The Stress of Her Regard (53 page)

"
Somebody
is still here, at least," Byron muttered, starting to limp forward.

Crawford and Hunt stood up and plodded after Byron through the thick hot sand to the hole. Crawford made himself keep up with Hunt, but in order not to faint he had to clench his fists and stare at the ground and take deep breaths. The bandages around his ankles were wet—the blood-draining incisions the
nefandos
had given him had started bleeding again.

Oddly, there was no noticeable odor of putrefaction on the pine-scented sea breeze.

The health officer had dragged a blackened, limbless body out onto the sand. A woven chain of garlic still adhered to the body, and several purpled silver coins tumbled off onto the sand. The Health Office didn't cheat, Crawford thought dizzily.

Byron was squinting, and his mouth was pinched. "Is that a human body?" he asked, his voice scratchy. "It's more like the carcass of a sheep. This is . . . a satire."

Trelawny reached down and gingerly pulled a black silk handkerchief free of the remains of the jacket; he laid it out on the sand near one of the silver coins and pointed at the letters
E.E.W.
stitched into the fabric.

Byron shook his head in disgusted wonder. "The excrement of worms holds together better than the potter's clay of which we're made." He sighed. "Let me look at his teeth."

Both Trelawny and Hunt turned puzzled glances on Byron.

"I, uh, can recognize anyone I've talked to by their teeth," he said. Glancing at Crawford, he added, "The teeth reveal what the tongue and eyes might try to conceal."

Trelawny muttered some quick Italian to the officer, who shrugged and, with the handle of the shovel, turned the head.

Crawford looked down at the shapeless, lipless face, and nodded. Williams's canine teeth were perceptibly longer than they had been when he'd been alive. The garlic and silver slowed him down, Crawford thought, but the Health Office really should have thought of some plausible, hygienic-sounding reason to put a wooden stake through the chest.

The officer had leaned into the hole again, and this time hooked up a leg with a boot on the end of it. Trelawny stepped forward—he had brought one of Williams's boots for comparison, and when he held it up to the one on the dead foot, they were obviously the same size.

"Oh, it's him, sure enough," said Byron. "Let's get this onto your oven, shall we?"

The officers were careful, but as they lifted the body, the neck gave way and the head fell off and thudded into the sand. One of the officers hurriedly stepped forward with a shovel, and, in a grotesque attempt at reverence that made Crawford think of someone coaxing some hesitant animal into a trap, gingerly worked the blade of the shovel under the head, and picked it up. The head grimaced eyelessly at the ocean, rocking slightly as the officer walked.

Byron was pale. "Don't repeat this with me," he said. "Let my carcass rot where it falls."

Several of the officers had continued digging in the sand; they had found another body now, and wanted to know whether it should be carried to the oven too.

"No no," said Byron, "it's just that poor sailor boy, I doubt that he has any family to—"

Crawford took Byron's arm, both to steady himself and to get the lord's attention. "Add him to the pyre," Crawford whispered. "I think you'll recognize him by his teeth, too."

"Oh." Byron swore.
"Si, metti anche lui nellafornache!"
Hunt and Trelawny were staring at him, and he added, "Shelley thought well enough of—whatever his name was—to hire him, didn't he? I'm taking over Shelley's debts, and I choose to regard this as one of them."

Hunt and Byron and Trelawny walked onward to stand around the open-topped oven on which their dead and sundered friend lay, but Crawford reeled away through the hot air to where the other body was being dug up.

The officers had got the head and an arm out, and Crawford saw here too the garlic and the silver coins. He stared down at des Loges's fleshless smile, noting the lengthened canine teeth, and he managed to smile back at the grisly thing, and tip his straw hat.

Goodbye at last, Francois, he thought. Thanks again for helping with my passport six years ago. I wonder if that clerk is still around—Brizeau? Some name like that—and if he'll finally manage to get your wife now.

The health officers laid des Loges's remains in a blanket, and Crawford limped along beside them as they carried the burden to where everyone else waited.

