The Stress of Her Regard

INTERLUDE: SUMMER, 1818

I wish you a good night, with a Venetian benediction,

“Benedetto te, e la terra ehe ti fara!”—"May you be

blessed, and the earth which you will make” is it not

pretty? You would think it still prettier if you had heard

it, as I did two hours ago, from the lips of a Venetian girl,

with large black eyes, a face like Faustina’s, and the figure

of a Juno—tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes

flashing, and her dark hair streaming in the moonlight—

one of those women who may be made any thing.

—Lord Byron,

19 September 1818

When he couldn’t take any more of the ceremony, Percy Shelley left the circle of people and walked away; in a few long strides he had followed his shadow to the top of a low hill, where a wind-twisted old olive tree seemed to point back south across the calm water of the lagoon toward Venice. Shelley turned his gaze in that direction, and the irregular glittering line that was the city seemed to him to be dominated by churches, from the Romanesque campanile of San Pietro di Castello in the east to, at the western end, the low walls of the Madonna dell’Orto.

Our Lady of the Kitchen Garden, he translated that last phrase mentally. A month ago Byron had told him that the church had been dedicated to San Cristoforo until 1377, when a crude statue, supposedly of the Blessed Virgin, had been found in a neighboring garden. Neither Byron nor Shelley had been in a mood to visit the place.

For a few minutes Shelley picked at the splinters and blisters he had inflicted on his left palm before dawn this morning; then he looked back down the hill toward the knot of people.

Mary and Claire were standing off to one side, near the flowers the English Consul had brought, and even from this distance Shelley could see that Claire was uneasily watching Mary, who simply stared at the ground.

He knew they’d have to be leaving Venice soon, now. Byron would be wise to leave too … but of course he wouldn’t—not with that Margarita Cogni woman living with him, and with the best poetical work of his life only begun.

This was a Friday, and it occurred to Shelley that he and Claire had arrived in Venice five weeks ago tomorrow night, looking for Claire’s baby—Allegra was nineteen months old now, and for the last four months the child had been staying in Venice with Byron, her father. Claire was desperate to see the child, and Shelley had agreed to help her. He had been looking for an excuse to visit Byron, an excuse that would look plausible to any minions of the Austrian government of Italy who might be keeping track of the extravagant English lord.

Their gondola had come in to the city from the mainland—they must have passed close by this island, though in the dark and the storm they could never have seen it—and though the string of lights that was Venice had been nearly invisible through the thrashing downpour beyond the gondola’s rain-streaked window, the water had been no choppier than it was today, for the long islands of the Lido to the east protected the lagoon from the wild Adriatic.

Pulling a long splinter from his palm now, he grinned bleakly. The lagoon’s always calm, he thought. Even though the city’s not ritually married to the sea anymore, the sea evidently still has a … soft spot for the place.

They had arrived at an inn at midnight, and even before they could go to their rooms the fat landlady, learning that they were English, felt called on to tell them about the wild countryman of theirs, an actual lord, who was living in a palace on the Canal Grande amid a menagerie of dogs and monkeys and horses and all the whores that the gondoliers could ferry to him.

Claire had turned pale, imagining her infant daughter living in the midst of this pandemonium, and for a while Shelley had thought he would have to send for some laudanum to get her to bed. At last she had gone to sleep—but before going to bed himself Shelley stood for a long time at the window, watching the dark twisting clouds.

He had known Claire as long as he had known Mary, which was to say two years before Claire had gone to London at the age of eighteen to seduce the notorious Lord Byron; that had been a project he’d helped her with, for he was instinctively unpossessive of his women … though Claire couldn’t really be said to be his. Shelley had always found her attractive, and often in their travels he had shared a bed with her and Mary, but he had so far not ever made love to her.

He certainly had no reason not to—she and Mary and he were in agreement about the unnatural laws, forced on people by the twin oppressors Church and State, concerning marriage and monogamy. And now at the age of twenty she seemed more beautiful to him than she ever had—just thinking about the way she had fallen asleep against him in the gondola, the black ringlets of her hair spilled across his shoulder and one warmly soft breast pressed against his arm, made his heart pound again and almost set him tiptoeing to her room.

Idealist though he was, he was a shrewd enough judge of women to know that she wouldn’t be alarmed or particularly reluctant.

But it would certainly complicate his situation. Experience had made her realistic, but she couldn’t help taking any such—liaison?—as at least partially a promise of getting her daughter Allegra back, and he was not by any means sure he’d be able to talk Byron into that.

It was getting late. A stagnant smell had begun drifting into the hallway on the draft from the window, and he guessed that the canals, when all the gondolas and grocers’ boats were retired for the night and no longer agitated the water into the bright choppiness so dear to painters and tourists, gave off this nocturnal evidence of their great age.

It humbled him, and he went quietly to his own room.

The next afternoon Shelley had gone alone in a low, open gondola to the palace Byron had leased. Shelley had been uneasy, for he hadn’t told Byron he was coming, and he knew Byron detested Claire and had said that if she were ever to arrive in Venice he would pack up and leave.

The previous evening’s storm had blown away, leaving the sky starkly blue behind the pillared and balconied palaces of green and pink stone that walled the broad waterway, and Shelley had blinked at the needles of sunlight reflected from the gold trim and gleaming black hulls of the gondolas that were ranked like slim cabriolets in front of the Byzantine structures.

Dozens of the narrow craft were moored to striped poles that stood up in the water a few yards out from the palace walls, and several times Shelley noticed wooden heads—mazzes—at the tops of the poles; once he was even close enough to see the gleam of a nail-head in one of the crudely carved faces. Shelley had heard that the mazzes now represented opposition to the Austrian rulers of Italy. It’s still resistance to the Hapsburgs, he thought.

The gondola passed under the ornate, roofed bridge that was the Rialto, and soon afterward the gondolier began trying to point out the palace Byron was renting, on the left ahead.

The Palazzo Mocenigo was actually several big houses which had at one time been united by one long, neoclassical façade of gray stone. No one was visible on the balconies or at the huge triple windows of the palace as the gondola glided across the water toward it, and when the gondolier had poled them in under the shadow of the palace, and brought the craft to a rocking stop at the puddled stone steps, Shelley couldn’t see anyone in the dimness beyond the open arches of the ground floor.

He stepped out, paid the gondolier, and was looking back out across the wide face of the canal when, simultaneously, the gondola he’d just quitted emerged into the sunlight with a flash of gold, and the door on the landing behind him was echoingly unbolted.

The person who pulled the door open was Byron’s English valet, Fletcher, and he remembered Shelley as a frequent visitor at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland; his master, he told Shelley now, had only awakened a little while ago and was in his bath, but would certainly be glad to see him when he emerged. He held the door open so that Shelley could enter.

The ground floor of the palace was damp and unfurnished, and it smelled of the sea and of the many sizeable cages that were stacked against the back wall; stepping around a couple of locally useless carriages in the dimness, Fletcher led him to an ascending marble stairway, and by the sunlight slanting down from above, Shelley was able to see the animals in the cages … monkeys, birds and foxes. He knew that if he had brought Claire, she would have theatrically insisted on searching the cages for Allegra.

Upstairs, Fletcher left him in a wide, high-ceilinged billiard room on the second floor, and went to tell Byron he was here; and as soon as Shelley had leaned back against the billiard table, a little girl wandered into the room from the direction Fletcher had taken.

