The Stress of Her Regard

And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow—

A living Image, which did far surpass

In beauty that bright shape of vital stone

Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion.

A sexless thing it was, and in its growth

It seemed to have developed no defect

Of either sex, yet all the grace of both …

And o’er its gentle countenance did play

The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies …

—Percy Bysshe Shelley,

The Witch of Atlas

…thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field …

—Job 5:23,

quoted without comment

in Shelley’s 1822 notebook

CHAPTER 12

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;

Thou art fed with perpetual breath,

And alive after infinite changes,

And fresh from the kisses of death;

Of languors rekindled and rallied,

Of barren delights and unclean,

Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid

And poisonous queen.

—A. C. Swinburne, Dolores

Pisa, on the northwest coast of Italy near Livorno, was clearly a relic of what it had once been. The houses were classical Roman, but the paint was blistering off the shutters on the windows, and the clean architectural lines were blurred now with water stains and cracks, and some of the streets were simply abandoned, with vines and weeds claiming the fallen buildings.

The yellow Arno still flowed powerfully under the ancient bridges, but the buildup of the river-mouth delta had tripled the city’s distance from the sea in the centuries since Strabo had called Pisa one of the most valorous of the Etruscan cities. Charcoal-burners and cork-peelers labored in the maremma, the salt marsh that now surrounded the city, but the local commerce subsisted mainly on European tourists.

Most of the tourists came to see the cathedral and the famous Leaning Tower, but a few came with medical problems to the university—where an English-speaking doctor was a Godsend—or to try to catch glimpses of the two infamous poets, exiles from England, who had lately taken up residence in the city and were supposed to be intending to start some sort of magazine; such literary-minded tourists were advised to hurry, though, for the poets had evidently got themselves into some sort of trouble with the local government, and were expected to be moving on soon.

As Michael Crawford made his way eastward along the Lung’Arno, the crowded street that overhung the north side of the Arno, he was not paying any particular attention to the people around him. Two men were beating out mattresses over the bridge ahead, and a woman was singing as she leaned from a third-floor window and hung laundry on an alley-spanning clothesline, but Crawford, glancing at the ground from time to time to judge where to seat the tip of his walking stick, didn’t see the old man who was hobbling toward him.

The river was deep and fast-moving on this overcast April Thursday, and all the boats were moored along the river wall below the sun-bleached stone houses—even the adventurous Shelley’s skiff was tied up, though it was on this side of the river, across the rushing water from the Tre Palazzi where he lived. Clearly he was visiting Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, probably for the last time before moving north to the Bay of La Spezia.

And Byron had decided to spend the summer in Montenero, ten miles to the south. It looked to Crawford as though the English colony in Pisa was breaking up; Byron and Shelley had formed the hub around which the rest of them had revolved like spokes.

Crawford and Josephine would stay on, of course. They worked as a brother-and-sister doctor-and-nurse team with the medical faculty at the university, and he was confident that their value there would keep the official anti-English sentiment from affecting them.

Byron was the cause of it all, anyway, and he was leaving. His current paramour was a young lady named Teresa Guiccioli, whose brother and estranged husband were known to be active in the anti-Austrian Carbonari, and Byron had apparently been initiated into the secret society himself, and frequently bragged about having stored guns and ammunition for the informal army when he had been a guest in the Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna.

The Pisan government had not been pleased when Teresa and her brother, and then Byron himself, had moved to their city; and the hostilities had reached a near crisis a month ago, when Byron and Shelley and four other members of the local English circle had got into a scuffle with a rude Italian dragoon at the south gate. The dragoon had punched Shelley in the face with the guard of a saber, and in the ensuing mêlée one of Byron’s servants had stabbed the dragoon with a pitchfork; the man had eventually recovered from the wound, and the servant had been imprisoned, but now government spies routinely followed Byron and Teresa and her brothers.

Crawford certainly hoped that he and Josephine were under no suspicion.

He had continued to practice medicine as Michael Aickman after he and Josephine fled Rome. He’d been afraid von Aargau might have removed his faked credentials from the official records in Rome, but the university here had been impressed enough by his documentable experience and obvious competence to dispense with checking his papers too thoroughly, and he and Josephine had come here with the hope that at last they could settle down. Crawford thought they could live together as brother and sister for the rest of their lives—neither one of them was likely to marry.

He was forty-two now, and nearly always walked with a cane because of the stiffness that he’d never been able to work out of his left leg, and he spent a lot of his free time reading and gardening; and Josephine had been getting steadily saner during this unstressful last year. The wines and cooking of Tuscany had filled her figure out too, so that she looked a good deal like her dead sister now, and the Italian sun had tanned her skin and brought out a whole spectrum of copper and gold and bronze in her long hair. She and Crawford had become friendly with the Pisan English, and were frequently guests at Byron’s Wednesday-night dinners, but the two of them were really more Italian than English now.

Crawford had been looking down to his right at the surging water and, when he looked up to make sure not to pass the white marble façade of Byron’s house, he did see the old man, who was also walking with a cane—but Crawford was too busy with his own thoughts to give the man more than a passing glance.

Byron stepped out onto the second-floor balcony now, his graying hair blowing in the breeze, and Crawford started to wave up at him, but halted the motion when he saw the grim expression on the lord’s thinned face. A moment later Percy Shelley strode out of the Palazzo’s front door. He too looked upset.

“Percy!” Crawford called, lengthening his stride. “What’s the matter?”

Shelley blinked at him for a moment as if without recognition, then shook his head. “Can you and your sister come with us to La Spezia?” he asked harshly. “I have reason to believe that we’ll be needing …your sort of medical expertise.”

Crawford had never really managed to like Shelley. “I don’t see how we could, Percy, not right now. Mary or Claire is pregnant?”

“As a matter of fact we think Mary might be again—but that wasn’t exactly …” He gestured impatiently. “I can pay you both more than you’re making at the university hospital.”

Crawford knew this wasn’t true—Shelley was in debt to any number of people, even his English publisher. “I’m sorry. We really couldn’t leave Pisa. You know Josephine isn’t well. Her nervous condition …”

For a moment Shelley looked ready to argue—then he just shook his head and stalked past him; a moment later he was hurrying angrily down Byron’s private landing steps to his moored skiff, his boots tapping on the wet stone.

Crawford looked up at the balcony, but Byron had gone back inside. He let his gaze fall back to the street, and at last he noticed the old man—and a moment later he had quickly stepped forward into the recessed doorway of Byron’s house, and was rapping the knocker hard against the wood of the door, for he thought he had recognized him.

He thought it was … what had the name been? … des Loges, the crazy-talking old man who had got the Aickman passport for him in France—and then asked him to drown him in exchange for the favor—six long years ago and more than five hundred miles from here.

“Come on, Fletcher,” he whispered to the locked door. He told himself that des Loges couldn’t have recognized him—he no longer looked anything like the young, dark-haired Michael Crawford who had crawled up onto the beach at Carnac in late July of 1816.

And perhaps it hadn’t been des Loges at all. What would the man be doing here?

Could he be looking for Crawford?

The thought scared him, and he hammered the knocker again, harder.

At last Byron’s servant dragged the door open, an expression of grieved surprise on his seamed face.

“Sorry to have been so insistent, Fletcher,” Crawford said breathlessly, and a moment later the servant’s eyebrows climbed even higher, for Crawford had hurried inside and pulled the door closed himself. “There’s a … an old creditor of mine out there, and I don’t want him to see me.”

Fletcher shrugged and nodded, and it occurred to Crawford that, over the years, Byron had probably burst into a number of the houses he’d lived in with the same excuse for haste.

“Shall I announce you,” Fletcher inquired, “or were you just …?”

“No, he actually is expecting me. We were supposed to ride out to shoot in the maremma.”

“I’ll tell my lord you’re here,” said Fletcher, starting up the stairs, “though he might not be in the mood.”

Crawford lowered himself onto one of the sofas, and then stared unseeingly at the painted flowers on the high ceiling and wondered what had so upset Shelley and Byron. Had they had a fight?

It wasn’t impossible. Shelley was often visibly annoyed by Byron’s bawdy talk, and by the slight but ever-present condescension which the fact of being an English peer gave him, and, above all, by his refusal to speak to Claire or let her visit their daughter Allegra, whom he had left behind in a convent in

Bagnacavallo, on the opposite coast of Italy.

Shelley would be reluctant to break with Byron, for the lord was the most important contributor and subsidiser of the Liberal, the proposed magazine that was to publish Byron’s and Shelley’s newest poetical works and save Shelley’s friends the Hunt brothers from bankruptcy—Leigh Hunt and his wife and children were already supposed to be in transit to Pisa from England—but the right provocation at the right moment could have set off Shelley’s temper.

Even before he and Josephine had arrived in Pisa, over a year ago now, Crawford had known that Shelley was living in the city, and that Byron was expected—but he’d confidently dismissed a momentary suspicion that it was Shelley’s inhuman twin, rather than the university, that had made the place look good to him.

In fact he had at first planned to have nothing to do with the English poets … but then he had met Byron one evening a couple of months ago on the Lung’Arno.

Crawford had instantly recognized Byron, and after a moment of hesitation he walked up to him and introduced himself. Byron had been chilly at first, but after they had shaken hands he was suddenly full of cheer, recounting nostalgically exaggerated stories about Polidori and Hobhouse and some of the inns they’d stayed in during that tour of the Alps six years earlier. Before the two of them had parted that evening, Crawford had found himself accepting an invitation to dinner at the Palazzo Lanfranchi that Wednesday night.

Josephine hadn’t accompanied him that first time, and Shelley had been a little more surprised than pleased to see Crawford again, but gradually Crawford and Josephine had become a part of the group of English who were drawn to Shelley’s house on the south side of the river and Byron’s on the north.

Josephine seldom spoke, and sometimes upset the Shelleys by staring intently into vacant corners of a room like a spooked cat, but Byron claimed to like her occasional abrupt, random statements, and Jane Williams, who with her husband was staying with the Shelleys, was trying to teach her to play the guitar.

Byron never referred to having met Josephine on the Wengern, and Crawford believed he had managed to make himself forget most of that day.

Crawford had wondered what it had been about that handshake that had so warmed Byron to him, until one day a couple of weeks ago when he’d been drinking with Byron, and the lord had held up his own right hand, on the palm of which Crawford saw a black mark similar to the one that had been burned into Crawford’s hand when he had stuck the knife into the face of the wooden statue in Rome, accidentally summoning the Carbonari.

“Yours is darker,” Byron had observed. “They must have used a fresher knife in your initiation, when they had you stab the mazze. Did you know that any one knife is only good for so many stabs? After enough use in initiations all the carbon has been thrown off into flesh, and the knife isn’t steel anymore, just iron.”

Crawford had just nodded wisely, and he was careful never to contradict Byron’s impression that he had been initiated into the Carbonari … partly because he suspected that he had been, that night.

Byron was limping down the stairs now, and Crawford looked away from the ceiling.

“Good afternoon, Aickman,” Byron said. He was slim and tanned after having lost a lot of weight he’d apparently put on in Venice, but today he looked harassed and unsure of himself. “What did Shelley say to you out there?”

Crawford stood up. “Just that he wanted Josephine and me to go with them to La Spezia.”

Byron nodded ruefully, as though this confirmed something. “He won’t be coming along today—and I’m damned if I’ll go over there to fetch Ed Williams—so I guess it’s just you and me.” He gave Crawford a look that was almost a glare, then grinned. “You won’t be putting any silver bullets into me, will you?”

“Uh,” said Crawford, mystified, “no.”

The two of them rode out through the Porta della Piazza, the same southern gate where Shelley had been punched and the Italian dragoon stabbed a month ago, but though pistols bristled from the tooled leather holsters that fringed Byron’s hussar saddle, the soldiers of the Pisan guard looked down from the walls with nearly none of the alarmed suspicion that they had shown in previous weeks. They all knew that Byron was leaving the city soon. Also, there were only two armed riders today. Previous shooting parties had consisted of half a dozen or more.

“The Shelleys and their damned children,” snapped Byron when the walls were well behind them, and wild olive trees and thickets of saw-grass lined the road. “Have they reared one? Percy Florence is still alive and in his second year, but how much longer do you imagine he’ll survive? Their son William died three years ago, you know—a year after little Clara died in Venice—and way back in 1814 or so they had a child that died after two weeks. They hadn’t even named it yet! And I seem to recall that he had at least one child by his first wife—

no doubt any such are long dead. I don’t think Shelley is interested in the welfare of children—particularly if they’re his own.”

“That’s obviously nonsense,” Crawford said, driven by his knowledge of Shelley to risk contradicting Byron. “You know how he feels about his children … when he’s had them.”

Far from getting angry, though, Byron actually looked abashed. “Oh, you’re right, I know. But they do always die. And now they think Mary’s pregnant again! You’d think he’d give up sex—abandon the whole notion as a bad job.”

As I’ve done, thought Crawford.

They rode on without speaking, and the only sounds were the sea wind in the trees, and the sandy thudding of the horses’ hooves. Crawford pondered Byron’s remark about a silver bullet. Did Shelley imagine that Byron was the prey of a vampire? He had been, of course, before getting to the top of the Wengern.

Crawford looked across at his companion, noting the hollowed cheeks under the graying hair, and the brightness of Byron’s eyes. And the poetry he was writing these days was the best he’d ever done—Shelley had said recently that he could no longer compete with Byron, and that Byron was the only one worth competing with, now that Keats was dead.

Suddenly Crawford was sure that Byron had given in again—probably while he’d been staying in Venice, to judge by Shelley’s description of the woman he’d been living with there. Would it have been the same vampire that had been preying on him before? Probably. As he’d guessed in Switzerland six years ago—to Byron’s displeasure—they seemed to keep track of their previous lovers even when they’d been barred from them.

But Teresa Guiccioli was obviously not any sort of vampire—she frequently accompanied Byron and his friends on the afternoon rides, and even went to Mass at the cathedral. How was Byron keeping her safe from the jealous attentions of his supernatural lover?

He found himself thinking of the feel of his own vampire’s cold skin, and he hastily fumbled under his coat for his flask. He hadn’t had sex with anyone—anyone human—since his disastrous wedding night six years ago, and he had come to the bleak conclusion that making love to the thing that was Shelley’s twin had spoiled him for sex with his own species.

He still sometimes thought about the painful but releasing kiss Josephine had given him in front of Keats’s house a year ago in Rome, but the memory never quickened his pulse, and he and Josephine had never referred to it.

He and Byron had reached the field at the outskirts of the Castinelli farm where they always did their shooting, and Byron swung down off his horse and grinned up at Crawford. “Join you in that?”

“Certainly.” Crawford handed the flask down and then dismounted, and walked with Byron to the ravaged tree around which they habitually set up their targets. Byron took a second deep sip of the brandy, then handed the flask back, and as Crawford tethered the horses he crouched over some stakes they’d pounded into the ground last time. He was wedging half-crown pieces into the splintered heads of a couple of the stakes.

“Allegra’s dead,” he said over his shoulder.

“Oh.”

Crawford had never met the five-year-old daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont, and though he knew that Claire cared passionately for the child, he had no real idea of how Byron had felt about her—clearly he blamed himself at least to some extent, since he had made such a point earlier of impugning Shelley’s ability to take care of children.

“I’m sorry,” Crawford said, blushing at how inane it sounded.

“I had her in a, a convent, you know,” Byron went on, still facing away from him and adjusting the stakes. His tone was light and conversational. “I’ve got certain protections for myself and Teresa, but they’re not foolproof, and I thought … that in a consecrated place, far away from me and everyone else who’s known to these creatures … but it doesn’t seem to …” His shoulders were rigid, and Crawford wondered if he was weeping, but his voice when he spoke again was just as steady. “Our poor children.”

Crawford thought of his own agonized resisting of the urge to invite his lamia back—which in his case was, among other things, resistance to the offer of enormous longevity—and he thought too of the cost at which Keats had managed to save his own younger sister.

“Your,” Crawford began, wondering if Byron would challenge him to a duel for what he was about to say, “your poetry means that much to you?”

Byron stood up lithely and limped back toward the horses, still without having faced Crawford. In one flash of motion he drew two of the pistols and spun toward Crawford and the tree; and, in the next stretched instant of panic, Crawford had time to wonder if this was where he would die, and to notice that Byron’s hands were shaking wildly and that his eyes were shining with tears.

The two detonations were one ear-hammering blast, but Crawford caught the brief, shrill twang of at least one of the coins as it was punched away across the field.

One muscle at a time, Crawford relaxed, dimly aware through the ringing in his ears that Byron had reholstered the pistols and was walking back toward the tree; and beyond the glittering dots swimming in front of his eyes he watched him limp on past the tree, out into the grass; Byron’s head was down, and he was apparently looking for the coins, both of which were gone.

“It has,” Byron called back, after Crawford had crossed to the tree and was leaning against it. “Meant so much to me,” he added. He was kicking at the grass ten yards away and peering intently at the ground. “I … I suppose I really did know what Lord Grey was, what sort of thing he was, at least, when I opened my bedroom door to him in 1803. By the time I found out that I had doomed my mother and imperiled my sister, of course, it was too late. Still, I didn’t want to believe that he was responsible for my … life’s work, my writing, the thing that I … that made me me, do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Crawford managed to reply.

“I did suspect it—and so I’ve always taken inordinate delight in physical accomplishments—swimming and shooting and fencing and carnality. But none of those things are enough—not to justify all the deaths and hatreds and … betrayals, that have been my life.” He stooped and picked up a wad of silver, then held it up with a frail smile. “Not bad, eh? The coin’s wrapped right around the ball.” He began limping back toward the tree.

Still remembering the way Keats had chosen to die, Crawford said, “But why did you ask him in again? After you had managed to cut free of him in the Alps?”

“I had stopped writing!” Byron shook his head and pitched the coin away. “It … it turned out that I couldn’t stand that. I wrote Manfred, yes, but that was mostly from memory, stuff I’d composed mentally before we climbed the Wengern; and then in Venice I started the fourth Canto of Childe Harold, but it was just plodding … until I met Margarita Cogni—and then I made myself believe that she wasn’t Lord Grey again in a differently sexed body, and that the sudden improvement in my writing would have happened anyway.” He started back toward the horses. “I find I’m not really in the mood for shooting—how about you?”

“To hell with shooting,” Crawford agreed bewilderedly.

“And now Allegra’s dead,” Byron said as he untethered his horse and swung up into the saddle. His eyes narrowed. “But before the … thing can get my sister and my other daughter, I’m going to ditch it again, and then go someplace where I can accomplish something, make my name mean something—in some more valuable arena than poetry.”

Crawford climbed back up onto his horse. “Like?”

“Like … what, freedom—fighting for it—for people that haven’t got it.” Byron frowned self-consciously. “It seems like the best way to atone.”

Crawford thought of the bas-relief coat-of-arms on the door of Byron’s carriage, and of the many-roomed palace he shared with his monkeys and dogs and birds. “Sounds awfully democratic,” he said mildly.

Byron gave him a sharp look. “That’s sarcasm, isn’t it? Apparently you don’t know that my first speech in the House of Lords was in support of the frame-breakers, the English laborers who were being jailed, and even killed, for breaking the machines that were taking away their employment. And you know how involved I’ve been with the Carbonari, trying to help them throw off the Austrian yoke. It’s been …” He shrugged and shook his head. “It hasn’t been enough. Lately I’ve been thinking about Greece.”

Greece, Crawford recalled, was struggling to free itself from Turkey; but it was such a distant conflict, and so overshadowed with echoes of Homer and classical mythology, that he dismissed the notion as mere Byronic romanticism.

“So you’re planning to return to the Alps?” Crawford asked.

“Perhaps that. Or Venice. There’s no terrible hurry … in the meantime I can continue to resist the thing’s attentions, as I’ve been doing. The Carbonari have been resisting them for centuries, and Teresa’s family is deeply schooled in Carbonari lore. You noticed, I trust, that Teresa is … that she remains untouched by this particular ailment.”

Byron seemed angry, so Crawford didn’t question him further—though he was now very curious to know whether Byron’s affection for Teresa had sprung up before or after his discovery of her family’s vampire-repelling skills.

They had ridden for several minutes back toward the centuries-forsaken walls of the city when Byron noticed a figure ahead of them, silhouetted against the gray sky on a rise in the track through the marsh. Crawford squinted in the direction Byron indicated, and saw that the figure was running wildly—toward them—and then he went cold with recognition.

“It’s Josephine,” he said tightly, spurring his horse forward.

She began waving when she saw the horses, and her arm didn’t stop met-ronoming back and forth until Crawford had ridden up to her, reined in and dismounted, and grabbed her arm and forced it back down to her side. She was panting so desperately that he made her sit down, and her eyes were wide open, the glass one staring crazily up into the gray sky.

Byron dismounted too, and held the reins of both horses, staring at Josephine with lively interest. Crawford hoped she would turn out to have had some purpose in running out here; he never permitted anyone to make fun of her odd behavior, but it was discouraging how many times she gave people the opportunity.

After a minute Josephine had regained her breath. “Soldiers from the garrison,” she said, “at our house. I hid when they broke in, and then I climbed out the kitchen window when they were all in the main room.”

Byron swore. “You two weren’t even anywhere near the damned gate when Tita stabbed that dragoon! And they just broke in? I’m going to deal with this, they can’t start harassing all my acquaintances—”

“I … I don’t think it was about the dragoon,” she said, staring hard at Crawford with her one eye.

“Well?” Crawford demanded impatiently after a pause. “What do you think it was about? You can talk in front of Byron,” he added, seeing her hesitate.

“They were talking about three men who were killed in Rome last year.”

Crawford’s belly suddenly felt very empty, and he instinctively looked past her at the city walls. “… Oh.”

Byron’s eyebrows were raised. “You killed three men in Rome?”

Crawford exhaled. “Apparently.” He looked back, along the road that led to the Castinelli family’s farmhouse, and he wondered how much the old farmer might charge to let him and Josephine sleep on his kitchen floor tonight.

“Byron, could you please have a message delivered to Shelley when you get back? Tell him that the Aickmans will take him up on his offer of employment after all—but that he’ll have to bring clothes and supplies for us, and pick us up on the road outside the city.”

CHAPTER 13

The realm I look upon and die

Another man will own;

He shall attain the heaven that I

Perish and have not known.

—A. E. Housman,

When Israel Out of Egypt Came

The entire Shelley household—which, after a hasty stop at the Castinelli farmhouse, included Crawford and Josephine—left Pisa the next day; and four days later Crawford and Shelley and Edward Williams spent an hour carrying boxes through the shallow surf of the Gulf of La Spezia’s eastern shore, setting the boxes down on the sand-swept portico of the old stone boat-house that Shelley had rented, and then wading back to the anchored boat for more.

Away from each side of the house stretched a seawall that divided the narrow strip of beach from the trees masking the steep slope behind the house, and the nearest neighbors were a dozen fishermen and their families in the little cluster of huts called San Terenzo, two hundred yards to the north. There was a road somewhere up the hill, but the only practical access to the shoreside dwellings was by sea, and Shelley was anxious for the delivery of the twenty-four-foot boat that he’d had built at Livorno, and aboard which he hoped to spend most of the hot summer days.

The house was called the Casa Magni, which Crawford thought was an awfully splendid name for so desolate and inhospitable a place. Five tall arches opened on the ground floor, but except for a narrow pavement the house fronted right on the water and, behind the arches, the flagstones of the vast, house-spanning chamber were always rippled and gritty with sand from the high tides.

The ground-floor chamber was used only for storage of boating equipment, and everyone had to sleep and dine in the rooms upstairs—Crawford remembered hearing descriptions of Byron’s palace in Venice, and he wondered why both poets seemed to like dwellings that were just about literally on the water.

On the evening after their arrival Claire returned unexpectedly soon from a walk along the narrow beach and, climbing the stairs to where everyone else was sitting around the table in the long central dining room, she heard Shelley saying something about Byron and the convent at Bagnacavallo; when she got to the top of the stairs she crossed the room and asked Shelley if her daughter was dead, and Shelley stood up and answered, quietly, “Yes.”

She stared at him with such white-faced fury that he actually stepped back, but then she turned and ran into the room she was sharing with Mary, and closed the door; Mary slept in Shelley’s room that night, contrary to their habit.

Even in his bunk in the men’s servants’ room in the back of the house, Crawford could hear Claire sobbing wildly until dawn.

During the next several days Shelley went on a number of solitary hikes up and down the beach, climbing the weirdly bubbled and wavy volcanic rocks and frequently cutting himself on them, but at sunset he could generally be found leaning on the rail of the terrace that fronted the Casa Magni’s second story, staring out across the four miles of darkening water at the tall, craggy silhouette of the peninsula of Portovenere across the Gulf.

One evening Crawford followed him and Ed Williams out onto the terrace after dinner; Shelley and Williams were talking between themselves, and Crawford, shaded from the moonlight by the ragged canvas awning, leaned against the house wall and, as he sipped a glass of sciacchetra, a locally made sweet amber wine, he stared speculatively at his new employer.

Crawford had wondered why Shelley had been so determined to bring his whole entourage to this particular section of bleak coast; at times like this, when Shelley would desultorily maintain a conversation as he scanned the empty waters and the structureless shores, he seemed to be waiting for something—and at such times too he often rattled certain quartzy beach pebbles in his fist, like a man working up the nerve to roll dice on a horrifyingly large wager.

The only sounds on the warm breeze tonight were the measured crash of the surf on the rocks below the terrace, and the hoarse whisper of the wind in the trees behind and above the house, and the clicking of the rocks in Shelley’s fist—and so Crawford spilled most of his wine onto his hand and wrist when Shelley suddenly gave a choked yell and grabbed Williams’s arm.

“There!” Shelley said in a whispered scream, pointing out over the rail at the white foam streaking the dark waves below. “Do you see her?”

Williams, his voice shrill with fright, denied seeing anything; but when Crawford hurried to the rail and looked down he thought he saw a small human form hovering over the waves, beckoning with one white arm.

Shelley tore his gaze away from the sea and looked at Crawford; even in the evening dimness Crawford could see the whites of his eyes all around the irises.

“Don’t interfere, Aickman,” Shelley said. “She’s not for you this—” He paused then, for he had looked back out at the sea, and the look of alarmed anticipation was struck from his face, leaving only a look of sick, tired horror. “Oh, God,” he wailed softly. “It’s not her.”

Crawford looked out again at the dark, surging ocean. The pale figure was farther out, and now he thought he saw several—no, dozens—of impossibly hovering human forms far out over the face of the night’s sea, and he flinched back, coldly aware of how alone he and his companions were on this desolate northern coast, and of how very many miles outward the featureless water extended.

In the moment before it disappeared, seeming to rise into the ash sky and disappear against the stony shoulder of Portovenere, Crawford got a glimpse of the face of the child-figure Shelley had pointed out; the face was porcelain white, and seemed to be showing all its teeth in a broad smile.

Shelley collapsed on the rail, and if Williams hadn’t grabbed his shoulder he might have fallen over the rail onto the narrow pavement below; but after a moment Shelley straightened up and pushed his disordered blond hair back from his face.

“It was Allegra,” he said quietly. “Don’t, for God’s sake, tell Claire.”

Crawford stepped back into the shadows and chewed sweet wine from his trembling knuckles.

During the long summer days the heat seemed to flow through all of them like a drug. Even the children were stunned by it—the Shelleys’ two-year-old son, Percy Florence, spent most of his time drawing random squiggles in any shaded patches of sand he could find, and the Williamses’ two children, one of whom was barely a year old, spent much of each day crying—it seemed to Crawford that they cried with a sort of slow patience, as if a lot of it would have to be done and they didn’t want to wear themselves out early.

Claire just stumbled around in a daze, and Crawford didn’t think it was caused by her admittedly heavy drinking. All she could talk about was the way Byron had used Allegra as a way to make her unhappy; in fact, so frequently did she say “He never did anything for Allegra!” that Crawford and Josephine would often whisper the sentence to each other when Claire opened her mouth to speak, and more often than not had correctly anticipated what she’d been about to say.

Mary was unspecifically ill, much of the time, and had taken on the status of an invalid, and when she did leave her room it was generally to talk to Edward Williams and his wife Jane, who of all the group were bearing up best.

Ed Williams was a year younger than Percy Shelley, and though he had literary ambitions, and had even written a tragedy, he was a bluff outdoorsman, always tanned and cheerful and ready to help with the various maintenance jobs the boats and house required. His wife Jane, too, seemed unaffected by the domineering sun, and was always ready to cheer up the rest of the party with her guitar playing in the evenings, when at last a cooling breeze would sweep in off the water to break the sweaty choke-hold of the day.

Crawford liked both the Williamses, and was profoundly glad that they were here to share the impromptu exile.

At noon of the fourth day after the apparition of Allegra had beckoned to Shelley from the twilight surf, they saw a sail appear around the headland of Portovenere.

For once the day was gray and storm-threatening, and when the watchers on the terrace realized that the sail was that of Shelley’s new boat, the Don Juan, being delivered at last, Shelley smiled nervously and remarked to Crawford how appropriate it was that his craft should first be seen emerging from the port of Venus.

That’s right, thought Crawford, with a sudden chill that wasn’t the cold wind’s doing, Portovenere—that’s what it means.

The boat was an imposingly big craft when seen up close—two masts stood up from the polished deck, each sporting a gaff-rigged mainsail and topsails, and three jibsails extended like an upswept mane from the tapering neck of the long bowsprit—and, after she was moored and the delivery crew had come ashore, Shelley hired one of them, an eighteen-year-old English boy called Charles Vivian, to stay on as a part of her permanent crew.

On a sunny afternoon three days later they took the Don Juan out for her first real sail with Shelley as captain, and tacked their way effortlessly across the sparkling blue water of the Gulf to within a hundred yards of the cliffs of Portovenere. Jane Williams and Mary were aboard, seated in the stern near where Shelley worked the tiller, and Shelley had insisted that Crawford come along too, in case the outing should make the pregnant Mary ill.

At one point Shelley gave the tiller to Edward Williams and walked up to where Crawford sat leaning against the forward mast. “Six months more, then?” Shelley asked him.

Crawford realized that he was talking about Mary’s pregnancy. “Roughly,” he answered, shading his eyes with his hand as he squinted upward. “Be born in the late fall or early winter.”

Shelley stood easily on the deck, keeping his arms folded and only leaning to compensate for the rolling. “Mary doesn’t like it here,” he said suddenly. “She hates the loneliness, and the heat.” He had to speak loudly for Crawford to hear him, but the wind was on the starboard quarter and was flinging their voices away over the bow. “I think she knows I have to be here, though. To …” He shivered and looked past Crawford at the cliffs, shaking his head.

Crawford wished Byron had followed them all here, instead of moving farther south for the summer; despite the differences between the two poets, he was the best person to get Shelley to express himself clearly.

“To …?” echoed Crawford helpfully.

Shelley dropped his gaze to him again. “I may … it’s possible I may … suffer, here, this summer.”

Shelley had often complained to Crawford about bladder stones and hardening of the skin and fingernails; the symptoms seemed to be aggravated by exposure to sunlight, and Crawford started to advise him for the dozenth time to be careful always to wear a hat, but Shelley waved him to silence.

“No, not all that.” Shelley rubbed his eyes.

“I may not be quite the same man, come fall, as I am now and have been,” Shelley said. “You’re a doctor—if the sort of thing I’m describing does happen, I’d be grateful if you’d authoritatively tell Mary that it was—oh, you know, a brain fever induced by a mortified cut or something, that left me not as … as intelligent, not as insightful, as the man she married.” His tanned face was hollowed and pinched, making him look much older than his thirty years. “Don’t ever let her—suspect that I did it intentionally—for her, and for our surviving son, and for the child she carries.”

Without waiting for a reply he turned away and strode aft, and a few moments later Crawford got to his feet and leaned on the starboard rail, staring out to the open sea and away from Portovenere. Summer lightning made it seem that flickering white-hot wires were turning in the terribly blue sky just above the horizon, and the recent storms had driven in toward shore hundreds of gigantic Portuguese man-o'-wars that now hung below the surface of the water like big malignant pearls.

Shelley continued to take his long walks, mostly after dark now; and after Williams built a little rowboat out of wood and tarred canvas, Shelley began rowing it out to where the Don Juan was moored offshore, and spending his days aboard the big boat, feverishly writing page after page of poetry. The Triumph of Life was what he was calling his new, long work.

The summer seemed to Crawford to be flying past. Josephine bunked with the rest of the women servants, and had been recruited as a sort of assistant to Antonia, the Italian nanny who took care of the Williamses’ two children and young Percy Florence Shelley, and so he hardly saw her except at dinner; and she was subdued then, firing off none of the weird, conversation-stopping remarks that had so upset Mary and Claire when they all used to gather around Byron’s table in Pisa.

Mary tended to hide out in her room, and the Williamses stayed together, often out on the boat with Shelley, and so it was almost with a sense of relief that Crawford recognized the man he met on the beach on a twilight evening a month after that first outing aboard the Don Juan.

Crawford and Josephine had been busy all day attending to Mary, who had begun bleeding from the womb and for a swelteringly strenuous couple of hours had seemed on the verge of having a miscarriage; the fit had eventually passed, to Shelley’s intense relief, and Mary had fallen into a restless, sweaty doze. Josephine had returned to the children and Shelley had stalked back to his own room to resume the writing that so absorbed him, and Crawford had gone for a long walk south along the beach, only turning back when the sun had dipped behind the island off the tip of Portovenere.

As soon as he turned his steps back toward the north, Crawford had noticed the man standing on the sand a hundred yards ahead of him, and when Crawford had taken a couple of dozen steps in that direction he had recognized him.

It was Polidori, the arrogant young man who had been Byron’s poetry-writing personal physician before Byron had dismissed him, and given the job to Crawford, in 1816. The carefully tended little moustache and the curled hair and the self-consciously dignified stance were unmistakable.

Crawford waved and called out to him, and Polidori turned to stare in response.

Crawford started toward him along the sand—but at one point the shoreline led Crawford inland around a boulder, and when his course took him again out to where he could see some distance of beach, Polidori was gone, presumably up the wooded slope.

Still holds a grudge, thought Crawford. I wonder why he’s visiting Shelley.

As he trudged up to the Casa Magni, Crawford saw Shelley at his usual station for this time of night, leaning from the rail on the second floor and staring out over the sea. Shelley started violently when Crawford hailed him, but relaxed when he saw who it was. “Good evening, Aickman,” he called down quietly.

“Evening, Percy,” returned Crawford, pausing below the terrace. “Didn’t mean to startle you. What did Polidori want?”

Shelley’s momentarily regained composure was suddenly gone. His narrow fingers gripped the rail like the claws of a bird, and his whisper was shrill as he told Crawford, “Get up here—and say nothing to anyone.”

Crawford rolled his eyes impatiently, but obediently blundered through the empty ground floor to the stairs, climbed them to the dining room level and passed by Jane Williams and Mary and Josephine without speaking, though he picked up a glass and filled it from a decanter on the table, and then walked out to join Shelley on the terrace. The wind was from the sea, and he looked nervously out across the face of the water before looking at Shelley.

“So why are you afraid of Polidori?” he asked quietly, taking a sip of the wine.

Shelley stared at him. “Because he’s dead. He killed himself last year, in England.”

“Well, your information’s faulty. I saw him down the beach not half an hour ago.”

“I don’t doubt you did,” said Shelley unhappily. “This is an easy place for them to come to, the port of Venus.” He waved out at the ocean. “Remember Allegra?”

Crawford was suddenly very tired. “What,” he asked listlessly, “are you saying.”

“You know what I’m saying, damn you. If someone dies after being bitten by a vampire, and nobody … kills the body in the right way, he comes back, he digs his way out of his grave and comes back. Though it’s hardly him anymore. I stopped Clara … but the nuns at Bagnacavallo didn’t stop Allegra, and clearly nobody pounded a stake into Polidori’s corpse either.”

He shook his head, looking even wearier than Crawford felt. “Eggshells is all humans are to these things—the bite carries their … what, eggs, spores … and in the ground the spores replace the organic stuff of their dead host with their stonier substance, like the primeval fish and plants you can find petrified in rocks.” Crawford tried to interrupt, but Shelley went on. “I wish it were possible to be certain, absolutely certain, that no bit of the soul of the original host was still present in the remade body—but the revivified ones do seem to seek out people they knew when they were alive.”

He turned to Crawford, and there were tears in his eyes. “What if Allegra, the real child, is still … in that head, somewhere, like a child lost in the catacombs of an overthrown castle? Christ, I remember playing with her, rolling billiard balls back and forth across the floor of Byron’s palace in Venice with her … years ago.”

“Why did you come here?” Crawford asked, thinking of the fragility of Josephine.

“Because I want to make a deal with her.” Shelley smiled shakily at him. “Her—not Allegra. You know who I mean. And, like the rest of her tribe, she’ll be more accessible in this place. I want to … buy her off.”

“With what?”

Shelley took the glass from Crawford’s hand and drained it. “With myself—or what makes me me, anyway; with the … greater part of my humanity.”

Crawford stared at him. “Will she take it?”

“Oh, she’ll take it, sure enough; I just hope she’ll remember to adhere to the bargain.”

Crawford shuddered, but didn’t try to talk him out of it.

That night Crawford was shaken awake by another of the servants, who told him he’d been shouting in his sleep; Crawford blurrily thanked the man, but was almost sorry he’d been awakened—for, though he couldn’t remember any of the dream, it was evident to him that it had been intensely erotic, and it was the first time in two years that he’d had any such feelings. At the same time he knew that even in the dream it had only been a tantalizing glimpse of something passing by, not anything for him.

He didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, and when at dawn he took a cup of coffee out onto the terrace he saw Shelley, pale and haggard, rowing the little boat out to the Don Juan; Shelley was facing him, and when he saw Crawford he nodded grimly.

The next day a three-masted frigate sailed into the Gulf and fired a four-gun salute to the moored Don Juan—it proved to be Byron’s new ship, the Bolivar, en route from Genoa to where her future owner awaited her in Livorno; aboard her were a Captain Daniel Roberts and a friend of Shelley’s and Byron’s from the days in Pisa, Edward John Trelawny.

Shelley was delighted to see Trelawny again, and even Mary revived somewhat from her semi-invalidhood, and for two days the Casa Magni was a cheerful place, with boat trips to Lerici for roses and carnations and spicy Ligurean food and strong coffee, and long, animated conversations around the dining table, and the sound of Jane Williams’s guitar echoing over the water.

Trelawny was a tall, bearded soldier-of-fortune who had known Edward Williams in Geneva; he had asked for an introduction to the Pisan circle mainly in order to meet Byron, whose adventurous poetry he admired, but as it happened he had become friends primarily with the Shelleys. He and Shelley were the same age, and though the one was big and dark and the other frail and fair, they were equally skilled at shooting and sailing, and now spent many hours together in pistol practice and in discussion of improvements Shelley wanted to make on the Don Juan.

The holiday atmosphere brought the children out, and Crawford saw Josephine frequently during the two festive days; and on Saturday night when a group took the Don Juan a mile north along the coast to Lerici for dinner, and there proved to be too many people for the longest table the restaurant had, he found himself sitting at a small separate table with her.

The waiter brought a steaming platter of trenette noodles covered with green pesto sauce redolent of basil and Ligurean olive oil and garlic, and Josephine said, “I hate this.”

She was forking a lot of the noodles onto her plate, so Crawford knew she didn’t mean the food. “We could leave,” he said quietly.

She looked up at him. “You know why we can’t.”

The smile he gave her was as affectionate as it was wry, for he knew she wasn’t referring to the danger of arrest. He nodded. “The children.”

“He’s got something in mind, in coming here,” she said. “Hasn’t he? Something he thinks will save them.”

Crawford took some of the pasta himself, and while he nibbled at it he quietly told her about the vague deal Shelley had hoped to make with his unhuman sister, and that he had apparently already made it.

“The one you’re married to,” said Josephine. “Are you … comfortable with the fact that she might be around?”

“Used to be married to,” he said. “I got a divorce in the Alps.” He went on hurriedly, “No, I’m not comfortable with the fact. She … killed Julia, after all. As a matter of fact I think she was around, night before last—I sort of … felt her, in my sleep, I think.”

Josephine reddened and looked away. “I know what you mean. Do you think Percy …?”

It was a new thought to Crawford, and he fought down the instant jealousy it roused in him. “I don’t know. That might have been part of the bargain, I suppose—he did … have her, once before, in 1811.” He despised himself for remembering the year. “Yes, I imagine that probably was part of it.”

She drank some wine and smiled unhappily at him, and he knew she had been aware of his momentary envy. “It’s all just so damned horrible, isn’t it?”

Crawford reflected her smile.

Edward Williams piloted them all back home, skating the Don Juan across the calm water under a full moon, but when they got back to the Casa Magni Crawford couldn’t sleep, and eventually got out of bed and went out to the

dining room to read.

The wind was strengthening, and the windows rattled with each gust in eerie counterpoint to the boom of the surf on the rocks, and Crawford kept being distracted by a remark Williams had made about the tides being capricious along this shore. Williams had seemed to find it amusing, but now, as the moon hovered over the massy shoulder of Portovenere, the thought made Crawford uneasy.

After a while Claire came silently out of Mary’s room and closed the door behind her. She smiled and nodded to him, but her face was drawn, and he wondered what dream had driven her out of bed. She seemed sober.

