The Stress of Her Regard (52 page)

Crawford blinked around at the catacombs. He was suddenly tired, and he let the weariness wash through him, dulling the momentary alertness Byron's appearance had provoked.

So what if she
is
pregnant, he thought blurrily. It was that Navy man that did it. Let
him
pull her out of the damned burning house, her and his unborn baby. I'll stay here at the Galatea where I can trade blood for polenta and rice and pasta—and brandy—lots of brandy.

"You go ahead, John," he said, but when he looked more closely at his companion he saw that it wasn't Keats. Where had Keats gone? He'd been here a moment ago—they'd been drinking claret and Oloroso sherry.

"I'm Byron," his companion said patiently. "If you tell
me
to leave, I will."

Why was the man being so troublesome? Of course Crawford wanted him to leave. Who was this Byron anyway? Crawford seemed to recall having met the man . . . in the Alps? That hardly seemed possible.

The thought of polenta reminded him that he hadn't eaten today, and he reached into his pocket for a piece of the fried corn mush he remembered having put there—but his pockets were full of other things.

He felt a crude iron nail, and it was wet with what he knew was his own blood, and for a moment he remembered having pushed the palm of his hand down onto the point of it on the terrace of Byron's villa in Geneva; and there was a glass vial in his pocket too, but he couldn't recall whether the liquid in it was the poison von Aargau wanted him to give to Josephine or was the dose of Shelley's blood, mixed with gall—no, with vinegar; then he found the piece of polenta, but when he took it out of his pocket it was an oatcake with a little raised image on it of two sisters who were physically joined at the hip. Josephine was supposed to have broken it at his wedding to her sister, so that he could have children.

He held it up in front of his eyes. It still wasn't broken.

And he knew that drunkenness wouldn't save him, wasn't strong enough to let him stay here and die. Tears of disappointment were coursing down his lean, bearded cheeks.

The disgruntled neffies had finished the chalice of his blood, and one of them brought the empty vessel back and set it down at the foot of the now vacant cross.

Crawford broke the oatcake into a dozen pieces and scattered it across the stone floor. "You're the wedding guests," he called gruffly to the slouched figures who were watching him and Byron.

"Pick up these pieces and eat them, you pitiful bastards, and the wedding ceremony will finally be finished."

Byron was still watching him patiently. "I'm Byron," he repeated, "and if you tell me to leave you here—"

"I know who you are," Crawford said. "Let's go. This is a good place to be out of."

Crawford was hardly able to walk. Byron had to get in under Crawford's right arm and then shuffle forward, carrying most of his companion's weight as Crawford's feet clopped unhelpfully on the stones. As the lurching pair made their slow way up the sloping floor and got closer to the door, several of the patrons stepped in front of them, one of them mumbling something about it being a shame to permit two such excellent wineskins to leave the place.

Byron let his snarl of effort curl up in a wolfish grin, and with his free right hand he drew his pistol again. "Silver and wood," he gasped in Italian, "the ball in this is. You can die the way your idols do."

The patrons backed away reluctantly, and a few moments later Byron and Crawford were scuffling out through the arched doorway. As Byron led him toward the wooden stairs, Crawford blinked over his shoulder.

"That's not the Thames," he said wonderingly, "and this bridge isn't London Bridge."

"Not much gets past you, Aickman, that's certain," Byron observed as he began dragging the two of them up the stairs.

Up on the pavement they paused to rest. Crawford squinted around at the torturingly bright street, and wondered where on earth he was. He peered down past his nose and was surprised to see that he had a beard, and that it was, though dirty, white.

"Not far now," said Byron. "I've got Tita waiting in a rented carriage around this corner. If I'm not back to him in a few minutes, in fact, he's been instructed to come after me."

Crawford nodded, trying to hold on to his fragile alertness. "How did you find me?" he asked.