Shelley recognized Allegra instantly, though she had grown taller even in just these last four months, and was beginning to show the Byronic dark hair and piercing eyes—and when he took some billiard balls from the table and, smiling, crouched down to roll them one by one across the threadbare rug to her, she smiled back, clearly recognizing her old playmate; and for several minutes they amused themselves by rolling the balls back and forth.

Claire had given birth to her while they were all living back in England, at a time when that country had begun to weigh on Shelley: only a month before her birth he had learned of the suicide of Harriet, his first wife; and two years before that, his first child by Mary had died of some sort of convulsion near London. The infant Allegra had for a while been more company to him than Mary or Claire, and he had missed her during these last four months.

“Shelley!” came a delighted call from another room, and when he looked up he saw Byron striding toward him from an inner archway. The man wore a colorful silk robe, and jewels glinted in the brooch at his throat and the rings on his fingers.

Shelley got to his feet, being careful not to let surprise show in his smile—

for Byron had put on weight in the two years since Shelley had seen him in Switzerland, and his hair was longer and grayer; he looked, Shelley thought, like an aging dandy, making up in finery for what he had lost in youth.

Byron seemed to know his thoughts. “You should have seen me last year,” he said cheerfully, “before I’d met this Cogni girl; she’s my—what, housekeeper now, and she’s thinning me down fast.” He peered past Shelley. “Claire’s not with you, I hope to God?”

“No, no!” Shelley assured him. “I’m just—”

A tall woman appeared in the archway then, and Shelley paused. She stared suspiciously at him, and he blinked and stepped back, but after a moment she appeared to make up her mind favorably about him, and smiled.

“Here’s Margarita now,” said Byron, a little nervously. He turned to her and, in fluent Venetian Italian, explained that Shelley was a friend of his, and that she was not to turn the dogs on him or throw him into the canal.

She bowed, and said to Shelley, “Benedetto te, e la terra ehe ti fara.”

“Uh,” said Shelley, “grazie.” He squinted at her, and wished the curtains were not drawn across the tall windows at the far side of the room.

Little Allegra was standing behind Shelley’s leg now, gripping it tight enough to hurt, and after a moment he looked down at her and noticed how wide her eyes were, and how pale she was.

Her grip loosened when Margarita turned around and disappeared back into the depths of the house.

“Where’s Mary?” Byron asked. “Have you all moved out to this coast? You were staying at that spa, last I heard, near Livorno.”

“Mary’s still there. No, I came here to talk to you about…” He touched Allegra’s dark curls. “… about our children. There was something you said in a letter—”

Byron held up a pudgy hand. “Uh,” he said, “wait.” He turned away and walked to the curtained window, and when he turned back Shelley could see that he was frowning and chewing his knuckles. “I think I remember the letter. I don’t think I still believe—still find mildly interesting, that is, I never believed—the things I wrote about. I told you to destroy it—did you?”

“Yes, of course. In fact I’m here in person only because you told me I wasn’t to write to you here about it. But whether you still credit the story or not, my daughter Clara is sick, and if those Armenian—”

“Hush!” Byron interrupted, glancing quickly toward the archway. Shelley thought there was exasperation, but a little fear, too, in the look. The smile he turned on Shelley a moment later seemed forced. “I’ve got horses stabled on the Lido, and I often go riding in the afternoons. Want to come along?”

“Very well,” answered Shelley after a pause. Then, “Are we bringing Allegra?”

“No,” said Byron irritably. “She’s—there’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

Shelley glanced down at Allegra; she looked unhappy, but not extremely so. “If you say so,” he said.

The warm morning breeze was from the mainland, and from Shelley’s sunny hilltop vantage point the priest’s Latin was just a low, intermittent murmur, like the droning of bees in a far field.

Mary was looking up the slope at him now, and even from this distance he thought he could read anger in her expression.

Don’t blame me, he thought unhappily. I did everything I could to avoid this, everything short of sacrificing my own life.

I suppose I should have done that. I suppose I should have. But I did a lot nonetheless—far more than even you, the authoress of Frankenstein, could ever know, or believe.

The Grand Canal broadened out as it merged with the wider Canal della Guidecca and, when the domes of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute were shifting massively past across the oceanic horizon on their right, Byron had the gondolier pull in at the left shore, among the ranks of gondolas moored in front of the Piazzetta. The gondola’s blade-shaped prow bumped the step, sending a cloud of startled pigeons swirling noisily up into the sunlight.

The Ducal Palace loomed at Shelley’s right, and its bottom two stories of Gothic pillars made it look to Shelley like a Venetian palace deprived of the sea, the once secret opulence of its supporting pilings exposed now to the air.

Byron told the gondolier to wait, and when they had got out and walked up the half-dozen steps, he led the way out across the warped mosaic pavement of the square. Shelley slowed to stare up at the white statues atop the pair of hundred-foot-tall columns fronting the water, but Byron only snarled and limped on ahead.

“I … thought we were going to the Lido,” Shelley ventured when they were halfway to the square tower that stood across the Piazza from the Basilica of St. Mark. “Isn’t that farther—”

“This whole enterprise is certainly foolish,” Byron snapped, “but I need to make sure it’s not absolutely impossible too. I lived near here when I first came to Venice—there’s a man we have to see.”

Despite Byron’s lameness, Shelley had to hurry to keep up with him. “Why should it be impossible? I mean, why lately? Surely the Austrians won’t—”

“Shut up!” Byron glared back the way they’d come; then he went on in a clipped whisper, “They will, and soon, according to what I’ve heard.”

Shelley knew his friend’s moods well enough to wait for him to speak at times like this. For most of a minute they walked together in silence past the pillars of the palace’s west face.

“For a couple of years now,” Byron said, more calmly, “a man has been … is … being moved south from Switzerland, laboriously and at huge expense … he’s Austrian, some kind of ancient patriarch who can pretty much command anything he likes. He’s incalculably old, and determined to become a good deal older.” He squinted sideways at Shelley. “I think I actually saw the wagon he was being carried in, during my tour of the Alps two years ago. There was a box in it like a coffin, leaking ice water.”

“Ice water,” Shelley repeated cautiously. “Why would—”

Byron made a quick motion with a jewelled hand. “That part’s not important. He needs to get here. The necessity of getting him here may be the main reason the Austrians took Italy, and why they put a stop to the annual ritual marriage of this city to the sea … in any case, we can’t discuss it now. Wait till we’re on the Lido, with the lagoon between us and this place.”

Several identical long banners had been hung vertically from the roof of the Libraria Vecchia on their left, and were curling and snapping in the breeze and throwing coiling shadows onto the sunlit pavement below; Shelley could make no sense of the trio of symbols painted on each of them—at the top was what seemed to be a downward-pointing crow’s-foot, then a vertical line, and then at the bottom an upward-pointing crow’s-foot with the middle toe missing, like a capital Y. Holes had been punched right through the thick paper at the ends of the lines, as if the marks were the footprints of something with claws.

“What does that symbol mean?” he asked Byron, pointing at the banners.

Byron glanced toward the library, then away. “I don’t know. I’m told it started showing up here and there during the last four years.”

“Since the Austrians took possession,” said Shelley, nodding. “Four points, then two, then three … and they look like footprints. What walks on four points, then two, then three?”