“I’ve got to get out of here, Michael,” she whispered, sitting down in a chair across the table from him. “Back to Florence. This is a bad place.”

He glanced out at the moon, and nodded. “Shelley should have done this alone,” he whispered back.

She stared at him. “Done what?”

He realized that she wasn’t aware of Shelley’s vague purpose in coming here, and he began to frame some answer having to do with the man’s poetry, but suddenly she was looking past him, toward the window, and her mouth was pinched shut and her eyes had gone as wide open as they could. Then she was up out of her chair and running toward the closed door to the terrace.

The violence of the movement startled Crawford half out of his own chair, and when he glanced at the French door he lunged out of the chair entirely and got to the door an instant before she did, and held her back.

There was a little girl out on the terrace, holding up white hands toward the light inside, and though she was silhouetted by the moon, Crawford could see her darkly shining eyes and white teeth as she mouthed inaudible words through the glass.

“What are you doing,” Claire panted, struggling to get out of Crawford’s arms, “that’s my daughter! That’s Allegra!”

“It’s not, Claire, I swear to you,” Crawford snarled, spinning her back across the floor to crack her hip against the table. “It’s a vampire. Your daughter died, remember?”

One of the candlesticks wobbled and then clanked over, and then Shelley’s door opened, and Crawford could hear people stirring in the rear rooms.

Claire ran back toward the glassed door, and Crawford caught her, holding her too tightly in his fear.

Josephine, wrapped in a robe, padded up, stared expressionlessly for a moment at the swaying thing on the terrace, and then stood between it and Claire.

Claire’s eyes blazed at Shelley, who was blinking around sleepily. “Allegra’s on the terrace,” she told him clearly. “Tell these two to let me go to her.”

Shelley was suddenly wide awake. “It wasn’t her, Claire,” he said quietly, keeping his eyes away from the windows. “Ed,” he added to Williams, who had appeared from his own room, “pull the drapes across, will you? And Josephine, get Claire a glass of something to let her sleep.”

Williams walked slowly across the room to the windows, and Crawford, still holding the struggling Claire, glanced at him impatiently.

Williams was staring at the child outside as he dragged the drapes across, and though there was no change in Williams’s expression, Crawford thought there had been some kind of communication through the glass in the instant before the drapes cut out the last of the moonlight. He tried to catch Williams’s eye as the man walked back across the room, but Williams was staring at the floor.

Claire sagged in Crawford’s arms, and he led her to a chair and lowered her into it as Josephine hurried back to the women’s servants’ room.

Shelley’s alertness had faded, and he was blinking around as if he couldn’t remember what had just happened—more than ever Crawford was sure he must have consummated his bargain with the lamia, and he gripped the back of Claire’s chair very hard. He didn’t want to go back to the lamia himself—he swore to himself that he didn’t—but he remembered with torturing vividness how hungrily she used to come into his arms, and he remembered his hands on her, and hers on him.

Josephine had returned with a bottle of laudanum, and Claire dazedly drank the dose Josephine measured out, and then let herself be led back to her bed.

Without a word Williams returned to his own room and closed the door.

“You didn’t expect this?” Crawford asked.

“Not Allegra, no,” Shelley said softly, shaking his head. “I couldn’t believe it when we saw her the other night—I was told that the body was shipped back to England. God knows what child’s body was sent there. I—”

“What do you recommend we do about it?”

“… All go back to bed?” Shelley ventured.

Not trusting himself to speak, Crawford nodded stiffly and returned to his room.

He still couldn’t sleep. He lay staring up at the ceiling, wondering if he should go take some laudanum himself to drive away the memories of cold breasts and a hot tongue, and glaringly alive but inorganic eyes, and the total loss of self to which he had so gratefully surrendered during that most peaceful week of his life in Switzerland six years ago.

Shelley was having her—perhaps even now, at this moment—and her thoughts were all of Shelley and not of him.

He sipped brandy from his ever-present flask instead, and at dawn managed to fall into an uneasy doze.

At eight he was again shaken awake, this time by Shelley, who was pale beneath his tan and clearly on the verge of weeping. “Mary’s had a miscarriage,” he said tightly, “and is hemorrhaging badly. Hurry—I think she may bleed to death.”

Crawford rolled out of bed and pushed back his hair. “Right,” he said, trying to gather his wits. “Get me brandy and clean linen, and send someone to Lerici for ice. And get Josephine—I’ll need her.”

CHAPTER 14

… The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image walking in the garden.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

… He had seen the figure of himself which met him as

he walked on the terrace & said to him—“How long do

you mean to be content?”

—Mary Shelley,

15 August 1822

The sheets had been peeled back from Mary’s bed, and blood seemed to be everywhere; it not only soaked the bedclothes and the mattress, but was spattered on the walls and smeared across her face—evidently she had reacted violently when she’d become aware of what was happening to her. By the gray, fog-filtered light from the windows, the blood seemed to be the only color in the room, and it was only after the first stunned moment that he even noticed Mary’s naked form lying among it.

The low ceiling of the long-ago hotel room in Hastings seemed to press down on the top of his head, and for several seconds he just stared in mindless horror at what seemed to be Julia’s exploded corpse.

“Aickman!” Shelley said loudly.

Crawford dragged himself out of the memory. “Right,” he said tightly.

He crossed to the bed and knelt, quickly pressing the heel of his hand against Mary’s lower belly.

“Someone’s going for ice?” he asked sharply.

“Ed Williams and Trelawny are, in the Don Juan,” Shelley told him.

“Good. Get me a bowl of brandy.”

Josephine hurried in a moment later, and when Crawford glanced back at her he could see that the spectacle had a traumatic effect on her, too—but she took several deep breaths, and then in a flat voice asked him what needed to be done.

“Come over here.” When she had crossed to the bed and leaned over, he spoke to her quietly. “It’s too late for the fetus. Now we’ve got to stop the bleeding. Get me a pot of very damned strong tea, and then roll a cylindrical bandage for packing her, and soak it in the tea—the tannin should help. And be ready to bandage her tightly around the hips, with a pad over the uterus here, where my hand is.”

He felt that someone else had entered the room and was standing behind him, but he was talking calmly to Mary now, reminding her that he was a doctor, and telling her to relax.

He saw some of the tension go out of the tendons in her neck and legs, and when Shelley returned with the bowl of brandy Crawford rinsed his free hand in it and then gently put a finger into Mary’s vagina to try to ascertain the source of the bleeding. As he’d feared, it was inaccessibly far up.

He felt strong disapproval radiate from the person behind him, but ignored it.

He heard Josephine return, and smelled the tea she had brought.

And suddenly it was Julia’s destroyed body that he was probing with such grotesque intimacy, and the room was again the one in which he’d spent his wedding night in Hastings. He drew back with a smothered yell and looked around wildly; Josephine and Shelley were the only other people in the room—God knew whom he had imagined to be standing behind him—and Josephine was trembling so hard that tea was shaking out of the pot she held as she stared in horror at the fearful bed.

It’s a hallucination, Crawford told himself desperately. This is like what happened in Keats’s apartment in Rome.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was Mary in the bed, and Shelley was looking at him anxiously. Crawford turned to Josephine—her face had relaxed again, but she was just staring blankly out the window, into the fog. Clearly she had shared the hallucination. “Josephine,” he said, to no response. “Goddammit, Josephine!”

She stirred, and blinked at him.

“What’s the year, and where are we?” he demanded.

She closed her eyes, then after a moment whispered, “Twenty-two, Gulf of La Spezia.”

“Good. Remember it. Now get the bandage out of the teapot and wring it out and hand it to me—it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit hot, I want to try diaphoretics anyway, until the ice gets here.” Easily said, he thought, but how are we to induce real sweating without burnt hawthorn or calx of antimony or elder flowers or camphor? More than ever he regretted the loss of his medical kit in Pisa.

He saw Josephine’s questioning look when he turned to her to take the bandage. “Well, wrap her up in blankets, at least, when I’m done here,” he said, “and then have her drink as much of that tea as she can.” He turned back toward the bed.

The whole front of Julia’s head was crushed, but there was a shifting of the bloody flesh where the eye sockets might have been, and he guessed she was trying to open her eyes. A hole opened beneath them, and managed to pronounce the words, “Why, Michael…?”

He closed his own eyes again. “Percy,” he said unsteadily, “go to the kitchen and get me garlic, anything with garlic in it. We’re getting that kind of resistance here.”

“Why, Michael …?” said Josephine behind him in an eerily accurate echo.

When he opened his eyes he saw Mary again—he gave her what he tried to make a reassuring smile, then glanced past her, out the window. The sky was still lost behind the fog, and he prayed that the sun would disperse the stuff soon.

The visual hallucinations stopped when Shelley followed his instructions about rubbing the window frame with the garlic bread he’d found, though Crawford—and, visibly, Josephine—continued to hear Julia’s voice outside, repeatedly asking him, “Why?”

Crawford’s measures slowed the bleeding, and when the ice was brought upstairs at nine-thirty he had Trelawny fill a metal hip-bath with salted water and chunks of the ice; then he had Shelley help him lift Mary out of the bed and lower her into the tub.

She shuddered violently at the chill, but it very shortly stopped the bleeding.

The fog was breaking up, and distantly across the Gulf the ridge of Portovenere glowed green and gold in the morning sun. Crawford stripped the bed, wrapped the tiny fetus of Shelley’s dead child in the ruined sheets, and walked out into the dining room. Shelley followed him.

“There’s a shovel downstairs,” Shelley said bleakly, “in the corner by the spare oars.”

Shelley dug the grave, in the slope behind the house; it didn’t have to be very deep, but tears were running down his cheeks and it took him nearly half an hour. At last Crawford laid the bloody bundle in the hole.

He straightened, and Shelley began shovelling dirt into the hole, and Crawford mentally said goodbye to the child that had been in his care. He had lost babies before, but—perhaps not rationally—this loss filled him with more guilt than had any of the others.

“She didn’t honor your deal, did she?” he asked Shelley in a brittle tone.

Shelley threw the last shovelful of dirt onto the low mound. “No,” he said hollowly. “She did take what I offered—I won’t ever write any more poetry, she gnawed out that part of my mind—but I guess she … didn’t remember, not for very long, anyway, what her part of the bargain was supposed to be.”

“This is what—the third child you’ve lost to her? The fourth, that’s right. And this time Mary nearly went too. You’ve got one child left, Percy Florence, upstairs. How long do you think it’ll be before she kills him?” Crawford had sometimes taken the two-year-old boy out rowing in the little boat when his father was off in the Don Juan, and he didn’t like to think of coming out here again some morning to bury Percy Florence.

Shelley blinked around at the walnut trees standing up from the slope, then out at the sea. “I don’t know. Not long, I suppose. I wish she could be stopped, but this was my best—”

“It was not,” interrupted Crawford harshly. “In Switzerland, when you talked to me in that boat on the lake, you told me that it’d be a bad idea for me to pitch you into the water, remember? You said that if you were to drown it would probably kill her, because of how closely you’re linked, being twins and all. Well, if you want to save Mary and your remaining son, why don’t you do that? Drown yourself? Why didn’t you do it years ago, before she killed your children?”

He had expected Shelley to get angry, but instead he seemed to consider seriously what Crawford had said. “I don’t know,” he mumbled again, then plodded slowly away toward the house, leaving Crawford to carry the shovel.

After stowing the shovel, Crawford took off his bloody shirt—he hadn’t had time yet this morning to put on shoes—and walked out across the pavement onto the sunlit sand and waded into the clear blue water. When the waves were lapping around his waist he kicked himself forward and began swimming, and he rolled in the waves and scrubbed at himself until he was sure all the blood was off him. It didn’t make him feel much cleaner.

He lay flat in the water and floated, listening to the pulse of his own blood. His bloodstream was currently a closed loop, not open to anyone, and for a while he thought about Shelley’s submission to his lamia, and then he made himself stop thinking about it.

He was pretty far out by now—fifty yards, he guessed. Treading water awkwardly in his long trousers, he turned and looked back at the old stone edifice all of them were living in. The awning over the terrace was ragged and faded, and the walls and arches were streaked with rust stains, and at this moment he couldn’t see why anyone would come here except to die and leave their bones to bleach on the white sand.

A robed figure stepped out from the darkness between the arches and began picking its way over the sun-bright rocks, and he recognized it as Josephine. Apparently she wanted a thorough bath too.

At the surf line she threw off her robe, and he was surprised and alarmed to be able to see, even at this distance, that she was naked. Shelley and Claire, and even the Williamses sometimes, liked to go swimming nude, but Josephine had certainly never done it before. Crawford hadn’t even known she could swim.

She swam out at a southward slant, and he decided she hadn’t noticed him bobbing far out on the glittering face of the water; he paddled along after her, more slowly because of the drag of his trousers.

They were a good hundred yards south of the Casa Magni when her head disappeared beneath the surface, and suddenly Crawford guessed what her purpose was. In an instant he had shucked off his trousers and was swimming as powerfully as he could toward where she had disappeared.

A cluster of popping bubbles told him he had found her—apparently she was emptying her lungs as she sank—and he jackknifed in a surface dive and struggled down against the buoyancy of the salt water. He could see her white body below him, and he kicked himself farther down. The sudden rush of water hurt his eyes, and he was weirdly reminded of swimming through the thickened air on top of the Wengern.

He grabbed a handful of her hair, and then began thrashing back up toward the rippling silver sheet overhead that was the surface; she clawed at his hand and forearm, and he could feel his lungs heaving with the effort to breathe in water, but he knew that if he let her succeed in drowning he would almost certainly decide to follow her, so he kept tugging and kicking.

At last his head broke the water, and he was whoopingly gasping air, and then, in a move that pushed him back under, he hoisted her up so that her head was out of the water. Her naked back was pressed against his chest, and he could feel her lungs working.

Not too late, he thought desperately.

He grabbed her under the arms when he came up again, and with his free arm and his legs he began dragging them back toward shore. She was moving weakly, but he couldn’t tell if she was trying to help or to get free of him. He managed to keep her face above the water most of the time.

His vision was darkening and his bad leg was beginning to cramp when at last he felt sand under one bare foot, and he managed to conjure up one last

explosion of effort that left them both sprawled naked on the hot sand.

Though bleakly sure that any more work would burst his heart, he rolled her over onto her stomach, spread his hands on her ribs just under the shoulder blades, and bore down, feeling the sand abrading her skin under his palms. Water gushed from her mouth and nose.

He did it again, forcing more water out, and then again; at last, with the colored sparkling of unconsciousness filling his sight, he rolled her onto her back and pressed his mouth onto hers and blew his own breath into her lungs—waited a moment while it rushed back out—and then put his mouth to hers once more.

The exhalation he gave her took his consciousness with it.

He couldn’t have been insensible for more than a few seconds, for the water she’d spewed out was still a patch of bubbles on the sand when he raised his head from her breast and stared anxiously into her face.

Her eyes were open, and for one long moment met and held his. Then she rolled out from under him and spent a good minute coughing up more water. She was facing away from him, and seemed to be almost clothed in clinging sand.

At last she got unsteadily to her feet. Crawford watched her, then hastily got up himself when he saw that she was walking back toward the water.

“I’m only rinsing off the sand,” she snapped when she heard his footsteps splashing behind her in the shallows.

He stayed close to her; and, when he saw that she really didn’t intend to swim out again, he decided that getting rid of the caking sand was a good idea, and he got down and let the waves wash over him, too.

Then they were walking back up the sand slope, and she took his hand. They kept walking, through the dry, floury sand, to the sudden coolness of the leaf-carpeted shadows under the trees, and when he released her hand it was just so that he could put his arms around her. She lifted her face to his and held him tightly.

He kissed her, deeply and with all the passion he had thought lost forever; and she was responding feverishly. In a moment they were lying in the leaves, and with each thrust into her it seemed to Crawford that he was pushing further away all the awarenesses of failure and death and guilt.

Later Crawford walked naked back up the beach to the Casa Magni, almost grateful now for the solitude of the area, and he managed to get upstairs to his bunk without being seen by anyone but Claire Clairmont, who had clearly started drinking early today, and simply blinked at him as he strode past her. Once dressed, he went into the women’s servants’ room and bundled up some clothes for Josephine.

When he returned to the clearing in which they had made love, he found her sitting up and staring out at the sea. She took the clothes with a grateful smile, and when she had dressed she hugged him for several seconds without speaking.

He was relieved, for during the walk back from the Casa Magni he had tried to imagine what he would find when he got to where he had left her—he had pictured finding her gone, and her body washing up some days later; or catching a glimpse of her, mad-eyed and with her fingers chewed bloody, scampering away through the trees like a wild beast; or hunched up as he’d seen a few over-stressed sailors get, with her knees to her face and her arms around her legs and nobody at all at home behind her eyes. He had hardly dared to hope that she’d be not only alive and sane but cheerful too.

Then she leaned back and looked up at him happily. “Found you at last, darling!” she said. “What on earth have you been doing in this desolate place, with all these horrible people?”

“Well,” he said, suddenly cautious, “we’re working for Shelley, you and I are.”

“Nonsense. You’ve got your practice in London, and I certainly don’t work! Do finish up whatever dreary little affairs you have here, and quickly—my mother must be wild with worry by this time, even though I’ve been sending her letters.”

He was far too tired to argue now. “I guess you’re right,” he sighed, holding her close again so that she wouldn’t see the weariness and disappointment in his face, “Julia.”

Trelawny left aboard the Bolivar two days later, though Captain Roberts stayed on at the Casa Magni so as to be able to help Shelley sail the Don Juan down to Livorno—for Leigh Hunt and his family were finally due to arrive there in two weeks; at last Hunt and Shelley and Byron would be able to start their magazine, though Shelley seemed to have lost some of his enthusiasm for the project.

Shelley was, in fact, devoting all his attention to refitting the Don Juan, presumably to make it a more imposing vessel, better able to stand comparison with Byron’s ostentatious Bolivar. He and Roberts and Williams were adding a false stern and bow to make the vessel look longer, and had dramatically increased the amount of canvas she could spread.

They also re-ballasted her; Crawford pointed out that the vessel rode a little higher now than it had before the refitting, but Shelley assured him that they knew what they were doing.

On the evening of Trelawny’s departure, Crawford was standing with Shelley and Claire on the terrace and watching the Bolivar’s sails recede to the south against a cloudless bronze sunset, when Josephine stepped out onto the terrace from the dining room and gave Crawford an unfriendly look.

“Can I speak to you in our room, Michael?”

Crawford turned to bare his teeth out at the sea and squint his eyes shut, then let his face relax as he turned around. “Of course, Julia,” he said, following her back inside.

Shelley had given up his room when Josephine told him that she and Crawford were married, and Crawford now missed his old bunk in the servants’ quarters.

She shut the door when he had followed her into the room. “I told you this morning,” she said, “that I wanted a definite answer from you about when we’re leaving this ghastly place.”

“Right.” He sighed, and sat down in a chair by the window. “Shelley’s sailing south to Livorno a week from yesterday, to meet Byron and this Leigh Hunt fellow. Shelley said you and I can ride along.”

“Why how frightfully generous of him!—considering that you’ve been working here for nearly two months without a penny of pay. You still haven’t explained to me why you failed to demand passage on the Bollix or whatever its foolish name was.”

“Yes, I did. Mary Shelley—and Claire, lately—are patients of mine, and I don’t want to leave them while their conditions are in doubt.” He tried to look sincere as he said this—the truth was that he had been delaying leaving the Casa Magni because he thought she was more likely to recover her real Josephine personality here, where she’d lost it, than in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Livorno, or back at home in the now alien nation of England.

“Very well.” Her tone was brittle with resentment. “But we stay not one day longer than next Monday, do you understand me? This place is horrible and these people are horrible. Have you made that Shelley person understand yet that you and I are not brother and sister?”

“Oh yes,” he said hastily. Actually he had only got Shelley to stop referring to them as such.

“How does he think we could be, and be married?”

“I don’t know.” Incest is nothing unusual to this crowd, Julia, he thought—Shelley and his “sister,” Byron and his half sister—but it wouldn’t help to tell you that.

“And when will you abandon this ridiculous ‘Aickman’ name?”

“As soon as we leave,” he told her, not for the first time.

She turned her head parrotlike to peer out the window. “I would think you’d be more concerned about getting proper medical help for your own wife,” she said, “than applying your evidently inadequate skills to strangers. This eye that you’ve proven unable to do anything about is getting worse.”

I doubt that, he thought, unless you’ve managed to crack it.

Yesterday he might have taken this complaint as a good way to try to remind her of the Wengern and all the rest of the events of her life as Josephine, but after last night’s dinner he had finally given up trying to provoke that.

In the afternoon yesterday he had forcibly held her down on their bed and told her about Keats, and fleeing Rome, and living in Pisa and working at the university there, and he’d been optimistic when her sobs and protests had ceased and she had relaxed under him; but when he had got off her—and, in a tone made hoarse by hope, said, “Welcome back, Josephine"—she had sat up so jerkily that he had almost thought he heard the clatter of gears and ratchets in her torso.

She had stayed in her mechanical mode all evening, snapping her neck from one position to another and moving awkwardly as if on hinged limbs, and Claire had fled the dining room and young Percy Florence had burst into tears and demanded that his mother take him away from the “wind-up lady.” When she recovered, some hours later, she was Julia again.

And so he had abandoned, at least for the moment, the idea of calling Josephine back—he had decided that he was at least minimally better off with Julia than with the wind-up lady.

He was eerily sure that Josephine’s body was doing a perfect imitation of his dead wife, based on its two decades of close acquaintance with the subject; in effect he was only getting to know his wife now, six years after her death, and he was dismayed to find that he didn’t like her at all.

She had made it clear two days ago that she would not welcome any sexual advances as long as the two of them were still in this house, and he was sure that part of her chronic resentment arose from the fact that this declaration had not sent him packing.

The truth was that he no longer wanted sex with her. He knew now that he loved poor Josephine—who, for all he knew, might be dead herself, no longer even a dormant spark in her own abdicated brain.

The thought reminded him of Shelley’s agonized speculation that Allegra might still be alive and aware somewhere in her own nightmarishly revivified skull. We’re all prisoners in our own heads, he thought now as he considered the memories that bound himself, but at least most of us can speak to other people through the bars, and sometimes reach between them to clasp someone else’s hand.

“I did meet one gentleman here,” Julia went on, “an Englishman, last night on the beach. One of Shelley’s friends who came on that ship, I suppose. I hope he didn’t leave on it today. He’s a physician,” she added, emphasizing the word. Crawford was only a surgeon. “He said he could restore sight to my eye. He promised it.”

Crawford blinked in puzzlement for a moment—then he was on his feet, and leaning down to speak directly into her face. “Don’t go near that man,” he said harshly. “Don’t ever invite him in, do you understand me? This is important. He’s a … a murderer, I promise you. If you ever again speak to him I swear I will never leave here, and my London practice can go to hell.”

She smiled, visibly reassured. “Why, I believe you’re jealous! Do you really imagine that I’d flirt—or do anything more than flirt, at least—with another man, when I’m married to a successful doctor?”

He forced an answering smile.

Shelley launched the refitted Don Juan on Saturday—he and Williams and Roberts kept her out all day and well into the evening, slanting and tacking across the calm water of the Gulf, and returning her to her mooring only when the moon began to be veiled with clouds; Shelley’s spirits remained substantially restored until, during the late dinner, Claire tremulously told him that twice during the evening she had seen him pacing the terrace … before the Don Juan had returned.

Josephine only rolled her eyes impatiently and muttered something about alcoholism, but Shelley threw down his fork, got up, and pulled the drapes across the windows. “From now on we’ll keep these closed after dark,” he said.

Remembering Josephine’s meeting with what must have been the resurrected Polidori, Crawford nodded. “A good idea.”

Claire, halfway through her third tumbler of brandy, frowned, as if she could nearly remember some reason why Shelley should be opposed in this; she hastily drank some more of the brandy, and the momentary kinks of alertness relaxed out of her face.

There was something ill about Edward Williams’s smile that made Crawford stare at him even before he spoke. “But we can—we can open them later, can’t we, Percy?” Williams asked nervously. “I only mean that—that it’s sort of pleasant to be able to look out over the Gulf at night.”

Crawford glanced at Shelley, and saw that he had noticed it too.

“No, Ed,” Shelley said tiredly. “Look at the goddamned Gulf all you want during the day. The drapes stay closed from sundown to sunup.” He looked at Crawford and Josephine. “I think the Aickmans will be willing to … wash the windows with a solution that will help to enforce this.”

“Windows!” protested Josephine. “Impossible! My husband is a doctor, and I’m certainly no one’s maid! How do you dare to imagine that—”

“I’ll do it, Percy,” said Crawford quietly. “After everyone’s gone to bed.”

Josephine got up from the table and stormed into their room.

A couple of hours later, when the lights had been snuffed, Crawford smashed several dozen garlic cloves into a bucket of salt water, then dragged it into the dining room and pulled the drapes back and, with an old shirt, slopped the mixture across the window panes and the flat stones of the floor.

He was glad that there were no lights in the room, for he didn’t want to be able to recognize the several human forms that were bending and gesticulating silently in the darkness on the terrace outside.

Shelley and Roberts and the English boy Charles Vivian took the Don Juan out by themselves the next day, for Williams had a fever and only wanted to lie in bed all day. Crawford offered to examine him and do what he could in the way of prescribing something, but Williams hastily assured him that it wasn’t necessary. Crawford was nearly moved to tears to see the sick brightness in the man’s hitherto clear and humorous eyes.

At about noon Crawford put on a pair of cut-off trousers Shelley had given him and went downstairs. The wind was shaking the trees on the slope behind the house, and the Don Juan, running with the wind, was a speck of white on the southern horizon. Crawford walked into the water and began swimming. Since the death of Mary’s fetus a week ago he had been taking a long swim every day.

The water was bracingly chilly, and revulsion at his situation made him swim out quite a distance before he relaxed and floated on his back, at last letting himself enjoy the sun on his face and chest.

Today was Sunday. They were to sail for Livorno tomorrow, and then he would have to decide what to do about Josephine. He couldn’t possibly go back to England with her—could he, in good conscience, book passage for both of them and then jump ship, leaving her to travel alone? No—whether she was his wife or the woman he loved, he was bound to take better care of her than that. And Josephine might one day come back. He couldn’t assume that she was gone forever.

Twice more he had felt the lamia’s nearness in the night—both times “Julia” had recoiled from him, thinking he was about to violate their agreement about not having sex until they left La Spezia—and he knew Shelley was still helplessly paying his part of the bargain. The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, he thought, mentally repeating a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets that Shelley had haltingly recited recently.

He didn’t know what to do about Williams—drag him into the Alps and up the Wengern? With Julia along?—and though he had garlicked the windows and threshold of the children’s room, and given Jane Williams ludicrous-sounding instructions not to let the children talk to strangers when they were outside, he bleakly wondered how long it would be until one of them, probably Percy Florence, began wasting away.

At last he let his legs sink and looked back toward the house, and a slight chill passed across his belly; he had drifted out while he’d been carelessly floating, and was now about twice as far from shore as he had thought. His heart was thumping hard in his chest as he began swimming back toward shore.

He couldn’t see that he was making any progress at all, and he cursed his four-fingered left hand and his stiff left leg.

After several minutes he was breathless from swimming against the tide, and he thought that in spite of his struggles he had drifted out farther. The sun was hot on his balding scalp, and glittered blindingly on the glassy waves.

He forced himself to breathe slowly and tread water. You swim in at a slant, he told himself, that’s what everybody says. This is not where you die, understand me?

He tried to see which way the tide had taken him, so as to be able to swim inward in the same direction, but now he couldn’t make out where the house was. The stretch of green-speckled brown that was the mainland seemed featureless, and farther away than ever. The harsh purple sky and the sun seemed to be squeezing it away.

He took several deep breaths and then kicked himself up as high out of the water as he could, and yelled, “Help!”—but the effort left him breathless, and the sound had not seemed to carry.

Tread water, he told himself; you can do that all day, can’t you? Hell, I remember a time in the Bay of Biscay when Boyd and I trod water for two hours straight, as an endurance contest, with friends swimming out to us to deliver fresh bottles of ale, and we only quit because it was clear that waiting for one of us to give up would require that the contest continue until well past dark. This current is much likelier to sweep you ashore somewhere than to take you right out of the Gulf into the open sea.

But even though he traded off between using his arms and using his legs, he could feel his muscles tightening like wires under his skin. Nearly a decade had passed since that contest, and he had clearly lost his youthful fitness somewhere along the line during the intervening years.

He forced himself to breathe evenly and slowly.

The loneliness was appalling. He was a tiny pocket of frightened agitation on the vast, indifferent face of the sea, as frail as a candle in a lost toy boat, and he thought that he wouldn’t even mind drowning if he could hear another person’s voice just once before going under forever.

He could call her.

The thought sent a shiver through his body. Could she get to him quickly enough? On such a sunny day? Somehow he was sure she could—she loved him, and she must have understood that he hadn’t really wanted to divorce her in the Alps. It might not even necessarily mean abandoning Josephine—once he was safely back ashore he could figure out some way to deal with that poor lunatic; certainly he’d be able to do more for her that way than by drowning out here.

He had been trying to favor his stiff left leg, but suddenly it knotted up tight with a muscle cramp that wrung a scream out of him. He flailed his arms to keep from sinking, but he knew that he had only perhaps a minute left.

And then to his own horror he realized that he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t call her. It meant that he was going to die out here, right now, but something—his love for Josephine, the love she had clearly felt for him on that too brief afternoon a week ago—made dying preferable to being possessed again by the lamia.

He tried to pray, but could only curse in angry panic.

The water closed over his head, and he looked up at the image of the sun wiggling on the surface. One more clear glimpse of it, he told himself desperately, just one more gasp of the sea air.

He made his hands claw out and down through the water, and his head poked out into the air—and he heard oar-locks knocking.

A moment later he heard Josephine’s voice screaming, “Michael!”

He discovered that he did still have a little strength left. He was sobbing with the pain of it, but he made his arms keep pushing the water out and down, and when an oar had spun through the air to splash near him, he managed to pull himself over to it and wrap his aching hands around the wide part of it.

A rope had been tied to the other end, and he nearly lost his grip when the line began to be pulled in; but at last his head collided with the planks of the boat, and he was being dragged in over the gunwale. He even managed to help a little.

His left leg was folded up tight, and hurt so badly that he really thought the bones might snap. He touched his thigh, and the knotted muscles were as hard as stone.

“Cramp,” he gasped, and a moment later she was massaging it with hands that had been made bloody by strenuous inexpert rowing. Her left hand, the one she had ruined on the Wengern, was itself visibly becoming clawed with cramp, but she worked strongly, with a nurse’s expertise, and after a minute the knot in his leg had been ground out.

For a long time he lay sprawled against one of the thwarts, just filling and emptying his lungs, his eyes shut. At last he sat up a little and looked around. The boat was one that Shelley had found too big to be convenient for rowing, and had stowed downstairs. There was no one in it but himself and Josephine.

He stared at her until he had regained his breath enough to be able to speak; then, “Who are you?” he asked bluntly.

At first he thought she wouldn’t answer; then she whispered, “Josephine.”

He lay back again. “Thank God.” He reached out and gently held her flayed, twisted hand. “How in hell did you even get this boat out of the house?”

“I don’t know. I had to.”

“I’m glad you noticed me out here. I’m glad you noticed me out here.” Julia, he thought, would never have done this.

Josephine sat back and pushed sweaty hair off her forehead. Her glass eye was staring crazily into the sky, but her good one was focused intently on him. “I … woke up from fright, I came back into my body, staring out the window at you and knowing you were in trouble. I had heard her noticing it—you understand?—and that was what gave me the strength to … push her aside, push J-Julia out. And then I was running down the stairs and wrestling this thing out through the arches and over the pavement and into the water.”

He saw that she was barefoot, and that there was blood on the floorboards too.

“Josephine,” he said unsteadily, “I love you. Don’t let Julia, your ghost of Julia, take your body, not ever again.”

“I—” For several seconds she tried to speak, then just shifted around toward the bow and shook her head. “I’ll try not to.”

That night was Midsummer’s Eve, and the two of them stayed up later than everyone else, though they could hear Ed Williams talking quietly, presumably to his wife, in his room.

Only one lamp burned, the lamp Shelley insisted burn all night, and Crawford and Josephine had finished the bottle of wine left over from dinner and were slowly working on another one that he had opened after that. They had talked for more than an hour, rarely even brushing any important topics, when, simultaneously, the latest pause in the conversation became the end of it and Crawford noticed that they had finished the wine.

He stood up and held his hand out to her. “Let’s go to bed.”

They went into their room and closed the door and undressed, and then in the darkness—for he had pulled the curtains across their window—they made long, slow love, stopping short of climax again and again until finally it was unstoppably upon them.

After a while Crawford rolled off of her and lay beside her, feeling her hot, dewy flank against his side; he opened his mouth to tell her softly that he loved her—

—And a shriek from another room interrupted him and sent him bounding out of bed.

For lack of anything else he pulled on Shelley’s cut-off trousers, then opened the door and stepped into the dining room; he could hear Josephine behind him struggling into clothes.

The door to the Shelleys’ room was open, and the tall, thin figure of Shelley came out quickly but without any sound. His eyes were glowing like a cat’s in the lamplight and, before pulling the drapes aside and disappearing onto the terrace outside, he crossed to Crawford and kissed him lightly on the lips. Crawford saw teeth glint in the open mouth, but they didn’t touch him.

Then Shelley came out of his room again, and Crawford realized that this was the real one—and when he realized who the first figure must have been, his chest went hollow and cold and he had half turned toward the terrace door before he remembered Josephine.

He made himself turn his back on the terrace and face Shelley.

CHAPTER 15

But the worm shall revive thee with kisses,

Thou shalt change and transmute as a god

As the rod to a serpent that hisses,

As the serpent again to a rod.

Thy life shall not cease though thou doff it;

Thou shalt live until evil be slain,

And good shall die first, said thy prophet,

Our Lady of Pain.

—A. C. Swinburne, Dolores

“Where did it go?” Shelley demanded.

Not trusting himself to speak yet, Crawford simply pointed to the drapes.

Shelley collapsed against the wall and rubbed his eyes. “It was trying to strangle her—strangle Mary.” He held up his hands, which were scratched and bloody. “I had to tear its hands away from Mary’s neck.”

The Williamses and Josephine were in the dining room now, and Shelley had pulled the drapes aside and, crouching, was licking his finger, rubbing it along the floor by the windows, then moving and licking it again. When he had hunched and licked his way down the whole length of the windows he looked up.

“There’s no salt nor garlic here,” he said, staring straight at Edward Williams.

Williams flinched, then mumbled, “Is that what that was? The smell—I just thought I’d wash them better—” He had buttoned up the collar of his nightshirt, but Crawford could see a spot of blood staining the fabric at his neck.

Shelley’s lips were a straight white line. “All of you go back to bed,” he said, “except you, Aickman—we’ve got to talk.”

“Josephine can hear it,” Crawford said.

Shelley blinked. “I thought her name was …? But very well, let her stay. Bed for the rest of you.”

Shelley was twisting a corkscrew into a fresh wine bottle when the Williamses closed their door, and he poured wine into the only lately abandoned glasses that Crawford and Josephine held out.

“We can’t leave tomorrow,” Shelley said quietly.

Crawford was glad that the person at his side was no longer Julia. “What are you talking about?” he whispered. “This makes it more urgent than ever that we leave! Did you see Ed’s neck? Will you wait until your last child is dead? I don’t—”

“Let him speak, Michael,” interrupted Josephine.

“She’s particularly accessible here,” Shelley went on, “and what I have in mind—the only thing left for me to try—requires that she be accessible.”

“What is it?” asked Crawford.

“You should know,” Shelley told him with hollow gaiety. “It was your idea.” When Crawford still stared blankly at him, Shelley added, with some impatience, “That I drown myself.”

Crawford flinched. “I—I wasn’t serious. I was just—”

“I know. Angry at the death of that unborn child. But you were right, it is the only way to save Percy Florence and Mary.” He smiled now—maliciously, Crawford thought. “But you’ll have to do something too. And I wonder if you won’t find it harder than my own task.”

The next day the sun burned more hotly than ever in the empty cobalt sky, and when Captain Roberts returned from a run up the coast for supplies—largely more wine—he reported that the narrow streets of Lerici were crowded with religious processions imploring rain.

That night was the Feast of St. John, and after sunset the people of San Terenzo came dancing down the coastline through the surf, singing holy songs and waving torches; Shelley stood at the rail of the terrace, even after night had fallen and the songs had degenerated into drunken, savage chanting and the figures in the surf had begun to throw rocks at the Casa Magni.

Finally a torch was flung at Shelley, and missed only because Crawford pulled him out of the way, and Shelley dazedly allowed himself to be led back inside. The noise continued until only shortly before dawn, when the fishermen went reeling and singing back to their boats and nets.

The shouting and the oppressive heat had kept anyone from getting any real rest, and when Crawford went downstairs to watch the fisher-folk go lurching and splashing home he saw the dim silhouette of Mary Shelley standing by the seawall and talking to someone up on the wooded slope beyond it.

He hurried toward her, thinking that one of the drunken fishermen might be bothering her, but he paused when he heard her laugh softly.

“John, you know I’m married,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly go with you. But thank you for the … attention.”

She turned back toward the beach and Crawford saw that she was holding a dark rose up to her chin, so that its petals seemed to be a part of the bruising that mottled her throat. He looked past her at the shadowy slope, but could see nothing there—though he could hear a slithering rustle receding up through the trees. Crawford walked forward, sliding his feet in the sand so that she’d hear him approaching and not be startled when he spoke. “That was Polidori?” he asked.

“Yes.” She sniffed the rose and stared out at the dark sea.

“You shouldn’t be speaking to him,” Crawford began wearily. He hoped the coming day wouldn’t be so hot as to make sleeping impossible. “He … he’s not …”

“He told me about it, yes,” she said calmly. “His suicide, back in England. He thinks they’re the Muses, thinks these vampire things are. Maybe he’s right—though they weren’t that for him. Even after he summoned one and let himself be bitten, he still couldn’t write anything publishable … and so he killed himself.” She shook her head. “The poor boy—he was always so envious of Percy and Byron.”

“If you know that much about him,” Crawford said, forcing himself to be patient, “then you must know how dangerous such people are once they’ve been resurrected. That is not Polidori, not anymore—that’s a vampire inhabiting his body, like a hermit crab using some sea-snail’s shell. Are you listening to me, damn it? Hell, ask Percy about all this!”

“Percy …” she said dreamily. “Percy is stopping being Percy, have you noticed? The man I love is … what … receding, diminishing like a figure in a painting with deep perspective. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to communicate with him even by shouting in his ear.”

“Ask me then, I’m your doctor, right? Have you invited Polidori into your presence yet?”

“No—though he hinted that he’d like that.”

“I daresay. Don’t do it.” He stepped closer to her and put his hand on her chin to tilt her face up. “Percy Florence will die, if you do,” he said, staring hard into her eyes. Was she getting any of this? “Repeat that back to me, please,” he said in his best professional tone.

“Percy Florence will die, if I do,” she said weakly.

“Good.” He released her. “Now go to bed.”

She tottered back toward the house, and Crawford sat down in the sand; he was aware of someone watching him intently from up the slope, but the sky was lightening toward blue, and he knew that the thing that had been Polidori wouldn’t try to approach him.

He remembered Byron derisively quoting some of Polidori’s poetry, back in Switzerland in 1816. Crawford had laughed at the inept lines, as Byron had meant him to, but then the lord had frowned and said that it really wasn’t funny. “He’s terribly serious about all this, Aickman,” Byron had said reprovingly. “He’s a successful doctor, one of the youngest graduates of Edinburgh University, but his only ambition is to be a poet—like Shelley and I. He approached me for the personal physician job just because he thought that by associating with me and my friends he would be able to … learn the secret.” Byron had laughed grimly. “I only hope, for his sake, that he never does.”

Well, thought Crawford now, he did learn it, Byron. But, though he paid the Muses, they didn’t deliver—it was much like the deal Shelley thought he could make with his sister, my ex-wife.

The sun was up now, sparking green highlights on the wooded peaks of Portovenere across the Gulf, and the breeze almost seemed to have some coolness in it. Crawford got to his feet and began plodding back through the sand toward the Casa Magni, trying not to step into the indentations of Mary Shelley’s feet.

During the next five days Shelley spent more and more time out on the Don Juan, letting Roberts and the Vivian boy handle the rigging while he peered at various mountains through a sextant and filled page after page in his notebook—not with poetry anymore, but with obscure, scribbled mathematics. When they returned at dusk he would sometimes try to get Crawford to check his math, but it was largely Newtonian calculus, and entirely beyond Crawford’s skill; Shelley never asked Mary to check it, even though she was clever with numbers and he had clearly begun to doubt his own thought processes.

Crawford thought the man’s doubts were justified. No longer did Shelley dominate the dinner-table conversation with long arguments about the nature of man and the universe; he now seemed to find it difficult, in fact, even to follow Claire’s ramblings about her shopping expeditions to Lerici—and, though he did still read his mail, Crawford had several times seen him struggling to puzzle out the meaning of a letter, frowning and moving his lips and circling important words.

