The Stress of Her Regard (49 page)

He sat down, for the rocking of the distant deck was making him weave on the sand—but the sand was moving too. The sand-waves moving away from the pentagram were higher now, though they seemed powerless to change the pentagram itself; and humped shapes, apparently made of sand, were beginning to rise up around the three human forms in a semicircle that was open on the seaward side. Rocks in the wooded slope cracked as if flexing themselves.

"My mother the earth would harm you," the woman said, "if I let her."

The three fingernails of Crawford's free hand had dug bloodily into his palm, and he couldn't tell whether the tears blurring his vision were his own or Shelley's. Everything that had happened since his week of glad bondage to the lamia in Switzerland seemed like a frustrating dream. "Let her," he said softly.

"How can I?" she asked. "I love you."

He was dimly aware that Josephine's hand was no longer in his. The
Don Juan
was in the haze under the dark clouds when the wind struck, and she heeled wildly, her sails full, of the hot damp breath of the storm; Crawford felt the pain as Shelley fell against the rail and clutched at it.

A little Italian boat, a felucca, was visible off the starboard bow, racing in for Livorno harbor, but she lowered her triangular lateen sails when she was near Shelley's boat, and her captain called across the dark water, offering to take the
Don Juan's
passengers aboard.

Crawford felt the strain in his own throat as Shelley yelled,
"No!"
The felucca was already receding aft, though Shelley had to look upward as well as back to see it from where he was crouched at the edge of the
Don Juan's
slanted deck.

"Break the pentagram," the silvery woman said, cringing against the weight of the sun on her, "and I will spare all of them—the children, that woman there—all of them. But do it now. Already I am so weakened that the task of saving Shelley will nearly kill me."

"Let her go, Michael," said Josephine suddenly. "You can't kill his
sister
!"

Too
, thought Crawford bitterly, you mean I can't kill
his
sister
too
, in addition to
your
sister, is that it?

"Remember her promise to Shelley," he said. His voice was as harsh as the cracking of the rocks and the rustling of the sand.

"You're a woman too," the lamia said to Josephine, "and you love him too. We're alike, we're
identical
, in that. I will let you have him—I'll go away—if you will just let me save my brother. I don't know why your Michael wants him to die."

"He's jealous of Shelley," said Josephine, "because Shelley . . .
had
you here, a month ago."

Crawford turned to Josephine to deny what she'd said, but the captain of the receding felucca had shouted, "If you will not come on board, for God's sake reef your sails or you are lost!"—and Williams, his earlier resolve shattered by the real proximity of real death, had leaped for the halliards to lower the sails.

Shelley sprang forward and punched him away from the rail, and the
Don Juan
labored on through the steamy rain, still under full sail, farther into the storm.

Crawford saw Williams—no, it was Josephine—start toward the pentagram, her hand out to break the lines of it, and Crawford seized her by the arm and threw her away across the sand.

Human-shaped forms made of flinty sand were standing around them now, waving fingerless arms in impotent rage or grief, and trees on the slope behind him were snapping and falling as though the hill itself were waking up and throwing off its organic blanket. The sea bubbled like a boiling pot, and the sky was full of rushing, agitated spirits.

"Michael," said the woman in the pentagram.

Helplessly he looked at her. Burns were visible now on her pearly skin. Horribly, love still shone in her unnatural eyes. No
human
, he thought, could have continued to love me through this.

"It is too late for me now," she said. "I die today. Let me at least die going toward him, even though it is certain that I will die on the way."

He knew that only someone who hated himself thoroughly could do this, could
continue
to do this, and he wondered if Josephine and Mary and her child would ever know enough to be thankful that one such had been chosen for the job.

"No," he said.

The
Don Juan
had foundered now under the dark, turbulent sky; water was cascading in over the gunwales, and the tightly bellied sails were pulling her over still farther.

Shelley was clinging to the rail. "Goodbye, Aickman," he said, having to spit out salt water before he could speak.

"Crawford," said Crawford, suddenly thinking it was important. "My name is Michael Crawford."

Crawford could feel the tension of Shelley's smile as he held his head up into the warm rain above the solid water surging in over the gunwales. "Goodbye, Michael Crawford."

"I could still release her," Crawford heard himself say.

"No," Shelley said, with a sort of desperately held serenity. "Stand with me."

"Goodbye, Shelley," Crawford managed to say.

He felt Shelley free one hand from the rail to wave.

Crawford caught a last thought of Shelley's as the young poet despairingly lifted his feet and let go of the rail and let the savagely eager sea batter him off the deck: bleak gratitude that he had never learned to swim.

The hot sand was in Crawford's mouth then, for he had fallen face down, gasping for air even though it wasn't his lungs that were being choked with cold sea water.

In a minute or two his breathing returned to normal, and he was able to lift his sand-caked face.

The woman in the pentagram was impossibly shrinking, shrivelling in the harsh sunlight. She seemed more reptile than human now, and soon she was unmistakably a serpent, her bright scales glittering purple and gold. And as if to match the foggy tempest in which the
Don Juan
had met its doom, the shaking hill had thrown up a cloud of dust, and a savage wind sprang up in which the sand-figures flung themselves apart in clouds of stinging, gritty spray.

With filming eyes the diminished creature gave him a last glance full of love and torment, and then there was just a little statue lying in the center of the pentagram. The wind died, and he was alone on the beach with Josephine, who was sitting in the sand where he had thrown her, rubbing her arm.

Crawford felt unpleasantly drunk, out of touch with the world. Throwing my women around, he thought, as he bent to pick up the little statue; he drew his arm back and flung it as far as he could out over the water of the gulf. It seemed to hang in the sky, turning slowly, for a long time before it finally sped downward and made a brief, small splash and was gone.