Byron stopped and looked at the banners, and his eyes were a little wild. He started to speak, then just shook his head and hurried on.

Shelley followed, wishing he could pause to look around at the structures ringing the broad square—he gaped up beyond the towering pillars at the vast gold-backed paintings in the highest arches of the basilica as the two of them hurried past, but Byron wouldn’t halt, or even slow down. Shelley got a quick look at the brightly blue-and-gold-faced clock-tower, and a glimpse of bronze statues on the top platform of it, before Byron had dragged him around the corner of the basilica.

A smaller square lay beyond the church, and Byron led them across it and into one of the narrow alleys between the buildings that were its north boundary.

Suddenly they had left all grandeur behind. The alley was scarcely six feet wide, and the overhead tangle of chimney flues and balconies and opened shutters kept it in deep shadow except where occasional lamps burned far back in the shops that occupied the ground-floor Gothic arches. It seemed to Shelley that anyone could find any shop here just by following his nose, so clear were the smells of fruit stalls, metal workers and wine shops, but the vendors nevertheless shouted the virtues of their wares up and down the alley, and Shelley could feel a headache coming on.

After a few moments he became aware of a regular metallic pinging amid the cacophony, and glancing to the side he saw that Byron was rhythmically bouncing a coin off the pillars he passed. Shelley was about to ask him to stop it when a ragged boy ran up and said something in hopelessly staccato Italian.

Byron gave him the coin and rattled out a reply, then turned around, retraced a few steps and limped through an arch into a tiny courtyard. Iron stairs curled away upward, and potted plants on the steps raised a jungle of leaves to block any stray rays of sunlight, but Shelley could see a crowd of ragged men standing by the far wall.

There was a metallic clinking here too—the men were lagging coins at the wall, each trying to land his coin closest to the wall, the winner taking all the coins.

After a moment one of them, a fat old man who was visibly drunk, scrambled over to the wall and began scraping up the accumulated money while the others swore and dug in their pockets for more.

Several of them noticed Shelley and Byron then, and began edging away, but the fat one looked up and then reminded his fellows sharply that gambling was legal “in questo fuoco”—Shelley was puzzled by the phrase, which seemed to mean “in this focus.”

Byron asked the man something that sounded like Is the eye restored yet?

The fat man waved broadly and shook his head. “No, no.”

Byron insisted that he needed to be sure, and that the man check right now.

The drunken man raised his arms and began protesting to various saints, but Byron crossed the tiny courtyard and handed him some money. The man relented, though with almost theatrical reluctance.

He waved at the other gamblers and they repocketed their coins and hurried away toward the arch. When they were gone he bit his finger—hard, to judge by his expression—shook a drop of blood onto the paving stones, and then walked to the far wall, tossing one of his coins and catching it.

“Stand back,” whispered Byron.

The man was facing the wall now, but squinting over his shoulder at the spot of blood and humming atonally as he repeatedly tossed and caught the coin; then he was looking straight at the wall in front of him and tossing several coins—juggling them, in fact—and the humming was echoing weirdly between the close walls. Shelley could feel the hair standing up on his arms, and the scar in his side began to throb.

Suddenly one of the coins was flung very hard straight up—Shelley watched it, and saw it glint for an instant in the sunlight high above, and then it fell back into the shadow and he could only hear it pinging as it tumbled down through the iron stairway; finally it spun off a flowerpot and clinked to the ground and rolled across the pavement, wobbled for a moment and fell over flat. It was several yards away from the spot of blood.

Shelley restrained a shrug. The juggling had been good, but if the idea had been to land the coin on the blood, the trick had been an absolute failure; of course, after all the bouncing around it had done, it would have been incredible if it had landed on it.

He turned to Byron with raised eyebrows.

Byron was staring at the coin sourly. “Well,” he said, “it is still possible—though I still think it’s damned foolish.” He nodded to the fat man and then turned and stalked out of the court. Shelley also nodded, though bewilderedly, and followed him.

They were out of the alley and halfway across the Piazzetta when Shelley noticed Byron cock his head as if listening; Shelley listened too, and heard a cracked old voice singing something in what sounded like Spanish—or was it archaic French?

He looked around and saw that the singer was a startlingly aged man a dozen yards away, hobbling north across the square, away from the Ducal Palace and the two tall columns by the canal; the man leaned heavily on a cane that clicked when it touched the warped pavement.

Shelley remembered Byron’s report of an unbelievably old Austrian being carried toward Venice in order to have his life prolonged even further, and he wondered if this aged fellow was here for the same reason; somehow he thought not.

Just then the old man looked up and met his gaze, and waved—Shelley noticed that his left hand was missing a finger—and called something that sounded like Percy.

Startled, Shelley waved. “Do we know him?” he asked Byron.

“No,” Byron replied, grabbing his arm and pulling him away, toward where their gondola waited. “But I’ve heard the song before.”

Claire looked up the hill toward where he was standing and, though she didn’t move her head, she rolled her eyes in a way that clearly summoned him. He sighed and stood away from the olive tree’s twisted branch and started back down.

The little box was being carried over from the boat, and Hoppner, the English Consul, had removed his hat. The hot morning sun gleamed on his bald head and on the varnished box.

Several emotions tightened Shelley’s chest as he stared at the box; but when he noticed that the lid had been nailed shut his only feeling was one of relief.

The Lido was a long, narrow spit of sandy, weedy hillocks, streaked with shadows in the late afternoon, and aside from a few fishermen’s net-draped huts, the wooden building that was Byron’s stable was the only structure visible along the desolate island.

Byron’s grooms had left for the Lido at the same time that Byron and Shelley left the Palazzo Mocenigo, and had been waiting on the shore for a while when the two of them stepped out of the gondola onto the low dock.

The day had turned chilly, and Byron quickly had the grooms saddle up two horses; minutes later the two men had ridden across the spine of the Lido and were galloping away down the eastern shore, the Adriatic on one hand and the low, thistle-furred hills on the other.

For a while neither of them spoke; the wind was snatching the tops from the waves and flinging occasional gusts of spray across their faces, and Shelley tasted salt when he licked his lips.

“When you wrote to me,” he called finally, “you said that in Venice a means could be found to free ourselves and our children from the attentions of the nephelim.”

“Yes, I did,” replied Byron tiredly. He reined in, and Shelley did the same, and they walked their horses down the slope toward the water.

“It’s … just possible,” Byron said, “that one can, here, just as in the Alps, break their hold and break their attention—lose them, the way you can lose tracking dogs by walking up a stream. You’ve got to invoke a blindness—for one thing, it can only be done at night.” He spat into the water. “Evidently you can even restore life to a freshly perished corpse, if the sun hasn’t yet shone on it; vampires’ victims never truly die, of course, but if you do this right you get the resurrection without the vampirehood—the person is still a normal, mortal human, revived from death just this once.”

Byron laughed. “And of course then you’d be best advised to take ship immediately to the other side of the globe, so that your devil won’t be likely to stumble across you again—put a lot of salt water between yourself and her. I was thinking very seriously about South America.” He gave Shelley a defiant stare. “I no longer think I need to.”

Byron was clearly not comfortable with the subject, so Shelley tried to approach it obliquely. “It sounded as though you asked that man about an eye,” he said. “Whether or not it had been restored.”

“The eye of the Graiae,” Byron said. His horse had come to a halt and begun chewing up clumps of the coarse grass. “You remember the Graiae.”