"I got my servants to ask around about an Englishman, with a Carbonari mark on his hand, who might well be trying to kill himself. They quickly learned that you were in one of these dens, and then they kidnapped one of the local
nefandos
—that's what they call the neffies here, you know, it also means 'unspeakable'—and they threatened to kill him if he wouldn't give us the location of this place."

Byron shook his head contemptuously. "The man broke down immediately, crying and babbling directions on how to get here. These
nefandos
are cowards. Even in their vice, they just want to skirt the unperilous outer edges, like a would-be rake who can't work up the nerve to do more than just peek in through bedroom windows. If they had any real ambition they'd go north to Portovenere, where they might just actually
find
a vampire."

Crawford nodded. "That's true, I guess. They just want the dreams they get from their quartzes and bits of lightweight metal . . . and from the blood of the people who have been bitten. You can see through the blood." He started forward, but again had to lean on Byron.

"And
I
wasn't even
infected
anymore. They said my blood was still worth a connoisseur's time, though—they said it was like a mild vinegar in which one could . . . still taste the grandeur of the fine wine it had once been." He laughed weakly. "They'd love yours. If you should ever fall into penury . . ."

"A job always open to me, right. Thanks."

For several moments they limped on in silence, while Crawford kept reminding himself of what was going on. "I'll
try
to go up into the Alps again," he wheezed finally, "for the sake of the child, but I'm afraid I'd die now long before reaching the peaks. I was . . . incalculably younger in 1816."

"If my plan is sound we won't have to go any farther than Venice," Byron said. "I think I know a way to blind the Graiae."

"Blind the . . . Graiae," Crawford repeated, sadly abandoning his frail hope of being able to understand what was going on.

They shuffled around a corner, and Byron had taken off his hat and was waving it at the waiting carriage.

"You'll stay at my place in Pisa tonight," Byron said as the carriage got under way, "and then tomorrow we'll take this carriage to Viareggio, where we'll meet Trelawny, who's sailing there aboard the
Bolivar
. He's built some kind of damned oven or something to burn the bodies in. We'll be bringing leaden boxes to hold the ashes."

Crawford nodded. "I'm glad they're going to be burned."

"I am too," Byron said. "The damned Health Office has been dragging its feet on letting us have the permits—I think someone high up in the Austrian government
wants
vampires hatching out of the sand—but we've got the permits now, and mean to use them before they can be cancelled. I just hope it's not already too late."

"Wait a moment," said Crawford. "Pisa? I can't go there—the
guardia
is looking for me."

"Oh for Christ's sake, do you really imagine that you're
recognizable
? You must weigh all of ninety pounds right now. Hell, look at this!"

Byron reached out and took hold of a handful of Crawford's greasy white hair, and tugged. The clump of hair came away in his hand with almost no resistance. Byron tossed it out the open window and wiped his hand on a handkerchief and then threw the handkerchief out too. "You look like a sick, starved, hundred-year-old ape."

Crawford smiled, though his vision was brightly blurred with tears. "I've always said that a man should have experienced something of life before embarking on fatherhood."

Leigh Hunt's children also noticed Crawford's resemblance to an ape, and insisted that the lord's menagerie was extensive enough already without bringing in "a mangy ourang-outang," but Byron cursed them away and got Crawford upstairs and into a bath, then went to fetch Trelawny.

Crawford scrubbed himself with some rose-scented soap that might have belonged to Byron's mistress Teresa—though he was sure she wouldn't want it after this—and washed his hair with it too. When he lifted his head after dunking it in the water to rinse out the soap, most of his hair stayed in the tub, floating in curls like strands of boiled egg white; and when he got out of the tub and used one of Teresa's hairbrushes, he realized that he had gone bald during this past month.

A full-length mirror hung on one wall, and he stared in horror at his naked body. His knees and elbows were now the widest parts of his limbs, and his ribs stood out like the fingers of a fist under tight cloth, and there were sores on his wrists from the daily chafing of the cross-ropes. And he didn't think he would be fathering any more children.

