The Stress of Her Regard (56 page)

"What have you got?"

Crawford looked up. One of the Hunt boys, apparently about seven years old, was standing over him. The child slapped Crawford's clasped hands. "What have you got?" he repeated. "Something from the kitchen, I can tell."

"Scraps," Crawford gasped. "For the dog."

"I'll take 'em to him. I want to make friends with him."

"No. Lord Byron wants
me
to bring them to him."

"My mom says you're a nasty man. You surely do
look
nasty." The boy stared speculatively at Crawford. "You're a weak old thing, aren't you? I'll bet I could
take
the scraps from you."

"Don't be silly," said Crawford, in what he hoped was an intimidatingly adult tone. He tried to straighten his legs and stand up, but his heels slipped in his blood again and he wound up just thumping the floor with his withered buttocks. The dizziness and nausea that the heart induced in him were very strong.

The boy giggled. "I'll bet you were taking scraps for yourself, so you could chew 'em up raw in your room," he said. "Lord Byron never said you could have 'em, did he? You're a thief. I'm gonna take that bag away from you." The boy was excited and breathless—clearly the idea of having a grown-up whom he could torment with impunity was a heady one.

Crawford opened his mouth and started to shout for help, but the boy began singing loudly to cover Crawford's noise, and at the same time he reached out and slapped Crawford hard across his white-bearded cheek.

To his own horror, Crawford could feel tears seeping out at the corners of his eyes. There wasn't time for this. If the heart were discovered, Hunt would lock it up securely and ship it straight back to London—and what if the boy brought it to the dog and the dog actually
ate
it?

He tried again to stand up, but the boy pushed him roughly back down.

Crawford was close to panic. The lives of Josephine and his unborn child—their lives as humans, at least—depended on his escaping from this little boy, and he wasn't confident that he'd be able to do it.

He started to yell again, and again the boy began singing—
"O say, thou best and brightest, my first love and my last"
—and slapped him backhanded on the other side of his face. The boy was panting now, but with pleasure instead of exertion.

Crawford took a deep breath and let it out, and then he spoke, very quietly. "Let me take it and go," he said evenly, "or I'll hurt you." Over his sickness he tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

"You couldn't hurt me. I could hurt you, if I wanted to."

"I'll . . ." Crawford thought of Josephine, whom he was so ludicrously failing to save. "I'll bite you."

"You couldn't bite a noodle in half."

Crawford stared hard at the boy, and slowly smiled, keeping his eyes wide open to magnify the wrinkles over his cheekbones. He held up his left hand and waved the stump of his wedding-ring finger at him. "See that? I bit that off, once when I was bored. I'll bite
your
finger off."

The boy looked uneasy, but angrier too, and when he drew his hand back again it was clear that he meant to hit Crawford a good deal harder this time. Crawford thought this blow might, in his weakened state, knock him unconscious.

"Like this," he said quickly, and thrust his own little finger into his mouth. He tasted bean soup on it, and the thought that he might also be tasting Shelley's heart very nearly made him vomit.

The boy's hand was still drawn back for the blow, but he had paused, staring.

Crawford bit down on his finger. He couldn't really feel any pain, so he bit harder, wanting some blood to scare the boy with. The hard pounding of his heart seemed to make coherent thought impossible.

The Hunt boy didn't seem to be impressed; he brought his hand farther back and squinted at Crawford's face.

A vast bitterness almost made Crawford close his eyes, but he kept them locked on young Hunt's; and even as he wondered if there might have been any other way out of this, he expressed all of his despair by clenching his jaw on the last finger-joint with every particle of strength he had left. Cartilage crunched between his teeth, and the horror of that seemed only to give him more strength.

Crawford's hand flew away from his mouth, spraying blood across the floor.

The last joint of his little finger was still in his mouth, severed. He spit it out hard, bouncing it off the boy's nose.

Then the boy was gone, screaming hysterically as he ran through ever more distant rooms, and Crawford rolled over onto his hands and knees and crawled away toward the stairs, dragging the paper bundle with him and leaving a trail of blood smeared across the stone floor.

Giuseppe found him on the stairs and carried him to his room.