“The … what was it, three sisters that Perseus consulted before going off to kill the Medusa?” Abruptly, and irrationally, he was sure it had been Perseus, not Percy, that the very old man had shouted to him in the Piazzetta earlier.

“Right,” said Byron. “And they only had one eye among them, and had to hand it back and forth to take turns seeing, and Perseus snatched it from the hand of one of them, and wouldn’t give it back until they answered his questions. When I first came here after leaving Switzerland, I spent a lot of time at a monastery full of Armenian priests and monks on one of the islands in the lagoon; I was … nervous about some metaphysical nonsense that doctor told me.”

“Who, Polidori? Oh! No, you must mean the very neffy one—Aickman.”

Byron looked annoyed that Shelley remembered the name. “That’s the one. He and I climbed the Wengern after you went back to England, and it really did exorcise us, as I told you it would—I felt the psychic infection sweated out of me, and I’m still not sure what we saw and what we only imagined we saw up on the summit.”

He squinted out across the Adriatic. “Odd to be speaking of restoring the eye—I think I saw a woman cut out her own eye up there. In any case, this Aickman fellow, afterward, tried to convince me that the … shall we call them lamiae? … would still, even after the exorcism, keep track of us, still be able to recognize us as good prospects, as people with a weakness for their particular … infection.”

Shelley thought of the woman he’d seen at Byron’s palace. “What are you writing these days?” he asked.

Byron laughed again and shook his head, but Shelley thought the laugh was forced. “No, no, I haven’t relapsed. I am writing my best thing to date, a … sort of epic, called Don Juan, but the fact that it’s good is to my credit, not some … some vampire’s.” He was looking Shelley in the eye as he spoke, as if to prove his sincerity.

“Oh, I don’t doubt you,” Shelley began, “it’s just—”

“In any case,” Byron interrupted, “you are hardly the one to be lecturing me about all this.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were chilly.

“You’re right, you’re right,” Shelley said hastily. “Uh, back to what I was saying. Was it word of this … exorcism possibility … that brought you to Venice in the first place?”

“I … can’t recall.”

Shelley nodded. “Very well. So what’s all this about the Graiae and their eye?”

Byron nudged his horse into a slow walk. He sighed, apparently tired of this subject. “The Armenian fathers claim that the three sisters were examples of the real, Old Testament nephelim giants, and were captured in Egypt way the hell of a long time ago. They were staked out in the sun until they turned to stone, and then they were carved up for use in architecture, and shackled by having certain restricting designs cut into their bodies. They became drained of energy—unconscious, asleep. But they still had their eye—except that it wasn’t really an eye, and what they did with it wasn’t precisely see.”

Shelley rolled one hand in an And? gesture.

“I wish I could have Father Pasquale explain it to you. With the eye they didn’t so much see as know. They knew, down to decimal points even finer than God Himself ever bothered to figure to, every detail of their surroundings; and therefore they could predict any future event with absolute certainty—as easily as you were able to predict which corner of the room would receive one of those billiard balls you and Allegra were rolling around this afternoon.”

He stared out at the sea for a moment before going on. “Now the world isn’t usually as knowable as this—it isn’t by nature hard and fast in its tiniest details, and that’s why we have the luxury of despising or admiring people, for if our courses really were as predestined as, say, the parabola of a dropped stone, we could hardly … make moral judgments … about the bodies that found themselves conforming to those courses, any more than we can blame a rock that falls on us. Fortune-tellers—and Calvinists—would like living around these things when they’re awake and have their eye, because the Graiae’s sight forbids all randomness, all free will. When they have their sight, the Graiae not only check on things, but also check them.”

“But according to that fat man they don’t have it, their eye hasn’t been restored,” said Shelley. A wave surged in and swirled foam around his horse’s fetlocks. “How did that juggling establish that?”

“Well, Carlo’s an expert coin-tosser, so good at it that he works right up against the bounds of what’s possible; and if you take that as a given, then by having him juggle and try precision-tossing, you can monitor the bounds of the possible. If the eye had been restored, his coin would have landed a good deal closer to the spot of blood; and if they were awake and had the eye, it would have landed squarely on it.”

“And what if they’d been awake this afternoon when he did it? Awake but still blind?”

“That’s what you’ve come to Venice to do—wake them up while they’re still blind—that’s what I was hinting about in my letter. As to what would happen to Carlo’s coin if he was to toss it in that circumstance—I don’t know. I’ve asked him, and he’s tried to explain, but all I can gather is that the coin wouldn’t even exist between the moment of being tossed and the moment of coming to rest; and where it came to rest would have nothing to do with how he threw it; and the penny that landed wouldn’t in any valid sense be the same one that was thrown.”

Shelley was frowning, but after a few moments he nodded slowly. “There’s a sort of insane consistency to it,” he said. “We’re trying to undo determinacy, predestination; these things, these three primordial sisters, cast a … a field, say. If they’ve got their eye, it’s a field of inviolable determinacy—but if they’re blind, it’s a field of expanded possibilities, freedom from coldly mechanical restrictions.” He grinned at Byron, his eyes bright. “You’ll remember that Perseus was careful to ask them his questions while they were casting their blind field—so that what he asked wouldn’t be impossible.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Byron. “And you’re right, if they’re awake but still blind, then many things ordinarily impossible are possible within their focus.”

“And they’re in Venice, the Graiae? And your priests told you how to wake them up?”

“I’m not too confident about waking them, certain very rare fuels have to be acquired … but yes, they’re here—you saw two of them an hour ago standing at the southern end of the Piazza. The third fell into the canal when they were trying to set them up, way back in the twelfth century.” Shelley blinked. “Those columns?”

“Right. The doge at the time, Sebastiano Ziani, promised any favor, any onesta grazia, to whomever could stand the pillars up in safe captivity there on the pavement in front of the Ducal Palace. Some fellow named Nicolò il Barattieri did it—though he did drop one of them in the canal—but then he demanded the eye as payment. In other words he demanded that uncertainty—gambling—be legalized in the vicinity of the square, in the focus of the sisters’ attention. The doge had to stand by his promise, but to counteract it he built the prison right there, and had executions held between the pillars. Blood, fresh-spilt blood, is evidently a fair replacement for the missing eye. Of course, they haven’t had executions there for quite a while now.”

Shelley was trying to hold on to his impression that all this made some kind of sense. “Why should blood be an effective replacement?”

Byron turned his horse back the way they’d come, and set off at a walk. “I’m just quoting the priests now, and I know what you think of priests—but they said that blood contains the … what, the complete, unarguable plan, the design, of the person it comes from. There’s no—”

“That has to be why they need to drink human blood,” interrupted Shelley excitedly. “In order to take human form. They couldn’t do it without the plan, the design, that’s in the blood. If they just drank animal blood, the only forms they could assume would be animals.”

Byron shrugged a little testily. “That could be. Anyway, in blood there’s no room for change—no uncertainty, in other words. It’s a pretty powerful embodiment of predestination. Semen would be the opposite, the embodiment of undefined potentiality. In fact, if you could have sex with a woman, there in the square, that would be a perfect blinder for them.” He laughed and put the spurs to his horse. “I’ll volunteer to try, if you like.”

Shelley was shaking his head. “How can the Austrians want to restore the eye, and make everyone in the area brute slaves to mechanical causality?”