For a few moments he wept, almost silently, for the man he had once been . . . and then bolstered himself with a sip of Teresa's cologne, pulled a robe around his wasted body, and tried to tell himself that if he could somehow save Josephine and their child he would qualify for manhood in a truer sense than he ever had before.

It was a brave resolve, but he looked at his pale, trembling hands and wondered how much he would be able to do; and he considered the fragmented state of his mind and wondered how long he would even be able to remember the resolve.

Byron returned with John Trelawny to discuss the details of tomorrow's pyre—Trelawny only gaped at Crawford twice, once when he first glimpsed him and once when he was told who Crawford was—but Crawford wasn't able to concentrate on what was being said; Trelawny was so burly and tanned and dark-bearded and clear-eyed and
healthy
that Crawford felt battered and scorched by the man's mere proximity.

Byron noticed his inattention, and led Crawford down a hall to a guest bedroom. "I'll send up a servant with some bread and broth," he said as Crawford carefully sat down on the bed. "I'm sure a doctor would insist that you stay in bed for a week, but this pyre tomorrow will be a sort of practice run for Shelley's on the following day, so I want you along."

Byron started to turn away, then added, "Oh, and I'll have the servant bring in a cup of brandy too—and feel free to ask for more whenever you like. It's no office of mine to restrict anyone's drinking, and I can't have word going around that my hospitality is such that my guests are driven to drinking cologne."

Crawford felt his face heating up, and he didn't meet Byron's eye; but after Byron had left the room he relaxed gratefully back across the bed to await the food. He heard his bath water being dumped out of a window, and he hoped the plants wouldn't be poisoned.

He fell asleep, and dreamed that he was back up on the cross in the underground bar; someone had mistaken him for a wooden crucifix, and was getting ready to hammer an iron nail into his face, but Crawford's only fear was that the man would notice too soon that Crawford was alive, and not do it.

The only portions that were not consumed were some
fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what
surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In
snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was
severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I
should have been put into quarantine.

—Edward John Trelawny,
Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author
, 1878

Lady Macbeth:
Here's the smell of the blood still: all
the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
Oh, oh, oh!
Doctor of Physic:
What a sigh is there! The heart is
sorely charged.
Waiting-Gentlewoman:
I would not have such a heart
in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.

—Shakespeare,
Macbeth

Serchio River at the end of summer was low and narrow between its banks, and the glittering waves that swept in from the Ligurean Sea and crashed along this uninhabited stretch of the Tuscany coast went foaming quite a distance up the river mouth, apparently unopposed by any current. The onshore breeze hissed faintly in the branches of the aromatic pine trees that furred the slopes of the hills.

The
Bolivar
was moored fifty yards out from shore, near a sloop that flew the Austrian flag, and Byron's carriage stood on the dirt road above the beach.

On the sand slope a hut had been built of pine tree trunks woven with pine branches and roofed with reeds, and Crawford and Byron and Leigh Hunt were sitting in its shade, drinking cool wine while several uniformed men stood around the little structure. Crawford was sweating profusely, and he wondered which of the officers had had the unpleasant duty of living in the hut for the past month, guarding the graves of Williams and des Loges.

"Trelawny is upset," Byron said. "He'd
like
to have done this at
dawn
—with a Viking ship for the pyre, I don't doubt. He's a pagan at heart." Byron had been nervously irritable all morning.

Trelawny stood a few hundred yards away, his arms crossed, watching the men from the Health Office digging in the soft sand. His custom-made oven, a sort of high-sided, four-legged iron table, sat over a lavish pile of pine logs a few yards past him.

Trelawny had told Byron that he wanted the cremation to take place at ten o'clock—but Byron had slept late, and his carriage had not come rolling up to the road above the shore until noon.

Crawford took one more sip of wine, then shrugged. "It's a pagan business," he said. The ride had tired him, and he wished he could sleep. He tugged the brim of his straw hat down farther over his eyes.

Hunt looked at him in puzzlement and seemed about to ask a question, but Byron swore and stood up—the men had evidently found a body, for one of them had climbed up out of the sandy hole and picked up a boathook.