Byron visited him shortly after Giuseppe had tied a bandage around his fresh finger-stump. The lord looked pale and shaken.

"That's . . . ," said Crawford weakly, "the heart, there. On the table."

"What the hell did you do?" asked Byron in a quiet but shrill voice. "Hunt's brat is saying that you bit off your finger! Is that what happened?"

"Yes."

"Did you have a fit? The boy says you—
spit
the finger at him! Everyone's shouting downstairs. Moreto got down there and seems to have
eaten
your finger. Goddamn it, why do I get involved with such horrible people? I've got Hunt and his sow and litter underfoot, because of this impossible project of his magazine, but that wasn't enough for me, was it? I had to get into an even
more
impossible project, with a man who bites his fingers off, and his wife, who pulls out her eyes!"

Crawford's shoulders were shaking, and he honestly couldn't have said whether he was laughing or crying. "Who's," he choked, "Moreto?"

Byron stared at him. "Who the hell do you
think
Moreto is?" He was frowning, but the corners of his mouth were beginning to twitch. "One of the servants? Moreto's my
dog
."

"Oh." Crawford was definitely laughing. "I thought it might be that old woman in the kitchen."

Byron was laughing too now, though he still seemed to be angry. "Just because you're driven to drink cologne doesn't mean I starve my help." He leaned against the wall. "So how
did
you come to bite off your own finger? A seizure of some sort, I assume." He stared at Crawford. "I mean, it
was
an accident, right?"

Crawford was still shaking. He shook his head.

"Jesus. Then . . .
why
?"

Crawford wiped his eyes with his maimed hand. "Well, it—it really seemed, at the time, to be the only way to keep him from feeding Shelley's
heart
to the dog."

Byron shook his head wonderingly. "That's . . . crazy. I'm sorry. That you could imagine such a thing is plenty of evidence that you're not ready for this undertaking of ours. Good God, you could have . . . yelled for help, couldn't you? The cook was right there. Or just
walked away
from the boy, surely? Or hit him? I just don't see—"

Now Crawford was crying. "You
didn't
see. You weren't there."

Byron nodded, and seemed to be working not to let pity—or it could have been disgust—show in his face. He crossed to the bedside table and picked up the paper-wrapped bundle. "I'd better hide this. Hunt will probably notice its loss soon." He hefted the heart. "Even if he just picks up the box, he'll realize it's light."

"No," Crawford choked. "The box weighs the same."

"The box," Byron said carefully, "weighs the same. What did you put in it?"

"A—oh, God—a rooster head. From the kitchen."

Byron was nodding gently, and didn't seem to be about to stop. "A rooster head. A
rooster
head."

Still nodding, Byron left the room, closing the door softly.

Crawford and Byron both developed high fevers, and during the ensuing week Byron's sun-burned skin peeled off in great patches, and he took delight in making jokes about snakes shedding their skins.

Crawford, tormented by his own helplessness and his impatience to find and save Josephine and his unborn child, didn't find the jokes funny.

For quite a while he could work up no enthusiasm about food or any activity, but forced himself to eat three meals a day, and to exercise—at first simply lifting the iron lamp on his bedside table a few times was enough to set him sweating and trembling, but by the end of the second week of his convalescence he had improved enough to ask Giuseppe to fetch him a couple of bricks, and he soon got to the point where he could lift them from below his waist to above his head fifty times in a row.

Shortly after that he began going downstairs and outside to the narrow kitchen garden to do his exercises, for there was a stout overhead beam there, on which various trellises were anchored, that proved to be sturdy enough for him to do chin-ups on. Byron's cook visibly disapproved of his presence in her garden until one day when he helped her pick and carry several bags-full of basil leaves; after that she stopped frowning at him, and once or twice even smiled and said
Buon-giorno
.

Byron seemed to recover more quickly. Crawford saw him frequently at dinner, but these days Byron was always accompanied by a vapidly gossipy friend called Thomas Medwin, one of the old Pisan English circle, and, on the two occasions when Crawford had tried to hint to the lord that he'd like to discuss their proposed journey, Byron had frowned and changed the subject.