“Well of course they’ve supposedly got this ancient member of the ruling Hapsburg family—some old fellow named Werner who’s apparently been hibernating in the Hapsburg castle in northern Switzerland for the last eight centuries. They want to keep him alive for another few centuries, and medicines and life-prolonging magics work much better near the Graiae—assuming they’re awake and can pay their razory sort of attention to things. The Austrians have apparently been busy shipping him south through the Alps ever since 1814, when they acquired Venice. I—” He laughed uncertainly. “I believe they’ve got him packed in ice.”

Shelley shrugged. “Very well. But back when Venice was a republic—why did the doges want the pillars to have the eye? The doges were always enemies of the Hapsburgs.”

“The Graiae, with the eye, promote stasis, Shelley,” said Byron impatiently. “Every ruler wants to maintain the status quo. And I don’t see that that’s so pernicious, either. Your fields of expanded probability sound to me like the … unformed darkness that was on the deep before God said ‘Let there be light.'”

“Maybe it is like that—maybe it’s God who imposes restrictions on us to keep us from becoming all that we’re capable of becoming, all we dream of. Certainly religion does that. Without the shackles of religion, mankind would be free to—”

Byron laughed. “You haven’t changed, Shelley. I’ll admit that it was cruel of nature to allow mankind self-awareness; death is going to sever every one of us from his memories and everything that he—uselessly—sought, and we all know it, and that’s unbearable. But it’s also the way the world works—you needn’t blame it on priests and religion. Hell, religion can at least make us believe, for a while, sometimes, that our souls are grand and immortal and perfectible.”

“You’re talking the worst kind of fatalism,” said Shelley sadly.

“And you’re talking Utopia,” answered Byron.

Shelley managed to get Byron to agree on a plan of action, and Shelley and Claire Clairmont left Venice three days later; Shelley was to return as soon as possible with his whole family: Mary, their two-and-a-half-year-old son William, and their one-year-old daughter Clara.

He wrote to Mary even before leaving Venice, telling her to bring the children with all possible haste to Byron’s hilltop villa in the mainland town of Este, where Shelley would be awaiting them. He had had to be a bit evasive in the letter, for he couldn’t tell her, especially through the Austrian-controlled mail, that he intended to take the whole family northwest to Venice in the middle of some night, awaken the blind Graiae and slip free of the attention-net of the vampiric nephelim, and then flee the Western Hemisphere forever.

Mary and both of the children arrived at Byron’s villa twelve days later, on the fifth of September, and Mary insisted on simply resting there for a week or so, relaxing in the gardens of the villa, which had been built on the site of a Capuchin monastery that had been destroyed by the French. Byron had told Shelley that consecrated ground might have certain protective properties.

The children seemed happy to get a respite from travel, and even Shelley decided that a few days of rest could do them no harm.

He was finding that he was able to write very well here, in fact; he began by doing translations of the Greek classics, and had now moved smoothly from translating the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus to actually trying to write the last play of that ancient, uncompleted trilogy.

He wrote during the long, hot days in the breezy summer house, which was reached by leaving the back of the main house and walking through a shady tunnel of vine-tangled trellises, and at night he often went out there to watch the bats fly out of the battlements of the ruined medieval fortress of Este; sometimes too, at night, he would stare out across the hundred and twenty miles at the spine of the Apennine Mountains to the south.

Those mountains had dominated the southeast corner of the sky when he and Mary and the children had recently been living near Livorno on the opposite coast, and the peaks had fascinated him then too. He had written a fragment of a poem while living there, and on many nights now he recalled it while staring south at the mountains over the monastery’s fallen walls:

The Apennine in the light of day

Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,

Which between the earth and sky doth lay;

But when night comes, a chaos dread

On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,

Shrouding …

He had taken the poem no further; he wasn’t sure what the mountain might be shrouding.

As it happened, they wound up spending eighteen days at the villa; then, one Monday afternoon late in the month, two things happened to convince Shelley that he’d better get the family on to Venice as fast as possible.

Clouds had sailed darkly up the Po Valley, and the light was leaden and dim by four o’clock; storm clouds bunched and flexed vastly in the south, like gods miraculously rendered in tortured, animate marble, and Shelley, sitting over his manuscript in the summer house, glanced up at the sky from time to time. He was hoping it wouldn’t rain for a while, for he was writing a more purely powerful sort of verse than anything he’d ever written before, and he was unwilling to stop the flow of words for any reason—not for rain, nor even to reread the verses to see if they made consistent sense.

“Ere Babylon was dust,” he found himself writing, “The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, / Met his own image walking in the garden …” And Shelley looked up and saw a figure walking in his own garden, behind a vine-choked lattice, a silhouette against the distant gray bulks of the clouds and the Apennines.

It seemed for a moment to be himself, but when it emerged from behind the arbor he saw that it was a much shorter figure—was, in fact, his infant daughter Clara.

The seeming connection between what was going on inside his head and what was going on outside had momentarily scared him, and so it was with considerable relief that he called out to Clara and pushed his chair back and got to his feet, holding out his arms to pick her up.

But she didn’t advance. In the metallic light she gave him a smile that scoured his own smile from his face, and then she walked back behind the arbor.

His heart was thumping alarmingly in his chest, but he was reaching for the door to the garden—when he heard familiar footsteps echoing in the trellised passage behind him, approaching from the direction of the house.

Suddenly glad of an excuse to put off going into the garden, he turned around and pulled open the house-side door, and saw Mary walking toward him with Clara in her arms.

“Dinner’s ready, Percy,” Mary said, “and you’ve got a letter from Byron.”

He slowly turned to look back out at the garden. There might have been a flicker of motion behind the lattice, but he turned his back on it, put his arm around Mary and escorted her back to the house, hurriedly enough to startle her.

“Where are you?” asked Byron in the letter. “The man is nearly here, I’m told, and the—Apparatus—is in Mestre, just across the lagoon. ‘If ‘twere done, ‘twere well done quickly.’ Go at once, if all this still seems sound to you, to Padua—think of some excuse—and I will write to you there and tell you if it be not too late. Destroy this letter now.”

Shelley put the letter down and looked across the dinner table at Mary. She was the only one looking at him, for Claire was busy feeding the two children; and Mary’s gaze was fearful, so he made himself speak lightly. “I’ve got to go to Padua tomorrow,” he said. “Byron has news of a doctor for Claire.” It seemed a fair excuse—Claire had been ill, and had taken her to a Paduan doctor only a week earlier. “And it seems that this medico might be able to cure little Clara’s malaise, too—be ready to follow with her when I send for you.” He glanced toward the back of the house, and then added, “And of course bring young William, too.”

Mary brought him a plate of steaming pasta and vegetables, but he seemed unaware of it, staring at little Clara as she licked some of her own puréed serving off of the spoon Claire held to her mouth, and he was thinking about the image of her that he’d seen walking in the garden. What did that mean? Had he waited too long?

The trusting innocence of the child was a shocking reproach to him, was like a hook turning in his side; she deserved a normal life, normal parents. There can’t be a God, he thought, if a child like this can be fathered by a man like me.

Byron’s letter was all Shelley ate that night.

Byron’s follow-up letter was waiting for Shelley in Padua, and after reading it he immediately bundled Claire into a carriage back to Este, for Byron said the gambit was still possible. Bewildered, Claire asked about the doctor they had supposedly come to see, and Shelley hastily told her that they had missed him, but would undoubtedly catch him when she returned with Mary and the children.