At last both bodies were laid side by side in the bed of the oven, and Trelawny crouched and held a burning glass over a particularly dry cluster of pine needles. The concentrated sunlight glowed blindingly white, and then resinous smoke was billowing up. Quickly the fire was burning so furiously that Hunt and Trelawny and the officers all stepped back, and the beach and the sea seemed to ripple through the nearly transparent flames.

Crawford forced himself to stand firm for one second longer, holding his hat onto his head against the blast of hot air that would have whirled it away, and through streaming eyes he watched the heat taking the ruined bodies; and when he finally had to spin away and stagger into the relative coolness of the sea breeze, he noticed that Byron too had hung back to look.

The two of them glanced at each other for a moment, and then looked away, Crawford toward the sea and Byron toward his carriage; and Crawford knew that Byron too had seen the pieces of the bodies moving, weakly, like embryos in prematurely broken eggs.

Hunt had fetched a wooden box from the carriage, and after the first intense heat had given way to a steadier fire, Trelawny opened the box, and then he and Hunt leaned in toward the fire to throw frankincense and salt onto the now inert bodies, and Trelawny managed to get close enough to pour a bottle of wine and a bottle of oil over them. Everyone retreated back to the hut then, for the very sand around the furnace was becoming too hot to walk on, even in boots.

Earlier in the morning Trelawny had curtly turned down the offer of a drink, but now he seized the wine bottle and drank deeply right from the neck of it. He leaned against one of the poles of the hut, but it started to give, so he sat down beside Hunt. Byron was standing just outside the hut, next to where the exhausted Crawford sat.

"A cooked salad," Crawford heard Byron mutter. Then, louder, Byron said, "Let's try the strength of these waters that drowned our friends! How far out do you think they were when their boat sank?"

Trelawny stared up at him in exasperation, the shadows of the woven branches striping his bearded face. "You'd better not try, unless you want to be put into the oven yourself—you're not in condition."

Byron ignored him and began unbuttoning his shirt, walking away down the sand slope toward the sea.

"Damn the man," muttered Trelawny, handing the bottle to Hunt and getting to his feet.

Crawford watched the two of them stride to the surf, throwing off garments as they went, and then dive into the waves. He and Hunt passed the bottle back and forth as the heads and arms of the two swimmers receded out across the sea's glittering face. Crawford absently brushed blood-caked sand off the bandages on his ankles.

After a few minutes one of the swimmers seemed to be having some difficulty—the other had paddled over to him, and now they had both turned around and were laboring back.

Hunt had stood up. "I think it was Byron that ran into trouble," said Hunt nervously.

Crawford just nodded, knowing that most of Hunt's concern for Byron's welfare was based on Byron's promised support of the magazine that was supposed to save Hunt from penury.

At last the two swimmers had reached the shallows, and were able to stand up. It had indeed been Byron who had broken down—Trelawny had practically towed him in, and Byron now angrily threw off his supporting arm.

Byron retrieved his scattered clothing, and put it all back on before walking back up to the hut. "It was an excess of black bile," he muttered when he had got back into the shade.

Crawford recalled that in the medieval system of medicine black bile was supposed to be the humour that caused pessimism and melancholy. I imagine, he thought, that we're all suffering an excess of it today.

Trelawny had stumped up to the hut now, and though he watched Byron solicitously, the lord avoided meeting his glance. "I hope you paid attention here today," Byron said, perhaps to Crawford. "Tomorrow we do Shelley."

Crawford stared toward the still raging pyre, and in spite of the day's heat he had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

Trelawny sailed off in the
Bolivar
and spent the night at an inn in Viareggio, while the others returned to Pisa in Byron's carriage. The next day they all met again at a section of beach fifteen miles farther north; and again Byron had made them late. No hut had been built here, and Byron and Crawford and Hunt waited in Byron's carriage.

The sky was as cloud free as yesterday's had been, and seemed all of a piece with the sea, so that the two islands on the southern horizon seemed to float in space.

Byron caught Crawford's eye and nodded toward the islands. "Gorgona and Elba," he said. "To which do you suppose our Perseus has flown? To the Gorgon, or to the isle of exile?"

Hunt rolled his eyes and exhaled loudly.