At last, seven days after Mary’s near strangulation, Shelley threw his notebook and a lot of his recent correspondence into the fire, and then asked Crawford and Josephine to accompany him on a walk down the shore.

The sun still shone in the morning half of the sky, but the sand underfoot was hot even through Crawford’s shoes, and he wondered how Shelley could stand plodding through it barefoot. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed yet that it hurt. Josephine was tense, but held Crawford’s hand and even managed a wan smile a couple of times.

“We leave tomorrow,” Shelley told them quietly. “You two will have to come back here in a week or so, but I want you with me in the meantime.”

Crawford frowned. “Why do we have to come back?”

“To do the part that has to be done here,” Shelley said peevishly, “and has to be done by you. So don’t pack everything, leave here any … scientific or medical apparatus you might possess.” He frowned, visibly trying to think. “Actually, Josephine needn’t come back here with you—she could stay with Byron and Trelawny and the rest of the crowd. They’re all going to be gathering back in Pisa.”

“I go where Michael goes,” said Josephine quietly.

Crawford squeezed her hand. “And neither of us is going to Pisa,” he said. “We barely escaped being arrested there two months ago. Why do you have to go there, anyway?”

“I—because of—oh, of course, to get poor Leigh Hunt set up with Byron. It was because of my urging that he’s sailed down here, with his whole damned family, and since I’ve got to be—stepping out of the picture, I want to see that he’s not left—left—”

“Helpless?” suggested Josephine.

“And broke?” added Crawford.

“In a foreign land, right,” said Shelley, nodding. “You can’t go to Pisa …? Well, we’re stopping off at Livorno on the way, to meet them all, so you could … wait for me there. I’ll be stopping back at Livorno again, before I …”

Crawford interrupted hastily. “This part that Josephine and I have to do,” he began, but Shelley waved at him to be silent.

When they had walked another hundred yards along the narrow, rocky shore, Shelley waded out into the shallows. “Let’s talk out here,” he said. “The, uh … the water, will help muffle our words. I don’t want the … vitro to … the sand, I mean, to hear what we say.”

Crawford and Josephine exchanged a worried look, but crouched to take off their shoes.

“What about glass?” Josephine called as she straightened up.

“Glass?” Shelley frowned. “Oh, like if you’re carrying any. Right, leave it there.”

Josephine reached up to her face and poked her glass eye out and put it in one of her shoes, then took Crawford’s hand again and walked with him out to where Shelley stood.

“Now pay attention,” Shelley told them. “I may not be able to express all this clearly … later. After now. Ever again.”

In the early afternoon of the next day the Don Juan sailed out of the Gulf of La Spezia for the last time, bound south for Livorno. Mary and Claire and Jane Williams and the children stayed behind, and Shelley was half-heartedly helping Roberts and Charles Vivian work the sails, and Ed Williams stayed below deck, out of the sunlight, so Crawford and Josephine had the bow to themselves.

“Six times six is thirty-six,” Josephine was muttering, “seven times seven is forty-nine, eight times eight is sixty-four …”

She had developed this habit during the last couple of days; it still annoyed Crawford, but after she had explained that it helped keep the Josephine personality in control when she could feel it weakening, he was careful not to let his irritation show. The habit had visibly upset Mary, but Shelley had tended to sit nearer to Josephine while she was doing it, as if the chant was an emblem of something he was losing … or, as Crawford had sometimes uncharitably thought, because the distraught poet was hoping to overhear a correct answer to one or two of the mathematical puzzles that were so clearly beyond him.

Crawford now simply stared out at the Italian shore that moved imperceptibly past, a mile beyond the port rail. Since yesterday afternoon he had thought of nothing but the thing he was going to have to do in a week, and so when Josephine let the multiplication table stutter to a halt and asked him a question, he answered it with no jolt of a changed subject.

“Will you be able to do it?” she had asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, still staring at the coastline. “I’ve resisted her before—with your help. And I—” He stopped, for he’d been about to say that now that he had Josephine he was immune to the inhuman woman’s sexual attraction, but it had instantly occurred to him that it might not be true. “I don’t know,” he finished lamely.

A tired smile made the lines in Josephine’s tanned face more evident. “It’ll mean the deaths of us all if you don’t—as opposed to the deaths of just a couple of us. She’d never let me or the children out of her net.”

“Perhaps,” he said with exaggerated politeness as he pushed himself away from the rail, “you imagine that I didn’t know that.” He walked away from her, back toward the stern where Shelley was listlessly working the mainsail sheet.

Behind him he heard the chanted multiplication tables start up again.

The boat flew along smoothly in a succession of long tacks against the constant wind, and a few hours after sunset they saw ahead the lights that marked the seawall in front of the entrance to the Livorno harbor. They tacked in to the sheltered expanse of water and, after a brief, shouted conversation with the harbor master’s boat, found a mooring next to Byron’s Bolivar; Byron was ashore, at his house in nearby Montenero, and the Don Juan was under temporary quarantine, but the crew of Byron’s ship obligingly tossed some pillows down onto the deck of the smaller vessel so that Shelley’s party could sleep in the open air of the warm night.

Crawford and Josephine slept up by the bow, while Shelley and Roberts and Charles Vivian sprawled themselves wherever they could find room around the mast and the tiller. Williams paced the deck all night, finally crawling below just before dawn.

The quarantine officers cleared them the next morning, and everybody except young Charles Vivian went ashore—though Williams complained of being sick, and wore a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off.

Shelley was almost hysterically cheerful now, and with uncharacteristic lavishness hired a big carriage to take them all the six miles to where Byron and the Hunt family waited for them in Montenero.

The summer seemed to be getting even hotter, and when, after a dusty hour’s ride, they arrived at Byron’s house, the Villa Dupuy, Crawford was discouraged to see that it was painted a particularly warm shade of brownish-pink.

Josephine hadn’t spoken during the ride, but Crawford had noticed her fingers working methodically in her lap and had guessed that she was running through the multiplication tables in her head. It hadn’t improved his mood.

Byron greeted them at the door, and though Crawford was startled to see that the man had put on weight again, Shelley seemed pleased by the change. Shelley appeared to be delighted with everything, in fact, remarking on how glad he was to see that Byron was still living with Teresa Guiccioli, and that she still liked to go outside on sunny days; and he eagerly introduced Crawford and Josephine to a tall, distracted-looking man who proved to be Leigh Hunt, the luckless Englishman who with his wife and six children had taken ship to Italy to co-edit the journal Byron and Shelley had dreamed up last year.

Byron was clearly hoping to be able to stay up late talking with Shelley, as they had done so often before they had left Pisa, but Shelley claimed to have been exhausted by the trip, and went to bed early.

Hunt was sulking because of some testy remarks Byron had made about his badly behaved children, and he went to bed early too, and so it was Williams and Crawford and Josephine who sat up with Byron in his high-ceilinged hall and drank his wine and listened to his complaints about his servants and the weather. And Byron seemed glad of the company, though Williams seldom spoke and spent most of the time peering out through a pair of glass doors at a side courtyard, and Josephine several times responded to questions with cheerful statements to the effect that some number multiplied by some other number equalled yet another number; but Byron had heard so many non sequiturs from her in the past that he only grinned and nodded each time she delivered another, and twice demanded that they all drink to the sentiment of the latest one.

He was in the middle of a story about how several of his servants had recently had a knife fight in the road out front, when everyone’s attention was suddenly drawn to Williams.

The man had abruptly tensed, so tightly that his body seemed to curl and his forehead was nearly touching the glass of the window, and he was standing on tiptoe.

Byron had looked across at him in annoyance at first, but there was alarm in his voice now as he said, “What the hell is it, Ed?” Byron clanked his wine glass down on the table and half stood up, but Williams jerked an arm toward him so imperatively that Byron fell back into the chair. A moment later Byron had reddened in embarrassment and repeated his question angrily.

“Nothing, nothing,” Williams answered quickly. “I just—I’m not going with Shelley to Pisa. Tell him I’m staying here in Livorno to—buy supplies for the run back up to Lerici. I—I’ll be back.”

Still stiff with tension, he hurried to the front door, and a moment later he had disappeared into the night. He had left the door open, and a warm breeze scented with night-blooming jasmine ruffled Byron’s graying hair.

Byron’s anger had disappeared. He was staring out through the open doorway with an expression of loss. At last he turned toward the couch where Crawford and Josephine sat, and looked hard at them.

“You two do seem to be all right,” he said after several seconds. He picked up his wine glass, ignoring the puddle he’d sloshed onto the tabletop, finished what was left in it and then refilled it from the decanter on the floor. “What kind of friend am I, not to have noticed it in him instantly?” He shook his head as he put the decanter down. “How long has that been the case?”

“A month or so,” said Crawford. “His wife, Jane, seems to be … untouched, so far. Unbitten.”

“They have to be bidden before you can get bitten,” remarked Byron with a bitter smile. “Damn Shelley.” With a sigh he stood up and limped across the tile floor to a cabinet in the corner and then fumbled in the loose sleeve of his ornate nankeen jacket. “You’re probably curious … as to how I’ve preserved myself and Teresa.” He had found a key and unlocked the cabinet, and took from it a pistol and a cloth bag. “There’s powdered iron in the paint on this house,

and a garlic-flavored stain deeply bitten into all the wood, and whitethorn and buckthorn around the windows, and of course it’s easy here to eat lots of garlic, and I have several guns around the house loaded with this sort of ammunition.” He tossed the cloth bag to Crawford and then resumed his seat, carrying the pistol pointed at the floor.

Crawford spilled some of the heavy balls into his palm. They were of silver, with a bit of wooden dowelling, sanded down flush, through the center.

“Twice I’ve shot at unnatural figures out in the courtyard,” Byron remarked. “No luck.”

Crawford kept his face expressionless, but remembered Byron’s excellent marksmanship, and decided that the contempt Byron had shown for his poetry when they’d last talked must have been largely a pose—it seemed that he was willing to restrict his vampiric muse, but not willing really to drive it away.

Crawford held up one of the silver-and-wood balls. “Would one of these kill … one of them?”

“Maybe. If the creature were very overextended, or very new, it might. Even a vigorous, mature one, though, would be—discouraged.”

“What does Teresa think of all this?” Crawford asked.

Byron shrugged. “These are traditional Carbonari protections. I bought that ammunition—I didn’t have to have it specially made.”

Crawford was getting angry, but it took him several seconds to realize why, and by then Josephine had already begun articulating his thoughts.

“What,” she asked slowly, “if Teresa should become pregnant? Would you stay with her, and a child of yours, under these circumstances, knowing what sort of perilous sea your … your admittedly carefully constructed boat is sailing on?”

Byron seemed startled, and not pleased, by these coherent sentences from her; but before he could answer, there came a catlike wail from the dark courtyard outside, rasping on nerves like a bow on violin strings. The wail continued for several seconds before diminishing away in a couple of syllables that sounded like “Papa.”

The pistol was shaking in Byron’s hand, but he got to his feet and walked to the glass doors.

“Papà, Papà, mi permetti entrare, fa freddo qui fuorí, ed è buio!” came the weirdly childlike voice. Crawford translated it mentally: Papa, Papa, let me inside, it’s cold out here, and dark!

Once before Crawford had seen the little girl who was now hovering in midair outside the glass, but she was plumper now. Her eyes were bright, and fresh red blood was smeared on the white skin around her mouth, and the palms of her hands were flattened against the glass. She was looking into Byron’s face, and all at once smiled hideously.

The skin was tight over Crawford’s cheekbones, and he forced himself to stay by Josephine and not run.

Byron had gone white and his hands were trembling, but he was nodding gently. “Si, tesora, ti piglio dal freddo.”

Without taking his eyes off of the child’s body he raised his voice and said, “Aickman—Josephine—go upstairs to your rooms. Please. This is between the two of us.”

Crawford opened his mouth to protest, but Josephine caught his arm. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

They crossed the wide room to the dark hall, and before they rounded the corner Crawford looked back. Sobs were visibly shaking Byron, but the pistol was steady.

They heard the shot when they were on the stairs, and several minutes later, from the window in Crawford’s room, they saw the limping figure of Byron carrying the small body out across the moonlit grass. Crawford remembered having seen a church in that direction, and he wondered if Byron could be confident of finding a shovel.

“He said a new one might be killed with that ammunition,” said Josephine solemnly as she unbuttoned her blouse. “And she was certainly a new one.” She folded the blouse, shed her skirt and then crawled into bed. “Remember what Claire always used to say?” By moonlight Crawford could see Josephine’s haggard smile. “Well, she can’t say it anymore. At last he’s done something for Allegra.”

After several minutes of silence they became aware of a distant, inhuman singing that seemed to resonate up from the earth and down from the sky; the chorus was a tapestry of long-sustained notes, but, though it was majestically tragic, it evoked only awe and humility in Crawford, for it was clearly not composed for human emotions.

A gentle rocking woke Crawford at dawn. For a few sleepy moments he thought he was on shipboard, but when he noticed the flowers bobbing in the vase on the bedside table he remembered that he was in Byron’s house, and he realized that what he was feeling must be a mild earthquake. The rocking quickly subsided, and he went back to sleep.

CHAPTER 16

There were giants in the earth in those days …

—Genesis 6:4

Crawford and Josephine were awakened later in the morning by Shelley’s shrill voice down in the yard—when Crawford got up and pulled the curtains back and looked down, he saw that Shelley was directing the loading of the Hunts’ luggage onto the roof of his rented carriage, and seemed impatient to be on the road.

Byron could be seen pacing back and forth through the long, stark shadows of the olive trees that bordered the dusty yard, and the fact that he was awake at this hour, and not even bothering to watch as his servants strapped his own luggage onto the rack at the back of his Napoleonic carriage, led Crawford to believe that the man had not slept at all.

The stripes of darkness across the flat dirt made the yard resemble to Crawford a wide stairway, like the flight of steps he’d seen from Keats’s second-floor window in Rome two years ago, and he morbidly wondered which members of this party were heading uphill, and which were headed down. Byron seemed likely to be one of those people, Crawford recalled, who simply stayed in one place on the stairs, waiting for some tourist to pay them to pose for a portrait—and what sort of character was Byron calculated to suggest? Certainly none of the saints.

Crawford unlatched the window and pushed it open, and the already warm summer air that sighed into the room was scented with coffee and pastries somewhere nearby—apparently being ignored by all the busy people below.

Crawford and Josephine got dressed and went downstairs, and since they were staying in Livorno and not going on to Pisa, they had the leisure to eat a lot of the informal breakfast Byron’s servants had prepared.

At one point Shelley took Crawford aside and gave him a hundred pounds. Crawford took the money, but squinted at Shelley.

“Are you certain you want to give me all this?” he asked.

Shelley blinked, noticed the bank notes in Crawford’s hand, and then shook his head and reached for them. “No, I—I should give it to poor Hunt—or have it sent back to Mary, in La Spezia—I—”

Crawford kept two ten-pound notes and handed the rest back. “Thanks, Percy.”

Shelley stared at the money Crawford had given back to him, nodded and smiled uncertainly, then stuffed it into a pocket and wandered away.

By eight o’clock the last of the Hunts’ children had been rounded up and bundled aboard the rented carriage—Byron wouldn’t permit any of them in his own—and the adults climbed into one carriage or the other, and latched the doors, and then the vehicles got under way, flanked by servants on horseback.

Not all of Byron’s servants were leaving, and he had left instructions that Crawford and Josephine were to be allowed to borrow a spare carriage and a couple of horses for the trip back to Livorno. By the time they had got themselves organized, though, the sun had begun baking the dusty road in earnest, and they decided to wait for the cool of dusk.

Crawford took a couple of Byron’s books out into the shaded courtyard and tried to read, but he kept getting distracted by the thought of the child he had seen out here the night before. He was sure the blood on the child’s mouth had been Ed Williams’s, and he wondered who Ed would get to consume him now.

Josephine spent most of the day lying down—Crawford assumed at first that she was napping, but at around noon he looked in on her and noticed that her eyes were open, staring patiently at the ceiling. He went back out to the courtyard and tried again to read.

West of Montenero the land sloped down for two or three miles to the coast of the Ligurean Sea, and when the sun had sunk enough to make a black silhouette of Elba, Napoleon’s island of exile, Crawford became aware of a rhythmic chanting from the road below the house.

He tucked one of Byron’s pistols into his belt before limping down the dirt road to investigate the sound, but found only a dozen villagers and a couple of priests standing around a wagon to which a weary-looking donkey was harnessed.

The priests were intoning prayers and sprinkling the dry road dust with holy water, and at first Crawford thought it was some local ritual that had nothing to do with him; then a very old man with a walking stick came hunching out of the sparse crowd and smiled at him … and Crawford wondered if a pistol would do any real good here anyway.

“They’re aware,” said des Loges in his barbaric French, “of the sort of place you people have lately come from.” He waved at the villagers and the priests. “Portovenere, I’m told. You’d be amazed to know how long it’s had that name,

and in how many languages. The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch had some things to say about the place, when he wasn’t moaning about his unattainable sweetheart Laura.”

He laughed and looked around at his bucolic companions, then squinted back at Crawford. “I think that at the right word these people would attack the house up there—note the knives several of them have, and the pitchfork that gentleman at the rear carries. The English lord who was here, Byron, is a member of the Carbonari, yes? These people approve of that—but Byron is gone now, and they can smell the—Siliconari—on you. They can smell it on me too, which isn’t helping.” He waved his stick back up the road. “Do you suppose you and I could talk?”

Crawford thought of Josephine, helpless back at the house. “All right,” he said, suddenly very tired. “Tell them I’m … tell them I’ve put a nail in a mazze, though, will you? We don’t need their … help.” Siliconari, he thought—probably a pun on silex, the French and Latin word for flint. Silex, silicis, silici.

Des Loges laughed and rattled off a quick phrase in Italian to the priests, who did seem to relax a little, though they didn’t stop sprinkling the holy water.

Des Loges stared at Crawford from time to time as the two of them limped ungracefully up the steep, dusty road to the dirt-paved yard. The shadows of the trees were lying to the east now, but the effect reminded Crawford of the stairway illusion he’d noticed that morning, and he wondered now whether he was headed uphill or down himself.

“You’re divorced!” exclaimed des Loges at last as they approached the front door. “But the Venice attempt was a failure, the one your friends made four years ago—you must have gone all the way up into the Alps, am I right?”

“Right,” answered Crawford. “With Byron, in 1816. And he’s backslid since, and I haven’t, so I don’t see why your priests admire him and fear me.”

“Actually they’re not that fond of Byron either, but he’s rich and powerful, and you’re not, and he is doing a lot for the Carbonari.”

Des Loges shook his head, and Crawford thought there was a glint of admiration in the ancient man’s eyes. “I never even seriously considered going to the Alps myself—the trip would have been a fearful ordeal for me, and I assumed it would be certainly fatal anyway; or, worse, that it would leave me crippled and unable to try anything else.” He shrugged. “So why not just get the right man to drown me at home.”

Crawford knocked on the door and self-consciously diverted the conversation from the subject of his failure to drown the old man six years ago. “It nearly was fatal. The trip to the Alps. There are some … astonishing creatures in those mountains.”

Des Loges nodded agreeably, accepting the conversational shift. “And you went in 1816? Old Werner was passing through in those years—his arrival in Venice was what wrecked the scheme your friends … and I … had there in 1818. His presence in Switzerland must have had the locals particularly upset—there must have been some Carbonari activity—and it would have had the old creatures particularly agitated, too, having the"—he used a word that Crawford could interpret only as animating focus—"pass so close. Did you see Werner, by any chance? He’d have been avoiding the highest passes, since he certainly wouldn’t be wanting a divorce, but you might have glimpsed his party.”

Crawford had begun to shake his head when des Loges added, “He’d have been travelling packed in ice, with an escort of Austrian soldiers.”

And it seemed to Crawford that he did remember something like that—a wagon stuck in the mud at dusk, and Byron whimsically climbing up onto its bed to help oversee the efforts to push the vehicle free.

“Maybe I did,” he said. “Who is this Werner?”

Des Loges didn’t answer, for one of Byron’s servants was finally pulling the door open. The servant stared with distaste at des Loges, but stood aside when Crawford told him that the old man was a guest of his—though this revelation earned Crawford himself a coldly reconsidering look.

“I’ll tell you about him,” des Loges said. “Where can we talk?”

The servant’s look of disdain had deepened visibly upon hearing des Loges’s calamitous French. “Uh, up in our room,” Crawford said. “Wait here while I tell my … wife, my current one, that we’re coming up.”

Josephine was sitting on the floor when Crawford returned to the bedroom with des Loges, and Crawford couldn’t tell whether she looked at the horribly old man with fascination or loathing, or both; he did see her hands working in her lap, and he knew she was once more mentally running through the halls of the multiplication tables.

Des Loges sat down in a chair by the window and put his feet up on the bed. “You asked about Werner,” he said. “Werner is the … high king of the Hapsburgs, you might say—the secret but absolute head of the Austrian empire. And he’s been that for a long time—he’s even older than I am, by a good four centuries. He was born in about the year A.D. 1000, in the old Hapsburg castle on the river Aar, in the Swiss canton of Aargau.”

Crawford was standing by the window, looking down the road toward where they’d left the priests and the villagers, but he looked around sharply at the name of the canton, and des Loges raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Uh, never mind,” Crawford said. He turned back toward the window, for he thought he had caught a flicker of movement in the dusky road. “Look, I’m not all that curious about this fellow. What do—”

“You have to be,” des Loges interrupted. “He’s the man responsible for all our troubles. He wanted immortality, and he was in Switzerland, so he was very aware of the stories about the Alps being the stronghold of the old gods, being in fact the old gods themselves, frozen in stone by the changed sunlight but not killed. He climbed the mountains at night, young Faust that he was, and he managed to awaken the mountains enough to talk to them, and he learned about their people, the nephelim, the pre-Adamite vampires, whose petrified bodies could still be found here and there, dormant like seeds in the desert waiting for the right kind of rain.”

Des Loges held up his withered hands, the palms about a foot apart. “They looked like little statues,” he said. “Little petrified ribs of some pre-Adamite Adam, waiting for the breath of life once more. And Werner found one, and had it surgically and magically inserted into his body, so that it could wake up on his account, in a manner of speaking, using his psychic credit. He became a bridge that way, an unnatural overlap, a sort of representative of both races at once, and he—the fact of him—both diminished humanity and revived the nephelim.”

“A Christ from the old gods,” said Josephine softly in French. “A sort of artificial redeemer-in-reverse.” Her hands lay limp in her lap, as if even the multiplication tables had failed her.

Crawford was peripherally impressed that she’d understood the old man’s speech, but his attention had been caught by something else, and he turned away from the window to face des Loges again. “Surgically inserted,” he said. “Where did he have that done? Switzerland, right?”

“Yes,” the old man answered. “You know something about that?”

Crawford remembered the manuscript he’d described to Boyd six years ago, the description in The Menotti Miscellany of a procedure for inserting a statue into a man’s abdomen. As he’d told Boyd, the manuscript had only survived because it had been mistakenly catalogued as a procedure for caesarian birth. “I believe I’ve read the surgeon’s notes.” Des Loges started to say something, but Crawford waved for silence. “This Werner—from Aargau!—what does he look like? Does he look … young? Healthy?”

Des Loges stared at him. “You have seen him, haven’t you? No, he’s not young nor healthy, though his condition is notably stable now that he’s in Venice, near the Graiae pillars. He can’t move around, but he can project himself, in images tangible enough to pick up wine glasses or turn the pages of books or cast solid

shadows in not too bright light, and these images can be as youthful-looking as he wants them to be. He can’t project them very far, though—no more than a few hundred yards from where his horrible old body is. And since 1818 that’s been Venice, in the Doge’s Palace by the Piazza San Marco. I believe that’s the only reason he had the Austrians take Italy, so that he could own the Graiae pillars and live in their preserving aura.”

“I met what must have been him—one of his projections—in a café on the Grand Canal,” said Crawford thoughtfully. “He wasn’t very secretive—he told me his name was Werner von Aargau.”

“I guess he hasn’t got a lot of need to be secretive,” put in Josephine. “The only thing he kept from you was—what, the fact that you were specifically furthering the nephelim cause, rather than just the Austrian one.”

“And the fact that the medicine I was supposed to give you would have killed you,” said Crawford.

“Of course it would have,” said des Loges, nodding so vigorously that Crawford thought his driftwoody neck would break. “The Austrians have derived their power from the alliance Werner forged with the revived nephelim, and so they do whatever they can to keep the nephelim happy—and this young gentleman’s … ex-wife,” he said, pointing at Crawford, “would be very happy to have you dead. These creatures genuinely do love us, but they are powerfully jealous.”

There was torchlight visible down the road now, behind the trees, and Crawford wondered if he should warn Josephine; but he decided that Byron’s servants could surely handle any visitors. Byron’s pistol was still in his belt, and he touched it nervously.

“Who are you?” asked Josephine. “How do you know all this?”

The very old man smiled, and his face had such a look of detestable wisdom that Crawford had to force himself not to look away. “My real name is François des Loges, though I’m remembered under another. I was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned to death, and I was a student at the University of Paris when I fell in love.”

He chuckled softly. “Near the University,” he went on, “in front of the house of a certain Mademoiselle des Bruyeres, there was a large stone—you saw it, sir, when you took advantage of my hospitality. The students must have perceived something of its … strangeness, for among them it was known as Le Pet-au-Diable, the Devil’s Fart. I never called it that—I had seen the woman it became by night, and I worshipped her. You have both experienced this.”

He smiled reminiscently. “When I was thirty-two I left Paris and the attentions of men, and for many, many years I wandered with her, a happy pet of hers. I was in the bosom of my new family, and I met other in-laws like myself—including Werner himself, the man who had reintroduced the two species to each other. The fours and the twos, under the gaze of the eternal threes.”

Crawford frowned and looked away from the window. “That’s the riddle, isn’t it? The one the sphinx asked us on the peak of the Wengern. What does it mean?”

“You don’t know?” Des Loges shook his head in wonder. “What did you do, just guess the right answer? You can’t have used the answer that legend claims was given by Oedipus—legend has it close, but not nearly close enough.”

Crawford tried to remember the wording of the riddle. What was it that walked on four limbs when the sunlight had not yet changed, and now is supported by two, but will, when the sunlight is changed again and the light is gone, be supported by three? “I thought the riddle might be a … a ritualistic demand for diplomatic recognition. A citing of something the two species had in common. So, instead of ‘man,’ I gave an answer broad enough to include the nephelim too—I said, ‘sentient life on Earth.'”

The old man nodded sombrely. “That was a lucky guess. You were lucky, too, to have got by the phantom that guards the threshold, the one Goethe refers to in Faust—'She looks to every one like his first love,’ Mephistopheles tells Faust. Actually, the phantom looks to every intruder like the person the intruder loved and has most grossly betrayed.”

Josephine had reddened, but was smiling slightly too. “So what does it refer to?” she asked. “The riddle, I mean.”

“Skeletons,” des Loges told her. “Your friend Shelley knows about it. Read his Prometheus Unbound: ‘A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres …'” Des Loges’s English was even worse than his French, to which he now mercifully returned. “Matter, every bit of stuff that comprises the world and ourselves, is made up of what the old Greeks called atoms—they’re tiny spheres, animated by the same force that makes lightning jump from the sky to the ground, or makes St. Elmo’s Fire flicker on the spars of ships.”

Corbie’s Aunt, thought Crawford, animating the hulks.

“Each of these spheres is ‘many thousand spheres,'” des Loges went on, “for the central bit is surrounded by tiny pieces of electricity that occupy distinctly divided spheres—and it’s the number of these pieces of electricity in the atom’s outermost sphere that defines which other atoms the atom may combine with. The pieces of electricity are the limbs by which the atom can seize other atoms, and three kinds of atoms are the bases for the three kinds of skeletons. Even the surviving legends of Oedipus describe the four-and-two-and-three as means of support.”

Crawford nodded dubiously. “So what are these kinds of skeletons?”

“Well,” said des Loges, “the nephelim, the Siliconari, so to speak, were the first intelligent race the Earth had, Lilith’s people, the giants that were in the earth in those days, and their skeletons are made of the same stuff their flesh is made of—the stuff that’s the basis of glass and quartz and granite. The atoms of that stuff have four pieces of electricity in their outer sphere. Then the sunlight changed and the nephelim all petrified and sort of receded from the perspective of the picture.

“Humanity was the next form of intelligent life, and our skeletons are made of the same stuff as seashells and chalk and lime. And the basic atom of those things has two pieces of electricity in its outer sphere.

“And the answer to the riddle implies that after the sunlight changes again and the sun goes out, the only intelligent things left will be the mountains themselves, the gods, and you’ve seen the stuff of their skeletons—it’s the lightweight metal my pots and pans were made of, remember? Back in my little boat-house in Carnac? It’s the most abundant metal in the earth, found most commonly in clay and alum, and of course its atoms have three of these electrical bits in the outermost sphere.”

Crawford remembered seeing a silvery metal exposed in the side of the Wengern by an avalanche—a mountain guide had called it argent de l’argile, silver from clay.

Then his attention was distracted by the lights on the road. There were many torches approaching—more than could be carried by the group he’d seen earlier. Byron’s servants would not be able to hold off this crowd.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said hastily to Josephine. “Back stairs, and no time to grab anything.” He was suddenly very grateful for Shelley’s twenty pounds.

Josephine’s eyes widened when she looked out the window, and instantly she was moving for the door, with Crawford right behind her.

On the stairs Crawford noticed that des Loges was following them. “Can you distract this gang?” Crawford hissed back at the old man. “They’re your friends.”

“No friends of mine, I assure you,” des Loges panted. “They’d kill me, but not in the way I need. I’m coming with you.”

There was no chance of escaping unseen by the front door, so Crawford led them out the back door and across the darkening field that Byron had trod only the night before, with his dead daughter’s body in his arms. Crawford was glad Byron’s servants hadn’t seen them leave, for it seemed to him that their loyalty was dubious.

The trio moved slowly through the dry grass for fear of making any trackable noise, and eventually found themselves blundering through the churchyard that must have been Byron’s goal. The sky was dimming through deep purple toward black, but Crawford spotted a small mound of fresh-turned earth under an olive tree by the fence. He led them several yards farther before sitting down.

“May as well get comfortable here,” he said quietly. “There’s no use blundering around in the dark with people after us who know every road, and they probably won’t look for us on consecrated soil.”

During the long, furtive walk he had remembered some things—such as Byron’s identification of the song Crawford had been singing in the Alps, the song Crawford had learned from des Loges—and he was now sure he knew what des Loges’s other name was, the one under which he’d said he was remembered. “And so, Monsieur Villon,” Crawford whispered when they had all sat down on the still warm, grassy earth, “is it your intention to travel with us?”

The old man laughed softly in the darkness. “You’re a bright boy. Yes, since you have evidently overcome your reluctance to participate in drownings, I want to enlist in the … the terminal cruise of poets.”

Crawford realized what the man was asking for, and realized too that he himself now knew enough about the situation to be unable to refuse. “Well,” he said slowly, “there’s no way Shelley will permit that English boy Charles Vivian to sail along—he certainly has no need of this kind of baptism. So yes—I see no reason why there shouldn’t be a berth for you aboard.”

CHAPTER 17

… Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

—Percy Shelley, Ozymandias

Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several

days past praying for rain; but the gods are either angry,

or nature is too powerful.

—Edward Williams’s journal,

last entry, 4 July 1822

As dawn scratched away the darkness of the sky between the trees and the old Romanesque buildings of the church, Crawford and Josephine and des Loges stole to the road and began walking north. The air had already shed the mild chill of night, and was poised for the day’s heat.

At first light the three of them caught a ride northward aboard a farmer’s wagon, and before the rising sun had even cleared the bulk of Mount Querciolaia they alighted in a narrow street in the southwestern waterfront section of Livorno. The docks and channels extended inland quite a distance, and were connected with a network of canals, and Crawford could almost believe he was back in the London Decks.

He knew that Shelley would expect to meet them at the Globe Hotel, but he knew too that Edward Williams would be there now, and he dreaded seeing the man again; so he found an albergo to stay at on the banks of one of the canals. The landlord crossed himself when they checked in, but an English ten-pound note for a week’s lodging overcame whatever superstitious misgivings the man may have had.

Crawford and Josephine took rooms on the ground floor, overlooking the canal, but des Loges insisted on a room right up under the roof, in spite of the impediment of the narrow stairway. “Even if I am dying in a week,” he told Crawford, “I’d just as soon keep as much stone as possible between me and the earth.”

Crawford made a show of liking the place, praising the local restaurants and getting to know the neighbors, but to himself he admitted that he was simply hoping to miss Shelley and not have to follow through on the promise he’d made to him … and, years earlier, to des Loges.

So he was dismayed when, early on the morning of Monday the eighth of July, their fourth day in Livorno, des Loges came hobbling to the table in the outdoor trattoria where he and Josephine were having minestrone with beans, and told them, “I feel a twin, a symbiote, approaching by sea, and it’s certainly not old Werner. It’s time—let’s go.”

The Don Juan was in the harbor, and Shelley was at the Globe Hotel, in the sunlit lobby. He was tanned and fit-looking in a double-breasted reefer jacket and white nankeen trousers and black boots, but the face under the disordered gray-blond hair was expressionless. An iron case with a carrying handle stood on the floor by his right foot. Williams and Trelawny were with him—Williams was pale and haggard and Trelawny looked worried.

Crawford limped up to them.

“The Vivian boy and I,” Shelley was saying quietly, “can work the Don Juan by ourselves. And we will.” Very slowly, as if saying it for the hundredth time, he added, “I simply want to do the trip in as much solitude as possible.”

“I don’t like it,” said Trelawny. “And I’m going to pace you in the Bolivar and you can’t prevent me. If you get into trouble, at least I’ll be able to fish the two of you out of the water.”

Shelley’s face regained its animation when he saw Crawford. “There you are,” Shelley said, picking up the iron case and crossing to him and taking his arm. “I’ve got to talk to you.” He led Crawford across the tile floor to a far corner.

Crawford tried to get in the first word, but Shelley overrode him.

“Listen,” Shelley said, shoving the iron case into Crawford’s hand, “you’ve got to leave now. I want to be setting sail this afternoon, but you’ve got to be in La Spezia, and all prepared, when I do. Also, this weather will become very bad—I’ve waited for it—and I don’t want you to run into trouble.” His smile was both frightened and bitter. “This coming storm is all for me.”

“And the Vivian boy too, I gather,” said Crawford angrily, setting the case down. “Doesn’t he count? I won’t permit you—”

“Oh, shut up, please, of course he’s not going. I’ve already paid him off and told him to get out of Livorno. No, I’m going alone—I can work the Don Juan solo, at least well enough to get myself killed—but if Trelawny knew it, I think he would physically prevent me. As it is he’s insisting on escorting me, but I’ve hidden his port clearance papers, so he’ll spend the night here, like it or not.”

Then Shelley reached into his jacket and pulled out a little vial of bright red blood. “I drew this only an hour ago,” he said, “and I put a little vinegar in it, as I’ve seen cooks do, to keep it from clotting. It’ll be a powerful proxy for me. Now remember, in addition to being my proxy, it’s also to let me know when you’re ready—so do remember not to dump all of it out for the lure.”

Trying not to gag, Crawford put the vial into his coat pocket; somehow, of all the things he would have to do today, the use of Shelley’s blood was the thing he was dreading most. He picked up the case again.

“I’ve got you a passenger,” he said, a little wildly. “Someone who wants to accompany you on your … cruise.” He waved to des Loges, who had been standing by the front door and now came hobbling toward them, a repulsive grin curdling his ancient face.

Shelley gaped at the old man and then turned to Crawford furiously. “Haven’t you understood anything? I can’t be taking passengers! What does this derelict imagine—”

Crawford overrode him: “Percy Shelley, I’d like you to meet François Villon.”

Shelley’s voice trailed off, and for several seconds Crawford could see the effort it cost him to think—then finally Shelley smiled, with something of his old alertness. “Really? It’s really Villon, the poet, he’s an in-law? And wants to … go … with me?”

Crawford nodded. “It is,” he said flatly, “and he does.”

Des Loges had by now hobbled up to them, and Shelley slowly reached out and shook his hand. “It will be,” he said slowly in modern French, “an honor to have you aboard.”

Des Loges bobbed his head. “It is an honor,” he said softly in his barbaric accent, “to sail with Perseus.”

Shelley blinked at the old man, then pointed at him excitedly. “You … you were in Venice, weren’t you? When I was there with Byron in ‘18. You called me Perseus then, too.”

“Because you had come to have dealings with the Graiae,” des Loges said. “And today, still true to your name, you mean to slay a Medusa!” He looked out the window at the hot sky. “It looks like a good day for doomed men to go sailing.”

Crawford waved for silence, for Edward Williams had stepped away from Trelawny and was approaching them.

Williams stopped beside Shelley. It was obviously painful for him to be up and around in the daylight, but he forced a smile as he took Shelley’s arm.

“I-I’m sailing w-with you, Percy,” he stammered. “Don’t try to talk me out of it. She’s d-dead, really dead, Allegra is … and I really … think … I can hold this resolve … until nightfall, and not try to find another lover. If I keep thinking about Jane, and our children, I think I can.” His smile was desperate but oddly youthful too, and for a moment he looked the way Keats had looked in London in 1816.

“Ed,” said Shelley, “I can’t take you. Go with Trelawny on the Bolivar, and—”

Williams smiled bleakly. “That wouldn’t … do me any good, would it?” he said quietly. “The Bolivar’s not going to sink.”

For several moments Shelley stared at his friend’s wasted face, and then his answering smile was sad and gentle. “Well,” he said, “now that I consider it, I can’t think of a pilot I’d rather have on this trip.” He turned to Crawford and extended his hand. “Go,” he said. “Now, while you can still do this for all of us.”

As Crawford took Shelley’s hand he was thinking about the first time he’d seen him, unconscious in a street in Geneva six years earlier. Aware of the losses Shelley had suffered since then, and of the gray hair and limp and scars he himself had acquired, and of Josephine’s lost eye and twisted hand—and of all the deaths and suffering—Crawford was choked, at a loss for an adequate parting statement.

“I wish,” he managed to say, “we’d got to know each other better.”

Shelley smiled, and when Crawford released his hand he further disarranged his hair. “There’s hardly anyone left here to get to know anymore—so go.” He reached across and tapped the lump in Crawford’s coat that was the vial of blood. “Tell Mary I send my … love.”

Crawford used some more of Shelley’s money to hire the fastest-looking boat he could find in the harbor, and when he and Josephine were aboard, and the single-masted sloop was coursing northward across the clear blue water, he limped through the spray and wind to the bow and stood staring ahead, toward what, one way or the other, would be the culmination of these last six years of his life.

He was still far from sure that he would be able to do what he had promised: the procedure that would save Josephine—and, incidentally, save Mary Shelley and her young son—but which would also bar him forever from the sort of longevity that des Loges and Werner von Aargau had been enjoying for the last several centuries. He could probably become a mere victim again, if he searched long enough for a nephelim predator to destructively love him, but he would certainly never again have the chance to actually marry into the family.

It was all very well for everybody to expect this of him. Des Loges had had centuries of the easy life already; Shelley had seen nearly all of his children die, and still had one to save; and Josephine had never had membership in the family even offered to her.

He took the vial of Shelley’s blood out of his pocket and thought about how easy it would be to simply drop it over the side, into the ocean.

He glanced back at Josephine, who was sitting against the mast with her eyes closed, mumbling—certainly the good old multiplication tables again. Sweat gleamed on her forehead. He tried to see her as an annoyance, as an odious responsibility he’d somehow accidentally been burdened with, and something in the empty sky seemed to help him think it—all at once Josephine seemed too physically hot and organic, and perishable like some kind of stuff for sale in the open air markets, where one had to wave away the buzzing clouds of flies to see what the merchandise looked like, be it vegetable or meat.

But though some power was helping him to see her as a temporary bit of noxious growth—some kind of mushroom that would appear fat on a lawn in the morning and be burst and spoiled by dusk—something in his mind, something more forceful, was making him see her in different contexts: he saw her helpless at sea, while he looked on without acting; trapped in a burning building while he drank nearby; crushed in a bed in which he slept, and went on sleeping.

And then he remembered her pulling Byron and himself back from the abyss on the peak of the Wengern, and kissing him with a mouth full of glass and garlic in a Roman street, and pulling him out of the sea and massaging his leg with tortured hands, and he remembered the beach on which they had first made love, the day of Mary’s miscarriage.

And, unhappily, he put the vial back into his pocket.

At a little after one in the afternoon the boat hove to and lowered its sails, and Crawford and Josephine climbed over the gunwale and waded to shore, a few hundred yards south of the Casa Magni; the trip had only taken about five hours.

The sun glared bright as static lightning in the burned purple sky.

“She’ll be weak,” Crawford told Josephine harshly as he dragged a stick through the hot white sand, drawing a wide pentagram, “since it’s daytime. She’ll come, though, because she’ll imagine that Shelley and I are in danger, and she—” His throat narrowed, and he had to stop before going on. “—she loves us.” He had shed his jacket, but still the sweat ran down his face and soaked his shirt.