When Claire had gone, he went to the Palazzo della Ragione and walked alone through its great hall, appreciating the way its vast dimensions dwarfed him; for he couldn’t, now, justify the eighteen days he had wasted at the villa in Este, and he wanted Percy Shelley to seem insignificant, a background character, a figure in a crowd, whose errors couldn’t possibly have serious consequences.

Two days later Mary and Claire and the children arrived in Padua, at eight-thirty in the morning.

Little Clara was sicker, her mouth and eyes twitching in a way Shelley recognized—his first child by Mary, a girl who had not even lived long enough to be named, had shown similar symptoms just before dying, four years earlier.

Over the exhausted Mary’s objections he insisted that the Paduan doctor had turned out to be no good, and that they must press on immediately to Venice. The weather had not cleared up—they were standing in the square in front of the church of Saint Anthony, and rain had darkened and shined Donatello’s equestrian statue of Gattamelata—and the children were crying.

For an hour they waited under a narrow awning for the coach that would take them to the coastal town of Fusina, where they could get a boat to Venice; at last they saw the coach come shaking across the flagstones of the square toward them and when it had squealed to a stop and Mary had climbed aboard, Shelley picked up Clara to hand her in.

As he hefted the infant in front of himself he looked closely at her, and noticed two inflamed puncture marks on her throat.

So much, he thought bitterly, for Byron’s idea that sanctified ground might be a protection against the nephelim—or perhaps the French had somehow neutralized the ground of the Capuchin monastery when they had knocked down the walls. The French, too, he recalled, had badly wanted to take Venice.

At the malodorous Fusina docks he found that their travel permits were not among the luggage, though Mary swore she had packed them. The customs guards told Shelley that he and his family wouldn’t be able to cross to Venice without the papers, but Shelley selected one of the guards and took him some distance away across the puddled pavement and talked to him for a few minutes in the shadow of an old stone warehouse; and when they returned, the suddenly paler guard said, gruffly, that they could cross after all.

The handkerchief with which the officer wiped his forehead as they strode past him was artistically spotted with old, dried blood.

During the long gondola ride Clara’s convulsions grew worse, and Shelley’s thin face was stiff as he stared alternately down at the child and up at the setting sun visible through the breaking rain clouds, for Byron had told him that the procedure had to be done at night.

When their gondolier poled them to a stop at the wave-lapped steps of a Venice inn, Shelley climbed right into another gondola and went to find Byron; the sun was low and glinting redly off of the nail-heads in the faces of the wooden mazzes atop the blue-and-white-striped mooring poles in front of the Palazzo Mocenigo when he disembarked, and Fletcher took him quickly upstairs to where Byron waited in the billiard room. Allegra was with him, but Shelley didn’t see Margarita Cogni.

“I may have waited too long,” Shelley said, his voice tight with controlled emotion. “Clara’s nearly dead.”

“It’s still not too late,” Byron told him. “They haven’t … bestowed the eye on the Graiae yet.” He waved tensely toward the window. “Meet me at sunset on the Piazza—I’ll have Allegra with me, and you have Clara, at least; that will do, I think, if she’s the only one getting the special attention. And then be ready to hide in some church somewhere until we can find a ship to take us all to America.”

“A church?” said Shelley incredulously. “No, I won’t-you may see nothing wrong with expressing … implicit allegiance to the Church, but I’m not going to let Clara and William grow up with blinders on. Even just as a gesture—”

“Listen to me,” said Byron, loudly enough to override him. “It won’t be a gesture, and you may well not be able to raise your children at all if you don’t do it. There’s evidently some truth to the idea that churches are sanctuary—it seems to have something to do with the salt in the holy water, and the stained glass, and the gold patens they hold under the chins of the people who line up to receive Communion.”

Shelley looked unconvinced. “The patens? Those are the little disks with handles, aren’t they? What good are they supposed to do?”

Byron shrugged. “Well,” he said, “the story today is that those metal disks are to catch any crumbs, but they’re very highly polished, and Father Pasquale hinted to me one time that they were originally used to make sure that each communicant could cast a reflection.”

When Shelley got back to the inn, Mary was sitting on a gaudy couch in the entry hall, and Clara was thrashing in her lap; and even as he crossed the stone floor toward them he saw the baby subside and go limp. He ran the last few steps, and lifted the body from Mary’s arms.

Claire and some man Shelley didn’t know were standing nearby, and the man now stepped forward and explained in Italian that he was a doctor. Shelley let him examine Clara while he held her, and after a moment the doctor said quietly that the child had expired.

The silence that followed seemed to shake the air in the hall all the way up to the arched and painted ceiling; Shelley asked the man to repeat what he had said, more slowly. The man did, and Shelley shook his head and demanded to hear it again; the dialogue was repeated several times, while the doctor grew visibly less patient, until finally Shelley couldn’t pretend any longer that the man might have said something else. Still holding the dead child, he sat down heavily beside Mary.

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, he thought crazily, met his own image walking in the garden.

Chilly air swept through the hall a few minutes later when the canal-side door was opened, but Shelley didn’t look up; Richard Hoppner, the English Consul, had to cross the room, glance at the doctor for a confirming nod, and then crouch by Shelley and call his name a couple of times before Shelley even realized that he was there.

“I can handle all the details, Mr. Shelley,” Hoppner said gently. “Why don’t you leave your daughter with us, and you and Mrs. Shelley can go to your room; I’m sure the doctor here can give you something for your nerves.”

Shelley’s mind was an aching vacuum—until he remembered something Byron had said during their ride on the Lido, a month and a day ago: Evidently you can even restore life to a freshly perished corpse, if the sun hasn’t yet shone on it…; and then his thin lips curled into a desperate smile.

Shelley stood up, still holding the little body, and walked slowly to the window. Only the top spires of the churches still glowed gold.

He turned back to Mary, and even through her tears she saw his expression clearly enough to visibly flinch at it.

“It’s still not too late,” he said, echoing what Byron had said to him less than half an hour ago. “But I have to take her … out, for a while.”

Hoppner protested, waving at the doctor to enlist his aid, and he looked relieved when Mary stood up to speak.

But she didn’t say what he’d apparently expected. “Maybe,” she said to Hoppner in a voice harsh with grief and fear, “you’d better let him take her.”

Hoppner began remonstrating with her now, in a louder voice, but she didn’t take her eyes off of Shelley’s face. “No,” she said, interrupting Hoppner, “he just … wants to take her to church, to pray over her. He’ll bring her back by …”

“By dawn,” said Shelley, striding toward the door.

When his gondola emerged into the Grand Canal from the narrow Rio di Ca’ Foscari, he recognized the man poling a nearby craft as Tita, Byron’s gondolier, and he waved; in a moment Byron’s gondola had pulled in alongside, and Byron was gripping the two gunwales to hold the boats together.

He saw Clara’s corpse, and swore. “Pass her across,” he said, “and get in yourself; I’ve just heard that there are Austrian soldiers in the Piazza—they’re apparently getting ready to restore the eye—and they’d catch on to what we’re attempting instantly if we let them see you bringing a corpse up to the pillars.”