All the cubic miles of hot air seemed to stagger, as if a vast but subsonic chord had been struck on some cosmic organ.

Josephine had stood up by the time he turned back from the sea, and she gave him a frail, bewildered smile. "We did it," she said, her voice quiet but pitched higher than usual. "We planned it and we did it. I even thought I had some idea of what it was we were going to do. Now I—" She shook her head, and though she was smiling he thought she might cry. "I don't have any idea what it is that we've done."

Crawford went to her and gently took the arm by which he had flung her away a minute earlier. He knew what to say, and he tried to give the sentence a tone of importance. "We saved Mary, and her son—and helped to save Jane Williams and her children."

Josephine's lips were slightly parted, and she was squinting around at the sea and the sand and the rocks. The haze of dust from the hill had blown away out over the sea.

"An enormity," she said. "I'll never grasp all of what we did, but it was an enormity."

They walked north along the beach. Crawford wanted to take her hand, but it seemed too trivial an action to be appropriate right now. The taste of Shelley's blood was metallic acid in his head. He was out of touch with the world, and he was vaguely glad that he was dressed, for he didn't think he would be able to put on clothes correctly—to remember what went on where, and which side out. He had to look down from time to time to make sure he was still walking.

The squat stone structure that was the Casa Magni appeared ahead, and shortly after they reached it he found himself drinking wine and chatting cheerfully with Mary and Jane.

He made an effort to listen to what he was saying, and was dimly reassured to hear himself telling the two women that their husbands had planned to leave Livorno in the afternoon, and would no doubt arrive sometime during the evening. "Percy sent you his love," he remembered to tell Mary.

They slept chastely that night in the room that Shelley had let them have, and they were awakened at midnight by a remote inorganic singing, a distant chorus that seemed to be in the sky and the sea and the hill behind the house. Without speaking, they both got up and went into the dining room and opened the glass doors and walked out onto the terrace.

The singing was a little louder, heard from out here, and deeper. The tide had receded out so far that if Shelley and Williams really had been coming home tonight they would have had a hard time finding a mooring at all close to the house—and the exposed shells and black hummocks of sodden, weedy sand seemed to be resonating to the inhuman chorus.

The house was creaking as if in accompaniment, and when he had to take a step sideways to keep his balance Crawford realized that the house was shifting in an earthquake.

"It's what we heard last week in Montenero," Josephine whispered finally, "the night Byron killed Allegra. It's the earth, mourning."

When they returned inside, Josephine insisted on spending the rest of the night in the women's servants' room; wearily, Crawford acquiesced and went back to bed alone.

No diver brings up love again
Dropped once, my beautiful Felise,
In such cold seas.

—A. C. Swinburne,
Felise

How elate
I felt to know that it was nothing human . . .

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mary Shelley and Jane Williams were awake early the next morning, and as they drank their breakfast coffee they anxiously scanned the blue horizon of the gulf; Claire got up later, and volunteered to watch from the terrace while the other two women tried to read and to conceal their uneasiness from the children—but it wasn't until the sun began to sink over Portovenere in the late afternoon, with no boat having appeared, that the three of them began to be alarmed.

Josephine had resumed her job as governess of the children, and Crawford spent the day drinking on the terrace. Claire stood by the rail near him, but they hardly spoke.

That night he and Josephine again slept separately.

Josephine was awakened in the middle of the night by a voice whispering faintly from outside the house. She climbed out of her bunk and got dressed without waking the other servants, and went down the stairs to the ground floor, walked past the boat in which she had rescued Crawford three weeks earlier, and out onto the still warm moonlit sand.

A man was standing on the beach, and when she had stepped out of the arches he turned toward her and held out his hand.

For perhaps a minute neither of them moved; then she sighed deeply and reached out and took the proffered hand with her maimed left hand.

They walked south along the shore, moving up the slope when the waves came up and straying out onto the wet, flat sand when they receded.

After a few minutes she looked into her companion's silvery eyes. "You're my friend from the Alps," she said, flexing her bent hand reminiscently in his. "Why do they think you're this Polidori?"

"I am him too, more or less," the man replied. "He came seeking my kind after leaving the poets, and I was . . . available and vital. Thanks to you, thanks to what you had given me. So I took him and, when he took his own life, the—what would be the right word?—the bits of attention . . . the seeds, say; the seeds I had planted in his blood quickened, and I emerged from his grave."

Josephine frowned. "Doesn't that mean there are two of you now? The one that bit him and the one that grew out of his dead body?"

"Identity is not as rigidly quantized with us as it is with you. We're like the waves that agitate a body of water or a field of grass; you see us because of the material things we move, but we don't consist of those material things. Even the seeds we plant in people's blood aren't physical things, but a sort of maintained attention, like the beam of a slotted lantern held on a moving object in the dark. My sister had to suffer, and labor, to be focussed down to a point where she could actually be killed, and even then she would probably not have died if she hadn't been linked to Shelley by the fact of their twinhood."

Josephine glanced at him warily, but his expression was still placid. "This person beside you," he went on, touching his own chest, "can exist in any number of forms at once, just as he can be both Polidori and the stranger you called to your room that night in Switzerland."

A wave came swirling up, faintly luminous in the moonlight, and they stepped up the slope to avoid it.

"It's been a long time," she said quietly.

"Time is nothing to my kind," her companion told her. "It needn't be anything to you either. Come with me and live forever."

Some muted part of Josephine's mind was profoundly frightened, and she frowned in the darkness. "Like Polidori?"

"Yes. Exactly like Polidori. Float to the surface of your mind only when you want to be awake."

"Are you in there, Polidori?" Josephine asked, a little hysterically. "Say hello."

"Good evening, Josephine," said her companion in a different voice, one that still carried some pomposity. "It is my good fortune that we meet at last."

"Did you find your life intolerable?"

"Yes."