Josephine didn’t say anything. She was standing at the top of the beach slope, just in front of the trees, and it occurred to Crawford that the spot where they had first made love must be somewhere nearby. He couldn’t be bothered now to try to figure out where it had been.

Outside the pentagram he put down the iron case Shelley had given him, and he crouched to open it. For a moment the reek of garlic overpowered the sea smell, and even after the breeze had taken the first redolent puff away, the smell swirled back and forth in the warm air like strands of seaweed in a tide pool.

He opened a little jar and turned to the pentagram and shook a mixture of wood shavings, shredded silver and chopped garlic into four of the five shallow grooves, leaving empty the groove that faced the sea. He set the jar down, still open, in the sand nearby. At last he straightened and stared out westward across the glittering blue Gulf toward the peaks of Portovenere.

He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called “the tempestuous loveliness of terror.”

Goodbye, he thought.

“Come,” he called softly.

He bit his finger savagely and held it over the pentagram so that the quick drops of blood fell onto the sand within it; then he took the vial out of his pocket and uncorked it and poured half of the contents onto the spatters of his own blood. There was still an inch or so of red fluid in the glass container, and he looked hopelessly at it for several seconds while he tried to summon the nerve to do what came next.

“Screw your courage to the sticking point,” he whispered to himself, and then drank the blood and tossed the empty vial into the close sea.

And then he was in two places at once. He was still on the beach and aware of the pentagram and Josephine and the hot sand under his boots, but he was also on the shifting deck of the Don Juan, back in the boat-crowded Livorno harbor.

“He’s there,” he heard himself say in Shelley’s voice to the two other men on the boat with him. “Cast off.”

A mirage was forming way out over Portovenere, and though there was no wind to deface the pentagram or stir Josephine’s skirt, Crawford felt something massive rushing toward them across the miles of ocean.

Josephine gasped, and when he impatiently glanced at her he saw that she had clapped her hand over her glass eye. “I saw her,” she said, her voice husky with fear. “She’s coming here.”

“To die,” Crawford said.

He felt the deck of Shelley’s boat shift under his feet and he had to resist the impulse to roll with it. “So is Shelley,” he said, and he spoke loudly, because des Loge’s harsh laughter on the deck of the Don Juan was ringing in his ears. Through Shelley’s eyes he saw the low, dark clouds moving in toward Livorno from the southwest, and distantly he felt too Shelley’s rigidly suppressed horror at what was soon to happen.

Then Crawford’s attention was entirely on what his own eyes were seeing, for now she was there on the beach, standing naked in the pentagram.

She was blinking in the glare of the sun on the white sand, and before he could look at her closely he quickly crouched to pour the wood-and-sand-and-garlic along the last line, closing the geometrical figure and trapping her inside.

When it was done he stood back and then let himself look at her.

She was pearly white and smooth, and the sight of her mouth and breasts and long legs made the breath stop in his throat; and though he could see that the sunlight was hurting her terribly, her weirdly metallic eyes were looking at him with love and, already, forgiveness.

“Where is my brother?” she asked. Her voice was like a melody played on a silver violin. “Why have you called me and imprisoned me?”

Crawford made himself look away from her, and he saw the sand shifting in waves away from the pentagram. “Shelley is sailing this way,” he said tensely. “There’s a storm …”

He heard her bare feet shift in the sand as she turned to look south. She whispered a sound that was half sigh and half sob, and he knew she was dreading the tortures of the long flight south to save Shelley. “You don’t want him to die,” she said. “Release me so that I can save him.”

“No,” Crawford said, trying to sound resolute. “This is his plan. He wants me to do this.”

The woman turned back toward him, and he found himself helplessly meeting her inhuman gaze. “Do you want him to die?”

“I won’t stop him.”

“Did he tell you,” she asked him, “that it will kill me too?”

Her eyes seemed prodigiously deep, and were as dark as a cool moonless night on a Mediterranean island. “Yes,” he whispered.

“Do you want me to die?”

He felt Josephine’s hot hand take his; he wanted to shake it off irritably, but he forced himself to clasp it, even though he knew that he was clasping death—his own soon enough, and Shelley’s and the lamia’s today. He tried to think about Percy Florence Shelley, and Mary, and the Williams children, and Josephine.

“Yes,” he answered the woman, hoping it would all be over before his fragile resolve crumbled. He looked away from her and saw, through Shelley’s tears, the thick skirt of rainy haze that hung under the dark clouds ahead of the Don Juan’s leaping bow.

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

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

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

“How can I?” she asked. “I love you.”

He was dimly aware that Josephine’s hand was no longer in his.

The Don Juan was in the haze under the dark clouds when the wind struck, and she heeled wildly, her sails full of the hot damp breath of the storm; Crawford felt the pain as Shelley fell against the rail and clutched at it.

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

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

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

“Let her go, Michael,” said Josephine suddenly. “You can’t kill his sister!”

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

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

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

“He’s jealous of Shelley,” said Josephine, “because Shelley … had you here, a month ago.”

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

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

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

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

“Michael,” said the woman in the pentagram.

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

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

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

“No,” he said.

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

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

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

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

“I could still release her,” Crawford heard himself say.

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

“Goodbye, Shelley,” Crawford managed to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An enormity,” she said. “I’ll never grasp all of what we did, but it was an enormity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 18

No diver brings up love again

Dropped once, my beautiful Felise,

In such cold seas.

—A. C. Swinburne, Felise

How elate

I felt to know that it was nothing human …

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Aziola

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

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

That night he and Josephine again slept separately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s been a long time,” she said quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you find your life intolerable?”

“Yes.”

“Have you managed to jettison those … things, those memories, now?” Her face was relaxed, but her heart was pounding.

“Yes.”

“Do you hate my … do you hate Michael?”

“No. I did, before. I hated him and Byron and Shelley and all the people who had what I so wanted—the channel to the Muses. I gave everything I had, I gave me, but the Muses still withheld that, though they took me.”

“Are you sorry now that you gave in?” she asked, surprised at the urgency in her own voice. “Since they didn’t keep the bargain you thought you were making?”

“No,” he said. “Now I live forever. I don’t need to write poetry any longer—I live poetry now. The nights are mine, and the songs of the earth, and the old rhythms of the worlds and the atoms, that never change. I’ve faced the Medusa, and what looks like stony doom to men is actually birth. Men are born out of the hot wombs of humanity, but that’s only … like a chick in the egg developing feathers. The real, lasting birth is the next one, the birth out of the cold ground. Everything you wished you could leave behind is left behind.”

The moon was sinking low out over the water, highlighting with silver fire the tips of the waves that had closed over Shelley and his slain and petrified sister.

“Polidori is me, and I am him,” her companion said in a different voice.

“His sister,” Josephine said. “Your sister. She’s dead.”

“Yes,” said her companion calmly. “It’s rare that we die, but she is dead.”

“I killed her, helped kill her.”

“Yes.”

Tears glittered suddenly on Josephine’s right cheek. “I—I’m sorry I abandoned you in the Alps,” she said hoarsely. “And I’m sorry I refused you in that street in Rome, in front of Keats’s house. And I’m sorry I helped kill your … sister.” She walked on in silence for a while. “Sisters shouldn’t be killed,” she whispered.

“Nobody should be killed,” said her companion. “We offer eternal life to everyone.”

Josephine stopped, and faced him, though her eyes were closed. “Will you still have me?” she asked in a humble, hopeful monotone.

“Of course,” he said, placing his hand gently behind her neck and lowering his head to her throat.

Mary and Claire and Jane Williams were nearly hysterical with worry when the next day dragged on till noon without any sign of the Don Juan, and Crawford

agreed to go back to Livorno to ask whether or not Shelley had actually set out. Josephine was ill in bed, so, alone, already trying to figure out how he would break the news to the ladies on his return, he walked north along the beach to Lerici, where he hired a boat.

He arrived in Livorno in the evening and found Trelawny and Roberts still at the Globe, and their expressions of worried hope turned to despair even before they could ask him any questions, for Crawford’s face let them know that the Don Juan had not arrived at the Casa Magni after having disappeared into the storm two days earlier.

Byron was still in Pisa, and after a bleak, muted conversation in the lobby, Trelawny volunteered to ride north to tell him that it seemed sure that Shelley and Williams were drowned.

Trelawny left early the next day and was back in the late afternoon. Hunt and Byron, he said, had both been visibly upset by the news, and Byron sent a servant back with Trelawny to act as a courier, and had insisted that Trelawny take the Bolivar out and search for the Don Juan until Shelley’s fate was absolutely known; and the next day, as the courier took a fast boat north to deliver a tersely unhopeful letter to the Casa Magni, Trelawny and Roberts and Crawford sailed slowly in the same direction, closely skirting the coastline and scanning the shore for any sign of Shelley’s boat.

Crawford had gone with them, rather than with the courier, because the task of facing the women seemed vastly beyond him. During the past two days his feeling of disorientation had only grown worse—he was bewildered by, and unable to come up with ready answers to, even such innocuous remarks as “Good morning,” and it was actually a relief that Josephine had not spoken to him since the day of the lamia’s killing.

No sign of the Don Juan was found that day.

Back at the Globe that evening they learned that Mary and Claire and Jane Williams had returned with Byron’s servant that afternoon, and had gone on to Pisa to stay with Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi to await word. Josephine, it appeared, had elected to stay on at the Casa Magni with Shelley’s servants. Crawford was obscurely glad of it.

He and Trelawny and Roberts kept up the search for five more blurry days, only quitting when word reached them that two bodies, one of them tentatively identified as that of Edward Williams, had been found washed up on the beach near the mouth of the Serchio River, fifteen miles north of Livorno.

The health authorities buried the bodies before Byron and Hunt could get there to look at them, and presented Byron with a bill for the interments; Trelawny showed the bill to Crawford, angry about the charges for health measures, which included “certain metals and vegetable bulbs.” Crawford told him there were probably better things to be worrying about.

Another body was found the next day, five miles farther north. The port officials were fairly sure it was Shelley’s. Trelawny blustered and threatened and made liberal use of the fact that Byron was an English peer, and eventually got them to agree to postpone the burial until the body could be identified.

On Friday the Bolivar sailed north once more, and dropped anchor when they saw half a dozen Tuscan soldiers waving at them from the beach near Viareggio. Crawford, leaning on the Bolivar’s rail, wondered idly why so many soldiers were necessary to stand watch over one drowned body.

Roberts lowered the boat, and he and Crawford and Trelawny rowed ashore through the low surf.

As Crawford was splashing in through the shallows he noticed the sprawled form around which the soldiers were standing. Several canvas bags lay on a wooden pallet nearby, and there were four shovels stuck upright in the dirt like sailless masts. A crowd of ragged civilians, presumably fishermen, watched from a sandy rise a hundred yards away. Crawford looked down at the body.

The flesh of the face and hands had been nibbled away, right down to the bones, and the soldiers assured the Englishmen that fish had done it.

Trelawny and Roberts just nodded blankly, but Crawford looked up the beach to the crowd of unsavory spectators, and he remembered an old man who had dressed up as a clergyman to get into Guy’s Hospital and steal blood from a certain sort of corpse, and he wondered what the Italian word for neffy was, and he thought he knew why so many soldiers were here. He considered walking up to the silent figures, but was afraid he would lose all contact with the sane world if he saw … say, a fork … in the hand of one of them.

He turned away and spat in the sand, for the taste of Shelley’s blood was hovering in the back of his throat like a bad smell.

He returned his gaze to Shelley’s stripped skull. Some of the flaxen hair still adhered to it, and he remembered the way that hair used to blow in disarray around his face after Shelley had excitedly run his hands through it. He tried to derive some sense of sadness from seeing Shelley in this state of ruin, but he found that he couldn’t see the corpse at his feet as anything more than a corpse; he had said goodbye to the man eleven days earlier, when the blood he’d drunk had linked him to Shelley as he clung to the rail of the foundering boat.

Trelawny on the other hand was striding up and down the beach with his hands balled into fists, cursing to cover his very evident grief. Roberts looked more embarrassed than anything else.

Even without a face, the body was clearly Shelley’s. It still wore the nankeen trousers and the reefer jacket, from the pocket of which Trelawny had melodramatically pulled Leigh Hunt’s copy of Keats’s poems. Crawford noticed that it was folded open to the poem Lamia.

The officer in charge of the soldiers was yawning and shrugging, as if to indicate how routine and unremarkable the whole proceeding was, and when he spoke it was in English, as if to distance himself even further. “This body,” he said, “must be buried now, very now. You should burn him later, and the bodies down the coast also. It is the final law. And with this … wherewithal … placed muchly upon the bodies, first, when they are buried.” He waved at the canvas bags. “Health necessities, of the law.”

“More of their damned health necessities,” growled Trelawny. “Like the vegetables and metals they made Byron pay for.” He turned to Crawford. “What the hell’s he trying to say?”

“I think,” said Crawford, “he means that we have to bury the bodies now, but can dig them up later for cremation. And when we bury them we have to dump those bags onto the corpses.”

“What is that?” asked Trelawny, his black beard seeming to bristle with suspicion. “In the bags?”

Crawford crossed the sand to the bags, touched one, and then smelled his finger. “Quicklime,” he said before the officer could think of the English word. “It gets tremendously hot on exposure to water, any dampness.” The other two Englishmen looked ready to object, but Crawford looked again at the spectators and said, “I think it’s a good idea.”

They buried Shelley under the hot sun, and dumped a bag of the quicklime over him and then hastily shovelled sand down on top of the steaming effigy. The crowd of spectators broke up and drifted away, and Crawford and Trelawny and Roberts waded out to the boat and rowed back to the Bolivar.

They sailed back to Livorno as the sun went down over the Ligurean Sea beyond the starboard rail. By early evening they were back at the Globe Hotel, but Trelawny paused only long enough to empty a glass of wine before riding south to break the final news to Byron and the ladies.

Crawford sat up late, drinking alone on a balcony overlooking the harbor. The water was dark, but streaked here and there with yellow light from the portholes of a few boats with people staying aboard, and the waterfront was quiet on this Friday night; the only sounds were the faint wash of the surf and the wind fluting in the roof tiles behind and above him.

As had happened once before, in Byron’s coach outside the walls of Geneva, the wine seemed to clear his wits rather than dull them, even though the glass he was now drinking from was plain glass instead of amethyst.

Sometime during the long, morbidly hot day he had decided that tomorrow he would use the last of Shelley’s money to hire a boat back to the Casa Magni … and then ask Josephine to marry him. His life hadn’t been one he’d have chosen, but Josephine was the best and most important part of it, and—now that he had begun to recover from the shock of having killed the lamia—he knew he couldn’t bear to lose her.

Only by promising himself that he would marry her and make the rest of her life happy and contented could he bear to think of what her life had consisted of since she’d left England—the injuries, the cold and hunger, the loneliness, the recurrent madness … or to remember the innate gallantry and loyalty of her, the moral strength that had several times been much greater than his own…

In fact, it occurred to him as he poured a fresh glass of wine, her life in England seemed to have been a nightmare too. Clearly she had always been implicitly blamed for her mother’s death, both by her father and by her sister Julia, whom he had so carelessly married so long ago. He remembered Julia cheerfully telling him about Josephine’s pathetic attempts to be Julia, and about Julia’s callous public shattering of those pretenses.

The fact that Josephine could still love anyone, that she could still care so much about people—like himself and Keats and Mary Shelley and the children—that she would put her abused life in danger to do it, was evidence of a soul that should all along have been treasured, cherished.

The world had no place for her, and would certainly break her—probably soon—if he didn’t do what he could to protect her.

The medical profession was undoubtedly closed to them now, in Italy, at least, but surely there was a quiet life to be had, somewhere, for two tired and damaged people. Surely the world had no further malice toward them.

Cheered by the wine and by his new resolve, he went to bed early, for he wanted to be at Casa Magni by noon.

The boat he had hired had no smaller boat for passengers to debark in, and so after the captain lowered the anchor to wait for him, Crawford had to wade waist-deep through the low surf to the beach in front of the Casa Magni; one of Shelley’s woman-servants waved to him from the terrace, and was waiting for him in the dining room when he had crossed the sand-streaked paving stones of the ground-floor room and ascended the stairs.

The servant, whose name, he recalled, was Antonia, hurried across the carpeted floor to him. “There’s only me and Marcella and Josephine still here, sir,” she said quickly in Italian. “Is there word on Mister Shelley?”

“He’s dead, Antonia,” Crawford answered in the same language. “They found his body on the beach yesterday, twenty miles south of here. Williams is dead too.”

“Ah, God.” Antonia crossed herself. “Their poor children.”

Crawford just nodded. “They’ll get along,” he said in a neutral tone. “Where is Josephine?”

“She’s in the room that used to be Shelley’s.”

And was afterward hers and mine, for a while, Crawford thought as he crossed to the closed door. He tapped softly on it. “Josephine? It’s me—Michael. Let me in, there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about, and I have a boat waiting—for us.”

There was no reply, and he turned back toward Antonia with a questioning look.

“She has been ill, sir,” Antonia said. “The sun hurts her eyes….”

Crawford turned the knob and pulled the door open. The curtains were drawn against the sunlight, but he could see Josephine lying across the bed in her nightgown, her sweaty hair trailing across her face and throat as if she were a drowned body carried up here to await identification. The window was open, though the curtains scarcely shifted at all in the still, hot summer air.

Very slowly he walked to the bed, and he laid his hand on her forehead. The skin was hot, and his eyes had adjusted enough to the dimness for him to notice how pale she was.

He reached out and, hesitantly, pulled the damp strands of hair away from her throat. Two red puncture marks showed clearly on her white skin.

“No,” he remarked quietly, almost conversationally, though his heart was thudding rapidly behind his ribs. “No, this isn’t what’s happened. Not …” He sat down on the floor beside the bed, and he only knew he’d begun crying when Josephine’s drawn face blurred and dissolved into the pattern of the curtains, like an imagined face seen in the contours of crumpled bedclothes, that disappears when the viewer moves.

Not now, he thought, not now that I’m finally free of the lamia, now that Josephine and I are both too old and broken to climb the Alps again….

When he blinked away his tears he saw that her eyes were slightly open, squinting down at him where he sat. “Darling!” she whispered. “Come along, tonight. We can all share each other….” Her lips curled in a strained smile.

Then he was running down the stairs two at a time until his bad left leg buckled and he rolled down to the sandy pavement of the ground floor, twisting an ankle and cracking his head hard against the stones.

He remembered the despair-inducing field that had hung about the top of the Wengern like a subsonic vibration, and he wished he could bask once more in its oppressive influence, for he was afraid he lacked the necessary strength of character to shoot himself, or take poison, or jump from a height, without that kind of help.

Ah, but don’t worry, he told himself bleakly as he limped across the sand and into the surf and then began laboriously wading back out toward where the anchored boat waited for him; there must certainly be other ways—not as abrupt as guns or cyanide or high balconies, but in the long run every bit as effective, I’m sure. And I have just enough faith left in myself to be confident that I’ll find one.

CHAPTER 19

My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,

And it is not life that makes me move.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley,

Fragment: Death in Life

Byron was squinting against the sun-glare on the water of the narrow Livorno canal below him to his right, and in spite of the nasty things he’d heard about his destination he was looking forward to getting there, for his informants had all agreed that the place was very dark.

He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, partly so as not to be recognized in this shabby district, but mostly for protection from the sun—his skin had always tended toward paleness, but lately he seemed to sunburn as easily as some British clerk on his first holiday.

Byron was in an irritable temper. His errand today would probably turn out to have been a waste of his time, and time was something he didn’t seem to have much of these days; what with the Hunts and their Cockney brats staying in the Casa Lanfranchi on the floor below his own rooms, and Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley and Jane Williams mooning around in their grief, and all the conferences with the Italian health authorities, he was lucky to have been able to get any work at all done on Don Juan.

And tomorrow he had to go along for the exhumation and cremation of the body of Ed Williams, and the day after that there was the same job to be done with the body of Shelley.

He wasn’t looking forward to it. The bodies had been buried in the shallow, sandy graves nearly four weeks ago, and he wasn’t sure which would be more upsetting: digging the bodies up again, or finding the graves empty. The latter was a distinct possibility—the seawater, and the garlic and silver the health authorities had buried them with, would have slowed them down, but still they’d been in the ground a lot longer than Allegra had. But perhaps small bodies were converted more quickly.

Byron paused, for ahead of him to his right was the narrow stone canal bridge he’d been told to watch for—three stylized wolves were rendered in bas-relief on the wall of it, and Byron saw without surprise that vandals had hammered away two legs from the middle figure and one from the far one. What was left was a four-legged wolf, a two-legged one, and one with three legs.

He peered under the foot of the bridge’s near side, and his heart sank to see the black wooden stairs leading down toward the water. He had been half hoping that the stairs would be gone, and the place they led to closed and abandoned.

He squinted up at the rusty iron balconies of the surrounding houses, but no one seemed to be staring at him from behind any of the flower pots and clotheslines, so he tucked his hat brim down and reluctantly stepped forward.

The stairs were so close to the bridge that he had to duck to get in under the weathered stone arch of it, and their construction was unsteady enough to make him hold the rails firmly, despite the muck they were smearing onto his suede gloves. He could hear voices now from below, and he was grateful for the weight of the pistol in his coat pocket.

The stairs led down to a shadowed dock that extended a couple of yards out over the slow-moving water, and a doorway had been cut into the stones of the canal wall to his left. The wooden door was open, but only dim spots of light gleamed in the darkness within. A dank breeze, rumbling with hoarse voices and heavy with the reeks of wet clay and liquor and unwashed bodies, sighed out through the stone mouth like an exhalation from the earth’s own sick lungs.

Byron whispered a curse and stepped inside. His eyes quickly adapted to the dimness.

Bottles on shelves lined one wall behind a long counter, and tables with little lamps on them had been set up on the uneven flagstones of the floor. The hunched forms in several of the chairs, he now noticed, were people; from time to time one of them would mumble something to a companion or lift a glass and drink from it.

A man in an apron was visible now behind the counter, and by the light of a candle on one of the shelves Byron saw the man raise his eyebrows inquiringly. Byron waved vaguely to him and turned back to the room, trying to see into the farthest corners—and suddenly he realized that the low-ceilinged room was much vaster than he had at first thought. The little dots of light that he had assumed were tiny candles set in a fairly close wall were actually the lamps on distant tables.

Through taverns measureless to man, he thought, mangling a line from Coleridge’s “Xanadu,” down to a sunless sea.

He started forward, slowing to peer into the lamplit face of every person he passed; the bartender called something after him, but Byron dug a pound note out of his pocket and flicked it away over his shoulder, and the man relapsed into silence. Byron could hear him pad out from behind the bar, and then after a moment return.

The floor sloped down as Byron moved farther away from the canal-wall door, and the smells grew worse. The scattered mutter of dozens of conversations or monologues echoed and re-echoed in waves of amplification and interference until Byron thought that out of the noise there must eventually emerge one disembodied, aggregate voice, pronouncing some sentence that it would be fatal to hear.

There was masonry ahead of him, and he wondered if he had at last reached the far wall of the place—then he saw that it was just a blocky pillar, with more darkness receding away on either side of it; but there was a crowd gathered there.

They seemed to be chanting very quietly, and Byron saw that there was a life-sized crucifix mounted on the pillar. A cup, apparently a gold chalice, was ceremoniously being passed from man to man.

Are they saying Mass? Byron wondered incredulously. The Eucharist, down here?

He moved closer—and noticed that the crucified figure’s feet were in a metal bowl, and that dark blood was running down the ankles; and then the figure rolled its white-bearded head and groaned, and flexed its bound hands.

Byron nearly screamed, and he found that his hand had darted into his jacket to seize the butt of his pistol. He lurched to the nearest table and, ignoring the languid protests of one solitary drinker, took the lamp and hurried back to the scene he had thought was a celebration of the Catholic Mass.

One of the men who had just drunk from the chalice licked bloody lips and smiled at Byron, whose face was now lit from underneath.

“Are you the afternoon shift, lover?” the man asked in Italian as he passed the chalice on to one of the other men. “You look like a fresher keg than our boy up there.”

Byron opened his mouth to answer furiously, and he might even have shot the man—but then the figure on the cross opened its eyes and looked down at him, and Byron recognized him.

Crawford recognized Byron too.

Oh God, he thought, go away, I’m within days of getting it all over with, the long suicide is almost consummated, don’t drag me back. I won’t be dragged back.

He had been here for two weeks now, opening his veins for the thirsty neffers on a fairly exhausting schedule, and he had been remotely pleased at the way the process had seemed to be fragmenting his identity. Several times when some customer had drunk some of his blood he had seemed to become that customer, able to stand back with the taste of his own blood in his mouth and look up at his own crucified body. Può vedere attraverso il sangue, in fact—which was Italian for You can see through the blood—seemed to be some sort of motto of the place.

Perhaps Byron would leave. Crawford blurrily hoped so.

But Byron was shouting, and he had driven away the neffies who had the chalice, and now he was climbing up to untie Crawford’s wrists from the horizontal beam.

The neffies began shuffling back toward the cross, but Byron, hanging on to the upright beam, drew his pistol with his free hand and pointed it at them, and they moved away again.

Crawford had been in this position for hours, and when Byron got the ropes loose he fell forward into his arms. Byron climbed back down, supporting Crawford’s weight, and lowered him gently to the stone floor.

“What the hell are you doing,” Crawford mumbled, “leave me alone, I don’t need rescue.”

“Maybe you don’t,” panted Byron, “but there’s those that do. Is that stuff in these glasses likely to be plain drink? Not blood or piss or something?”

“Brandy, mostly,” Crawford said, hoping that Byron might just have blundered his way in here looking for alcohol. “Grappa, you know.”

Byron got up and snatched a glass off of the table he’d taken the lamp from, and drank half of it in one gulp. Then he crouched and started to tilt the glass toward Crawford’s lips, but stopped. “My God,” Byron said, “you already stink of brandy.”

Crawford shrugged weakly. “Brandy in, blood out. It’s a living.”

Byron spat in disgust. “It’s a dying,” he said, looking around to make sure the neffies kept their distance. “Listen, you can come with me or stay here. Shelley’s body is to be burned the day after tomorrow, and I think I know a way to use his ashes to get free of the nephelim net. I—” “I’m already free of it,” Crawford said. “You go ahead.”

“What about your girl, Julia or Josephine or whatever her name really is? Shelley’s servants have come back to Pisa, and I know you saw her at the Casa Magni, and recognized what was wrong with her.”

“She’s buttered her bread and now she can lie in it,” said Crawford. He reached up and took the cup from Byron and drained it. “She knew what she was doing when she gave in. I stay here.”

Byron nodded. “Fine. I’m not going to … abduct you, just escort you out of here if you decide you want to come. I’m only doing even this much because I

…do remember what happened on the peak of the Wengern six years ago. You and your Josephine saved my life. If you don’t come with me I’ll do what I can to save her myself.”

“Fine.” Crawford struggled to his feet and stood swaying in the fetid breeze, massaging his numb, bleeding wrists. “I hope you do better with her than I did. Do you suppose you could help me back up there, and retie me?”

Byron was angry. “I’ll be happy to, as soon as you know the stakes.”

“Goddamn it, I know the stakes. Josephine’s going to die if she doesn’t shed her vampire. Well guess what, she likes her situation. Everybody who’s in it likes it. I liked it, while I had it. The people in this place would eat poison if they could experience it for half an hour.”

Byron looked at the men hovering nearby, and sneered. “I think you overestimate their courage. They just like to sniff.”

“You haven’t been all that eager to lose it, have you?” Crawford added. “Now that you’re writing so well?”

A bitter smile hollowed Byron’s face. “Josephine isn’t the entirety of the stakes.”

“Your sister and children are your concern. And as for Mary, and Williams’s children, I’ve already—”

“That’s not it either,” Byron said. “Josephine’s pregnant.”

For the first time since finding this place, this job, Crawford felt real panic building up in him. “Not by me, she’s not. I’m sterile.”

“Apparently you’re not. Antonia, Shelley’s old servant, is confident that Josephine shows the symptoms of pregnancy as of last month and this month, and Josephine certainly wasn’t—cohabiting with anyone else in July.”

“Stress,” Crawford said quickly, “can easily make a woman … show the symptoms of pregnancy, as you put it, and that’s probably exactly what’s—”

“Maybe,” interrupted Byron. “But what if it isn’t stress?”

Crawford’s heart was pounding, and he tried to drink out of the glass again, but it was empty. “This is a lie,” he said, in a voice that he made as steady as he could. “You’re just saying this to get me to leave here.”

Byron shook his head decisively. “I’d never stop anyone from killing himself, as long as he truly knew what he was doing. And now you know what you’ll be doing by staying or leaving. I’m leaving here in a moment. I only want to know if I’ll have to carry you along too.”

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

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

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

“I’m Byron,” his companion said patiently. “If you tell me to leave, I will.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crawford broke the oatcake into a dozen pieces and scattered it across the stone floor. “You’re the wedding guests,” he called gruffly to the slouched figures who were watching him and Byron. “Pick up these pieces and eat them, you pitiful bastards, and the wedding ceremony will finally be finished.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not the Thames,” he said wonderingly, “and this bridge isn’t London Bridge.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A position always open to me, right. Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

Crawford nodded. “I’m glad they’re going to be burned.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 20

The only portions that were not consumed were some

fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what

surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In

snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was

severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I

should have been put into quarantine.

—Edward John Trelawny,

Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 1878

Lady Macbeth: Here’s the smell of the blood still: all

the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

Oh, oh, oh!

Doctor of Physic: What a sigh is there! The heart is

sorely charged.

Waiting-Gentlewoman: I would not have such a heart

in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.

—Shakespeare, Macbeth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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 wer?”

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 nella fornache!” 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, François, 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 La 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?”

Byron shook his head. “I’m not sure. That’s why I needed you to be here, to help me. It’ll be … whatever so drew the attention of the Graiae to Shelley, in Venice four years ago—and drew the attention of some kind of wild lamia on Lake Leman, two years before that.”

Seeing Crawford’s baffled look, he added, “Whatever made him different from people—different from everybody, even people like you and I.”

“Ah.” Crawford nodded. “Right, he was a member of the family—and by birth, by blood, rather than just by marriage, as I was.” He remembered Shelley’s complaints about bladder stones and the stiffening of his skin and the hardness of his fingernails. “He was mostly human, but part … nephelim, part stone.”

“His bones, then, perhaps,” said Byron hoarsely. He raised his hand uncertainly, almost as if in farewell or apology to Shelley, then looked over to where Trelawny stood, sweat and tears running down the tanned face into the black beard. “Trelawny!” Byron called. “I’d like his skull, if it can be salvaged!”

Trelawny hadn’t caught his words, and made him repeat them—and then visibly comprehended them, and stared at Byron wrathfully. “Why?” Trelawny demanded. “So that you can make another drinking cup?”

Byron’s voice was level when he answered. “No,” he said, limping toward the others, “I will treat it as … as Shelley would have wanted.”

Crawford followed Byron across the sand as Trelawny reluctantly picked up a long-handled boathook and approached the fire. The bearded giant leaned toward the blazing oven and reached in with the hook toward Shelley’s head, but at the first touch of the iron the skull fell to pieces, throwing burning bits of flesh spinning up into the sky. Trelawny reeled back, tossing the hook aside and rubbing singed hair off his forearm.

Crawford caught Byron’s eye and shook his head slightly. It’s not the skull, he thought.

The flames billowed in a breeze from the sea, and Crawford turned away to cool his sweating face. In the last few minutes he had become intensely aware of the charring figure on the iron bed behind him—not as a human figure, much less as something evocative of the man it had been, but as a kink in the fabric of the world, something that violated natural laws, like a stone impossibly hovering in midair. It was as if the heat had crystallized something, quantified something that had only been implicit before.

He looked back at the body, trying to determine the source of the impression, but the body looked like nothing more than dead flesh and bone in a fire.

Crawford looked toward Byron, curious to see if he showed any signs of feeling a wrongness about Shelley’s body, but for the moment Byron seemed to have forgotten that Shelley had not been entirely human—he was just clenching and unclenching his fists as he stared at the pyre of his friend.

Hunt had walked up with the wooden box he’d brought to Williams’s pyre the day before, and now he and Trelawny opened it and began throwing frankincense and salt onto the fire, intensifying the yellow-gold glow of the flames. Trelawny again plodded up close to the oven, this time to pour wine and oil over Shelley’s body.

“We restore to nature through fire,” intoned Trelawny, “the elements of which this man was composed: earth, air, and water. Everything is changed, but not annihilated; he is now a portion of that which he worshipped.”

For awhile no one spoke, and the roaring of the fire was the only sound under the empty sky; at last Byron forced a frail smile. “I knew you were a pagan,” he said to Trelawny, “but not that you were a pagan priest.” Tears glistened in Byron’s eyes, and his voice was unsteady as he added, “You do it … very well.”

Hunt walked back through the hot sand to the carriage, and Trelawny walked around to the other side of the fire. Byron, clearly embarrassed at having shown emotion, was blinking around as if someone had said something he chose to interpret as an insult. Crawford was watching the burning body.

“I think it’s the heart,” he said.

“What is?” asked Byron belligerently. “Oh.” He took a deep breath and expelled it and rubbed his eyes. “Very well—why?”

Crawford nodded toward the fire. “It’s turned black but it’s not burning—though the ribs have collapsed around it.” And only when I stare at it, he thought, do I get that feeling of cosmic wrongness.

Byron followed his gaze, and after a few moments he nodded. “You might be right.” He was breathing hard. “Damn all this. We need to talk—I need to tell you about this thing he and I tried to do in Venice, unsuccessfully, and how I think it can be done successfully.” Byron looked up and down the shore, then down at the sand under his boots. “We can’t talk here—let’s go out to the Bolivar. I’ll swim, and you can go in the boat. I’ll get Tita to go with you and work the oars.”

Crawford looked at the sand too, and remembered that when Shelley had first talked to him about the lamia, on that summer night six years ago in Switzerland, he had insisted that they talk in a boat out on the lake; and before Shelley had told Josephine and Crawford about his plan to run the Don Juan into a storm and drown, he had told them to walk a few yards out into the surf first—and he even told Josephine to leave her glass eye on the sand.

So Crawford just nodded, and followed the limping figure of Byron down across the white sand toward the waves.

Tita wordlessly rowed Crawford out toward the Bolivar as Byron and one of his Genoese boatmen swam alongside, a few yards out from the boat’s starboard gunwale. Crawford assumed Tita and the Italian sailor were keeping track of their master’s progress, but Crawford did too, remembering that Byron had had trouble while swimming yesterday.

But Byron was swimming strongly today, his muscular arms metronomically knifing ahead of him to pull him forward through the glassy water—though Crawford noticed that his shoulders were red with sunburn. He should call for a shirt when he gets to the Bolivar, he thought.

The three bare masts of the Bolivar grew taller and clearer and farther apart with each powerful pull on the oars, and soon Crawford could recognize the men on her deck. He waved to them, but though they waved back they clearly didn’t recognize him as the man who had helped them search the shoreline for signs of the Don Juan a month earlier.

He looked back at the shore. The smoke was a tower in the nearly windless sky, and the men standing around on the distant beach looked like the dazed survivors of some disaster.

The Bolivar was close enough now to blot out a third of the sky. At a call from Byron, Tita pushed strongly on the oars, and a few moments later the boat had stopped and was rocking in the water under the arch of the Bolivar’s hull.

The rope boarding-ladder hung to the water from the rail above, but Byron stayed a yard or so out away from it, treading water. He looked skeptically up at Crawford. “Can you handle the oars well enough to keep the boat from bumping the hull? Or drifting away?”

Crawford flexed his bony shoulders. “I have no idea.”

“Oh hell, in a pinch I can swim over and give the boat a push or a tug. Tita, up on deck with you—and lower us a cold bottle of sciacchetrà and a couple of glasses.”

The sailor had come paddling and gasping up to the ladder, and after catching his breath he pulled himself up the rungs to the rail, followed closely by Tita, who had paused to maneuver the boat in to within a yard of the hull.

The creaking of the timbers and the slap of low waves against the hull were the only sounds now, and in spite of his broad-brimmed hat Crawford felt the hot sun as a weight on his head.

Through the clear water he could see Byron’s legs kicking at a relaxed pace, and there was no sign of strain when he raised one hand to carefully push his wet hair back away from his forehead.

Byron looked up at him. “Trelawny or Hunt might want the heart,” he said quietly. “Or Mary—she might already have asked for it.”

Crawford nodded. “People get sentimental about such things. Hunt tells me that Jane Williams already has Ed’s ashes in an urn on the mantel of the house in Pisa.”

Byron spat. “She’ll forget and make tea in it one of these days.” He tilted his head back to peer toward shore. “Well, they can have the bones or something—we’ve got to make sure we get the heart.”

A basket was being lowered on a rope, and Crawford leaned out and caught it and took from it a bottle and two napkin-wrapped wine glasses. The cork had been pulled out of the bottle and stuck loosely back in, but it took all of Crawford’s strength to tug it out again, and his hands were shaking as he poured the wine into one of the glasses and held it out over the gunwale to Byron.

“Thank you,” Byron said, taking a sip and then effortlessly holding the glass steady above the water as his legs continued to pump below the surface. “You seem to be a moderately educated man, Aickman—have you heard of the Graiae?”

“Graiae as in the Greek myth?” asked Crawford. “They were the three sisters Perseus consulted, before going to kill the Medusa.” He carefully filled his own glass and tasted the wine. “They had only one eye among them—didn’t they?—and they had to keep handing it back and forth.”

Byron confirmed this, and then went on to describe the attempt he and Shelley had made to awaken the blind Graiae pillars in Venice in 1818. The narration took several minutes, and twice during it Byron paddled closer to the boat and held out his glass for a refill.

Crawford had finished the wine in his own glass, and was debating the wisdom of pouring himself some more. He decided not to—he was already dizzy, and this story would clearly require all of his concentration. “So—what is it we want the heart for?”

“I think it’s what drew the attention of the Graiae to him. The fresh blood that was splashed all over the pavement acted as a sort of jury-rigged eye for them, and—goddamn me, Aickman—when Shelley was wavering at a point about the same distance from each of the columns, that blood just raced across the paving stones from one column to the other, and back! You could feel the attention they were paying to him, like … like the pressure on your ears when you’re under water.”

He held up his glass, and Crawford leaned over the gunwale to refill it again.

“And then when we were fleeing in a gondola,” Byron went on, “the third sister—the pillar they’d dropped in the canal centuries ago—came rearing up out of the water as we passed. I think if we hadn’t very quickly got out of their … field of influence, the blood would have sprayed horizontally out over the water to that pillar. They wanted to stare at him as closely as they could, and so they were throwing their eye back and forth, to whichever of them was closest to him.”

“What’s so … astonishing … to them, about his heart?”

“I can only guess, Aickman. Since it’s half-human and half-nephelim—”

“Carbonari and Siliconari,” commented Crawford.

Byron blinked. “If you like. In any case, since it’s a mix that probably isn’t logically possible, I think it’s a violation of the determinism that the Graiae project with their eye, and so the eye can’t leave it alone. I don’t think such a creature as Shelley could have been conceived in the field of the eye … though I’ll bet such a creature couldn’t be easily killed in the field, either. The eye prevents randomness, the vagaries of chance. As I told Shelley then, it not only checks on things, it checks them.”

Crawford opened his mouth to speak, but Byron was already talking again. His upthrust hand was still steady, though the moisture beading his face now was clearly sweat.

“The reason the Austrians brought the eye to the pillars,” Byron was saying, “was that they were also bringing some enormously old Austrian king or something there too, so that with specific treatment he can live forever in the deterministic focus of the wakeful, sighted Graiae.” Byron raised his sunburned shoulders above the water in a shrug. “Maybe this king is a half-and-half too, like Shelley.”

Crawford’s stomach had gone cold, though the sun on him was as hot as ever. “Yes,” he said. “He is. But unlike Shelley, who was born that way, this king was … surgically made into one.”

For the first time that day, Byron really looked squarely at Crawford. “You know of him?”

“I—” Crawford laughed uneasily. “I used to work for him. Werner von Aargau, he’s called these days. You and I saw him—or his vehicle, at least—when we were going through the Alps. Do you remember a wagon that was bogged down in mud? You jumped up into the bed of it to oversee the job of freeing it, and you said there was a box in it full of ice. I’m pretty sure our Austrian was in that, in the box.”

“Huh. Well, he’s no concern of ours. The thing is, when the Graiae are awake but without their eye, then everything is very randomized, supremely uncertain. And this priest I got to know there said that if you were in the focus of them while they were blind, you could shed the attention of a vampire. The vampire can’t track you in the … the spiritual darkness, the chaos of unresolved probabilities. The creature can’t hold its beam of attention on you. Of course you’d have to cross a lot of salt water directly afterward so that the vampire wouldn’t eventually be drawn back to you.”

“America, you once told me.”

“Or Greece. Now I think Greece would be good enough.”

“But even if your vampire did find you again, it’d need a fresh invitation, wouldn’t it?”

The corners of Byron’s mouth turned downward in a bitter smile. “Yes—but even though you never gave in and asked yours back, as your wife and I both did eventually, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a … powerful temptation. I’m sure there were moments of loneliness and fear, in which even you just about gave in.”