Shelley had started to hand the body across, but halted. “But we’ve got to bring her, the whole point of this—”

Byron gently took the body from him and laid it down on one of the leather seats in his own gondola. Shelley noticed that Allegra, Byron’s daughter by Claire, was crouching wide-eyed in a seat up by the bow.

“We’re going to bring her,” Byron assured him. “We simply can’t let them see that she’s dead.”

Shelley climbed across into Byron’s gondola and then tried to pay the gondolier who had picked him up from in front of the inn, but the man clearly hadn’t known until now that he’d been ferrying a corpse, and he poled his craft away without accepting any money.

“A good sign,” said Shelley a little hysterically as he sat down beside his dead daughter. “She can’t be dead if the ferryman won’t take two coins.”

Byron laughed grimly and then ordered the imperturbable Tita to go on—and to watch for any canal-side spectaculos di marionettes. He gingerly lifted a cloth bundle from his pocket and unwrapped it; it contained a tiny iron fire-pot, and he blew on the air-slits. Shelley saw a glint of red light from within.

Shelley was willing now to let Byron handle things, and he didn’t even ask for a reason when Tita maneuvered the gondola to a stop beside a pavement near the Academia di Belle Arti where a puppet show was going on by early lamplight.

Byron wrapped the fire-pot in the cloth and replaced it in his pocket; then he climbed out and limped over to the stage and managed to interrupt the show long enough to talk to one of the puppeteers behind the stage. The audience didn’t seem to mind, and several people cried, delightedly, “Il matto signore ing-lese!”—the mad English lord! Shelley saw money change hands, and then Byron was limping back with one of the big Sicilian marionettes in his arms. It was of a knight in golden armor, and strings and iron rods dangled from it.

When Byron had got back into the gondola and ordered Tita to resume their journey, he began untying the sections of armor from the marionette and tossing them to Shelley. “Dress Clara in these,” he said curtly. Shelley did as he was told, and when Byron handed him the visored golden helmet he tried to fit it over Clara’s head.

After several minutes of wrenching, “It doesn’t fit,” he said desperately.

The canal was in shadow now, and darkening by the moment—the water was already streaked and stippled with the reflections of colored lights from the many-windowed palaces they were passing.

“It’s got to,” Byron told him harshly. He was staring ahead at the night-silhouetted domes of Santa Maria della Salute. “And quick—we’ve only got another minute or so.”

Shelley forced the helmet on, hoping Allegra wasn’t watching.

The gondola pulled in to the fondamenta in front of the torchlit Piazza, and as Shelley stood up and stepped across from the rocking boat onto the stairs he saw that there were indeed Austrian soldiers on the pavement—ranks of them—and he saw too that charcoal and straw and bundles of wood and canvas bags had been piled around the bases of the two columns. A man was splashing some liquid onto the piles. Shelley smelled fine brandy on the breeze.

He turned to Byron, who now stood beside him with Allegra. “Intense heat wakes them up?”

“Right,” Byron answered, starting forward, “with the proper fuel, and just so it isn’t done in sunlight. The Austrians are ready; the eye must be in Venice now. I wish I’d thought to bring Carlo.”

Tita stayed by the gondola, and the odd foursome—Byron, Allegra and Shelley carrying the ghastly marionette—strode out across the square.

Several of the Austrian soldiers stepped forward as if to stop them, but began laughing when they saw what Shelley carried, and they called to him in German.

“They want to see the puppet dance,” whispered Byron tensely. “I think you’d better do it. It’ll be a distraction—I’ll try to ignite the fires—now, while the eye isn’t here yet—while they’re watching you.”

Shelley stared at him in horror—and noticed a very old man standing behind Byron, leaning on a cane. There was a moment’s glint of light beneath the old man’s plain brown robe, and Shelley realized that he was carrying a concealed lamp. Did he, too, intend to light the fires prematurely, while the Graiae were still blind?

The old man met his gaze, and nodded, as if answering his thought—and suddenly Shelley remembered having seen him here a month ago; he had called something that had seemed then to be Percy, but Shelley was now surer than ever that the name called had actually been Perseus.

“Do if,” snarled Byron. “Remember, if this works, it won’t have been disrespect to a corpse.” He shoved Allegra toward him, which added to Shelley’s distress—what would she make of this?

With tears in his eyes, Shelley took hold of the two iron rods in one hand and the strings in the other, then let the body slide out of his arms so that it dangled above the warped pavement—and, as Byron sidled away in the shadows, Shelley began yanking at the strings and rods, making the body dance grotesquely. Torchlight glinted red on the helmet, which was lolling loosely at the level of his belt.

His teeth were clenched and he wasn’t permitting himself to think, except to hope that the impossibly hard thudding of his heart might kill him instantly; and though over the rushing of blood in his ears he was vaguely aware that the soldiers had begun muttering, it wasn’t until he sneaked an upward glance through his eyebrows that he realized that they were dissatisfied with the show—that they’d seen better, that they had higher standards when it came to this sort of thing.

Somehow that made the whole situation even a little bit worse. It occurred to him that he now knew something that perhaps no one else in the world did—that there was no curse more horrible than, May your daughter die and be made into a puppet which finds disfavor before an audience of Austrian soldiers.

Then an urgent shout rang among the pillars of the Ducal Palace, and Shelley had completely lost his audience. He stopped jiggling the body and looked up.

Two of the soldiers had grabbed Byron, but the lord managed to tear one arm free and throw his firepot into the heaped straw at the base of the western column—the column, Shelley remembered, that was surmounted by a statue of St. Theodore standing on a crocodile.

One of Byron’s captors let go of him to rush to where the firepot now lay flaming.

We’re committed now, thought Shelley—or at least Byron is.

At the same moment the old man in the brown robe shambled awkwardly to the other column, opened his robe and, with a full-arm swing, lashed a lamp onto the pavement at the base of it. Burning oil splashed across the straw.

The soldier who had started toward the first pillar evidently saw this as the greater threat, for he veered toward the burning straw at the base of the second one and began trying to kick the stuff away; his trousers began flaming, but he didn’t stop.

“Feuer!” the soldiers were yelling now, and they were rushing away from Shelley and his marionette; the old man swung his heavy walking stick at the Austrian who was trying to kick the fire away from the second column, and the apparently weighted end of the stick caught the man solidly in the belly; he folded up in midair and hit the pavement and lay there, writhing and still burning.

A man who was clearly an Austrian officer sprinted up, his fire-thrown shadow dancing across the pillared wall of the Ducal Palace, and he was waving to someone back by the dark bulk of the basilica. “Das Auge!” he was yelling. “Komm hier! Schnell!”

One soldier levelled a rifle at the very old man and squinted down the barrel. Shelley grabbed Allegra’s hand. Things were getting out of control—people might very well die here tonight.

Byron had torn free of his remaining captor and flung him to the ground. Two of the soldiers had dragged their burning fellow away toward the canal, apparently hoping to throw him into the water, but his rifle still lay on the pavement. Byron limped over to it, picked it up and hurried back to where Shelley stood with the children.

In the instant before the soldier fired his rifle at the old man, Shelley saw a thing burst vividly but silently into existence in the air between the soldier and his target; it was a winged serpent as big as a large dog, and firelight glittered on scales and blurs of wings as the snaky thing curled in the air.

After the bang Shelley heard the rifle ball ricochet off of the thing and go rebounding away among the pillars as the echoes of the shot batted between the palace and the library.