And when Medwin finally left, on the twenty-eighth of August, Crawford found himself unable to talk to Byron at all. The lord spent all his time locked in his room reading, or lounging with Teresa Guiccioli in the main garden, and when Crawford had one day presumed to interrupt the two lovers, Byron had angrily told him that any further intrusions would result in his abandoning their plans altogether.

Byron slept late into the afternoons, apparently spending the entirety of the nights drinking and feverishly scribbling more stanzas of
Don Juan
. He never went out in the
Bolivar
anymore, and had apparently given up riding.

When Crawford felt well enough to go outside, he took to walking up the Lung'Arno and crossing the bridge over the Arno's mud-yellowed water—on which Shelley had so loved to sail—and knocking at the door of the Tre Palazzi, where Mary Shelley was once again staying. He hoped to get her to intercede for him with Byron, but she was still too distracted by Shelley's drowning, and angered by Leigh Hunt's refusal to let her have Shelley's heart, to pay much attention to him.

Crawford thought he knew why Hunt was so adamant. One recent evening, after a long dinner-table conversation about Percy Shelley, Hunt had retired downstairs to his own rooms—and had then been heard to yell in alarm. Byron had sent a servant down to find out what the matter was, and Hunt had assured the man that he had simply stubbed his toe . . . but a few minutes later the entire household was made helplessly aware that Hunt had, for once, abandoned his often-boasted conviction that children should never be beaten.

Crawford often wondered now, half fearfully and half amused, whether Hunt had believed his children's no doubt passionate denials of any knowledge as to how a rooster head had got into the box that was supposed to contain Shelley's heart.

On the eleventh of September, Mary moved out of the Tre Palazzi, bound for Genoa. It occurred to Crawford later that Mary might in fact have been speaking well of him to Byron while she'd been in Pisa, for on the day after her departure Byron summoned Crawford to the Palazzo Lanfranchi's main garden, in which the lord and his mistress Teresa sat over a leisurely lunch under the spreading orange tree branches, and told Crawford curtly that the house was shortly to be closed down and vacated, and that Crawford would have to leave.

Crawford decided to give Byron a few days to cool off and then to just confront him somewhere, now that there seemed to be nothing to lose—at least there were currently no houseguests.

But four mornings later Crawford awoke to discover that Byron's old friend John Cam Hobhouse had arrived for a week's visit. Crawford remembered Hobhouse from the trip they'd taken through the Alps six years before—Hobhouse had been a fellow student of Byron's at Trinity College, and was now a politician, worldly and sophisticated and witty, and Crawford despaired of ever getting Byron's undivided attention.

After doing his exercises—he could now do twenty chin-ups in a row—Crawford spent the day walking around Pisa, noting places he'd been to with Josephine and savagely wishing that the two of them had got married when they had first arrived in the city, and that they had never renewed contact with the damned poets. Back at Byron's house, he drank brandy in his room for a couple of hours, then went downstairs and ate polenta and minestrone in the kitchen. Feeling sleepy at last, he went back out into the hall.

He paused outside the kitchen arch. In the dim illumination of a couple of lamps in niches in the walls, the Palazzo Lanfranchi's main hall looked like a disorganized warehouse these days—crates of books and statuary and dishes were stacked everywhere, and a dozen ornate swords and rifles stood like umbrellas in a barrel by the door. The usual sour milk and stale food smell of the children was overwhelmed by the musty exhalations of old leather.

Crawford sidled between the crates to the barrel, and he had lifted out an old saber and drawn it from its scabbard and was sighting along the blade when footsteps sounded on the pavement outside and the door was ponderously opened.

Hobhouse stepped in, glimpsed Crawford and ducked right back out with a smothered yell. A moment later Byron sprang in with a pistol in his hand, but relaxed, frowning, when he saw Crawford.

"It's just St. Michael," he called out through the open door, "looking for the serpent."

Crawford hastily sheathed the sword and poked it back into the barrel as Hobhouse re-entered.

"You might not recognize this old boy," Byron said to Hobhouse, "but he was my personal physician during that trip we took through the Alps in '16."