Crawford lifted his eyes and looked past Byron, up the coast to the point where the shoreline seemed to dissolve in the wavering heat-mirages, and he nodded. “So,” he said after a moment, “we go to Lerici, catch Josephine and tie her up, and take her to Venice, and then use Shelley’s heart to draw the eye out of whichever of these sisters has got it, and catch it.” He grinned and looked down at his pale, trembling hands. “And then run like hell.”

“That’s it.” Byron’s face was shining with sweat, and the hand in which he was holding his glass had at last begun to tremble. “Here,” he said, thrusting the glass at Crawford, who managed to take it without dropping it and the bottle into the sea.

Byron ducked under the surface, and when his head bobbed back up into the air he even seemed to have swallowed some of the seawater.

“Are you all right?” Crawford asked.

Byron nodded and tossed his head back. He was using his arms too to tread water now, and didn’t ask Crawford to return the glass. “I’m fine,” Byron said shortly. “I seem to—lately I seem to think better if I’m surrounded by salt water; and even better if I’m actually immersed in it.”

“I think it insulates you from the nephelim influence,” Crawford told him. “The only times I really wanted to escape the nephelim net, when I was infected, were moments when I was under water. You recall Noah didn’t escape by climbing a mountain.” He stared at Byron, who was panting now. “You’re doing a lot of swimming lately, it seems. Are your Carbonari precautions beginning to falter?”

“Don’t—” Byron began angrily; then he shook his head. “I guess you do have the right to ask.” He swam to the boat and flung his elbow over the gunwale and let his arms and legs relax. The boat tilted with his weight, and Crawford had to grab the bottle to keep it from falling over.

“Yes,” Byron said, “the precautions don’t seem to be a permanent solution. Hell, I’m like a drunk who keeps telling himself that there is some way to have his gin and have a normal life too. I thought I could hold—whatever you want to call it, Lord Grey de Ruthyn, Margarita Cogni—it—at bay; so that I could still write, but at the same time that I would be free to go out in the sun, and that Teresa and my remaining children would be safe. But lately I’ve been getting weaker during the day, and less able to concentrate.

I don’t think I’ve been entirely without a fever for months. I want to do this, this exorcism, while I still have the strength—both of mind and body.”

Crawford thought of the strength of his own mind and body. “Will we be bringing Tita along with us, or Trelawny?”

“No.” Byron brought his other arm to the gunwale and laboriously hoisted himself up into the boat. His shoulders were even redder now than they had been when Crawford noticed them earlier, and had begun to blister. “No, Tita won’t touch that kind of work since that night in Venice when the pillar rose up out of the water, and I know that Trelawny wouldn’t believe us if we told him what his revered Shelley really was.”

Byron took hold of the oars and, weakly, maneuvered the boat back close to the boarding ladder so that Tita could climb down and row them to shore. “It’ll just be you and me—and Josephine.”

“God help us,” said Crawford softly.

“If there is one.” Byron grinned. “A whole lot of ghastly things have turned out to be possible, remember.”

By four o’clock the fire had burned down enough so that they could approach the oven without being scorched. The rib cage and pelvis had collapsed into broken, charcoal-like chunks, but the heart was still whole, though blackened. The sight of it made Crawford dizzy again, and he sat down in the hot sand.

Byron took a deep breath. “Tre,” he said, “could you get the heart for me?”

Trelawny shook his head firmly. “I tried to get the skull for you. Hunt has asked for the heart.”

Byron glanced worriedly down at Crawford. “That’s absurd,” he told Trelawny, “I knew Shelley longer than either of you! You’re both guests in my home! I demand that—”

He paused and stared at Hunt and Trelawny. Crawford could guess what the lord was thinking: Trelawny wouldn’t budge, and Hunt might, out of injured pride, actually move out of the Casa Lanfranchi, taking the heart with him; and if Byron made a scene about wanting the thing, Hunt might very well ship it to his home in London at the first opportunity.

“Sorry,” Byron said. “It’s just been a trying day. Of course you can have it, Leigh—I’ll make do with a bit of bone.”

Hunt had brought a little box to carry away relics in, and now he held it open while Trelawny leaned over the blackly littered oven and snatched out the heart. He whistled in pain, but juggled the thing toward Hunt, who managed to catch it in his box and slam down the lid as if the heart might try to escape.

Hunt glanced at Byron nervously, but the lord was smiling—though Crawford noticed that his jaw muscles were tightly flexed. Byron took out a handkerchief and with it picked out a segment of a rib. “This will do for me,” he said in a neutral voice.

The ashes and remaining bone fragments were scraped into the little lead and oak coffin Byron had bought, and then the health officers helped Trelawny slide poles under the oven and carry it down to the surf. Steam billowed up when they lowered it into the water, and Crawford thought the sudden hiss sounded like the sea reacting in pain.

An hour later Trelawny and Byron and Hunt and Crawford were having dinner in Viareggio. Byron puzzled Hunt by asking the innkeeper if they could drink their wine from amethyst glasses—plain glass ones turned out to be all that was available, but the four of them got drunk on the house’s harsh red wine anyway, and on the drive back south to Pisa in Byron’s Napoleonic coach they sang and laughed hysterically.

Crawford recognized their mirth as a reaction to the horror of the day; but in his own laughter, and Byron’s, he heard too an edge of fear, and as the shadows of the roadside trees lengthened across their route he couldn’t help throwing frequent glances at Hunt’s little relic box on the seat beside Trelawny.

CHAPTER 21

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The next day was a Saturday, and Crawford did little besides eat and sleep.

He was awakened early Sunday morning by birds twittering and hopping around in the branches of the tree outside his window, and for at least an hour he just lay in the bed, enjoying the softness of the mattress and the warm weight of the blankets.

Eventually the door swung inward quietly, and Byron’s servant Giuseppe peered in at him; seeing that Crawford was awake, the man left and returned shortly with a bowl of bean soup. Crawford ate it happily and had lain back in the bed, vaguely wishing he’d asked the servant to fetch him some books … when it occurred to him that Josephine must only recently have gone to sleep. He hoped she was still staying at the Casa Magni, and not sleeping out among the trees somewhere.

He looked at the scraped-clean soup bowl on the bedside table and wondered what she was eating these days. She should be eating liver and raisins, he thought, just to restore the blood she’s certainly losing every night; and she should be eating for two now. I wonder if she even knows that she’s probably pregnant.

“Damn,” he whispered wearily, and swung his narrowed legs out from under the blankets. He was wearing a long nightshirt, and he pulled it down over the depressing spectacle of his white, bony knees. A moment later he took a deep breath and stood up, swaying and dizzy at the sudden altitude, and then shuffled to the door.

Giuseppe came in just as he was reaching for the knob, and the door hit Crawford in the shoulder; he lost his balance and sat down hard on the rug.

The servant shook his head impatiently and bent down and, with humiliating ease, wrapped his hands around Crawford’s upper arms and hauled him back up to a standing position.

The man pointed over Crawford’s shoulder at the bed.

It took an effort of will for Crawford not to rub his bruised arms. “Very well,” he said, “but tell Byron when he wakes up that I have to talk to him.”

“He is awake now,” Giuseppe said, “but too sick to speak to anyone. He will see you when he wants to. Now get back in bed.”

Crawford wondered why the man seemed to dislike him. Perhaps he’d heard how Crawford had spent the last month, and disapproved of nefandos; or perhaps it was just that the Hunt children had got all the servants in a bad mood.

Crawford obediently went back and sat down on the bed, but when the servant had left, he once again struggled to his feet.

There was no one in the hall, and he padded down the cold stone floor to Byron’s room and knocked on the heavy door.

“Come in, Seppy,” Byron called, and Crawford opened the door.

Like most inner rooms of Italian houses Crawford had seen, Byron’s bedchamber was dark and cheerless. The bed in which the lord lay was an immense black canopied structure with, Crawford noticed, the Byron coat of arms painted on the foot of it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Byron irritably, sitting up.

“I hear you’re sick.”

“I doubt that you came to ask about my health.” He lay back on the tasselled pillows. “Yes, I’m sick. I think he resents it when I spend so long in the sea. She’s jealous of the time spent out of her control, and so hits me with the fever redoubled, as punishment.”

Crawford knew that both pronouns referred to the same creature. “Let’s start soon,” he said, taking the liberty of sitting down in an ornate chair near the bed. “Hunt may ship the damned heart to England any day, and you’re not getting any stronger.”

“Don’t be importuning me, Aickman—I’m doing this for your damned wife—”

“And yourself and your remaining children.”

“—And don’t interrupt me, either! I can’t possibly travel in this condition! And you’re a ruin yourself, look at you! We daren’t risk attempting this until we’ve … done everything we possibly can to make our success likely.”

A writing board and sheets of manuscript lay on the bed by Byron’s hand, and

Crawford’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room enough for him to see that the sheets were scribbled with six-line stanzas. It was probably more of Don Juan, the apparently endless poem Byron had started writing in Venice in 1818.

Byron had followed the direction of his gaze, and now opened his mouth angrily—but Crawford waved him to silence.

“Did I say anything?” Crawford asked. “I didn’t say a word.”

Byron seemed to relax a little. “Right. Well, if you want to be so active, why don’t you go steal the heart? Hunt’s got it on a shelf downstairs.”

“Out of reach of his children, I really do hope.”

Byron blinked. “Not if they were to fetch a chair, now that you mention it—if there still is an unbroken chair down there. Yes, I think it would be a good idea if you went and did it right now.”

Byron clearly wasn’t going to offer to accompany him, so Crawford left the room and tottered to the stairs and started down.

Byron’s bulldog sat on the landing, but merely lifted its head to squint at Crawford as he shuffled nervously past. Crawford recalled Byron having told the dog not to “let any damned Cockneys” up into his apartments. He smiled now as he descended the last of the stairs. On your way back, he told himself, be sure to say Hello, doggie in your most cultured accent.

Once in the main hall, he shuffled quickly to the arch that led to the room the Hunts were using as their parlor. The room was empty, though the scribbling on the walls reminded him that the children might appear at any moment.

The box was on the mantel, and he crossed to it and took it down. The top wasn’t locked—impulsively he opened it and stared down at the charred lump inside it.

Again he got that feeling of a profound contradiction in terms. It nauseated him, and he closed the box.

He walked back out to the hall, but had taken only two steps toward the stairs when he heard someone fumbling at the heavy front door behind him; he quickly side-stepped through a narrower arch on his right, and found himself in a wide, stone-flagged room dimly lit by sunlight through a couple of small hexagonal windows.

The air was warmer here, and heavy with the smells of garlic and cured ham. The old woman who was Byron’s cook glanced up at him disapprovingly from her seat by the fire, but just shook her head and returned her attention to the pot of broth she was stirring.

Crawford could hear the cheery scream and clatter of the Hunt children in the main hall. Were their parents following? Leigh Hunt would certainly notice the absence of the box, and might well begin shouting about it before Crawford could get safely back upstairs.

Several sheets of butcher paper lay on a wooden counter by his right elbow, along with some chickens in various stages of dismemberment, and on a sudden inspiration Crawford spread out one of the sheets of paper, opened the box, and rudely dumped Shelley’s heart out onto it; then he snatched up a big, wattled rooster head and dropped it into the box. He closed the lid and hefted the box—noting with anxious satisfaction that its weight was roughly the same as it had been when it had contained the heart—and then wrapped the paper tightly around the heart and picked it up in his other hand.

The sight of Shelley’s split and blackened heart had made him think of his own, which was pounding so hard in his rib cage that his head was bobbing in time to it. God knew what the Hunts and the servants would make of his burdens if he were to pitch over dead right now. Even Byron would wonder what had possessed him.

He couldn’t hear the children—apparently they had run right through the house and out the back door. Panting, Crawford limped once more across the hall and through the arch into the Hunts’ parlor.

He slapped the box back up onto the mantel and forced himself to actually run back toward the arch.

He made it into the hall, but the effort had cost him. His vision was dimming and he had to sit down on the stone floor with his knees drawn up, clutching the paper-wrapped heart tightly to be sure his numbed, trembling hands wouldn’t drop it. His ankles had started bleeding again, and his heels kept slipping.

“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 mum 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 … mad. 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 sunburned 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 Buongiorno.

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.”

Hobhouse stared at Crawford. “Yes, I do remember,” he said quietly. “You fired him for talking about living stones. St. Michael, eh?” To Crawford he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Both Byron and Crawford looked at him in surprise.

“You … said something about brandy,” Hobhouse remarked to Byron.

The lord nodded. “Upstairs,” he said, pointing the way with the pistol he still carried. He noticed it and set it down on one of the crates.

“No, bring it along,” said Hobhouse, “and your physician too.”

Byron was still frowning, but smiling now too. “He’s no longer my—”

Hobhouse was already making his way through the angling corridor between the crates. “Whatever he is,” he called back over his shoulder, “bring him along.”

Byron shrugged and waved toward the stairs. “After you, Doctor.”

The paintings had been taken down from the walls of Byron’s dining room, and faint white squares on the plaster marked where they had been. Hobhouse closed the windows while Byron poured brandy.

Hobhouse sat down and took a sip. “I talked to your half sister Augusta recently,” he said to Byron. “She showed me some stones you sent her, that summer when we toured the Alps. Little crystals, from Mont Blanc. And she showed me some of your letters.”

“I was drunk that whole summer,” Byron protested, “those letters are probably just—”

“Tell me about your involvement with this Carbonari crowd.”

“I—” Byron cocked an eyebrow at his old friend. “I could tell you I’m helping them overthrow their new Austrian masters, couldn’t I?”

“Of course you could. But I was there when you met Margarita Cogni, remember?” Hobhouse turned to Crawford. “It was in Venice in the summer of 1818; we were out riding one evening, and met two peasant girls, and Byron set about impressing one, and I the other.”

He looked back to Byron. “When I got mine alone,” Hobhouse went on, “it developed that she wanted to bite me. And she led me to believe that the Cogni woman had the same interests. I’ve always had to save you from … inappropriate women, and you recall I tried to talk you into ridding yourself of her too. But at the time I thought I was simply trying to rescue you from a mistress with perverted tastes.”

Byron looked shaken. “Christ, man, I’m glad you didn’t let her bite you.” He sighed and took a long sip of the brandy. “The Carbonari are trying to drive out the Austrians, you know—and I do think that’s a good cause.”

He held up his hand to stop Hobhouse from saying more. “But,” Byron went on, “you’re right, there’s more to my association with them than just that. In the eyes of the Carbonari, the species of which Margarita was a member is much more specifically the enemy than is the literal category of Austrians. The Carbonari have methods of keeping such creatures at bay, and I’ve been making use of those methods. You’ll have noticed that Teresa is entirely human, and unharmed—and so are Augusta and her child, and my ex-wife and her child.

“'At bay,'” said Hobhouse. “Is there a way to free yourself and your dependents from her—from her species—entirely?”

“Yes,” said Crawford.

Hobhouse looked at him, then back at Byron. “And do you intend to do it?”

“Just out of curiosity,” said Byron stiffly, “do you know what doing it will mean? The most … trivial consequence is that I’ll dry up, poetically.” Crawford noted with admiration that Byron did seem to be honestly trying to regard it as trivial. “I will have written my last line.”

Hobhouse leaned forward, and Crawford was surprised at how stern the man’s round, mild face could look. “And your children won’t become vampires.”

“They probably wouldn’t anyway,” said Byron irritably. “But yes, Aickman and I are going to do the trick shortly. And then I’ll be going to Greece, where I shall no doubt encounter another consequence before very long.”

Hobhouse glanced at Crawford, who shrugged slightly. Don’t look at me, Crawford thought, I can’t tell his sincerity from his posturing.

“You almost sound,” said Hobhouse carefully, “as if you believe that freeing yourself from this thing, from these things, will cause your death.”

Byron emptied his brandy glass and refilled it. His hand was shaking, and the decanter lip rattled on the edge of his glass. “I do believe that,” he said defiantly.

Crawford shook his head in puzzlement. “But people live longer, free from these creatures. You’ve been able to avoid the worst of the emaciation and anemia and fevers that their victims usually suffer, but it’s cost you a lot of effort, and even so hasn’t been entirely effective. Free of your vampire, you’d be really healthy, and with no necessity for your Carbonari measures.”

“You certainly haven’t lost your doctory tone, Aickman,” Byron said. “Hell, I’m sure what you say is true in most cases, but …”

After a moment’s silence Crawford lifted a hand inquiringly.

Byron sighed. “In my case, the creature has preserved me. I know I wouldn’t have lived as long as I have without its … its watching over me. Even though I insulted Lord Grey after he had come into my bedroom at Newstead Abbey when I was fifteen, and though I abandoned Margarita Cogni for Teresa, the thing …” He smiled. “It loved me, and loves me still.”

Crawford caught Hobhouse’s eye, and shook his head slightly. Their regard for us, he thought, is why they’re so destructive of us.

“And you,” said Hobhouse softly, “love it still.”

Byron shrugged. “I could love any creature that appeared to wish it.”

Hobhouse shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “But you … will do it, right, this … exorcism?”

“Yes, I said I would and I will.”

“Is there any way I can help?”

“No,” said Byron, “it’s—”

“Yes,” interrupted Crawford.

Both men looked at him, Byron a little warily.

To Hobhouse, Crawford said, “Make him promise you—promise you, his oldest friend, schoolmate at Trinity and all that—that he won’t publish any more poetry. That would eliminate one of the strongest attractions the nephelim hold for him.” He turned to Byron. “In spite of your manner of seeming to despise poetry, I think it’s a huge part of how you, I don’t know, define yourself. As long as it’s still available out there, I can’t imagine you really wanting to abandon your vampire.”

Byron had been sputtering while Crawford spoke, and now burst out, “That’s ludicrous, Aickman, for a dozen reasons! For one thing, would you trust me to keep my promise?”

“A promise you made to Hobhouse—yes. Even more than your poetry, I think your honor is central to your definition of yourself.”

Byron seemed to flinch. “Well, what would there be to stop me from writing just for myself, for no audience but me and the monkeys? Or publishing under a pseudonym?”

“On the one hand it wouldn’t be read by the world, and on the other it wouldn’t be perceived as being Byron. For you, there’d be no point in it.”

Byron was looking hunted. “So you believe that this will eliminate any hesitancies I may have—that since I would have abdicated the poetry anyway, I’d have no reason not to do this.”

“Right.”

Byron looked up at Crawford with hatred. “I’ll … do it.” He raised his eyebrows sarcastically. “I presume it would be acceptable if I publish the stuff I’ve already written? There’s quite a bit of it.” “Certainly,” said Crawford. “Over the next few years you can … bleed it out.”

Byron barked one harsh syllable of laughter, then turned to Hobhouse. “I promise,” he said.

Hobhouse reached across the table and squeezed his old friend’s hand. “Thank you,” he said.

CHAPTER 22

Quaff while thou canst: another race,

When thou and thine, like me, are sped,

May rescue thee from Earth’s embrace,

And rhyme and revel with the dead.

—Lord Byron,

“Lines Inscribed upon

a Cup Formed from a Skull”

Hobhouse left six days later.

The Casa Lanfranchi by this time was in chaos. The Hunts were staying at a nearby inn until Byron should have got all his belongings packed for the trip to Genoa, but Byron’s dogs and monkeys had been moved into a couple of emptied rooms in the house while their cages and kennels were disassembled and packed, and the animals made up for the racket of the vacated Hunt children. Byron occasionally pretended to have forgotten that the children had left, and interpreted the barking and chattering as idiot demands and complaints in Cockney voices.

Byron was drinking wine all day and gin all night, and he alternated from moment to moment between giddy cheer and resentful gloom. He told Crawford that on the same day that he had rescued Crawford from the nefando den he had made arrangements to see a notary and get his will drawn up, but that Teresa had become so upset at the very idea of his ever dying that he had had to cancel the appointment. She had made him promise to forget the idea, and Byron liked to imply that he was sure to die in this upcoming enterprise, and that it would be Crawford’s fault that Teresa would get none of his money.

At last, on the twenty-seventh of September, Byron was ready to leave. Most of his servants and possessions were being shipped north aboard a felucca out of Livorno, while he and Teresa and Crawford would travel by land in the Napoleonic coach; the animals had been noisily confined in temporary cages and packed into and on top of two carriages that would accompany their master’s.

Shelley’s heart was in an under-seat cabinet in Byron’s carriage, still wrapped in butcher paper.

Byron was irritable at having had to get up early, and he curtly ordered Crawford to ride up on the bench with the coachman. Teresa was accompanying them only as far as Lerici, and would complete the journey to Genoa with Trelawny, and Byron told Crawford that he wanted as much time alone with her as he might have left.

The three carriages got under way at ten, but it took half an hour for them to move a hundred yards down the Lung’Arno: the horses of other carriages were panicked by the screeching of the monkeys and parrots, and children and dogs crowded up around the wheels, and women in second- and third- floor windows leaned out to throw flowers and handkerchiefs. Crawford took off his hat and waved it at them all cheerfully.

The festival mood dissipated when they turned north on a broader street—mounted Austrian soldiers rode ahead and behind, emphasizing the government’s approval of Byron’s departure, and Crawford could see, off to his left, the buildings of the University, where he and Josephine had worked together so peacefully for a year.

The famous Leaning Tower was tilted away from them, making it seem that they were travelling downhill.

Byron insisted on stopping a number of times throughout the day’s drive, to eat, and drink, and reassure the animals, and walk around in the roadside grass with Teresa. Crawford hid his impatience, and didn’t even look northward if Byron was watching him, for he was sure that the lord would interpret the intensity of his gaze as a protest against the delays, and out of spite insist on even more of them.

It was dusk when the three carriages finally turned west on a seaward road, crossed the bridge over the Vara River and rolled into Lerici. The carriage the Hunts had travelled in was empty behind the inn, and the Bolivar rode at anchor in the little harbor, but when Crawford and Byron and Teresa got out and went into the hotel, they learned that Hunt and Trelawny had set out to walk south along the coast to the Casa Magni. Crawford and Byron went back outside.

“They’ll be composing sonnets to Shelley,” Byron said as he watched his coachman unstrapping the luggage from the top of his carriage. A chilly wind blew in from off the sea, and he shivered and buttoned up his jacket, though his face shone with sweat in the light from the inn’s windows. “No point in going down there ourselves.”

Crawford looked south longingly. “Shouldn’t we … reconnoiter? Josephine is down there somewhere….”

Byron coughed. “Tomorrow, Aickman. If she sees you sooner, she might simply flee, mightn’t she? Inland to Carrara, drawn by the marble they make all the statues out of, or across the Gulf to Portovenere. If you can’t—” He began coughing again, then swore and pushed open the inn’s door.

Crawford followed him back inside. “Are you … well?” he asked nervously.

“No, I’m not well, Doctor—do I look well?” Byron took a flask from his pocket, unscrewed the cap with trembling fingers, and took a long sip. The fumes of Dutch gin roused nausea in Crawford. “I’m vulnerable here,” Byron went on. “My Carbonari measures are getting less effective anyway, but in this cursed Gulf they’re tenuous indeed.” He looked toward the stairs. “I was mad to have brought Teresa here at all.”

“Do you think,” began Crawford; then he considered how he’d been about to finish the question—that you’ll be able to go with Josephine and me?—and he stopped, not wanting to let Byron think the issue might be in doubt. “Do you think you should get some sleep then?”

“Brilliant prescription. Yes.” Byron screwed the cap back onto the flask and pocketed it. “Don’t get me up early tomorrow.”

Byron limped away toward the stairs, shivering visibly, and as Crawford watched him recede he wondered if Byron would be able to go, or, if so, would be able to survive the trip to Venice and the exertions they’d be in for there.

For that matter, he thought, will any of us survive it.

Not wanting to meet Hunt and Trelawny when they returned, Crawford went upstairs to his own room.

His room was narrow and windowless, and the bed’s mattress seemed to be blankets wrapped around dried bushes, but he fell asleep as soon as he lay down, and dreamed all night that Josephine had already died, and been buried; and, a cold, silver-eyed vampire now, had clawed her way back up to the air and was giving solitary birth beside the erupted grave. Toward dawn the baby’s scalp began to be visible between the inhuman mother’s thighs, and Crawford forced himself to awaken rather than see its face.

The skin around his eyes was stiff with dried tears, and he washed his face in the basin before getting dressed and going downstairs. He ignored the corn-meal smell of hot polenta wafting from the kitchen and walked to the inn’s front door, trying to suppress his limp.

The air outside seemed even colder than it had last night. Fog hung over the gray slate roofs—for a moment he didn’t know in which direction the sea lay, and he was surprised to find himself a little frightened by the uncertainty.

Get used to it, he told himself. Soon enough you’ll be crossing the Apennines, and dozens of miles distant from the sea in any direction.

He walked downhill through the narrow streets, shivering whenever a drop of cold dew would fall from one of the iron balconies overhead and strike his bald scalp, and in a few minutes he had left the buildings behind and reached the drab beach; Portovenere was invisible beyond the fog, and the Bolivar was a dim, vertical brush-stroke of slightly darker gray far out on the leadenly shifting sea.

He began walking south along the dark, surf-firmed sand, still trying to suppress his limp, and he tried to assess his capabilities, mental and physical.

He had lost the inhuman pallor the nefando den had given him, and he really thought he was stronger now than he had been in many years; still, he felt fragile, and he hoped no great exertions would be required of him. His left hand wouldn’t be much good for holding a knife or a pistol, with its maimed little finger and absent ring finger, but his right hand was still good. And, since trimming his white beard and remaining hair, he no longer drew wondering stares from strangers.

And he was fairly confident that he would be able to maintain his resolve, for he’d been firmly decided for six weeks now—without any of the passion and drama that accompanied Byron’s decisions—that he would do everything he could to free Josephine and his child from the nephelim infection, even if the effort should involve his own death.

The fog was beginning to glow—perceptibly brighter to his left, where the unseen sun was rising over the eastern mountains. He turned and began walking back toward the inn.

The fog had burned off and the sky was a hot, empty blue by the time Byron arose at noon, and Crawford had to find his hat in order to be able to accompany the lord and Trelawny down the hill again to the shore. The sand was hot underfoot.

Byron was sweating and trembling, but after walking up to the surf and letting it swirl around his ankles he suddenly insisted that he would swim out to the Bolivar and have lunch alongside, treading water.

Trelawny was unable to talk him out of it, and so once again the two of them stripped and waded into the surf, Byron looking desperate and Trelawny impatient, leaving Crawford to watch their clothing.

Crawford sat down in the hot sand and watched the two heads recede beyond the low waves.

He soon lost sight of them against the distant wedge that was the dark hull of the Bolivar, but after a while, squinting against the glitter of the sun on the water, he could see bundles being lowered from the ship’s deck, and he knew the swimmers had arrived and were about to start their lunch.

Crawford got to his feet and plodded up the sand toward where the early-morning fishing boats rested upside down against the crumbled edge of the street pavement, faintly shaded by their spread, drying nets. Up on the pavement he turned and looked back at the Bolivar. He still couldn’t make out the heads of Byron and Trelawny.

The thought of food wasn’t at all attractive, but he knew he should eat something. An old woman was selling tiny fried squids out of a wheeled cart nearby, and he walked over, allowing himself to limp, and bought a plateful. They were redolent with garlic and green olive oil, and at the first bite his hunger awoke; he ate the squids as fast as he could cram them into his mouth, and then bought another plate and ate them at a more leisurely pace, standing by the old woman’s cart and glancing occasionally at the piles of clothing and out at the Bolivar.

At last he could see white arms flashing in the sea between the shore and the ship, and he handed the empty plate back to the woman, hopped down off the pavement into the soft, hot sand, and began limping back toward where the swimmers’ clothes lay on the shore.

And he began to run down toward the surf, though there was nothing he could do, when he saw the figure that was Trelawny begin swimming rapidly toward the other.

The two heads were stopped out there; almost certainly Trelawny was arguing that Byron should let him help him, and Byron was—no doubt angrily—refusing.

“Let him help you, damn it,” Crawford whispered, knuckling sweat from his eyes.

Trelawny didn’t get any closer to Byron, but after a few moments Crawford could see that the two men were swimming back to the Bolivar.

Fine, he thought. Now come ashore in the ship’s boat. This is no time to be airing your damned pride, Byron.

He didn’t see any figures climbing the ladder, and no boat was being lowered; and, a few minutes later, he once again saw the swimmers working their way shoreward through the low waves.

“You idiots,” Crawford said softly.

It took five minutes for Trelawny and Byron to swim in to the point where they could stand, and Crawford met them there, the surf swirling around his waist.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Crawford demanded furiously.

“What right have you got to risk your life—unnecessarily!—when so many people are depending on you?”

Byron had waded in a few yards farther and was leaning forward, his hands on his knees under water, apparently devoting all his attention to filling and emptying his lungs.

Trelawny had backed away a couple of steps, so that the incoming swells twitched at the spiky ends of his black beard. “You might go get our clothes,” he told Crawford.

Crawford hesitated a moment, then nodded and turned and began wading back to the beach. Luckily no one had stolen the clothes.

Trelawny and Byron dressed in the water. Trelawny started forward toward the wavering surf line, then paused and looked back when he realized Byron and Crawford weren’t following.

“You go ahead, Tre,” panted Byron. “We’ll meet you at the inn. Have a bottle of something cold waiting for us, there’s a good lad.”

Trelawny’s bushy eyebrows went up. “Aren’t you at least going to get out of the water?”

“Soon enough,” Byron told him.

Trelawny shrugged and splashed ashore.

Byron turned to Crawford. “I’m doing this—” he began. Then, “God, you reek,” he said. “What have you been eating?”

“Squids. You should eat something, too—we might need our strength tonight.” He smacked his lips. “And the garlic can’t hurt.”

“I already eat God’s own amount of the damned stuff. Garlic, not squid.” A knee-high wave slapped at them, and Byron stumbled but caught himself. “It’s not without defense value, but …” He was squinting in the bright sunlight, and his shoulders were already red.

After a pause while another, smaller wave foamed around their knees, Crawford said, “But …?”

Byron visibly regained his train of thought. “Damn you, Aickman, do you suppose I like wringing my body out on these swims? Do you imagine I’d do it if eating some … goddamned garlicky squids would insulate me sufficiently to let me save your strayed wife? Do you … do you imagine that I’m showing off?”

Crawford could feel his face heating up. “Actually,” he said, “I suppose I did. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to swimming. I swam the damned Hellespont, from Sestos to Abydos.”

Ten or twelve years ago, thought Crawford. But aloud he said, “I know.”

“I’ll be ready tonight,” Byron said resentfully, limping away through the shallow water toward the sand. “Just see to it that you are.”

At dusk Byron and Crawford left the inn and walked slowly and without speaking down the Lerici streets, past windows and doorways that were already beginning to glow yellow with lamplight under the purpling sky, to the lowest, farthest-seaward edge of pavement. Byron gave Crawford an ironic look, and made the sign of the cross before stepping carefully down from the masonry into the sand.

Crawford smiled tightly and followed him, and they plodded side by side down the shoreline. Each of them carried in his pockets ajar full of minced garlic and a pistol loaded with a wood-and-silver ball, and Crawford kept having to hitch up his pants because of the weight of the coil of rope twined to his belt; the slip-knotted loop thumped his thigh, separate from the coil, at each step. Byron was swinging an unlit torch as if it were a walking stick.

The wind was cold from Portovenere across the Gulf, and Crawford shivered and tucked his chin into his coat collar, wishing his scarf hadn’t been packed up in the luggage he and Byron would be taking with them later tonight.

After a few minutes of walking, they heard the rattle and jingle of a carriage going by on the road over the beach. Byron nodded. “Tre’s right on time,” he said quietly.

With my scarf, thought Crawford. “I hope he’s done what you said, about bringing a spare horse to ride back to Lerici on.”

“So do I,” said Byron. “He’s far too chivalrous about women—and ignorant of the nephelim—to condone a forcible kidnapping.”

They trudged on as the sky darkened, and soon they heard the repeated triple-thudding of a horse riding back, northward toward Lerici.

“He did what I said,” observed Byron. “Our carriage awaits us above the Casa Magni.” He began coughing, pressing his face into the collar of his jacket to muffle the noise, and Crawford hoped his fever wasn’t as bad as it seemed to be. “Teresa is very upset,” Byron whispered when he had recovered, “at having to go on to Genoa without me.”

Crawford knew this was an appeal for sympathy, but he was too aware of Josephine, somewhere ahead, to spare concern for Byron or Teresa. “If she ever gets pregnant, she’ll be glad of this.”

He thought Byron might get angry at his callousness, but after a long, plodding silence Byron just said, “You’re right.”

Soon Crawford caught Byron’s arm, and pointed ahead. Faintly against the nearly black sky, above the silhouettes of the pines, stood the rectangular bulk of the Casa Magni.

There was no faintest light in any of its windows.

“Do you think she’s still here?” asked Byron when they had walked around to the sand-gritty pavement between the house and the sea. He had wedged the torch into a crack in the rocks, and had fished a tinder box from his pocket and was striking showers of dazzling sparks from the flint.

“Yes.” Crawford spoke with certainty.

The sparks had ignited a frail flame in the lint in the box, and Byron quickly unwedged the torch and held the splintery, frayed end of it over the light; in a moment the resinous wood was flaring, lighting in its orange glow the startled-looking arches and windows of the house, and he closed the tinder box and tucked it back into his pocket.

“Call her, then,” said Byron, holding the torch up so that the trees were visible on the hill behind the house and shadows crawled and darted among the trunks.

“Josephine,” said Crawford loudly. His voice disappeared in the vast night like wine spilled on sand. “Josephine!” he shouted. “I need you!”

For several moments the only sounds were the continuing rustle of the wind in the pines and the waves crashing at his back. Crawford looked up at the terrace railing, remembering how Shelley would lean there, staring out at the Gulf waters, during the long June evenings.

Then in the pauses between the waves he could hear a soft but echoing shuffling from the darkness behind the ground-floor arches—and a moment later a figure in a tattered dress was visible standing in the central arch, the arch through which Josephine had single-handedly dragged the rowboat on the day she had saved him from drowning.

“Michael,” said Josephine hoarsely. Some dark substance was caked around her mouth, as if she’d been eating, but she looked weak and starved, and her eyes were enormous.

Crawford took a step forward, and she instantly disappeared back into the darkness. “Don’t … approach me,” she called. “I’m not supposed to let people approach me.”

“Fine,” said Crawford, backing away with his palms held out. “Look, I’m way back here—you can come out again.”

For several moments there was silence—he and Byron exchanged tense glances—then Crawford heard sandy scuffling inside, and, very slowly, she re-emerged into the flickering orange light. Crawford tried to see if she looked pregnant, but wasn’t able to tell.

“Can you approach us?” Crawford asked.

She shook her head.

“Not even so that we can talk? Maybe I want to rejoin the flock. Byron here is … one of you, I’m sure you can see it in him.” He felt Byron shift beside him, and he could tell from a wobble in the light that he had moved the torch from one hand to the other. Crawford prayed that he wasn’t getting impatient, wasn’t going to say anything.

“I can’t do anything for you,” Josephine said. “You know that. You need one of them to look favorably on you.” She smiled, and he could see what her skull would someday look like. “They will, though, Michael. Find one of them and ask for forgiveness. They’ll give it. I’m forgiven for … for what you and I did.”

Her bare feet on the flagstones looked like white crabs.

Crawford blinked back tears. “I want you to come with me, Josephine. I love you. I—”

She was shaking her head. “I think I loved you,” she said, “but now I love someone else. We’re very happy.”

He squeezed the rope, the useless rope. “Listen to me,” he said desperately.

“No,” she said. “The sun is down, and he’s waiting for me.” She started to turn.

“You’re pregnant,” he said loudly.

She had paused. Crawford thought he had heard a sound on the dark hillside, something different from the hiss of the sea wind in the branches, but he didn’t look away from her.

“Think about it,” he went on quickly, “you were a nurse, you know the symptoms. It’s our baby, yours and mine. Maybe this … life is what you want for yourself, but is it what you want for our child?”

For several long seconds she didn’t speak. “You’re right,” she said finally, wonderingly. “I think I must be pregnant.” Her face was expressionless, but tears gleamed now on her hollowed cheek.

Again there was a faint sound from the hillside. Crawford glanced up there for a moment but couldn’t see anything among the dimly lit pines.

She turned back toward the sea and took a hesitant step out from the arch, and Crawford broke the twine that held the rope to his belt; the coiled rope was in his hand now.

She had noticed Byron now, and was staring at him as anxiously as a half-tamed cat.

Byron waited until a wave had crashed on the rocks and receded. “It’s all right,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear. “Two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four is eight.” His voice was almost harsh with compassion, and Crawford wondered if he was remembering her rescue of them on the peak of the Wengern.

“Come with us,” said Crawford.

“Two times five is ten,” said Byron, softer now, as if reciting a lullaby to a child, “two times six is twelve …”

She opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by a loud, musically resonant voice from the darkness on the hill.

“No,” it said. “You’re mine, and your child is mine. I’m the father.”

“Christ,” grated Byron, sliding his free hand into his pocket, “that sounded like Polidori.”

Josephine had stopped. Her tattered dress was fluttering in the chilly breeze.

She was staring at Crawford intently. He smiled at her—and then flipped the rope out away from his side and tossed the loop over her shoulders.

She turned and lunged for the arch and the darkness beyond it, and Crawford was pulled off balance and fell painfully onto his knees; but he pulled her strongly back, and she fell across him.

She was struggling furiously, and even though Byron knelt on her—awkwardly, for he wouldn’t drop the torch or take his hand out of his pocket—Crawford wasn’t able to get another loop of the rope around any part of her. He could hear something scrambling down the hillside, and in desperation he hauled back his maimed hand and slapped her very hard across the face.

It rocked her head and she went limp, and as Byron stood up Crawford hurriedly rolled her over and tied her wrists together tightly.

The hand he’d hit her with was gritty with clay. The stuff smeared around her mouth was clay. Had she been eating it?

When he looked up, Byron had drawn his pistol and was pointing it past Crawford, toward the trees. His free hand held the torch steadily.

Crawford looked in the direction the muzzle was pointing. A man stood on the pavement beside the house.

He was dressed in a shirt and trousers as shabby as Josephine’s dress; but, unlike Josephine, he looked well fed, with a visible paunch and the beginnings of a double chin.

He was smiling coldly at Crawford. “I,” he said, “have not ever hit a woman. I’m proud to have resigned from a race whose members would.”

Josephine was recovering from the blow, and flexing weakly under Crawford, and he ran the rope back from her wrists and looped it around her ankles and drew it tight. He began tying a knot, with trembling fingers.

“Polidori,” called Byron, his voice a little unsteady. “The ball in this pistol is Carbonari issue—silver and wood.”

Crawford drew the knot tight, and looked up.

With an explosive tearing pop that made Crawford jump, Polidori’s clothing flew away in rags in all directions—and to judge by the way the torchlight guttered and flared, Byron had been startled too—but when the light steadied, Crawford saw that a serpent with buzzing wings hung now in midair where

Polidori had been standing.

It curled heavily in the air, its metallic-looking scales glittering in the torchlight. Its long snout opened, showing a white brush of teeth, and its glassy eyes swivelled from Byron to Crawford, and then down to where Josephine lay on the stones.

“Don’t shoot now,” said Crawford hastily. “I’ve seen them in this form before—pistol balls just bounce off them.”

“My darling!” breathed Josephine, staring at the serpent.

The thing rose up into the air, buzzing loudly, and then sailed off into the darkness toward the hillside.

Crawford had wrestled the resisting Josephine halfway to her feet when the musical voice sounded again from among the trees.

“Your ball wouldn’t have killed me,” it said, and though its tone was urbane, Crawford could clearly hear anger in the precision of the syllables, “but it would have hurt me. You hurt me before, Mister Crawford, in the Alps. Do you recall?”

Crawford couldn’t hold up the struggling Josephine any longer; but he knelt under her as he let her fall, so that it was his already bleeding knees, and not her head, that cracked against the stone. “Why the hell didn’t you shoot when you had the chance?” he asked Byron, his voice an exhausted sob.

Then he took a deep breath and looked up. “No,” he shouted, answering the voice.

He was glad the thing apparently wanted to talk, for he needed time to think. Could he and Byron drag Josephine into the surf, and use the insulating qualities of seawater to keep the thing away from them until dawn? It would be, he thought hysterically, like children swimming in a pond, ducking under water when a hornet was hovering near.

Josephine was panting, staring up into the dark trees.

“With the mirror,” said the voice. “When you reflected sunlight onto me.”

Crawford did remember it. “But that wasn’t Polidori,” he panted. “Polidori only killed himself last year.”

“We’re not such divided entities as humans,” came the voice. It laughed, a harsh ringing like bronze bells. “'What you have done to the least of my brethren, you have done to me.'”

“How,” demanded Byron, “do you dare to quote Scripture?”

“How do you dare to publish poetry as your own?” returned the voice, its rage abruptly very evident. “The great Lord Byron! Secretly sucking away at the Gorgon’s teat! Presuming to despise anyone who hasn’t found their way to it! My poetry may not have been brilliant"—the voice was shrill—"but at least it was my own!”

Byron still had the pistol in his hand, and he laughed now and swept its muzzle across the hillside. “Poetry,” he said good-naturedly, “was the least of the things in which I excelled you.”