Byron grabbed Shelley’s arm. “Get back—all we can do now is hope the fires get hot enough before they can restore the eye.”

The winged serpent disappeared, and the sudden chill in the air made Shelley wish irrationally that he had brought a coat for Clara.

In the red light he could see several of the Austrians hurriedly carrying a wooden box from the direction of the basilica.

“It’s the eye,” said Byron. “Hold Allegra.”

The Austrian officer was gesturing urgently to the men with the box, and yelling something to them about the fires being nearly hot enough.

And Byron swore, made the sign of the cross and then raised the captured rifle to his shoulder. It took him only a moment to aim at the advancing men, and then he fired.

The box fell to the stones as its lead carrier buckled, and Byron barked a quick, harsh laugh, which was echoed by the old man. Shelley was holding Allegra’s hand so tightly that she had started to cry.

The officer cast a desperate glance toward Byron and Shelley, and then snatched at his belt—Shelley turned his back and crouched in front of Allegra, but when he glanced fearfully over his shoulder he saw that it hadn’t been a pistol the man had been reaching for.

The man had drawn a knife and, even as Shelley watched, he slammed the edge of it against the throat of one of the soldiers Byron had struggled with. Blood sprayed across the stones as the man folded backward and down, his hands clutching uselessly at his split neck.

“Blood!” yelled Byron, throwing the rifle down, “he’s spilling blood! That will provide an eye!”

Shelley unceremoniously dropped Clara and rushed forward, intending to drag the bleeding body away, out of the focus of the Graiae, but the officer had spun around and cut the throat of another soldier—and as Shelley ran toward him, shouting in horror and still twenty feet away, the officer looked him square in the eye and lifted the blade under his own chin and dragged it deeply across his throat. He knelt down almost gently, leaning forward.

Blood was puddled across the uneven pavement now, and Shelley floundered dizzily to a halt, wondering if it was delirium that made the paving stones underfoot seem to ripple, as if thirsty for the fare they hadn’t got since executions had stopped being done here.

But the air was rippling too, like a bird in a trap, and Shelley thought the very fabric of the world here was quivering in protest—then abruptly it stopped, and though the fires were still raging and lashing bits of burning straw up to the weirdly underlit statues on top of the columns, and the soldiers were shouting and running back and forth as chaotically as ever, Shelley felt a heavy stillness settle over the square; and he knew it was too late.

The Graiae were awake, and they could see.

He backed hesitantly across the solid pavement to where Byron stood. Byron tossed Clara’s ludicrously costumed body to him and began leading Allegra back toward the gondola.

Shelley followed numbly, and their shadows were wiggling across Tita and the gondola long before they reached the steps. As Byron lifted Allegra into the gondola Shelley noticed how pale he was, and he remembered the soldier Byron had shot.

Shelley looked back—and the hair stood up on the back of his neck for, impossibly, the blood was now sliding rapidly across the square from the base of one column to the base of the other, horizontally, as though the whole pavement had been tilted up; and then as he took a sideways step to see better, it rushed back the other way, toward the column at whose base it had been spilled.

The stars seemed to be crawling in the sky, and when Shelley turned back to get into the gondola he noticed that the shadows cast by the fires were particularly hard-edged, with no blurriness.

Shelley could feel vast attention being paid to him; he had to glance up to make sure nothing had leaned down out of the sky to focus on him. There was nothing to see but the hard-gleaming stars.

“It’s the columns,” said Byron hoarsely, pushing him into the gondola. “They’re—apparently fascinated by you.”

As Shelley climbed in and sat down, Allegra edged away from him, up toward the bow, and for an anguished moment he thought she hated him for the way he had treated Clara’s body; but then she pulled one of the seat cushions over her face and, in a muffled voice, called, “Why is the eye staring so hard at you, Uncle Percy?"—and he realized that she had only wanted to get away from the object of the Graiae’s overpowering scrutiny.

And they were staring hard at him, he could feel the intense interest. His heart labored in his thin chest, as if extra work was required to push his blood along against the resistance of their attention.

Byron untied the mooring ropes and climbed in last.

The water was uncharacteristically choppy as Tita poled them away from the fondamenta, though the sky had cleared of storm clouds hours ago and the stars shone like needles. Again the stars seemed to be moving in the sky, rocking just perceptibly like toy boats on an agitated pond. Shelley leaned out of the gondola and clawed sweaty hair back from his forehead to see what was happening in the canal.

Something was splashing heavily in the water fifty yards away, out in front of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and spray glittered dimly in the starlight—Tita was audibly and uncharacteristically praying as he wrenched at the oar—and then for a moment something big had risen partway out of the water, something made of stone but alive, and its blunt head, bearded with seaweed and crusted with barnacles, seemed to be turned toward the glaringly lit Piazza with terrible attention in the moment before it crashed back into the water and disappeared.

The oppressive sense of being cosmically stared at lifted from Shelley’s chest.

“The third pillar,” Byron said hoarsely. “The one they dropped into the canal in the twelfth century. We’ve awakened it too.” He looked almost fearfully at Shelley. “I think even it wants a look at you.”

Shelley was glad he had blocked Allegra’s view of it—she had already seen far too much tonight—and he tried to broaden his narrow shoulders to keep her from seeing anything more; but the water seemed to be settling down, and the thing didn’t rise again.

Soon the church of San Vitale blocked the rearward view, and he let himself lean back. He looked anxiously at Allegra. She was apparently calm, but he wasn’t reassured.

He didn’t stay long at the Palazzo Mocenigo.

He did remember to take the armor off Clara’s abused body—and to borrow a couple of tools from the shaken Byron, who didn’t ask why or even look at him as he handed them over—before flagging a gondola in which to return to the inn where Mary and Claire waited.

Shelley walked back down the hill in the morning sunlight to where Mary and

Claire stood. The tiny coffin had already been lowered into the grave, and the priest was shaking holy water down into the hole. Too little too late, Shelley thought.

Goodbye, Clara. I hope you don’t resent the last thing I did for you—the unspeakable going-away present I gave you just before dawn, after we’d got back to the inn and everyone but you and me had gone to sleep.

Did I really delay so long in Este, he asked himself, and let this happen to my child, just because my writing was going so well? Am I guilty of the same self-imposed blindness as Byron, who is clearly ignoring the connection between his concubine Margarita Cogni and his recent poetry?

Maybe, he thought now, maybe if I had jumped out of the gondola on the trip from Fusina to Venice, when Clara was at least still alive—drowned myself then, even as late as that—my dreadful sister would have died too, and Clara wouldn’t have had to die. But no, by then she’d already been bitten.

He looked again at his abraded left hand.

The coffin had been shut last night, when he had stolen down to the spare room where the landlord had told them to put it, but Shelley had lifted the lid and taken Clara’s cooled little wrist in his hand. There had been no pulse, but he had felt a patient vitality there, and he knew what sort of “resurrection of the dead” would await her if he didn’t take the ancient precaution.

It hadn’t taken him long, even trembling as he was and blinded with tears.

When he had finished, he had closed the coffin again, and despite being an atheist he prayed, to whatever benevolent power there might be, that no one would open it—or at least no one unburdened by an awareness of the truths behind superstitions.

He threw Byron’s iron-headed hammer into the canal; the wooden stake, which had so ravaged his hands and had so much more horribly ravaged little Clara’s body, he left imbedded in her chest.