary, and the Williams children, and Josephine.

"Yes," he answered the woman, hoping it would all be over before his fragile resolve crumbled. He looked away from her and saw, through Shelley's tears, the thick skirt of rainy haze that hung under the dark clouds ahead of the
Don Juan's
leaping bow.