A scream sounded from the hillside, and for a moment Crawford glimpsed a naked man rushing toward them between the trees, and Byron levelled the pistol; but an instant later the buzzing curdled the air again and it was the winged serpent that flew at them.

Byron’s pistol went off just before the thing hit him, and the ball ricocheted off the serpent and the house wall as the torch spun through the air and hit the stones, scattering sparks.

The light was gone, and over the ringing in his ears Crawford could hear Byron’s panicky gasping and the slither and heavy slap of the serpent’s coils; then there was a sharp, tortured wheeze, and he knew that the thing had wrapped itself around Byron and was squeezing the breath out of him.

Crawford had taken one step toward the sea—the only thought in his mind being to swim out as far as he could—when he saw that the torch was not quite extinguished. It lay on the stones a couple of yards to his left, and the head of it was still smoldering.

Still not giving up the idea of fleeing, he snatched it up and whirled it in a circle in the air. It flared back into flame, and the first thing he could see was Josephine’s face staring anxiously toward Byron and the serpent.

Her concern, he realized, was not for Byron’s safety but for her lover’s—and Crawford’s panic hardened into a leaden, despairing rage.

He turned away from her.

The thing had Byron down, its long rippling body coiled around him, holding his arms helpless against his constricted ribs, and even as Crawford stepped forward it lowered its head to Byron’s neck and delicately lanced its narrow teeth into the man’s corded throat.

Byron’s eyes clenched shut and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl of pain and rage and humiliation—but of reluctant pleasure, too—and Crawford leaned down and thrust the torch against the serpent’s eyes.

Josephine screamed, and the flames licked Byron’s cheek and withered the gray hair at his temple, but the reptile’s eyes just rolled upward to look at Crawford incuriously as the scaled throat worked, swallowing Byron’s blood.

Still holding the torch in one hand, Crawford pulled the jar of minced garlic out of his coat pocket and lashed it down onto the stones, then scooped up a handful of glass and garlic and, shivering with revulsion, leaned down to scour it across the reptile’s eyes. Shards of glass lanced into his palm, but the chance that it might hurt Josephine’s new lover made him ignore the pain.

The snake-thing convulsed, hissing and spitting out a spray of blood and blinking its huge eyes. Its coils loosened, and Byron shook them off and rolled weakly away, sobbing and whooping.

Crawford backed away from the monster, toward Josephine, as the gold-foil wings began thrashing and buzzing, blowing sand away across the flagstones.

The thing that had been Polidori rose up into the air again, its weight apparent in the ponderous swinging of its body. For a moment the head swung back and forth in the chilly breeze, peering uselessly through the blood and glass and garlic that fouled its eyes.

Then, hanging in the air at shoulder height, the thing shuddered, and its face began squirming, reshaping itself. The snout crumpled inward and widened and, grotesquely, became a fleshy human mouth in the reptilian face. “Where is the child?” said the mouth. Its voice was hoarse and breathless, as if the creature had not had time to mold more than rudimentary vocal organs. “Where are you, Josephine?”

Suddenly Crawford guessed that the child was terribly important to it, much more important than Josephine; that children who were born into submission, as Keats and Shelley had been, were a particular victory for its species. He crouched over Josephine and clamped his bleeding hand over her mouth, but she squirmed away from under him with surprising strength.

“Here,” she gasped. “Take me.”

The thing’s head snapped around toward her hungrily, and as the long body shot forward through the air Crawford grabbed Josephine around the waist with his free arm and, with an effort that seemed to dislocate his shoulder and spine, heaved her back.

The serpent’s head cracked so hard against the pavement where she had been that chips of stone whistled through the air, and its body rebounded up and crashed against the top of one of the building’s pillars with an impact that made the Casa Magni resound like a vast stone drum.

The thing hung higher in the air now, about twenty feet above the pavement, and its furiously buzzing wings were blurs of reflecting gold around the downward peering face. The mouth had been shattered against the stones, and blood ran from it in a long, swaying string, but it managed to produce one word.

“Where?”

Crawford’s arm was still around Josephine, and he felt her draw in a breath to answer.

In an unreasoning burst of jealous fury he released her and snatched the pistol from his pocket, and only after he had cocked it and aimed it up at the devastated mouth that she preferred to his own did it occur to him that Polidori had compromised his invulnerability by adopting this piece of human anatomy.

Crawford pulled the trigger, and beyond the flare of the explosion he saw the serpent cartwheel away upward through the air, and over the echoes of the bang he heard it scream shrilly like blocks of stone sliding rapidly across each other.

Josephine screamed too, wrenching at her bonds so hard that Crawford thought she would break bones.

He stood up, and limped over to where Byron lay. The lord was staring blankly at the pavement under his face, but he was breathing.

“I hate you,” sobbed Josephine. “I hope this child is his. It ought to be—he and I have been living out here as husband and wife for months.”

Crawford smiled savagely at her and blew her a kiss with his bleeding, garlic-reeking palm.

CHAPTER 23

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

–T. S. Eliot, Preludes

Byron had rolled over, his hand clamped to his bloody throat, and was staring up at the stars. “Well done,” he said hoarsely. He sat up, groaning and bracing himself on his free hand. “That won’t have killed him, you know. He’ll be petrified, and with luck he landed somewhere where the sun will shine tomorrow, but he’s not out of the picture.”

“True,” came a grating voice from the darkness, harsh with inorganic pain.

Byron and Josephine and Crawford all jumped, and the torch in Crawford’s hand swung wildly.

“Take me!” screamed Josephine, managing to prop herself up on one elbow.

“Soon,” said the voice.

Crawford shook his head unhappily, staring at Josephine and dreading exertions to come. He looked back up at the dark hill. “And you rebuked me for having hit her! You tried to kill her!”

“Jesus, Aickman,” said Byron as he struggled to his feet. “Don’t be talking to the thing. We’ve—”

“To kill her,” came the voice, every syllable sounding as if it cost the thing unimaginable pain, “is not an insult.”

“You,” Josephine called into the night, “you want me … dead?” She had managed to get up into a wobbling crouch, with her hands behind her back.

Crawford stared at her. “Of course he wants you dead. Look at the goddamn hole in the pavement where you’d still be lying, smashed like your sis—like a bug, if I hadn’t pulled you away!”

He walked back and crouched by her. “Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening? Good. He wants you to die and be buried so that you can hatch like an egg and give birth to the seed he’s sown in your blood, the extension of himself that will climb out of your grave. And then after a while you’d give birth to what would once have been our child, but would by this time be one of these creatures.”

He laughed grimly. “Talk about there being no ‘well-at-any-rates'! Our child would be like Shelley or Keats, condemned to nephelism by the circumstances of birth, except that this child would be deprived of ever having any human life. This may be unprecedented, at least since the good old days before Noah.”

Josephine nodded, seeming to have comprehended what he’d said, and he had begun to relax a little, and even to smile, when she suddenly arched powerfully backward, striking her head with a sickening crack against the pavement.

“God!” Crawford squeaked in horror. He lunged forward onto his aching knees and for a moment just cradled her head, his mind as blank as if it had been his own head that had hit the stones; then he laid the torch down carefully and began feeling her skull. Hot blood was rapidly clogging her already matted hair, but she was breathing and her skull was at least not broken in.

He was crying, remembering having given her the same desperate, frightened examination after the two of them had been shot in a street in Rome; then too there had been the powerful reek of garlic and blood, but then it had been because she had kissed him to save him from giving in to the lamia.

He tore a strip from his shirt and tied it around her head so that there would be pressure on the cut. Her hair stuck up ludicrously in all directions.

“She should really be in a hospital,” he was mumbling, more or less to Byron, “she’s bleeding and she hasn’t been eating, you can see that—God knows what that fit was, it was like the convulsions you get if you eat strychnine, but at least it’s worn off for now, apparently—”

“Aickman,” said Byron, swaying unsteadily, “that wasn’t a convulsion.”

“You must not have been looking, man! I’m a physician, but anybody could see—”

“It was,” said Byron, his voice weak but very clear, “a suicide attempt. She learned that the Polidori-thing wants her dead, and so she tried to comply. It’s a good thing you had her tied up—otherwise we’d be out in the sea right now trying to catch her.”

Crawford laid her head down gently. “… Oh.” He stood up, absently grateful for the cold wind in his sweat-drenched hair. “I suppose it could … I suppose that was it. Yes.”

Byron leaned, then caught himself with a quick forward step and sat down hastily. “I, however,” he whispered, “may shortly be able to show you a genuine convulsion.” Both his hands were palm down on the ground, and Crawford could see the blood coursing steadily down his neck.

Crawford shambled over to him, sat down and, hopelessly, lifted one of Byron’s hands and put his fingers on the man’s wrist. The pulse was fast and thready, and the skin was hot. The characteristic fever of a newly bit vampire victim was already setting in, building on the fever Byron had already had.

Crawford dropped the hand and sat back, at last recognizing the huge, unalterable fact that had changed the evening, made their efforts and heroics pointless.

“You can’t physically make it to Venice, can you?” he asked, his voice flat with the effort of concealing the bitter resentment he felt; he would never know if Byron had secretly wanted the evening to end this way, but he vividly remembered the two opportunities Byron had had to shoot the vampire—before its first metamorphosis, and in the instant when it was again a man rushing down the hill at them—before it could bite him. And Crawford knew Byron was a good enough marksman to have made either shot. “Over the Apennines, and down the Po Valley … especially starting tonight—which,” he added with a bleak look up at the hillside, “I’m afraid we would have to do.”

All for nothing, he thought. My shredded hand, Josephine’s cracked head.

Byron put his hand back on his throat and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m nearly certain I’ll die if I try it now.” He glanced across at Josephine’s sprawled form, and sighed. Then he looked back at Crawford, and all of the usual bluster was gone from his eyes. “But let’s put it to the test.”

Crawford blinked at him, a little ashamed now of his earlier suspicions, but still angry. “No. Thank you, but no.” He tried to think. “Maybe I could do it without you,” he said, knowing even as he spoke that it wasn’t true.

“No, you couldn’t. You don’t know … nearly enough about the eye, and the Graiae. For one thing, the eye isn’t usually free to jump—it was jumping in 1818 because Shelley was right there when they woke up, but ordinarily it stays with one of the columns. There are a number of chants that will free it up, but you have to be able to gauge a number of factors to know which chant will work on the night you’re there. I studied these things at an Armenian monastery there for months, but I’m not even sure I could do it.”

After a moment Crawford nodded reluctantly. He knew Byron was right.

There was a word Crawford was trying to think of, something with the dryness of a legal term, but which had come to have a physically unpleasant meaning for him … a taste of iron and vinegar.

Then he had it. “Proxy,” he said, his voice hollow with hope and nausea.

“Proxy?”

“You can be there—enough to advise me, and to draw the attention of Lord Grey and then lose him—and still be here. How’s your neck bleeding?”

“Steadily, thank you.” Some of the old irritability was seeping back into Byron’s voice. “Aren’t you supposed to know about bandages and such things?”

“I’ll put a bandage on it in a moment. First, give me your jar of garlic.”

Byron dug it out and handed it to him, and Crawford opened it and with his fingers dug out as much of the minced garlic as he could and dropped the stuff onto the pavement. Then he held the jar against the skin of Byron’s neck. “I just need a bit of your blood.”

For a moment Byron looked as if he would resist—then he just nodded weakly and lifted his chin and turned away so that Crawford could hold the jar to the bite.

When the jar was half full, Crawford shut it and set about bandaging Byron’s neck.

“When I drink this blood,” he began.

“Drink it?” Byron exclaimed. “You spent too much time in that nefando den!”

“Just enough time, actually. I remember thinking that when those men drank my blood I was able to look out of their eyes, see myself on that cross, if only dimly and fitfully, from the other side of the room. And when I drank Shelley’s blood—”

Byron gagged. “You really are a neffer, Aickman.”

“When I drank Shelley’s blood,” Crawford went on steadily, “I was able to see and feel everything he did, and I was even able to talk to him, converse with him.”

Byron was interested in spite of himself. “Really? I wonder if something similar may be the original basis for the Christian Eucharist.”

Crawford rolled his eyes impatiently. “Conceivably. So when I drink this, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to be you, to some extent, and you be me. So you’ll know when I’ve got there, and am ready to start. Now listen, I’ll spill what I don’t drink, so Lord Grey will come rushing to your rescue in Venice as surely as my lamia rushed to where I’d spilled Shelley’s and my blood. The thing is, and do pay attention to this, you must not be visible to him anywhere else when I do it, or he won’t be fooled. Shelley made himself invisible to his half sister by being out in the boat—seawater, right? So you have Fletcher or Trelawny or somebody bring a tub of seawater into your room, and you make sure you’re immersed in it when I spill your blood in Venice.”

They set out for the road above the house, where Trelawny had left the carriage.

Byron held the torch and Crawford half carried, half dragged the unconscious Josephine, and they managed to work their way to the back of the house in only a few minutes.

The upward sloping path behind the house was more difficult; Byron couldn’t climb more than a few feet before needing to sit down and breathe deeply for a while, and Crawford found, to his confused horror, that the only way he could get Josephine up the slope was to tie a fresh length of the rope around her ankles and loop it around a higher trunk and then lean into the free end, so that his own weight dragged her up the hill backward; though it delayed them still further, he couldn’t help pausing frequently to go to her and pull her skirt back up over her knees.

His heart was pounding alarmingly, and not just from the physical effort; he kept imagining that he heard Polidori whispering over the crash of the surf and the rustle of the branches and the scuffing and slithering and panting of his own progress, and during one of the pauses for rest he was sure he heard a soft chuckling from the darkness beyond the torch’s frail light.

At last he had got Josephine up to the road, and had rolled, hiked and folded her into the carriage. Byron followed her inside and Crawford climbed slowly up to the driver’s bench with the torch, which he wedged into a bracket in the luggage rail. The two horses harnessed to the carriage seemed impatient to be gone.

The clouds had broken up, and the moonlight was bright enough so that he was able to drive at a fairly good speed; within minutes they had reached the streets and overhanging buildings of Lerici, and he reined in the horses in front of a house a few hundred feet from the inn where Byron’s party was staying.

Crawford climbed down and opened the door, and Byron got out, as carefully as someone’s great-grandfather. Crawford couldn’t help remembering the vital young man he’d first met in a Geneva street in 1816.

The paving stones ahead were streaked with light, and faintly on the breeze they could hear music and laughter. “Trelawny will be carousing,” said Byron hoarsely, “and the Hunts will probably have already gone to bed, in their sensible way. I should be able to get to my room without anyone asking me about this bandage.” He reached back into the carriage and pulled out a cane, which he handed to Crawford. “You remember it?”

Crawford nodded, a faint, sad smile touching his bearded face. “Your sword cane. I remember you waving it around in a lightning storm at the foot of the Wengern.”

“It’s yours now. Twist the metal collar of it, that ring there, and you can draw it. It’s good French steel.” Byron seemed ill at ease. “You know where the money and guns are in the carriage. And poor Shelley’s heart. And I’ve got my passport and you’ve got yours. I don’t imagine you’ll—”

He stopped, and took Crawford’s good hand in both of his. “I’ve been a lot of trouble, haven’t I? During these, what, six years.”

Crawford was embarrassed, and glad that the flaring torch was above and behind Byron so that he couldn’t see if there were tears in the lord’s eyes. “A lot of trouble,” he agreed.

Byron laughed. “You’ve been a good friend. It’s not terribly likely that we’ll see each other again, so I do want you to know that. You’ve been a good friend.”

“Oh hell.” Crawford freed his hand and hugged the man, and Byron pounded him on the back. “You’ve been a good friend too.”

Clearly embarrassed himself, Byron stepped back. “Do you think it’s midnight yet?”

Crawford laughed softly. “It feels like tomorrow’s midnight—but no, it can’t be past ten.”

“In two hours it will be Michaelmas. St. Michael’s day.” Byron waved clumsily. “Kill our dragon for us, Michael.”

“You’ll know,” said Crawford. “You’ll be there, in all but the flesh.”

Byron nodded dubiously. “That’s right. Jesus. Don’t go getting us up too early in the morning.” He turned and began limping away, toward the inn.

Crawford leaned into the carriage and made sure Josephine’s pulse and breathing were still steady, then closed and latched the door, wearily climbed back up onto the bench and snapped the reins.

He drove northeast until he’d crossed the arching stone bridge over the Vara River, and then he took the old road that paralleled the Marga River, between high mountain shoulders that were a deeper black than the starry sky.

The road was getting steeper as it curled up into the Apennines, but the moon was high and the horses were fresh, and Crawford felt better with every mile he put between the carriage and the stony thing that lay injured but aware somewhere on the hillside behind the Casa Magni.

Finally it was the cold and his own exhaustion that made him stop. The torch had long since burned out.

Seven miles northeast of the Vara a stream flowed into the Marga from up in the mountains, and around the bridge over the stream were clustered the light-less wooden buildings of a little village called Aulla. Crawford found a stable and banged on the broad door until a light appeared in a window overhead, and the door was eventually unlocked and slid open by an old man with a lantern.

Crawford paid him to take the two horses out of harness and groom them,

and to fetch a cup of vinegar from somewhere, and to ignore the fact that Crawford and his companion chose to sleep in the carriage.

When everything had been done and the old man had returned upstairs, Crawford checked Josephine—her breathing and pulse were still regular—and then carefully poured about a tablespoonful of the vinegar into the jar of Byron’s blood, to prevent its clotting, and closed the jar and tucked it safely into one of the bags on the floor.

Josephine was lying on the rear seat, and he lay down on the front one; in order to fit he had to tuck his legs up and bend his head down over his knees, but he managed it, and was asleep in seconds.

He woke again, hours later, feeling painfully constricted and breathless. He had sat up, and gingerly stretched his legs out and rearranged his clothing and loosened his belt, before it became clear to him, to his dull astonishment, that it was sexual excitement that had forced him awake.

He looked at the dark form of Josephine, only a yard away, and after a moment he realized that the glints of light in her face were reflections of the dimly moonlit stable in her open eyes. He smiled at her, and started to get up.

Then he noticed that she was hunched up on one elbow, and staring out of the carriage window and not at him. Crawford followed the direction of her gaze—and jumped when he saw several erect forms standing on the straw-covered stable floor outside the carriage.

There was a regular squeaking noise—the carriage springs. He looked back at Josephine and noticed that she was rocking her hips against the upholstered seat.

And she was still staring out the carriage window.

Teeth glinted in the hollow faces of the things outside, but Crawford couldn’t work up any fear; he could only look at the dim outlines of Josephine’s emaciated body under the ragged dress; he thought his own clothes must explode, the way Polidori’s had earlier in the evening, if he weren’t able to get out of them.

He reached across the carriage and tremblingly cupped her hot right breast; the contact stopped the breath in him, and made his heart beat like a line of cannons being fired by one continuous, insanely quick-burning fuse.

She snarled at him, and her head jerked down and her jaws clicked shut only an inch from his hand.

Even in the dim light and the musty air it was clear that she was excited too—in fact sexual heat had flexed the whole fabric of the air to a tightly strained point, the way imminent lightning causes hair to stand up on scalps, and Crawford imagined that the horses, their very fleas, must be having erotic dreams.

With nothing but hot jealousy Crawford looked through the glass at the creatures Josephine so very evidently found more attractive than himself—and then he remembered something that had been said to him by a young woman he’d encountered six years ago in the streets of Geneva, on the day he’d first met Byron and Shelley: “… we could share in their interest in us, Michael, and at least be interested in each other that way …”

At least one of the forms swaying outside the glass was female—if he opened the door and gave himself to her, to the crowd, would he thus be able to have a willing Josephine at second hand, at least? Vicariously?

By … proxy?

The carriage already smelled of vinegar and blood, but the word brought back with extra clarity the memory of the woman with whom he had killed the lamia on the beach below the Casa Magni—the woman who had made love with him willingly, joyfully.

He didn’t want to have her now if her attention was on someone, something, else.

Byron had laid in a good stock of minced garlic, and Crawford opened a fresh jar and smeared the stuff around the cracks of all the windows and both doors.

As soon as the smell began to drift outside the carriage, the figures in the stable diminished into sluglike things and crawled away across the straw-littered floor and up the wall and out through the stable window. Crawford watched until the last of them had heaved its bulk over the sill and thumped away outside into the moonlit night.

Then he checked the knots on Josephine’s bonds, being resentfully careful not to touch her at all as he did it; and finally he sat back and opened his flask and drank himself into oblivion.

At Michaelmas dawn the old man burst into the stable with a priest, and as the stable owner harnessed the horses the priest shouted angry, incomprehensibly fast Italian sentences at Crawford, who just nodded miserably.

The carriage was on the road again before the sun had quite cleared the mountains ahead.

“Making friends everywhere you go, hey?” shouted Crawford from the driver’s bench to the sleeping Josephine as he snapped the reins over the horses backs. “Good policy.”

They drove north under the blue summer sky, through the Cisa Pass between the vertically remote and snow-fouled peaks of the Apennines—the sun was rising ahead of them, and the sunlight was hot in the moments when the mountain wind was not rasping down through the sparsely wooded pass—and by mid-morning Crawford knew, from Byron’s maps and roadside markers, that they were very near the border between Tuscany and Emilia.

The road had got narrower, and the rocky wall on his right and the abyss to his left had both grown steeper, and when he knew that they must be within a hundred yards of the border crossing, Crawford gave up on finding a place to pull over, and simply halted the carriage in the road. At least there didn’t seem to be any traffic right now. He hurriedly climbed down and opened the carriage door—and then gagged and reeled away.

He had left the windows half-open, but the sun had nevertheless made a garlic steam-room of the carriage’s interior. Josephine was only semiconscious. He checked her pulse and breathing—they were still regular, and Crawford wondered what he would have done if they had not been.

There was a strongbox under the front seat, and Crawford made sure that all of Byron’s pistols and all the knives from the cutlery set were in it, and that it was locked and the key in his pocket. He climbed back outside for a breath of fresh air, then leaned in for one more look around.

He supposed she could break one of the windows and saw open her neck on the jagged edges, or open the door and throw herself off the precipice, but he would hear her beginning either of those, and could conceivably get down in time to stop her—and she looked too weak for any strenuous suicide anyway.

He leaned out for another breath, and then quickly but gently untied the knots he’d pulled tight twelve hours ago in front of the Casa Magni.

He closed the door and climbed back up to the driver’s bench and started the carriage rolling again.

At the border crossing Josephine was so clearly ill and incoherent, and Crawford’s explanation that she needed to get to the hospital in Parma so desperately convincing, and his bribe so handsome, and the smell of garlic so appalling, that the border guards quickly let them continue on the road east, the road that would lead them down out of the mountains.

A few hundred yards farther on, Crawford halted the carriage and climbed down. He roused Josephine enough to get her to eat some bread and cheese with him, and he made her drink some water, reminding himself to plan a rest stop before too long.

She cursed him weakly as he retied her hands and ankles. After a minute he realized that he was cursing her in return, and he made himself stop.

Hand-sized wooden crucifixes stood on poles every few miles along the roadside, sheltered by tiny shingled roofs, and as the sun climbed by imperceptible degrees to the zenith, and then began to throw Crawford’s shadow out under the horses’ hooves, Crawford found himself praying to the weather-grayed little figures.

He wasn’t precisely praying to Christ, but to all the gods who had represented humanity and had suffered for it; curled around his mental image of the wooden Christ were vague ideas of Prometheus chained to the stone with the vulture tearing at his entrails—and Balder nailed to the tree, around the roots of which flowers grew where the drops of his blood fell—and Osiris torn to pieces beside the Nile.

He had his flask with him on the driver’s seat, and the brandy worked with the fatigue and the monotonous noises and motions of driving to lull him into a state that was nearly dreaming.

He wished he had the time, and the hammer and nails, to stop the carriage and go pound an eisener breche into the face of one of the little wooden Christs—it would be a gesture of respect and a declaration of solidarity, not vandalism—and, after a couple of hours of wishing it, he began to imagine that he was doing it.

The figure, in his hallucinatorily vivid daydream, lifted wooden eyelids and stared at him with tiny but unmistakably human eyes, as red blood ran down the pain-lines of the crudely chiselled face, and then it opened its wooden mouth and spoke.

“Accipite, et bibite ex eo omnes.”

It was Latin, and he translated it mentally: All of you take and drink of this.

He was pretty sure it was a line from the Catholic Mass, said when the priest changed the wine into Christ’s blood.

Crawford noticed now that a rusty iron cup hung under the crucifix, and that the blood had run down the legs into the cup. He reached for the cup, but a cloud passed over the sun then, and the figure on the eclipsed cross was himself, and while he was watching himself from someone else’s eyes he thrust an eisenerbreche into the side of the crucified figure.

Water ran out of the wound, and he didn’t have to taste it to know that it was salty—seawater. The water puddled and deepened, and filled the cellar and spilled out into the Arno, which somehow was also the Thames and the Tiber, and flowed out to sea; the little roof over the crucifix became a boat, but it was too far out at sea by now for Crawford to know which boat it was. The Don Juan? The ark? One boat to save us by sinking, Crawford thought dizzily, one to save us by surviving.

He realized that his flask was empty, and that the sun had set behind them. They were down among the wooded foothills now, and he blinked back over his shoulder at the red-lit mountain peaks, through whose stony domain this little box of warm organic life had travelled, and he shivered and thanked the hallucinated Christ, or whoever it had been, for the horses, and even for Josephine.

Somewhere ahead lay the ancient walled city of Parma—once a Gallic town, then an important Roman city, and now a possession, with the blessing of the Austrians, of the French; its royal gardens and promenades were supposed to be among the most beautiful in Italy. Crawford just hoped that whatever stable he would find for them to sleep in would have straw lying around, so that he and Josephine could sleep out of the malodorous carriage.

CHAPTER 24

Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast,

As on we hurry through the dark;

The watch-light blinks as we go past,

The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark …

—George Crabbe

Perhaps because Parma was occupied by Austrian-sanctioned forces, no priest came to the stable to harry the vampire’s woman out of town. The stable owner slid open the heavy wooden door at dawn, and plodded inside to open one of the stalls and lead a horse out, but he didn’t even look toward where Crawford and Josephine lay on a luxuriously thick pile of straw, covered by a spare horse-blanket.

Crawford wished Byron had thought to pack blankets.

The man led the horse outside, and Crawford threw the blanket aside and stood up. He went to the carriage, but the jug of water had somehow picked up the ubiquitous garlic smell, and he cursed and took one of Byron’s crystal glasses to a horse-trough and dipped up some water. It didn’t taste bad, and he refilled the glass and took it over to Josephine.

He crouched by her, and for several seconds just looked at her lean, strained face. She had still been awake when he had gone to sleep, staring at the ceiling and flexing her bound wrists and ankles, and he wondered when she had finally let herself sleep.

He shook her shoulder gently, and her eyes sprang open.

“It’s me, Michael,” he said, trying to make it sound reassuring, even though he knew that his was the face she least cared to see. “Sit up so I can give you some water.”

She hiked herself up and obediently sipped from the glass he tilted to her mouth. After a few sips she shook her head, and he held the glass away.

“You can untie me,” she said hoarsely. “I won’t try to run.”

“Or kill yourself?”

She looked away. “Or kill myself.”

“I can’t,” he said wearily. “Even if it was just you, I wouldn’t. I love you, and I won’t cooperate in your death. But anyway, it’s not just you. There’s a child.”

“It’s his,” she said. Her voice was listless. “I really think it’s his. They can have children by us, you know.”

Crawford thought of Shelley’s half sister, who had grown inside Shelley’s body while he was still in his mother’s womb, and had by that prolonged contact infected him and made him not entirely human. Josephine’s haggard face reminded him of the wooden Christ-face he had imagined yesterday, and he prayed that the human fetus was all that Josephine carried.

“The child is human,” he told her. “Remember I’m a doctor that specializes in this. You were already pregnant when you first—when you first had intercourse with Polidori.” He looked away so that she wouldn’t see the rage in his eyes. “Even if Polidori has succeeded in impregnating you too—they can do that, the inhuman fetus grows with, or even in, the human one that was already there—our child is still there, and will be at least as human as Shelley was.”

She closed her eyes—he saw with sudden compassion that her eyelids were deeply wrinkled—and tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh,” she said miserably.

For perhaps a full minute neither of them spoke. A horse poked its head around a stall partition and peered at the two of them, then snorted and stepped back out of sight.

Josephine sighed. “So it might even be … twins.”

“Yes.”

Josephine shuddered, and Crawford recalled that she herself had been one of a pair of twins, and that her mother had bled to death within minutes of giving birth to her.

The stable owner walked back into the building and, still not looking over at Crawford and Josephine, opened another stall. Crawford tensed, ready to jump on Josephine and cover her mouth—but when it became clear that she wasn’t going to shout for help he was grateful for the interruption; he needed to think.

Would it help, he wondered as the man led another horse out, to remind her of her mother’s death? It had, with the help of her sister Julia, effectively wrecked her youth. Would being reminded of it make her more suicidal, or more concerned for the well-being of her child? Would it help to remind her of what Keats went through so that his sister would not become the prey of his vampire?

She had now gone two full nights without giving blood to Polidori, and Crawford remembered, from his long-ago week in Switzerland, how hard it was to do without that erosion of personality, once one had grown used to it.

She’s probably only now beginning to be able to think for herself, he thought. And she’ll be hating it. Will she acknowledge the responsibilities that she can now clearly see, or will they be so appalling that she’ll just want to return to the selfless haze?

“I thought,” she said when the man had left, “that there’d be no difference if I

killed myself. If the baby was his, suicide would just … speed up its birth.”

“And your … rebirth.”

She nodded. “I’d finally be able to stop being me, Josephine; I really would be just a walking … thing.”

“But now,” said Crawford carefully, “you know that our child would be too.”

Josephine’s eyes were wide now, and it occurred to Crawford that she looked trapped. “But we,” she whispered, “we killed her, the woman that loved you. I can’t … know that, I can’t let myself know that.”

Crawford took her shoulders. “It wasn’t Julia,” he said. “It wasn’t your sister. I know you know that, but you haven’t … what, digested it. The thing we killed was a goddamn flying lizard, like that thing that tried to kill you—and our child—two nights ago. It was a vampire.”

She lowered her head and nodded, and he saw a tear fall onto the knot at her wrists.

Too tired to worry anymore, he released her shoulders and began untying the knot.

When the stable owner came in again, Josephine and Crawford were standing together by the carriage, clinging to each other. The man smiled and muttered something about a more before going to the next stall.

They traded Byron’s carriage for a less elegant but fresher-smelling one, loaded all their baggage into it, and then paid for a room at a hotel just so that they could bathe and get into clean clothes. Crawford even shaved—and, after agonizing about it for a minute, decided not to hide the razor.

Crawford was careful to wait in the hall while Josephine took her bath and got dressed; he was dimly and incredulously beginning to hope that the two of them might someday marry after all—if they weren’t killed in Venice, and if she was carrying only one child—but he could imagine her withdrawing totally if he even seemed to be attempting familiarities right now.

When she stepped out of the room Crawford thought she must have left years in the bath water: her hair was clean and combed, and lustrous even in the dimness of the hall, and in one of Teresa’s dresses that Byron had packed for her she actually looked slim rather than gaunt.

He offered her his arm; after only the slightest hesitation she took it, and together they walked to the stairs.

They walked down the sunlit Emilian Way to the Piazza Grande, and at an outdoor table under a statue of Correggio they ate hard-boiled egg slices in tomato sauce with grilled bread and olive oil, and drank most of a bottle of Lambrusco.

Beggars were huddled in the sun in front of the Renaissance arches of the Palazzo del Commune, and a barefoot old couple in ragged clothes had ventured out among the tables; the man was wringing a devastated hat in his hands and was talking to the well-dressed people at a table near Crawford. Thankful for his own clean clothes and good food and wine, Crawford pulled a bundle of lire from his pocket and waited for the couple to make their way to the table at which he and Josephine sat.

Then he noticed the Austrian soldiers. They must have come into the square several seconds earlier, for they were already spread out and walking purposefully across the square. Two of them seized the old couple and began marching them away, and, looking past them, Crawford saw that the soldiers had rounded up all the beggars and were herding them out of the square.

Suddenly ashamed of his apparent affluence, he crumpled the bills and let them fall to the pavement. In the breeze the wad of paper scooted away across the flagstones like a little boat.

“Parma’s new Austrian masters don’t seem to approve of beggars,” he said to Josephine as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Let’s go—I hate seeming to be part of the crowd they’re protecting from them.”

Josephine too looked sickened by the spectacle, and stood up. “I think we’ve done Parma,” she said in a sprightly imitation of the voice of an English tourist. “Do let’s be moving on toward Venice.”

Crawford was delighted to see even weak, ironic humor in her. “The Tintoretto Last Supper!” he exclaimed fatuously, trying to maintain her mood.

“The Verrocchio Colleoni!” she chimed in; then, perhaps because she’d seen drawings of that grim mounted statue, her affected smile collapsed. “Back to the hotel?”

“Just for the carriage. Our old clothes they can keep.”

Austrian guards were checking everyone who was leaving the city through the high stone arch of the north gate, but the soldier who checked their carriage just leaned in the window and looked at Josephine, then peered up at Crawford with a disapproving air; he sniffed officiously and waved them on.

The carriage moved forward out of the shadow into the hot sunlight, and then the horses bounded forward, as if tired of the slow pace of city traffic. The road northward curled away ahead of them across the Po Valley, and for several hours Crawford drove happily between wide fields of yellow earth on which the vines and peach trees made geometrical figures in livid green.

A number of horses and carriages passed them, but he was not anxious to reach the nightmare end of this journey, and he wanted the horses to be fresh for the drive through Lombardy and Venetia tomorrow, so he maintained their leisurely pace.

In a couple of hours they had reached a village called Brescello that sat on the marshy banks of the Po. Crawford thought about stopping, but the air was full of some kind of lint that was making him sneeze, and he tilted his hat back and squinted along the western riverbank to see where the bridge was.

Suddenly the carriage rocked violently on its springs, and a black-bearded young man was sitting beside him.

Crawford darted a hand toward the pistol under his coat, but the man caught his wrist with a browned hand. Crawford instinctively looked at the hand, thinking of breaking the grip—and then noticed the black mark between the thumb and forefinger. It looked very much like the two-year-old stain on his own palm.

He looked up into a pair of fierce brown eyes. “Carbonari,” the man said.

Crawford nodded, a little relieved. “Si?” he said.

The man spoke rapidly in what Crawford at first thought was French; then he recognized it as the patois of Piedmont, which lay westward up the valley, and he managed to translate it mentally. “You must go down the river,” the man had said, “not across into Lombardy. Running water—it throws them off the scent.”

“Uh … who,” asked Crawford carefully, unconsciously trying to match the accent, “do you think we are?”

The man had taken the reins from Crawford and was goading the horses east down a narrower dirt track, away from the bridge.

“I think,” he said, “that you are the couple who traded in a carriage reeking of garlic, in Parma this morning; the couple who got by the border guards at the Cisa Pass yesterday because of a sick woman, and a big bribe to men who are in some trouble now.”

Suddenly Crawford remembered the guards in the Piazza that morning, who had been arresting everyone who looked as shabby as Crawford and Josephine had the day before; and he remembered the guard who had passed them through the Parma gate after having sniffed the carriage. Crawford was profoundly glad that he and Josephine had happened to abandon Byron’s vehicle.

The new carriage was among wooden shacks now, and the lint in the air was worse. Crawford sneezed six times in succession.

“They’re steeping the harvested flax crop,” Crawford’s guide said. “The air will be full of the stuff for days.” He threw a quick glance sideways at Crawford.

“You have no drink to offer a fellow soldier?”

“Sorry. Here.” Crawford handed him the flask, and the man drank everything that was in it and handed it back. “Thanks. My name’s della Torre.”

“I’m—” Crawford began, but the man quickly held up his stained hand.

“I don’t want to know,” he said. “There was a description of the two of you, mentioning your Carbonari mark, in a message an Austrian courier was bringing from Lerici yesterday. Our people killed him in the mountains.” He looked over his shoulder, back toward the bridge. “Clearly the courier they killed was not the only one they sent.”

“Have the Austrians followed us here?” Crawford asked. “Perhaps we should abandon this carriage too….”

“Yes, you should and you will, but not at this moment. They are not here yet—I passed them half an hour ago on the road from Parma, on a faster horse than any of the soldiers had, and I only got here a few minutes ago.”

“Do you know … what it is they want us for?” Crawford asked. Shelley’s heart? he wondered; the men I killed in Rome? Both?

“No,” said della Torre, “and I don’t want to know. I just assume you’re on Carbonari business.”

“I am that.”

A series of decrepit wooden docks segmented the roadside on their left now, and della Torre slanted the carriage into a narrow alley between two ware house like buildings on one of the docks. Crawford heard a squeal and splintering snap as some part of the carriage caught against the corner of one of the buildings and apparently broke off.

Della Torre ignored it. “There will be a boat here,” he said, and hopped down to the resounding boards.

Several big, scarred-looking men emerged from a dark doorway in the building they’d collided with, and della Torre began arguing with them so immediately that Crawford thought they must be old enemies resuming some long-standing conflict.

Alarmed both by the pursuing Austrians and by his new ally, he climbed down and opened the carriage door. Josephine was asleep, and he reluctantly shook her shoulder.

She opened her eyes, but there was no particular alertness in them.

“We’re abandoning the carriage,” he said to her clearly, “and proceeding by boat. You might want to step out.”

“Boat?” she asked doubtfully.

“Boat,” he said. “What’s wrong? Do you want him to be able to follow you?” She closed her eyes. “You know I don’t,” she said. She climbed out of the carriage and stood by him, swaying. He put his arm around her. “But,” she whispered, “you know my blood does.”

Della Torre walked around the carriage; he was slapping his forehead. “The men of Emilia are corrupt,” he said when he had paused before Crawford and lowered his hand. “These men want a thousand lire for the use of one of their boats. It is their best boat, understand, and in it I and one of them can take you to Porto Tolle, on the Adriatic, in two days at the most.”

Crawford’s stomach felt hollow. He only had about fifteen hundred lire. Still, he couldn’t see that he had any choice but to deal with these people, and there didn’t seem to be time to try to talk the price down.

“We’ll take it,” he said, despising the way his voice sounded like a very old man’s.

Della Torre nodded bleakly, then shrugged. “For nothing, though, they will take responsibility for the carriage and horses that the Austrians are looking so hard for.”

I daresay they will, thought Crawford bitterly. But, “Very well,” he said. And how much of this are you skimming off? he wondered.

“I,” della Torre went on stoically, “will help you take your baggage onto the boat.”

“You’re too kind,” said Josephine in English as they started across the dock.

The boat was about thirty feet long, with apple-shaped bows and a leeboard like a wooden wing on each side; the mast was hinged and lying back across the stern, and Crawford could see that it would carry a gaff-rigged mainsail and a jib. He admitted to himself that it did look serviceable.

Within minutes the mast had been raised and locked in place, and as soon as the baggage and the four passengers were aboard, the lines were cast off and the sails were raised and the land-side leeboard was swivelled down into the water, and the boat began angling out away from the dock.

Josephine had gone straight to one of the narrow bunks below the deck, but Crawford refilled his flask and sat with it by the starboard rail, and he watched the village recede behind them.

Today was Monday. They had left Lerici on Saturday night, and already he had spent more than half of the two thousand lire Byron had given them … and lost Byron’s carriage and horses.

But the brandy made him optimistic. With luck, he thought, we’ve also lost our pursuers, both human and inhuman.

All afternoon the boat beat on down the Po, between green fields dotted with white cattle, and at sunset Josephine came tottering up onto the deck.

Della Torre stared at her for a moment, then walked across the deck to where Crawford sat. “She’s bitten,” he said.

Crawford nodded drunkenly. “We’re going to get her unbitten.”

“Why do you go toward the sea, then? The Alps, I’m told, are where one goes to shed the vampires.”

“We’re going to do it in Venice.”

“Venice?” Della Torre shook his head. “Venice is their stronghold! That’s where their king is supposed to be living.”

Josephine walked up and without a word took Crawford’s flask and drank deeply from it. “God,” she said in English, “I’m—” She shook her head, staring at the distant riverbank.

“I know,” said Crawford. “I’ve felt it too. Fight it—for the child’s sake if not your own.”

She shivered, but nodded and took another sip.

“Talk Italian,” said della Torre. For the first time, Crawford heard real uneasiness in the man’s voice.

The sky was darkening ahead, and clouds curled solidly in the sky.

At dusk the man from the docks—whose name, Crawford gathered, was Sputo, the Italian for spit—started to tack in toward the lights of a city, but della Torre told him to keep going, to sail all night. The man shrugged and obeyed, only remarking that if they were to go on they’d have to kindle up running lights. Della Torre walked around the boat with a firepot, carefully lighting the lamps that swung on chains out over the water.

The wind had picked up, and the boat was scudding along under only the half-reefed mainsail.

Crawford was in the bow, fingering the grip of the pistol under his jacket and watching the turbulent sky—but he was nevertheless taken by surprise when the thing struck.

Aloud, musical rushing sound slashed the air like a sword across the strings of a harp, and then the deck was heavily struck and resounding hollowly—the boat was jarred sideways with a loud crack and a ripple of popping rigging, and when Crawford scrambled around and looked back toward the stern the hair stood up on the back of his neck.