Trelawny had arrived early in the morning and set up his oven, and now that Byron's carriage was here he told the officers that they could begin digging.

For more than an hour, though, the men dug in the soft sand with no result—aside from unearthing an old pair of trousers which didn't seem to have belonged to anyone who'd been on the
Don Juan
. The officers impatiently threw the sand-caked garment aside, but Crawford leaned out the carriage window to stare at the trousers, wondering if they might have been the pair he'd shucked off two months earlier, in the Gulf of Spezia, just before swimming to rescue the suicidal Josephine.

For a moment he regretted having gone to save her, but then he remembered that she now seemed to be pregnant by him—had possibly become pregnant that very day.

When he finally relaxed back into his seat Byron glanced nervously at him, and Crawford knew what he feared—that the delay had been too long, and that Shelley's body had undergone the stony resurrection and climbed up out of its grave.

"It begins to look like Gorgona," Byron said.

Crawford shrugged, then sketchily made the sign of the cross. He was weak and trembling, and at the moment hoped they wouldn't find Shelley's body, for then he wouldn't have to get out of the carriage and walk around.

But a few minutes later one of the probing shovels thudded against something, and after the officers had crouched to brush away sand they called to the Englishmen.

"Elba after all, it seems," said Crawford stoically, putting on his straw hat.

Byron sighed and unlatched the carriage door. "Not too late," he agreed, climbing down to the sand-swept pavement. His graying hair shone as he stepped out of the shadow of the carriage into the hot sun.

" 'Not too late'?" echoed Hunt irritably as he followed Byron out. "Did you suppose that he would have decomposed entirely in this time?"

"On the contrary," Byron said, and started out across the dry grass of the road shoulder toward the sand.

Hunt turned to Crawford, who had now climbed down beside him. "What does his
lordship
mean by
that
, do you suppose?" Hunt asked.

"He probably meant 'on the contrary,' " Crawford told him.

They followed Byron to where Trelawny stood beside the hole in the sand, and then for several moments they were all silent, staring down at Shelley.

The exposed bones had turned a dark blue, and the once white clothing was now all black. Unlike yesterday's exhumations, the smell of rot here was overpowering, and the health officers tied handkerchiefs over their faces before freeing the thing from the hole. At least it held together, and when it was laid out on the sand Crawford noticed that the incisor teeth showed no signs of having grown during the month in the earth.

Crawford looked up at Byron. "Not even a glance toward Gorgona," he said softly. Clearly Shelley had died entirely when his lamia sister had expired on the beach below the Casa Magni.

Byron swore hoarsely and turned away, and angrily wiped his sleeve across his eyes.

Trelawny crouched beside the corpse and gingerly prised from the jacket pocket the copy of Keats's poems, but it now consisted only of the leather binding, and he sadly laid it back on the dark ribcage.

The body was then shifted onto a blanket, and the four Englishmen walked beside it like pallbearers as the Italians carried it to the oven and gently laid it into the blackened bed. The rotted leather binding still lay on the body's chest—like, thought Crawford, a Bible clasped in the hands of a dead pope lying in state.

Again Trelawny set fire to the pile of pine logs under the iron table, and again the flames sprang up in a withering rush—but though Byron and Crawford once more braved the shocking heat for several seconds to watch, Shelley's body sizzled on the iron bed but didn't move at all. The two men stepped back from the heat and stood away from Hunt and the others.

Though still high, the flames were steadying, and an aura of gold and purple shone around them. Byron glanced at Crawford, who nodded.

"The thing that attacked us in the Alps glowed with those colors," Crawford said quietly, "just before it petrified."

"So did the rainbow over the . . . dramatically
petrified
Alps. I wonder if human royalty adopted these colors in a spirit of . . . hanging up the dried head of your slain enemy—though in the cases of these things the dried head can often still bite."

"Bite's the word," Crawford agreed.

Byron mopped his sweating face with a handkerchief. "There'll be something here," he muttered to Crawford. "These days you understand at least as much as I do about this business—watch for it."

Crawford looked back to the black figure reclining in the heart of the flames. "What—what sort of thing?"