A translucent human figure, a woman, was rising slowly in the dark sky above the mast, its long hair streaming out behind it like the fine tentacles of a jellyfish. The long glassy arms and legs were flailing, and Crawford realized that the creature had rebounded upward after hitting the deck, and was now about

to dive into it again. The face of the thing was contorted with idiot rage.

Della Torre and Sputo had scrambled to the stern and were cowering there, though della Torre had drawn a pistol; Josephine was standing beside the mast, staring up into the face of the woman in the air. It seemed to Crawford that Josephine’s head was canted, that she was looking upward through her glass eye.

Crawford drew his pistol and aimed up at the inhumanly beautiful form, wishing the boat would stop rocking and that his hands were steadier, and that he had a few more pistols with him—and then he let out the breath he’d been holding, and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion jolted his wrist and the long yellow-blue muzzle-flash blinded him, but over the ringing in his ears he heard the harsh metallic music of the thing’s scream.

Crawford rolled away to the other side of the bow as the air shook with the firing of della Torre’s gun.

Again the boat was struck. Crawford got to his knees on the slanting deck, blinking furiously to rid his eyes of the red dazzle-spot that stained his vision.

Dimly he could make out the inhuman woman’s form; it was contorting in midair only a couple of yards over the deck, its fine hair spread out around its head like a flexing crown. One perfect leg was stretched behind the body and its clawed left hand was slowly stretching out toward Josephine’s face.

Josephine was just staring at the approaching hand.

Crawford sobbed a curse and lunged aft at the thing, but even as he took the first of the two steps that would propel him uselessly into the creature he saw Sputo draw a knife from behind his collar and throw it.

The woman exploded in an icy gust that punched Crawford backward off his feet and filled his nostrils with the smell of cold clay.

Crawford wanted nothing more than to lie on the deck; but he rolled over and got up onto his knees and then, gripping the rail, he stood up.

The woman-shaped thing was gone—a wisp of fog out over the water might have been what was left of her. The boat had lost headway and was heeled around almost perpendicular to the current, and it disoriented him to look aft and dimly see the shoreline beyond the stern.

Josephine had sat down against the mast; Sputo walked up next to her, and he crouched to pick up the knife he had thrown. He grinned at Crawford and held the blade up. “Ferrobreccia,” he said.

Iron breach, thought Crawford. Eisener breche.

Della Torre barked some harsh order at Sputo, who shrugged, tucked his knife back behind his collar, and went back to the stern.

For the next ten minutes everyone, even the subdued Josephine, was kept busy lowering the sail and splicing and repairing lines and bailing water out of the hold. At last della Torre took the helm and had Crawford raise the gaff-spar halfway, and the sail filled without snapping the rigging, and the bow began ponderously to come around into the wind.

Crawford was crouched by the broken-off leeboard, where until a moment ago he’d been ready to release the runner line if the sail or the gaff-spar had looked overstrained, and della Torre now left the helm to Sputo and walked over and leaned on the rail near Crawford.

“She,” he said, nodding toward Josephine, who was up at the bow, staring ahead, “summoned that thing. To kill us.”

Crawford laughed weakly. “You know that’s not true.”

“How do I know?” Della Torre’s tone was one of token anger, and when Crawford looked up at him the only expression he could see in the man’s eyes was haunted bewilderment. “The thing came to her, was reaching for her.”

“Not to do her any good. If Sputo’s knife-cast had missed, I’m pretty sure my … my wife’s face would have been torn off.”

Della Torre shook his head. “It came to us—something drew it.” He heaved himself away from the rail and went back to talk to Sputo.

Only Sputo slept that night; Josephine refused to go below, and della Torre worked the tiller with one hand so that he could clutch a pistol in the other, and his eyes were scanning the currents of the sky as much as the dimly visible river ahead of them, and Crawford paced ceaselessly from one side of the boat to the other, peering out at the dark lands moving past.

The creature’s screams and the gunshots must have been heard by some villagers, he thought, and fishermen and other boatmen out on the Po. Would the Austrians hear of it? What would they make of it?

Several times he heard distant singing, and once when a breeze brought a few particularly clear notes he looked back at della Torre, who just shook his head.

And once there was a rushing in the sky, high in the empty vaults through which the clouds sailed, but though both men crouched tensely, pistols drawn and cocked and aimed upward, the sound was not repeated, and after several minutes they cautiously relaxed again.

Crawford allowed himself a swig of brandy and leaned against the rail. Sometime during this silent watch he had figured out what it was that must have drawn that air-creature, and he prayed again that Josephine was carrying only a human baby, and not the sort of pair Shelley’s mother had carried.

The thing had been drawn by Shelley’s heart, which was currently packed, still wrapped in butcher paper, in one of Crawford’s bags.

Shelley had been an inadmissible mix of species, like a baby bird who has been handled by humans and now carries their smell; and like a mother bird, most of the pure examples of either species had found him repugnant—though in the case of the human species, the members had not been able to say exactly why he was so intrinsically offensive, and had had to use the excuses of his atheism and his revolutionary poetry and his morals as reasons to disown him and hound him from country to country, so that his only friends had been other outcasts.

His heart still embodied the appalling mix, and was therefore still a tangible offense against the inherent separateness of the two forms of life.

Shelley had once told him about having been attacked by one of the airy creatures in a boat on Lake Leman, and how he had been strongly tempted—since in that case the boat had very nearly been sunk—to use the incident as an excuse for the watery suicide that he had always known could free his family from the consequences of his existence.

Crawford thought now that the main reason Shelley had considered drowning must have been the awareness of rejection by both forms of life on earth. Crawford didn’t want a child of his to have to face the same exile.

At dawn Crawford and Josephine went below, to two separate bunks. Della Torre stayed on deck with the refreshed and chatty Sputo.

Crawford woke up to someone shaking his shoulder.

“Good morning-which-is-evening, Inglese,” said della Torre. “I think you will want to be leaving the boat.”

Crawford struggled up in the bunk, bumping his head on the close underside of the deck. He didn’t know where he was. “Leaving the boat,” he said cautiously, stalling for time.

“We are only a mile short of Punta Maestra, where the Po River empties into the Adriatic Sea. Austrian military boats are blocking the river ahead of us. We’re moving slowly, but you will nevertheless have to swim away—you and the woman both—soon, if you hope not to be noticed. Already it is too late for us to slant in to shore without drawing their attention.” He shrugged. “Sorry.”

Crawford suddenly remembered everything, and he was grateful that he’d been able to get a lot of sleep. “I understand,” he said quietly, rolling out of the bunk and shaking Josephine’s shoulder. “Josephine,” he said. “We’ve got some swimming to do.”

Sputo and della Torre helped them tie their luggage onto a couple of planks.

“These articles are likely to get wet,” della Torre advised Crawford, “when you are swimming.”

“That’s … quite a thought, della Torre,” said Crawford, absent-mindedly speaking in English.

The riverbanks were shrouded in fog, and the setting sun was just a red glow astern, but Crawford could see the line of boats ahead, toward which they were drifting.

For several long seconds he tried to think of some way to keep from having to swim. At last he shook his head and took Josephine’s arm and walked to the stern, and the two of them sat down and took off their shoes and added them to the raft, tying them down securely.

“Thank you,” he said as he swung one leg over the transom, “but I don’t think we quite got our money’s worth. If we come back this way, I’ll want a ride back up the river.”

Della Torre laughed. “You’re going to Venice, you said? If you manage to come back, we’ll sail you to England.”

Crawford jumped off the back of the boat.

The water seemed icily cold after the recent warmth of the bunk, and when he had bobbed back up to the surface he could only breathe in great, whispered hoots. The makeshift little raft splashed in next to him, followed by Josephine, who, more stoic than Crawford, was breathing normally when she surfaced. Crawford caught his floating hat and set it back on his bald head.

He waved to della Torre—and softly called, “We might just take you up on that!"—and then he and Josephine each took an end of the little raft and began paddling toward the north bank.

CHAPTER 25

They ferry over this Lethean sound

Both to and fro, their sorrow to augment,

And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach

The tempting stream, with one small drop to lose

In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe,

All in one moment, and so near the brink;

But Fate withstands, and, to oppose the attempt,

Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards

The ford, and of itself the water flies …

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

It was only early evening, and the breeze that swept the lagoon from over the low sand-hills of the Lido behind the gondola was warm; but Crawford was shivering as he saw the filigreed white bulk of the Doge’s Palace, and the tower of the campanile, rising on the dark horizon beyond the gondola’s beak. The lagoon was calm, and the gondola’s bow hardly rose and fell as the keel skated through the water.

Crawford was holding the jar of Byron’s blood in one hand and Shelley’s charred, paper-wrapped heart in the other. The poets return, he thought nervously.

He dreaded what he was going to have to do, and he took a frail comfort in the expanse of water, glittering with reflections of the many-colored lights of the city, that still lay ahead to be crossed. Several minutes at least you’ve got, he told himself.

For the first time he noticed that the upswept stem of the gondola was metal, and shaped vaguely like a trident blade. He turned around in his seat and waved at the gondolier, then pointed forward at the stem. “Why is it shaped like a blade?” he asked.

The gondolier managed to shrug without breaking the rhythm of his sculling. “Tradition,” he said. “Gondolas in Venice have always had it. It’s called the ferro.”

Crawford nodded and looked forward again. From where he sat the ferro did make a breach across the many-eyed and toothy-looking face of the Doge’s Palace.

He looked worriedly at Josephine, who was slumped on the seat across from him, beside their bag and Byron’s sword cane. She was shivering too, but from fever more than fear.

The two of them had had to walk eastward last night for several hours, slogging through marshes as often as walking on roads, to get past the line of Austrian boats blocking the Po, and by the time they had found an early-morning fisherman who would agree to sail them north to the Lido, Josephine had been hot and trembling and unsure about where they were or what year it was. More often than not she had seemed to believe that they were back in Rome, fleeing south from Keats’s apartment through the ruins of the Roman Forum.

And several times she’d been doubled up with cramps, though when he’d become alarmed she’d told him that she had them frequently, and that they always passed within a few minutes. He worried that something might be going wrong with her pregnancy—certainly her life recently wasn’t the sort of regimen he’d have recommended for an expectant mother.

The white pillars of the Church of San Giorgio were squarely off the portside now, a hundred yards away across the low waves, and the gondola was slanting across the wide mouth of the Canale di San Marco toward the domes of the Church of San Zaccaria, a hundred yards to the east of the Ducal Palace. Crawford could now see the two columns standing on the seaward side of the brightly lighted Piazza.

Within minutes San Giorgio was astern, and away off to port was the broad, boat-spangled corridor of the Grand Canal; the façades of the tall palaces, seen end-on, were a Byzantine glory of lights and arches and ornate balconies.

Crawford stared at the spectacle until he noticed a turbulence in the water out between the gondola and the lights.

“Faster,” he called to the gondolier, who sighed but increased the rhythm of the oar.

Crawford realized that they were on the fringes of the Graiae’s focus—the agitation in the water had undoubtedly been the third sister, heaving blindly under the surface at the perception of the heart moving past.

It was time. He laid the heart on his knees, and then, with infinite reluctance, he opened the jar. If only this cup could pass away, he thought with forlorn irony—and he took a deep breath and raised it to his lips.

Somehow his disgust was so great that he didn’t even gag at the garlic and vinegar and rust taste. When only a couple of spoonfuls remained in the jar, he surreptitiously poured the stuff out onto the floorboards and placed the sole of one shoe in the puddle; then he dropped the empty jar into the sea, feeling as though he were handing it to a friend. He recalled that, until the Austrians had taken over, the doges had annually taken part in an ancient ritual that was supposed to marry the city to the sea. Help me tonight, he mentally asked the dark waves.

The canal scene faded, and he was lying on his back in a narrow bed under a low wooden ceiling. His eyes burned and his throat was dry.

“Good evening, my lord,” he said in English. The lips were cracked and chapped.

“You’re there,” he felt the body say. “Am I, yet?” The head rolled to the side, and Crawford could see a tub of water on the floor.

“Not quite yet. When I step ashore you will be. I’ll give you plenty of warning so you can be in the tub when I do it.”

“Damn this scheme of yours,” said Byron. He was quiet for a moment, then said softly, “God, she is the most beautiful city on Earth,” and Crawford knew Byron was looking at Venice through his eyes while he was seeing Byron’s room in Lerici.

With a slight effort of will Crawford resumed his own body. The gondolier was staring at him dubiously, and Crawford realized that he must have seemed to be talking to himself. Byron had clenched Crawford’s hand on the package that contained Shelley’s heart, and Crawford loosened the fingers a little.

The gondola had slanted back westward, and the bow now pointed just east of the Ducal Palace. Close ahead were bristling ranks of docked gondolas moored at right angles to the wide stone stairs, and Crawford’s gondola had already passed between two of the outer mooring poles.

“Get in the tub,” he said.

Crawford saw the docked gondolas grow nearer and then flank them as the one he was in was deftly edged into a space between two others, and he tensed for the exertions to come—but he nevertheless gave an involuntary shout, for he could suddenly feel cold water up to his waist.

Josephine jumped and stared at him, and he managed to wave reassuringly. “It’s all,” he said through chattering teeth, “going according to plan, yes, great God. We’re … in the tub.”

Behind him the gondolier was muttering something about l’Inglese pazzo, the insane Englishman.

In his head he heard Byron say, “Do you like that, Aickman? I’m letting you do the feeling for a while.”

Then Crawford thrashed in the tub, for his body in Venice had stood up without his volition. He was seeing what his body was looking at in Venice but feeling what Byron’s body felt in Lerici.

“The … blood,” Crawford made his own body say, “is on the sole of … our left shoe. Don’t rub it off or get it in the water before you step ashore.”

The gondolier had stepped onto a little floating dock that projected a few yards out into the water, and he reached a hand down to Josephine and helped her up out of the gondola and then handed her the bag and the cane.

Crawford found himself waving the help away and then hopping on one foot up onto the dock and then down its thumping boards to the lowest of the stone steps. God only knew what the gondolier was making of this.

On the pavement he paused for a moment on one leg. “So this is what a sound right leg feels like,” said Byron through Crawford’s mouth.

“Don’t try the left one,” said Crawford through the same mouth. He was growing accustomed to the water in the tub, and was able to talk without chattering the teeth they shared. “A pistol ball in Rome made a mess of the thigh muscles.”

Byron lowered the left foot and pressed its wet sole against the step.

Like the whisper of a loosed arrow diminishing in one ear and then being audible to the other, Crawford felt a focus of attention leave the body in the tub and arrive at the body standing on the step.

“You’re here now,” said Crawford tightly. “Go.”

Crawford relaxed in the tub and simply rode his body passively, like a man riding a horse that knows the way.

Byron was walking across the canal-side pavement awkwardly, apparently from his lifetime habit of putting his weight on his left leg, and he was tearing the paper off of the heart.

“You do understand that I’m Byron?” he asked Josephine, who was reeling along beside him. “Even though I’m in Aickman’s body?”

Josephine frowned in concentration, but finally nodded. “Yes,” she said. “You’re going to free the eye for jumping from one sister to the other, and then you’re going to try to catch it in the heart.”

“Very good. Now in a moment I’ll want you to walk away from me, stand clear, and watch me and the people around me; I’m going to be busy, and might well miss something. Act like a tourist who’s out shopping. Hell, do some shopping—Aickman, how much money do you have left?—Uh, about two hundred lire—Two hundred? Out of two thousand? And I suppose the horses and carriage are gone?—Well, yes—Damn me!” Crawford could feel Byron clenching Crawford’s fists. “Well, if we’re not killed here we’ll talk about that later. Where is it?—In our right coat pocket.”

Byron dug out the bills and handed them to Josephine. “Here. Buy some touristy junk but keep watching for anyone, especially soldiers, watching me. Got that?”

“Yes,” said Josephine. “Do you want to carry the … cane?”

“No—this doesn’t seem to be a night for close work. And if it all goes very wrong, you can use it to defend yourself.”

They had passed the darkly pillared façade of the building that had been the city’s prison centuries ago, and reached the foot of the Ponte della Paglia, a stone bridge over the narrow canal that flanked the Doge’s Palace.

Halfway across the bridge Byron paused, and for Josephine’s sake pointed and for Crawford’s sake looked up the dark little canal to the archingly roofed Bridge of Sighs, which looked in the dim light like a jawless skull wedged between the walls of the two forbidding buildings.

“That’s the bridge across which prisoners were taken from the prison, for execution between the pillars on the Piazza. Thank God we don’t cross it—though we’re crossing a bridge that parallels it. Keep moving,” he added involuntarily as Crawford took control of the mouth for a moment.

Byron laughed, and resumed his limping pace. “It’s clear you’re no longer infected, Aickman,” he said. “You have no poetry in you.”

He turned to Josephine and went on, “Now if any soldiers are watching me, and coming toward me, I want you to scream, as loud as you can. Pretend you saw a bug or something. And if they’re pointing guns at me, scream several times, as if you’ve become hysterical. Have you got that?”

Josephine sighed, and Crawford thought it was a good sign that she evidently dreaded the possible necessity of making a spectacle of herself. “Yes,” she said.

“Good.” They had reached the lowest, widest-set pillars of the Ducal Palace. It took them a minute to limp and lurch past the building to where the Piazza opened away on their right.

The Graiae columns were only a dozen yards away. Crawford would have flinched a little if he’d been working his body—the marble pedestals of the columns alone were half as high as a man, and the wide stone shafts soared away far upward against the night sky.

At that moment bells began ringing—the bronze figures on top of the Coducci clock tower at the far end of the Piazza had moved forward on their tracks and begun swinging their hammers at the bell. “Now start slanting away from me,” said Byron.

Since Byron didn’t turn his head Crawford couldn’t see Josephine go, but from his tub on Italy’s west coast he wished her well. Crawford felt a strong sense of being watched—it seemed to partake of the echoing of the bells, and set all the stones of the buildings vibrating like plucked violin strings.

Byron was limping toward the nearest of the two columns, the one with the statue of the winged lion of St. Mark at its top. The far one was capped with a statue of St. Theodore standing on a crocodile, and Crawford thought of St. Michael killing the serpent.

The fourth shivering bell-note rang away across the water.

There was a fist-sized spot moving down the near column. Byron stared at it, and Crawford tried to figure out what it consisted of. It wasn’t a patch of darkness or light … and then he realized that the stone of the column, the minute pocks and scratches, were particularly clear in the spot, as if a clarifying lens were moving down the shaft.

“I believe that’s the eye,” muttered Byron tensely as the sixth note rang from the clock tower.

He walked past the column toward the farther one, and Crawford was grateful that Byron looked back; the spot of clarity was around on this side of the lion’s column now. The sense of a vast attention focussed on him was now terribly strong, like a pressure in the air. The bell in the clock tower was still ringing, though Crawford had lost count of the notes.

When Byron was nearly halfway to the far pillar he paused and crouched—like, thought Crawford, a mouse between the feet of a giant.

“Sorry, Aickman,” Byron said, then stuck Crawford’s maimed little finger into Crawford’s mouth and bit the scarcely healed stump with Crawford’s teeth.

It bled freely, and Byron shook Crawford’s finger over the rippled pavement, spattering blood onto the stones.

Crawford shivered, but not at the cold of the water in the tub—for the drops hit the pavement in a symmetrical pattern, as if defining the points on a crystal. They seemed to resonate almost visibly in the vibration of the bells.

Byron looked up at the sky, gauging the clouds and the positions of the stars, and then he looked out at the water of the Canale di San Marco, apparently noting the level of the water; and Crawford for a moment sensed Byron’s thoughts, and knew that he was choosing from among a number of incantations the one that would work in this particular alignment of the elements.

Then he began chanting under his breath, against the rhythm of the bells, but though Crawford listened closely to his own voice he couldn’t decide whether the language he was speaking was Greek or Latin—or, conceivably, some much older tongue.

Still chanting quietly, Byron straightened and resumed walking toward the St. Theodore column.

Crawford heard a sustained musical note rush past close over his head, and then the spot of clarity was on the broad surface of the far column.

The eye was freed to be passed back and forth among the sisters.

The bells had ceased, and the last harsh echoes rolled away across the water toward the domes of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute.

Byron had stripped all the paper off of the heart now, and he gripped it in Crawford’s good hand so that the split open side of the thing faced outward. He held his hand up, with the palm toward the spot of definition, and began walking backward.

“Hope I can catch it,” he whispered.

Josephine screamed; and then screamed again, and again.

Byron threw Crawford’s body to the ground and began rolling across the wavy pavement toward the ranks of gondolas, and Crawford heard two bangs from the far end of the Piazza, and then heard the twang of a leaden ball darting past next to his ear.

“That’s torn it,” gasped Byron out of Crawford’s throat as he rolled to his feet and ran in a low crouch toward the water. “We can—try it again sometime. No, get into one of the gondolas. Are you mad, Aickman? Swimming’s the route now. Damn it—”

Crawford exerted his will and forcibly took control of his body. They had reached the steps now, and he ran down them, tossed the heart onto a seat in one of the gondolas and began untying the little boat from its mooring.

When it was free he ran down the short dock it had been moored to, pushing the blade-shaped stem of it ahead of him, and then when the dock ended he jumped into the seat beside Shelley’s heart.

The boat was arrowing backward out away from the stairs, and he scrambled aft and, trying to keep low, grabbed the steering oar.

He kept his jaws clenched, but he could still hear the words Byron was making his throat form: There’s nothing to be done out here—we had to be equidistant between the two pillars, so that the eye would dart back and forth between them!

Another gunshot sounded behind them, and the ball skipped away past them across the water with a sound like startled birds in tall grass.

Dive overboard! hummed the voice in his throat. I can swim us to safety! I know a hundred places I can swim to in this city where we’ll be safe!

“Soon,” said Crawford. He had worked the gondola around and was sculling furiously, working up speed. As his arm worked he was peering ahead, trying to judge the relative distances of the Grand Canal and the Church of San Giorgio and the Piazza behind him.

“I guess those bells,” he panted, “weren’t—tolling the hour. They were—an alarm.”

He was just beginning to wonder desperately if he could have miscalculated the place where he’d seen the turbulence in the water earlier, when he saw it again, ahead.

The water was churning at a spot a hundred yards ahead of the prow, and then splashing violently, flinging up a cloud of spray that glittered in the multicolored lights—and then the third sister raised her head above the white water, into the warm night air.

His mouth formed the word “Jesus,” and he didn’t know whether it had been Byron or himself who had spoken.

Perhaps the thing had lost its shape in its long years underwater; or perhaps she had never been carved into as symmetrical a pillar as her sisters, in which case it had probably not been an accident when the workmen had dropped her into the canal in the twelfth century.

Her head was a barnacled boulder twelve feet across, and under a single gaping socket her mouth—as wide as Crawford’s gondola was long—lowered open and then crashed shut with an explosion of iridescent spray and a sound like a stone door dropped closed over the whole city. The head swung slowly, blindly, back and forth over the water.

Crawford stood up—having to grip the gunwale, for the boat was rocking in the suddenly choppy water—and, gripping the heart the way Byron had, turned away from her and faced the other two pillars. He raised the heart over his head.

Again he heard the musical note, distant at first but getting rapidly louder, and in the space of an instant a dozen stars in quick succession became momentarily brighter and steadier. As soon as he had noticed the effect they had resumed their dim twinkling.

“You missed,” he heard himself say. “And here come the Austrians.”

He had been peripherally aware of another, bigger gondola angling out from the docks, and when he looked closely at it he could see the barrels of long guns against the lights of the distant Piazza.

He looked back toward the third sister. The socket above her mouth was no longer empty—it was darker than it had been before, but it gleamed, and every needle of light it reflected seemed aimed straight into Crawford’s own blinking and ephemeral eyes. Shelley’s heart flexed in his hand, with a faint crackling sound.

Hastily he tossed the heart onto the seat and sculled his gondola around, and then began heaving at the oar to get closer to the Piazza.

“A little farther,” he panted, his face running with sweat, “past the equidistant point, and then I’ll try it again.”

He spared a glance to port, toward the Austrian boat; they were still moving in the opposite direction, as if intending to pass the third sister on the far side.

They’re afraid of her, he realized, afraid to shoot toward her; they want to get to a position from which they can shoot at us with only the lagoon and the distant Lido behind us.

He looked back, toward the third sister. “You’ll have to row farther than you thought,” said Byron, unnecessarily. “She’s following us.”

Crawford leaned hard into the oar, sweeping it back and forth through the water so hard that he was afraid it would break, and he was desperately pleased to see the wake his gondola was throwing; and when he thought that he had outdistanced the advancing thing by a few more yards, he dropped the oar and picked up the heart and again held it up.

Again the music swept past him, briefly clarifying a line of stars. “Missed again,” he gasped, before Byron could say it.

Then the night lit with a yellow flash in the east, and the gondola was jarred by a dozen hammer-blows; stung with flying splinters and off-balance, Crawford rolled over the gunwale as the multiple booming of the Austrian guns shook the air. Instinctively he kicked off his shoes as he splashed into the water.

He nearly lost his breath when Byron spoke in his throat underwater. We’re invisible to everyone now, came the muffled sound from his closed throat. Let me swim back.

Crawford gratefully relaxed back in the tub of water in the Lerici inn and watched the black Venetian water rush past his eyes.

When Byron had thrashed Crawford’s body several yards back underwater toward the third sister, he hunched it and then kicked strongly with the legs, and Crawford was for a moment out of the water to his waist, and his hand, still holding the heart, was lashed upward hard enough to nearly sprain his shoulder.

And the music swept up in volume, and then held steady at a tooth-razoring pitch. Time seemed to have stopped—he could see drops of water suspended in the air, and he wasn’t falling back into the water.

He had caught the eye.

He forced his head up to look at it. The stars were as clear and bright as luminous diamonds just in front of the ragged bulk that was Shelley’s heart. The eye was wedged in the split, barely captured.

He forced his hand forward, closing the cloven heart around the patch of unnatural clarity, and he squeezed his hand hard to hold the eye in.

Motion crashed back in on him as the music was muffled, and then he had fallen back into the water. His legs and his free arm began pumping, propelling him back toward the Piazza.

Crawford knew his body was very close to total exhaustion, and he was horribly aware that the canal bottom was far below his feet, and that the nearest solid ground was a hundred yards away in either direction; he didn’t try to resist when Byron again took over the job of swimming.

And even Byron seemed to be finding it difficult. The current had carried them well east of the glow on the horizon that was the Piazza, and though he swam in at a slant against the current, at a fairly good speed considering that one of his hands had to grip the heart, he had to pause frequently simply to float and work his heaving lungs.

At one point his bad leg began to tighten up painfully, and Crawford thrashed Byron’s body in panic in the tub at Lerici, but Byron just gasped a curse and folded double in the water to massage the thigh muscles with his free hand. He had clearly had to do this many times before—his hand worked neither too quickly nor too hard, and within a minute the muscles were unkinked.

Byron breathed deeply when he hauled Crawford’s head back up into the cooling night air. “You did mention your leg,” he said stoically. “Onward.”

Three times they heard gunshots, followed by the soft whipping sound of lead balls snipping the wave-tops as they flew away toward the Lido, and for several minutes after each shot Byron swam with a sort of dog-paddle stroke that, though slower, was quieter. The hand holding the heart was beginning to cramp now.

Crawford’s lungs seemed to be wringing themselves empty and then filling to capacity every second, and his heart was a staccato hammer in the soft tissues of his chest. His left hand, holding the heart, was an aching claw. The lights of the Piazza were closer, but when Byron next paused to rest he gasped, “Your body’s—not going to—make it.”

Before Crawford could use his mouth himself, Byron was speaking again. “I’ll—try something.”

Suddenly Crawford was entirely in the room in the Lerici inn. Trelawny was standing in the doorway and staring at him. “You had a fit,” Trelawny said worriedly. “Let me get you out of that tub.”

“No, damn you,” said Crawford in Byron’s voice, “leave me alone.”

Had Byron decided to throw Crawford to safety and ride Crawford’s used-up body down to the canal bottom? But that wouldn’t work—after a couple of hours, at the most, the blood-induced link would dissolve. Byron’s body would simply die, and Crawford would find himself, for a few terrible minutes, in the drowned body.

All at once the body he was in sagged with stunning fatigue, and was panting violently. Sweat sprang out on Byron’s forehead as Trelawny swore in alarm and rushed to the tub, but Crawford managed to choke out a strangled laugh as Trelawny lifted the body from the tub, for he realized what Byron had done.

Just as he had, earlier, let Crawford be the one to feel the cold water of the tub, he had now let his own body take the exhaustion Crawford’s felt. He had used the blood link to send the fatigue poisons to his own body, and send whatever it was that made blood fresh to Crawford’s.

Trelawny had gently laid him down on the narrow bed. “Where’s that damned Aickman when we need him?” he muttered to himself as he flung blankets over Byron’s shivering, gasping, nearly unconscious form.

After a few minutes the panting began to subside, and Crawford opened eyes to see the gondola docks close ahead, and he felt his right hand close around the upright wooden trunk of one of the outer mooring poles.

His body was panting, but evenly. “Did I kill myself?” asked Byron bitterly through Crawford’s mouth.

“No,” said Crawford, staring gratefully at the nearby hulls rocking in the water. “Trelawny thought you’d had it, but … you’re fine now. I’ll bet it did me a world of good,” Byron added. “Does Josephine have dry clothes for you in that bag? Yes. Then let’s get out.”

He climbed up onto the little dock, noticing with respect that he was still somehow clutching the heart.

With even more respect he saw that Byron had swum to the same dock they’d arrived at earlier in the evening. Helps to have a native guide, he thought. “Byron,” he said feelingly, “thank you for … for everything.”

The gondolier who had boated them in from the Lido was standing on the shoreward end of the dock; he had been talking to some other gondoliers, but was now staring at, and clearly recognizing, Crawford.

Crawford took back control of his body and smiled at the man, and he was wondering what he could say to make this unconventional reappearance seem mundane, when he saw Josephine hurrying toward them down the fondamenta, the sword cane and their one remaining bag still blessedly clutched in her hands.

Crawford set the heart down on the dock and then stood up and began taking off his clothes, and the gondolier shouted to several saints and took a step toward him as if intending to throw him back into the water.

Josephine’s call for him to stop was so imperious, though, that he paused; and when she had come panting up and shoved a handful of lire into his hand, he actually bowed. Crawford by this time was naked.

“Take us back to the Lido,” Crawford gasped as he opened the bag Josephine handed him and began pulling on a dry pair of trousers. When he had got them on he wrapped Shelley’s heart tightly in a shirt.

The gondolier shrugged, and waved toward the boat they’d come in on. Josephine stepped into it, followed by Crawford, who was carrying the balled-up shirt.

The gondola was expertly poled out into the water, and Crawford looked back toward the Piazza. The soldiers’ boat was still crisscrossing the water well to the west, and such soldiers as he could see on the pavement of the Piazza were looking out toward it.

The gondolier turned the boat, and now the bow faced the darkness of the lagoon, away from the lights of the city. The breeze was colder now, but Crawford didn’t even bother to dig in the bag for a shirt or jacket or shoes.

“We … goddamn … did it,” he breathed wonderingly. “Great God, my body’s a wreck!” he said helplessly then. “I suppose I’ll live, though—for a while, anyway. Now what about the eighteen hundred lire you spent, and what about the horses and carriage?” Crawford laughed in plain relief. “Byron,” he said, “I will curry your horses and mop your floors for twenty years to pay you back. I—”

He paused, staring at Josephine.

She was sitting with her legs crossed. She had got mud on her shoes at the dock, and now she dragged a finger down the sole, and stared at the resulting ball of mud on her fingertip.

Then she put her finger into her mouth and licked it clean and began scraping her sole again.

Expectant mothers, he knew, often ate odd things—it was as if their bodies knew what the growing babies needed to form themselves.

Abruptly he remembered the clay he’d seen around her mouth when she’d first appeared at the Casa Magni four nights ago—and he remembered too the uncharacteristic pain her three-month pregnancy was giving her.

For several seconds he tried to think of some explanation besides the one he knew must be the true one, and at last he had to abandon them all.

Clearly she carried more than just a human baby.

He became aware that she was looking at him, and he tried to reassume the satisfied smile he’d been wearing moments before.

She wasn’t fooled. “What is it?” she asked.

Byron repeated aloud the thought Crawford had just had. “It’s twins,” Crawford heard his own mouth say.

The gondola surged on through the dark water for a full minute while Josephine stared at the bloodstained floorboards. At last she looked up at him from eyes exhausted of tears. “I think I knew that.”

Crawford leaned forward and took her hand. In his other hand he clutched the shirt that wrapped Shelley’s heart, and he hefted it. “Shelley had a good life,” he said, forcing each word out as if it were a stone he was pushing in through the doorway of a house, “all things considered.”

Now she was sobbing, but still without tears. “What did we accomplish tonight, then?”

“We … freed you, the child’s mother,” Crawford said. “And we bought for the child at least as human a life as Shelley had, as opposed—” He paused. The effort of speaking was almost too much. “—As opposed to a life of pure … stone. We saved Byron, and his children, and Teresa. It was … a … worthwhile endeavor … on the whole.” His own throat was closing, and he turned away so that she wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes.

For a while neither of them spoke. “And all of us,” she said finally in a desolated voice, “have to flee across oceans now, or else be constantly afraid that they’ll find us again, and that we’ll eventually one night be weak enough to invite them back. And our child will be born into their … their slavery. I asked them in, for little him or her.”

She leaned back in her seat and stared up at the stars. “I suppose if you add it all up it’s a victory—of sorts—at least—for most of us,” she whispered. “But God, I wish there was a way to free people, to cut the string between our species and theirs.”

Crawford trailed the fingers of his maimed hand in the water and watched the dim silhouettes of the church domes filing silently past on the portside, and he thought about the link between the species. He mentally re-heard conversations he’d had with Shelley and Byron and Villon.

And at last he took a deep breath and said, “I think there may be.” He turned around to face the gondolier. “Take us back to the Piazza, please.”

“No!” he shouted a moment later in Byron’s unmistakable tones. “No, onward to the Lido. Aickman, listen to me—as soon as the Austrians realize the eye is gone, they’ll just cut somebody’s head off in the Piazza, and the blood will work as an eye. If Josephine is there she’ll be seen, she’ll be back in the net.”

Crawford took back control of his throat. “I’m not going to bring Josephine along. She won’t step out of the gondola, so she shouldn’t be visible to her vampire even if they have already done the blood trick. And I wasn’t in their net even before we took the eye, so it’s no danger to me.” He turned and spoke to the gondolier. “Take us back to the Piazza, please.”

Josephine leaned out over the gunwale and cupped up some water in her clawed hand. She leaned forward and splashed it across Crawford’s forehead.

Crawford blinked at her in irritable puzzlement for a moment, then smiled. “I said in Rome that I might want that sometime, didn’t I? Thank you.”

He dipped his own hand in the water and rubbed his wet hand across her forehead too, vertically and horizontally.

Now baptized, they turned to look anxiously back toward the Piazza San Marco.

CHAPTER 26

Nothing is sure but that which is uncertain,

What’s evident to all is most obscure;

Only when snared in doubts can I be sure.

Only to enigmas, never to Logic’s lure,

Knowledge surrenders, and draws back her curtain …

—François Villon,

“Ballade for the Contest at Blois,”

the W. Ashbless translation

The gondolier sighed theatrically and waved one imploring hand to heaven, but he obediently swung the gondola into a wide curve, back the way they’d come, probably because they were closer to the Piazza than to the Lido, and he’d be rid of these mad people sooner.

Crawford’s mouth opened again. “They might just arrest both of you at the mooring stairs.” Crawford massaged his throat and wished Byron wouldn’t speak so harshly. “If we see soldiers near the stairs we’ll go on by, and let me off somewhere else.”

Josephine had been staring at him with desperate hope. “What is it you’re going to do?” she asked now.

“I’m going to undo—try to undo—the link between the species.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, precisely.” He rapped one knuckle against his head. “Byron—the Graiae are still awake, but right now they’re blind. What does that mean? It means that, unless the Austrians keep a steady flow of blood running in the Piazza, my friend Carlo has lost his livelihood as the premier coin-lagger in Venice. He’ll be unable now even to toss a penny reliably through an open window from three paces—and if he can, there’s no way anyone will be able to predict with any certainty where it will land—and it won’t even still be the same penny in any sense that makes sense. The field the Graiae are projecting right now is one of indeterminacy and imprecision. I wish Shelley had lived to see it, he did so love disorder.”

It was clear from the tone Byron put into Crawford’s voice that Byron did not love disorder.

“Did your Armenian priests tell you how quickly the whole field changed, once the radiating heart of it is altered? It changes instantaneously, Aickman—or, as the fathers insisted on putting it, at the speed of light. But they told me that it’s like St. Elmo’s Fire, or the electricity stored in a roomful of Leyden jars: it’s not a current, it’s a static field, and so there will probably be patches where the old field is still standing—leaky, but still standing—though such … high spots … will probably have faded out and conformed with the predominant field within a day or so.”

Crawford nodded. “Unless they get the eye back, or keep drenching the pavement with blood. Can you find Carlo? If he’s still alive. He won’t have moved—until tonight this was coin-lagger heaven.”

Crawford watched the lights of the Piazza drawing closer. The Graiae columns seemed slightly flexed, and the Doge’s Palace was a motionless but unpredictable beast crouching on a thousand stone legs.

He dug into Josephine’s bag and pulled out one of her blouses. “This looks nothing like the shirt I was wearing earlier,” he observed, pulling it on. He smiled at her tiredly. “I don’t suppose there are any shoes in here?”

She shook her head. “Your last pair you lost in the canal.”

“Huh.” He pulled out a blue shirt of his own and, with some effort, tore off the sleeves and drew them over his feet. The cuffs flapped loosely a few inches in front of his toes, so he unlaced a couple of ribbons from one of Teresa’s dresses and bound up the loose sleeve-ends with them, lacing the ribbons up around his insteps and ankles and then tying them off low on his shins. “There,” he said. “They may be looking for someone who has shed his shoes.”

Josephine shook her head doubtfully. The gondolier was making the sign of the cross.

“I think,” Crawford said, “that there will be one main pocket of the old, determinate field still standing; it’ll be near the Piazza and the Ducal Palace, and it’ll be where Werner is being kept. He’ll have made sure he’s living in the equivalent of a Leyden jar.”

A boat was approaching them, and belatedly he noticed the guns in the hands of the men aboard it—these were the Austrian soldiers who had shot to pieces his hijacked gondola only half an hour ago.

He tensed, ready to tell his gondolier to angle away from the boat, then realized that there was no possibility of eluding the Austrians. Instead he gaped at them as they drew near, and nudged Josephine and said, “Look, dear—those men have guns!”

“Gracious!“ Josephine exclaimed.

The Austrians stared at them, but rowed on past to look at other gondolas.

Crawford relaxed, one muscle at a time. “I guess they’re not looking for a couple, especially two people on their way in.” He took several deep breaths.

“Anyway, Byron, if your friend Carlo can’t help us find the field, and if we can’t manage to … undo Werner, Werner will probably have his Austrians put the Graiae back to sleep before his determinacy pocket bleeds away, and then he’ll be at least no worse off than he was before he came south from Switzerland. And then he can set his people searching for the eye.”

He had paused for only a moment when Byron took his throat again. “Who cares about this Werner?”

The gondolier swung the craft’s stern out to port and then leaned on the oar to push the gondola forward into an empty space between the lean hulls of two others.

Crawford stuffed into Josephine’s bag the balled-up shirt that contained Shelley’s heart and the Graiae’s eye. “Don’t lose that,” he told her, handing it to her and standing up.

“Werner,” he said quietly as the gondolier hopped out and began looping lines around the mooring poles, “constitutes the link between the two species, human and nephelim. Eight hundred years ago he revived the nephelim, who at that time had been dormant for thousands of years, by having one of them—a little, petrified statue—surgically sewn into his abdomen. And the two of them, one being contained inside the other, now constitute the overlap between the two forms of life on Earth—the overlap that keeps the nephelim species revived, and able to prey on humans.”

He started to step out of the boat, but Josephine caught his arm. “I’m coming with you,” she said. “Look at the square—obviously they haven’t spilled a lot of blood there. They have no eye.” Her own glass eye was staring into the sky, though her human eye stared intensely at Crawford.

“Not yet,” Crawford told her, “but they might do it at any moment. If—.He’s right,” Byron interrupted. “Go back to the Lido and wait for us.”

“No,” said Josephine calmly. “You’re sure to need help, you’re sure to fail without help. I’m not going to the Lido to wait for someone who won’t be returning.”

She held up her hand. “Listen to me, and believe me—if you don’t let me come, I swear to you I’ll … fill this dress with stones and jump into the middle of the lagoon. Enough weight and a couple of fathoms of salt water should prevent any of us from ever reappearing: these two fetuses, the heart, the eye, or me.”

Crawford was shaking his head and moaning. “But what if they do cut off somebody’s head or something when you’re ashore?”

“If you succeed in this, it won’t matter. And if you fail, I’ll drown myself anyway.”

Crawford knew she meant it. He shook his head, but took her hand. “'If ‘twere done, ‘twere well done quickly,'” he said. “Macbeth again,” observed Byron as they stepped out onto the dock.

She offered the gondolier more money, but he waved her off, again making the sign of the cross.

“Fine,” she told him. “Thanks.” She linked her arm through Crawford’s, and they walked down the dock to the pavement and began strolling toward the Piazza. “So,” she said, as casually as if they were tourists deciding where to dine, “you plan to cut this statue out of him?”

“That’s it,” said Crawford. He swung Byron’s sword cane with despairing jauntiness.

“What if our human child is already infected with the nephelim stuff? Like Shelley was?” She looked at him brightly. “Wouldn’t he or she constitute another overlap?”

Crawford stopped walking. He hadn’t thought of that. “Jesus.” He ran his maimed hand over his bald scalp. “How long have you been … eating dirt?” he asked.

She shrugged. “A week? Less.”

“We’re probably all right, then. I doubt that the inhuman fetus could get around to interfering with his womb-mate until he was fairly well formed himself, and it doesn’t sound as if he is yet.”

He tried to put more conviction into his voice than he felt, and he mentally cursed any God that there might be, for having made this coming ordeal not only tremendously difficult and dangerous, but possibly pointless too. “Take the legs, Byron,” he said hoarsely.

Byron did, without comment; Crawford relaxed in the Lerici bed and watched the pillars of the square-facing side of the Ducal Palace sweep past on the right side of his vision. The palace’s white pillars were so near that he could clearly see the rust stains on the undersides of the Corinthian capitals, and he realized that Byron was skirting the Graiae columns as widely as possible.

Crawford assumed just enough of his body’s sensations so that he could feel Josephine’s arm in his. A frailer overlap, he thought—but just possibly the one that will prevail tonight.

A hundred yards ahead, torchlight outlined the Byzantine arches and spires of the Basilica of St. Mark in luminous orange dry-brush strokes against the starry blackness of the night, and Crawford tried not to see the main entry arch as a gaping stone mouth. Dozens of people were strolling across the broad mosaic pavement, and several of them wore the uniforms of the Austrian military, but at least none of the soldiers was escorting a prisoner and carrying an axe.

The faces of many of the people he passed were blurred slightly, and seemed to shimmer with multiple, contradictory expressions, and it was difficult to be sure in which direction they were looking.

All potential, Crawford thought, and minimal actuality; it would be interesting to live in an indeterminacy field. Imagine cooking, trying to get a three-minute egg just right.

Byron walked Crawford’s body quickly past the palace and then past the high arches of the basilica’s west face, hurrying Josephine along whenever she slowed, and under the broad face of the clock tower he turned left, toward the narrower north end of the Piazzetta.

Crawford’s face was for a moment lifted toward the ornamental architecture above the clock face, and he wondered if Byron was as uneasy as he was to see the winged stone lion staring down at them, and above it the two bronze giants poised with hammers beside the great bell.

With scarcely a glance around at the smaller, darker square, Byron hustled the two weary bodies toward a narrow alley-mouth on the north side.

The alley itself, Crawford saw when they were in it, was more brightly lit than the square behind them; lamplight spilled from shops tucked in under the arches on either side, casting onto the worn brick walls the shadows of hanging sausages and cheeses, and lights behind opened windows overhead illuminated flowerpots and balconies and frail curtains flapping in the night breeze.

“Give me a coin,” rasped Byron with Crawford’s voice.

Josephine dug one out of her bag and put it in Crawford’s hand, which lifted and tossed the coin against the wall, deftly catching it again when it bounced back and tossing it again.

The alley was noisy with conversation and laughter and the strains of a man singing drunkenly somewhere nearby, but the clink … clink … clink of the coin seemed to undercut and dominate all the other sounds. Before his body had taken six more steps Crawford had become sure that the other sounds were now coordinated with, their pace dictated by, the rhythm of the ringing coin.

Then there were two clinks for each impact of the coin against the wall. Crawford’s hand caught the coin and his face looked upward.

On a balcony above, a fat man was tossing coins against the far wall. The coins rang against the bricks, but none of them fell down into the alley, or were even visible after hitting the wall.

The man looked down, apparently with recognition. “They’re awake now,” he said in Italian, fear putting a quaver into the careful nonchalance of his voice. “And blind.”

“We need your help, Carlo,” Byron said. “I’m Byron, the—”

“I know,” the man interrupted. “Byron’s face is visible behind the face you’re wearing, like one patterned veil behind another. This is an evil night.” He threw one more coin into ringing oblivion, then gripped the balcony railing firmly with both hands, as if to stop it from vibrating. “What help?”

“We believe that somewhere nearby is a pocket of the old way—in this pocket you would still judge that they can see. We need you to help us find it.”

“What will you do there?”

“If we succeed we’ll kill the columns, and the vampires—all the unnatural stony life—or at least reduce them to a dormant state they haven’t been in for eight hundred years.”

“I’ve got a wife,” Carlo said thoughtfully. “And children.”

“You rent, don’t you? I’ll buy you an estate anywhere in Italy.”

After a long pause—during which Crawford, in the room in Lerici, whimpered with impatience as he imagined soldiers leading a prisoner out onto the square and drawing a knife—Carlo nodded. “But you don’t speak to me or in any way indicate that I am with you.”

“Fine.”

The fat man turned and entered the building.

With some of the lire Josephine still had they bought a bag of coins and gave it to Carlo, who took it and walked out of the alley into the Piazzetta; Crawford and Josephine followed him at a distance of a dozen feet.

Carlo walked halfway across the pavement toward the basilica, then flipped a coin into the air. It glittered for a moment in the torchlight and then Crawford lost sight of it; a few seconds later he heard a metallic clink-and-roll far out to the right, toward the tall brick tower of the campanile.

Carlo walked in that direction for a few steps, then flipped his thumb up again. This time Crawford never saw the coin, and heard nothing but the voices and laughter from the alley behind them.

Carlo turned around and walked the other way, toward the rear of the basilica. After twenty steps he tossed another coin. Byron was able to keep Crawford’s eyes on it, but it landed well behind Carlo, and for an instant after it hit the pavement it was clearly three coins, then two, and then it was simply gone.

Carlo nodded, and kept walking.

Crawford took control of his mouth long enough to whisper; “We could have done this.”

“So far, yes,” Byron had him saying a moment later. He took a firmer grip of Josephine’s arm and walked in the same direction as Carlo without appearing to be following him.

The fat man ambled in an apparently random pattern across the mosaic tiles, each of his tossed coins flying in a different direction and then rolling away at impossible angles.

An alley stretched away in darkness at the northeastern end of the Piazzetta,

and after several minutes it became apparent that he was walking inexorably toward it.

Eventually he disappeared into it, and after a pause and a yawn and a bored glance around, Crawford found himself escorting Josephine into the shadowed gap between the tall, ornate buildings.

Crawford could hear running water ahead, and he knew it must be the canal on the east side of the palace. The comparative brightness of the open night loomed ahead, and he saw Carlo toss another coin and then disappear around a corner ahead. The coin bounced once behind Crawford, then again far behind him, and then rolled to a stop ahead of him.

Carlo had turned right, and Crawford’s left leg ached as Byron began walking faster so as not to lose him.

When they had rounded the corner too they found themselves on a catwalk over the narrow canal, with the skull-like Bridge of Sighs silhouetted ahead of them against the glow of the lights along the broad Canale di San Marco.

Byron followed Carlo more closely now, and walked up beside him when he had paused at a closed, iron-banded door at the end of the catwalk.

“Well?” Byron whispered.

“This is the sacristy of the basilica,” said Carlo quietly. “What you’re looking for is somewhere inside.” He shrugged.

Josephine reached forward and took hold of the door latch, and pulled. The door swung open, revealing a dim, high-ceilinged passage beyond.

Muttering prayers, Carlo went in. Crawford followed him, and Josephine pulled the door shut behind them.

Carlo moved forward slowly, pausing every few feet to send another coin spinning into the air. The coins were landing closer to him now, and not rebounding in startling directions.

Crawford could no longer see anything erratic in the courses of the coins. Carlo was catching them easily—but clearly the man was still aware of deviations, for when confronted with a choice of doorways he stepped toward one as he tossed and caught a coin, then toward the other as he did it again, then nodded and walked unhesitatingly through one of the doorways.

After threading a path through a number of ground-floor rooms, Carlo led his two companions up a stone stairway, and halfway down another hall. Pairs of high, narrow windows slitted the canal-side wall between broad wooden pillars, and the light was good enough to throw vague shadows onto the panelled wall on the other side.

All at once Crawford seemed to weigh more, and the light was clearer, and the scuff of his ravaged shirt-sleeve socks on the floor was raspier.

Carlo tossed another coin—he caught it, as he had been doing for several minutes now, but he grunted in surprise.

He tossed it higher, almost to the ceiling, and closed his eyes as he held out his hand.

Again he caught it.

He put his finger into his mouth and bit, and then walked a few yards forward, shook a drop of blood onto the flagstones, and walked back.

He took two more coins out of the bag and began juggling all three, humming a random tune. The coins spun around faster and faster, and his humming became louder and seemed to start up a maddening itch in the stump of Crawford’s wedding-ring finger.

Then one of the coins bulleted up, pinging rapidly off the ceiling and against one wall and then the other; it hit the floor spinning so fast that it seemed to be a glassy globe, and it moved in a hissing spiral around the spot of blood, getting closer to the spot with every loop.

At last it wobbled to a stop and fell over, exactly covering the spot.

“We’re there,” Crawford heard himself say.

“Not quite,” came a familiar voice from a shadowed doorway ahead of them. “A tourist has had an accident—quite a bloody accident—in the Piazza.” Polidori limped unsteadily out of the shadows into the dim light, and smiled. “Right between the columns.”

Crawford was walking toward one of the nearest pair of tall, foot-wide windows, and his hands unlatched one of them and swung it open. He turned and said to Carlo, “Into the canal with you. Swim back, and go home to your family.”

The fat man hurried to the window and managed to squeeze his bulk into the gap and halfway over the sill, and then he wriggled furiously and scraped his way through it and fell away forward into empty air; a second later they heard a splash.

Byron turned Crawford’s head toward Josephine and raised his eyebrows.

“No,” said Josephine. “I’ll see this out.”

“You certainly will, darling,” said Polidori, hunching forward, his smile a grimace of pain now. “You’ll see Mister Crawford’s liver out, torn out by your own hands, and then you’ll eat it. Happily.”

Crawford’s body shifted its weight on his feet as he mentally pushed Byron out. “Where is Werner von Aargau?” he asked, concealing his horror and regret behind a determinedly conversational tone.

“Von Aargau? In his chamber in the Ducal Palace, where else? Perhaps you imagined he’d be out boating on the canal?” He stared at Crawford. “Were you looking for him?”

Crawford didn’t answer, and Polidori turned to Josephine. “Were you?”

She threw a pleading look to Crawford, who stepped forward and put an arm around her shoulders. “Yes we were,” he said quietly. He was certain that they had lost everything, including their child, but he couldn’t bear to let this … rival for Josephine’s affections see despair in him.

Crawford looked up at Polidori with raised eyebrows. “Tell me,” he said politely, “can one get to his chamber from here?”

Polidori laughed, and Crawford was fiercely glad to hear pain putting anger into the sound.

“Well,” said Polidori, mockingly imitating Crawford’s courteous tone, “I’ll tell you a secret, Doctor—yes one can. His projections of himself, the substantial, handsome ghosts through which he lives, often use this hallway to enter and leave the palace discreetly. There’s a door at the end of the corridor behind me, and a little dock downstairs—he likes to emerge into Venice from under the Bridge of Sighs.”

“Fitting.”

“Why were you looking for him?”

“We mean to kill him.”

Polidori laughed—a strangled, wheezing sound. “That would be difficult. He’s got many, many guards, and none of them will ever take bribes or bring him poison or fight half-heartedly, for they’re all his handsome, muscular projections. And even if you did succeed in killing him, you’d die yourselves a second later.”

Footsteps echoed on the stairs behind Crawford.

“Austrian soldiers,” Polidori said. “I’d advise you not to resist.”

Crawford let his shoulders slump, and he clasped his hands on the head of the cane, and part of his evident resentful surrender was genuine, for he hated the necessity of letting Byron do this—and then he forced himself back into the bed in Lerici and let Byron take his body.

Instantly the two good fingers of his left hand spun the collar below the cane’s grip, and then he sprang forward in a thigh-straining, long lunge, simultaneously whipping free the length of steel and whirling it into line.

Polidori lurched aside to Crawford’s right, but in midair Byron twisted Crawford’s wrist outward into a deep sixte line and managed to drive two inches of the blade into Polidori’s side.

“Eisener breche, you bastard!” Byron gasped as Crawford’s right foot slapped down at the end of the lunge.

Polidori shrank off the end of the blade; he was still human in form, but only a couple of feet tall now. His facial features, handsome a moment ago, had now cramped together in a toadishly broad face. He scuttled away backward down the hall, burping and retching.

Josephine, biting her lips, watched him go but at least didn’t follow.

The footsteps were in the hall now, and running, and Byron spun to face them. Six soldiers with drawn swords skidded to a halt at the sight of his sword, and then advanced cautiously, their blades extended. Oddly, not one of them carried a gun, and their eyes shone with an uneasiness that clearly had nothing to do with Crawford or Josephine.

Reminded of something by Byron’s cry, Crawford took advantage of the momentary pause to override Byron and swing the sword at one of the wooden pillars between the windows, leaving a horizontal dent in the wood.

Byron swore as he resumed control, and then he hopped forward impatiently with a feint at one of the soldiers and a corkscrewing bind to the blade of another; Byron’s point darted in and gouged the man’s forearm, and then Byron had leaped back out of range.

The wounded Austrian fell back with a startled curse, and the two of his fellows who had been flanking him ran forward with their swords held straight out, and Byron feinted high and then flung himself down and sideways so that he was in a low crouch, supported by Crawford’s left hand and holding the sword extended in the right, and the window-side soldier unwittingly lunged himself onto the point.

Byron straightened, yanking the blade free as the man tumbled backward, and Crawford intruded for a moment to make his hand lash the sword at the wooden pillar again, cutting another dent next to the first.

“Stop that!” yelled Byron as the four unhurt soldiers all attacked at once. Byron swung his blade in a horizontal figure-eight, parrying all four of the blades for the moment, and then he hopped forward in a short lunge and darted his point into the cheek of the man on his far right—instantly he swept the blade down and across, knocking aside the other three swords, and ducked to quickly but deeply stab the kneecap of the next man.

He was going to advance, but Crawford halted him and swung the blade very hard at a section of the pillar below his two previous cuts.

“God damn you!” Byron yelled, and hopped forward with a furious beat to the blade of the nearest Austrian.

The blow jarred the man’s blade out of line, and Byron slashed his throat in the instant before two of the others could bring their own blades to bear. Blood sprayed from the opened throat and the Austrian folded to the floor as Byron shuffled back.

“Your clowning will get you killed,” Crawford heard his own mouth say; nevertheless Crawford took possession of his body one more time and, ignoring the advancing men, drove his point into the crude face he’d hacked into the wooden pillar.

The sword’s grip was suddenly red-hot, and he had to force himself to hold on to it.

And then one of the advancing sword-points slashed along his right ribs, twisting as it darted in. Josephine gasped, and through the hot flare of the pain Crawford was peripherally glad to know that she was still there.

Byron spasmodically took back control and lashed his sword forward; it chopped across the Austrian’s eyes and physically knocked the man over backward, and then Byron was rushing at the three Austrians who were still standing.

None of them were unwounded, and they turned and ran from this embodiment of murderous fury. Their footsteps clattered down the stairs, and Crawford could hear them calling for reinforcements.

Tense with the pain of the gash in his side, Crawford swished the sword through the air, and realized that Byron had relinquished control of his body.

He heard Trelawny’s voice, raising no echoes in the narrow room of the inn at Lerici: “How do you feel?”

“Feel!” yelled Byron from his own body on the bed. “Why, just as that damned obstreperous fellow felt, chained to a rock, the vultures gnawing at my midriff, and vitals too, for I have no liver.”

Crawford took a step back toward Josephine, and the cut in his side sent such agony lancing through him that he sagged and had to take a deep breath to keep from fainting.

Apparently Byron felt it too, for in his bed he shouted, “I don’t care for dying, but I cannot bear this! It’s past joking, call Fletcher; give me something that will end it—or me! I can’t stand it much longer.”

Faintly through the window Crawford heard the echoes of gunshots, and he prayed that they were Carbonari guns summoned by his stabbing the makeshift mazze. He took Josephine’s arm and limped away up the hall in the direction the midget Polidori had taken, pressing his sword-gripping fist against his bleeding side and leaving the scabbard lying on the floor behind him.

“Here, my lord,” said Fletcher, seeming to be speaking at Crawford’s ear despite the hundred and fifty miles between them.

A moment later Crawford shook his head and exhaled explosively, for his head was full of the fumes of spirits of ammonia. Then the smell was gone—and so was his link with Byron.

“We’re on our own now,” he told Josephine grimly.

He took her arm and hefted the sword, and together they limped on down the hall, through patches of moonlight and darkness.

At last he could see a door in the wall ahead, and he was dizzily hurrying Josephine toward it when he heard heavy steps on the stairs behind him.

He fell forward into a jolting, flapping run, dragging Josephine along beside him. His lungs were heaving and his sleeve-socks had completely come apart, the ribbons loose and whipping at his ankles, but he didn’t slow down until he and Josephine had collided with the tall door.

There was a plain iron latch, and he had fumbled at it for several seconds before he realized that it was bolted on the other side.

He turned around and raised his sword.

The stairs were far behind now, and the three Austrian soldiers were uneven piles on the floor in the middle distance. It occurred to him that the hall stretched so far south that he and Josephine must by now be within the walls of the Ducal Palace.

“Stay away from the windows!” came a call in Venetian Italian from the head of the stairs. “The Austrians have a cannon loaded with shot in a boat in the canal.”

Crawford let himself fall against the wall in relief—it was the Carbonari.

Bearded men were running up the hall toward him, with pistols drawn, and a couple of them crouched briefly over each of the three downed Austrians and worked briefly with knives.

The man in the lead came sprinting up to Crawford in a low crouch, a pistol in each hand. “What in hell are you doing? This is no place for humans.” He gave Josephine a hostile stare. “Though it’s where I’d expect to find nefandos.”

“Help me,” gasped Crawford, “kill the man we’ll find behind that door.” He waved over his shoulder.

“No,” the man said angrily. “He can’t be killed. Two of my men are dead on the Piazzetta—is that what you called us for, to try to kill him?”

From beyond the narrow windows Crawford could hear voices, and the splashing of an oar in the water of the canal.

“You’ve got guns,” Crawford said.

“We couldn’t have got in here if we didn’t,” the man said impatiently. “Guns weren’t working when the sisters were blind this evening. The Austrians found that out and then tossed theirs aside. We saved ours.”

“Can you at least shoot up the lock on this door?”

“We may not even be able to do that,” said the Carbonari. “The blood on the pavement is drying and cooling, and if the sisters lose their blood-eye the iron won’t spark the flint.”

But a moment later he had beckoned three of his followers forward and given them orders, and each of the four men aimed a pistol at the latch. One after another they fired at it, the four detonations lighting the hall in livid yellow flashes and battering at the windows.

And a second later the pair of windows nearest to Crawford exploded inward in a spray of glass, and as a mattress of hot, compressed air flung him into the far wall, and as he rebounded onto his back on the floor, he dimly heard the echoes of a cannon shot batting away between the buildings along the canal outside.

Two of the Carbonari were lifting him up—they had all been crouching below the windowsills, but several were bleeding freely now from glass cuts—and their leader was staring at him angrily. Crawford’s ears were ringing loudly, and he could hardly hear the man say, “Are you hit?”

Crawford weakly brushed splinters of glass off his shoulders. “Uh … apparently not,” he said, speaking loudly to be able to hear himself. “I was to the side.”

“Do you think you can kill him?” the Carbonari leader demanded.

Blood was running from Crawford’s nose, and he wasn’t at all sure he would even be able to stand unaided. “Yes,” he mumbled through chipped teeth.

“And is this woman … helping you? Sincerely?”

“Yes,” Crawford said.

The man visibly made a decision. “Very well.” He handed Crawford an unfired pistol and then pulled a long, narrow knife from his belt and slapped the grip into Josephine’s hand.

“We will hold them off,” he said, “for as long as we can.” He tossed his spent gun to one of his men, who caught it and threw a fresh one to him, and then he went to the window and pointed the gun down toward the canal.

He pulled the trigger, and the hammer snapped down, spilling powder, but there was no detonation.

“The blood has cooled,” the Carbonari leader said, tucking the useless gun into his belt. “That cannon shot was the last shot there will be in this area until they spill more blood. We have knives, and can use them—but do be quick.”

He gathered his men with a gesture, and Crawford sat down hard when the two men released him and went loping away down the hall with their fellows.

Josephine rushed to him and helped him stand, but for a moment he forgot the door ahead, and simply stared at the wall across from the devastated windows.

The wood panelling was peppered with shot pellets in vertical patterns—but not in two lines, as he would have expected from the fact that the blast of shot had come in through two windows. Instead there was a series of vertical strips of splintering, and the strips were widest in the center of the pattern and narrower and fainter toward the edges. It was a wave pattern, similar to the ones he had often seen in the water between a long ship and a long dock.

He knew instinctively that this was a consequence of the indeterminacy field that the Graiae, blind again, were projecting; and he knew too that it meant that von Aargau’s pocket of determinacy, his individual Leyden jar, had lost a good deal of its potency, perhaps all of it. If Carlo had been here tossing his coins now, they’d still be disappearing.

Josephine had been cutting her skirt hem into long strips, and now she knotted a couple of them tightly around his ribs, over his sword cut.

“Can’t have you bleeding to death,” she muttered when she had cinched the knots.

“Not yet, anyway,” Crawford said.

Leaning on Josephine, he reeled to the door the Carbonari had shot at. The latch had been shattered and the wood around it was splintered away and the bolt broken, and the door swung open at his first tentative push.

CHAPTER 27

What rites are these? Breeds earth more monsters yet?

Antaeus scarce is cold: what can beget

This store?—and stay! such contraries upon her?

Is earth so fruitful of her own dishonor?

—Ben Jonson,

“Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue”

A narrower hall doglegged away beyond the door, its brick walls dimly illuminated by lamplight from around the corner. Crawford was staring blankly, so Josephine took his hand and pulled him forward; he took a step to keep from falling, and then the two of them were shambling down the little hall.

Crawford’s nose was still steadily dripping blood onto the front of the blouse of Josephine’s that he was wearing, and he was leaving the red track of one bare foot on the stones of the floor. His arms were too tired to hold the sword and gun extended, but he thought he could raise them if he had to, and he was pleased with his hands for being able to stay clamped on the grips.

Josephine had tucked the knife into the waistband of Teresa’s skirt, and was holding the leather bag in front of herself with both hands. Crawford thought it was a good idea, but he wondered what would happen if a sword or a pistol ball should strike the heart.

They shuffled around the corner—a lamp burned in a niche in the wall, and Crawford could see that the floor was carpeted ahead, and the walls panelled in dark wood. The hall made another turn a few yards beyond that point, and the light from around that corner was brighter.

Crawford was dully surprised to realize that the only emotion he felt was anticipation of the softness of the carpeting under his bare feet.

They reached it and turned the corner, and then for a moment they both paused, swaying.

An open doorway stood only a few paces ahead, and the room beyond it was wide. Crawford could see a lot of elegantly dressed men standing on the marble floor, though none of them moved or was speaking.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” Josephine whispered.

He nodded, and they walked forward.

The room was vast and high-ceilinged, and brightly lit by candles in crystal chandeliers high overhead. The two dozen men in the room were all staring blankly at the walls, as if drugged or listening intently for something.

They’re all brothers, he thought—and then he realized that the features they all shared were those of the young Werner von Aargau whose stab-wound he had sewn up in Venice six years earlier, and for whom he had subsequently worked.

“Good evening, Werner,” Crawford said loudly.

The men all turned toward him—and a moment later he swore in panic and stepped back, and Josephine had dropped the bag and convulsively drawn her knife.

The men’s bodies were changing.

One man’s head was stretching away toward the ceiling like a pulled piece of dough—the tongue emerged, seemed to try to speak for a moment, and then rapidly lengthened for yards like a long, weightless snake and commenced busily curling around the elongating head; another’s eyes had by now swelled so grossly that the head was just a toothy bump behind the two gleaming, staring globes; a third had one giant horny plate like a toenail growing out of its shirt collar, concealing the mouth, and then the nose, and finally the eyes of the face.

Most of them had lifted their feet from the floor, and were floating in the air.

Crawford noticed that each right hand, whether that member was a tight bunch of flesh like pink broccoli or was a cluster of long tentacles, now gripped a gun or a sword; and he realized that all the different shapes and sizes of eyes were focussed on him.

As if a load of bird-shot had been fired at a stretched rubber sheet, the holes of all the mouths opened simultaneously in all the faces. “Get out of here,” they chorused, speaking Italian with a thick German accent. “Whoever you are, you are well advised to leave.”

“You don’t recognize me?” asked Crawford with fatalistic bravado. “Look closely,” he added to the man whose two eyes were still growing—at the expense of the body, which had shrivelled up and was now hanging under the suspended globes as its shoes and clothing dropped one by one to the floor. “I’m Michael Aickman.”

All the varieties of left hands were raised in the air and hideously flexed. “Aickman!” croaked and whistled all the voices. “Biting the hand that fed you?”

Crawford tucked the presently useless pistol into his belt, then took Josephine’s free hand and walked forward.

A bell rang somewhere to Crawford’s right, and a moment later the high double doors at the far end of the room were swung open and several Austrian soldiers burst into the room.

Crawford noticed that even as they entered the soldiers looked frightened and desperate; and when they saw the warping and swelling bodies moving slowly through the air like diseased fish in a vast aquarium, they simply screamed and ran back out of the room. The doors were dragged closed, and the boom of a bolt being shot shook the air and rippled the floating bodies.

“Evidently the blood between the columns has cooled,” calmly observed all the stretched or puckered mouths. “They’ll spill more, Aickman, at any moment, and in the restored determinacy field these bodies will resume their solidity. Go while you can.”

“We can ignore the guns,” Crawford told Josephine quietly, and together they stepped forward.

The floating bodies thrust awkwardly gripped swords at them, but even Josephine with her dagger was able to knock them away. Some of the twisted hands were able to pull the triggers of their pistols, but the hammers snapped down quietly on the inert powder.

The bodies were becoming more distorted with every passing second, like clouds or smoke rings. “Wait,” said the mouths that were still capable of forming words. “I’m willing to … call it a draw, a stalemate. If you leave now, I’ll see to it that you two, and anyone else you designate, will be left alone by the nephelim.”

“For the rest of our lives, no doubt,” said Crawford, still pushing his way forward through the insubstantial crowd, with Josephine audibly parrying blades beside him. He heard the clang of several swords hitting the marble floor, released by hands too stretched to continue holding them.

“For eternity,” replied the mouths.

Crawford didn’t answer. He took three more limping strides, and glimpsed through the warping forms a nude figure lying in a glass case against the right-hand wall.

He began angling toward it, making sure not to get separated from Josephine and being careful to clang the weakly obstructing swords out of the way. All around him he heard the clicks of pistol hammers falling into impotent flashpans.

Only a few of the mouths were still capable of producing human sounds now, but the ones that could laughed heartily. “I never anticipated someone being able to free, and then catch, the eye,” they chorused. “I should have anticipated it—Perseus did it, after all. And I should have had braver human guards, or even blind ones. Still, it doesn’t matter.”

“No, it doesn’t matter,” came a different voice from overhead, and when

Crawford looked up he thought for a moment that the winged stone lion from the clock tower had left its post and was now clinging to the wall, head down.

It wasn’t until Josephine weakly said “Polidori …” that he recognized the gray face below the long, winged body.

A stone wing swept out to each side, throwing a gust of wind that Crawford knew must have swirled all the von Aargau duplicates to homogenous ribbons, and then the stony mouth creaked open and the claws retracted from the holes they had punched in the marble wall, and the thing that had been Polidori sprang.

It sprang toward Josephine—and in the instant when it was launched Crawford remembered the way it had tried to smash her against the pavement in front of the Casa Magni four nights ago, and in one flash he remembered too an overturned boat in gray surf and a burning house and a destroyed body in a bed—and he threw himself at her almost joyfully, slamming her out of the thing’s way and falling where she had been standing.

A blast of air hit him and bounced his chin off the marble floor, but the impact against which he was cringing didn’t come; he rolled over and saw that the creature had stopped its dive and flown out into the high reaches of the room, setting the chandeliers swinging with the wind of its wings. The false von Aargaus were now just slivers whirling in the air, and all their clothing was scattered across the floor.

Josephine had fallen to her knees, but was looking over her shoulder at Crawford, and her eyes were wide with wonder and gratitude.

The winged thing flapped down to the floor, and for several seconds Crawford hoped it was undergoing the same loss of form that the von Aargau duplicates had suffered—its wings broke noisily and folded into the white body, which tilted upright and began to narrow in the middle, and its forepaws stretched, separating into fingers. The face was rapidly narrowing, and he heard the snap as the more slowly shrinking jaw was dislocated.

But it stopped warping itself, and stood up and faced him and Josephine, and his heart sank to see that it had taken the form of Julia, Crawford’s long-dead wife.

“Look at me, Josephine,” said Julia’s mouth. “Look at me and relax.”

“Don’t listen to it,” Crawford wheezed, hiking himself up on one elbow, “don’t look into its eyes …”

But Josephine already had, and was staring into the eyes of the thing that still had power over her.

“Who am I, Josephine?”

“You’re …Julia.”

The woman figure nodded and walked forward, smiling. “My poor little sister! Look at your hand, and your eye! What have they done to you?”

Josephine lowered her head jerkily and held up her skeletal arms. She looked as inorganic as the bronze men on the clock tower, and the knife she still clutched in her hand looked as if it had been cast with her arm. “They’ve,” she said in a rusty voice, “taken away nearly all of my flesh.”

“Did you want them to?”

Josephine shook her head, and Crawford bared his teeth in empathic pain to see the tears in her eyes. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I couldn’t have … wanted it, though, could I?”

“They’ve used you up,” the shape of her sister said.

“Yes. They’ve used me up.”

“You’ve always wanted to be me,” said the Julia-thing. “You can have it now.” Its tone was infinitely comforting. “You can be me.” It took another couple of steps, and was now standing in front of Josephine. Its smile was radiant, and even for Crawford it evoked dim memories of the house in Bexhill-on-Sea.

“I have always wanted to be you,” Josephine said softly. “But …”

The thing was reaching out white hands toward her. “But what, dear?”

Josephine took a deep breath.

And the dagger lashed forward so quickly that the thing had no chance to get out of the way, and to Crawford it looked as though the obstruction of the hilt was all that prevented Josephine from driving her fist right through the figure.

“But I hate you!” Josephine screamed, falling to her knees with the figure of Julia and dragging the blade upward through the abdomen. “You wanted me to worship you, and live only as a … a reflection in one of your mirrors! You loved it when I’d dress up as you and pretend to be you, so that you could … have everybody make fun of me, expose me as horrible little Josephine, and you could drink up the bit of yourself I’d made!” She pulled the dagger out and drove it into one of the struggling figure’s eyes. “I’m like Keats and Shelley—I was born into submission to a vampire!”

The figure had stopped struggling, and was clicking and creaking under her, and moving only as its shrinking limbs were drawn in, and Josephine tugged the dagger free and slowly got to her feet.

Crawford gathered his remaining strength and then made himself stand up and cross to where she stood. He approached her cautiously until she looked at him and he saw recognition in her eyes.

“It wasn’t really Julia,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder.

“I know,” said Josephine, staring down at the little statue on the floor. “But everything I said was true. How … could I not ever have known, until now, that all of that was true?”

Crawford pulled her away, and together they turned and slowly walked over to the glass case against the wall. The figure within it shifted weakly on its ornately embroidered mattress, and seemed to chuckle.

For one moment Crawford thought it must be a terribly old woman, with one hip shoved into a hole in the wall, who had somehow become pregnant—the face was as wrinkled and collapsed as a sun-dried apple, but the belly was tightly distended as if with a huge baby. Then he noticed the wispy beard, and the scar on the abdomen and, finally, tucked away like forgotten schoolboy textbooks in an old man’s basement, the withered male genitalia.

The scar was stretched by the swollen belly, but he recognized it—he had noticed it on the flat stomach of the von Aargau duplicate whose wound he had sewn up in a canal-side café, so long ago.

“Good evening, Werner,” Crawford said unsteadily. “Do you know who this lady is? She’s the nurse who you tried to get me to poison in Rome two years ago.”

“Look at the ceiling,” the appallingly old man said.

Crawford looked up.

And his chest went cold. The ceiling was a checkerboard of heavy, square stone blocks, and Crawford’s very spine cringed with the sudden awareness that there weren’t enough pillars to support it.

“Now look at me.” The old man waved a skeletal hand toward his own left hip, which at first glance had looked as though it had been thrust into a hole in the wall. When Crawford looked more closely, though, peering over the tight expanse of the abdomen, he saw that the pelvis and thigh seemed to have been pared down nearly to the spine, and the body then somehow spliced to the stone.

He and the building are joined at the hip, Crawford thought. It’s like the two women on that little cake that Josephine was supposed to break when I married her sister.

And Crawford thought of a line from Shakespeare, from Macbeth, that Shelley had frequently quoted: like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art; and for a moment it seemed to him that he, and Josephine, and all the poets, had also consisted of two persons intolerably joined. Werner, and the women portrayed on the oatcake, were simply more obvious examples, and thus a concealment of the subtler forms of it.

“I’m a part of the building,” said Werner. “It’s my continuing vitality alone that prevents the ceiling from falling.” From webs of wrinkles in the ancient skin of the face the two gleaming eyes stared up at him. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Crawford. “If you die, we die.”

The crumpled, papery mouth worked: “Those are the facts of the case. So you can forget your ideas about cutting the statue out of me. And my offer nonetheless still stands: leave now and I will instruct the nephelim to forget all of you forever.”

Crawford was trembling, but he forced a laugh. “I know what their word is worth. Percy Shelley put it to the test recently.”

I could force Josephine to leave, he thought, and then do it, cut it out of him.

Then he remembered her promise to drown herself if she were not allowed to accompany him in this. He knew he would not be able to force her to leave.

For a moment he considered taking Werner’s offer—but he knew Josephine would not ever agree to that either.

Perhaps Werner was bluffing about the ceiling?

Crawford glanced up, and then shudderingly looked down again. No, he was not bluffing.

He was snapping his fingers, and he avoided looking at either Werner or Josephine.

And you don’t have infinite time, he told himself. You’ve got to do something.

He stared down into the glass case at the ancient scar that stretched across von Aargau’s distended belly, and then very slowly he turned to Josephine. “You’ve been a nurse for how many years?” “Six,” she whispered.

“How many times do you think you’ve—” He had to pause and take a deeper breath. “How many times do you think you’ve assisted at a caesarian birth?”

Werner was saying something quickly, but Josephine’s voice overrode his. “Say, six times.”

“Good—because you’re about to do it again.”

Crawford climbed into the glass case and, ignoring Werner’s bony hands plucking weakly at his trousers, began carefully breaking the glass walls outward with the butt of his pistol—he and Josephine would need room to work.

Werner’s frail shouting stopped consisting of words when Crawford, holding the dagger wrapped in cloth so as to be able to grip it near the point, pinched up a tight fold of flesh and made the first incision.

And though Werner’s struggling became even more violent then, Josephine had tied him down well, and was able to hold him still with one arm and use the other hand to blot up the flowing blood with a piece of cloth soaked in brandy from Crawford’s flask. Every few seconds she held the flask to the old man’s lips—after the first cut he had stopped refusing it.

Exhaustion was beginning to darken Crawford’s vision, and it took a powerful effort of will to keep his hand from trembling or cutting too deeply. He kept forgetting that he was not in a hospital delivering a baby, and more than once he irritably asked Josephine for a bistoury or probe-scissors.

He forced himself to remember the series of drawings he had seen in The Menotti Miscellany, the drawings that had been miscatalogued as illustrations of a caesarian section but had actually been a record of the operation in which the statue had been inserted into Werner. He remembered where the incisions had originally been made in the membrana adiposa and the peritoneum, and he tried to cut in the same places.

His fingers seemed to remember their old skill, and moved with increasing deftness, and in only a few minutes he was able to press aside the split skin and muscle layers and see the statue.

It had grown during its centuries inside Werner, and was now about the size of a two-year-old child, but he recognized it from the drawing in the ancient manuscript. Like a real baby it was curled up head-downward, its feet and hands up around its cheek, and Crawford had to remind himself that this form was stone, and that he wouldn’t be cutting an umbilical cord. He carefully worked his hand in behind the slippery head.

“Carefully now,” he said tightly. “Here it comes.”

He began lifting.

“Hemorrhage, Doctor,” said Josephine urgently.

Crawford had been blinking sweat out of his eyes and staring at the statue’s head; now he looked down and saw that purple venous blood was flowing in strong spurts from under his probing hand.

Werner’s gasps sounded like weak laughter now.

“Get your hand in under mine,” Crawford told Josephine, “and push against the area of the bleeding.”

Crawford kept his own hand behind the statue’s head as Josephine’s blood-slick fingers wormed in under his knuckles. For a moment he was afraid that the stretching of the incision might cause more bleeding from somewhere else, but Josephine was skilled at her job—her hand moved quickly but carefully, probing and testing the tension of the tissues, and in seconds the bleeding had slowed.

“Good,” Crawford said between clenched teeth. “We’ll have to sew that up soon, or tie it off or something, but that’s good for now.”

He began lifting the stone head.

The statue flexed, making its stone substance squeal in stress. It was resisting him, trying to tense itself wider and stay in the fleshy nest it had occupied for eight hundred years.

“The tissues are too tight,” said Josephine quickly, “something’ll tear if it keeps that up.” She glanced up at Crawford and gave him a haggard smile. “The mother’s life is definitely endangered.”

Crawford instinctively winced, for in childbirths that sentence generally meant that the baby would have to be sacrificed, killed and brought piecemeal out of the womb.

The statue had had to soften its substance to move, but nevertheless Crawford could see cracks, filled with Werner’s blood, where its stony substance had given way.

One stretched across the thing’s neck, and he inserted the point of his blade into it, and pushed.

The thing stopped moving. He pushed harder, and felt the knife blade slide a little farther into the stone as it extended the crack.

The statue blinked at him from its upside-down face, and its mouth opened and, in a bird-shrill voice, said something rapidly in German.

Crawford hadn’t caught what it had said, and he passionately didn’t want to hear what the thing might say; he pushed harder, ignoring Werner’s screams and the pain in his own left hand, wedged under the statue’s head—

—And the tip of the knife blade broke off. Crawford managed to yank his hand back before the jagged end of the knife could do more than slightly nick the exposed peritoneum.

The statue was frozen now with the eisener breche in its throat. Its mouth was still open.

Crawford put down the broken knife and resumed pulling at the stone head. He tried to hold Werner’s incised tissues apart with his free hand.

The old man had fainted, but he was still breathing, and Crawford knew that if his pulse had begun to weaken Josephine would have told him.

He could feel his own strength failing, so he cursed and braced himself, and then gave the statue one very strong tug—and a moment later he fell over backward onto the floor with the horrible thing in his arms.

The room shook ponderously, and the chandeliers were swinging, and he could hear a roaring from outside the building as the city of Venice rocked in the grip of an earthquake.

Josephine had fallen too, and her eyes were clenched shut in pain and she was pressing her bloody forearms across herself. Crawford guessed that the nephelim twin was dying inside her.

He rolled the statue away and, after an anxious glance at the ceiling, he leaped back to his patient.

The broken vein had started spurting again when Josephine had fallen, but he found it and pinched it off. Werner’s breathing was fast but regular and deep, and Crawford let himself relax for a moment with his left hand inside the ancient man’s abdomen.

Josephine slowly sat up, opening her arms cautiously, as if too fast a move might bring the pain back.

With his free hand Crawford had now begun mopping blood away from the edges of Werner’s gaping wound, but he took a moment to glance at Josephine. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I … think so,” she said, resuming her place beside him.

“Be ready with the sutures,” he said, and Josephine picked up one of the long strings into which they’d torn the ribbons from his ankles.

He took it from her and, after cutting the vein free of the surrounding flesh with the edge of his broken knife blade, he one-handedly tied the ruptured vein off between where it was split and where his left thumb and forefinger were squeezing it shut.

He let his cramping fingers relax—the vein bulged against the knot of ribbon, but nothing broke. If blood was leaking through the constriction of the knot, it was doing it very slowly.

He turned his attention to closing up the incision.

“Josephine,” he said thoughtfully, handing her the truncated knife, “do you think you could break the heel off one of your shoes, and then use the edge of this knife to pry one of the nails free?”

Josephine looked at her shoe, then at the knife. “Yes.”

Within a minute she had handed him a nail, and he went to work.

His attention hanging agonizedly on each inhalation and exhalation of the old man, Crawford carefully used the point of the cobbler’s nail to poke holes into the edges of the cut tissues—then he took one of the ribbon-strips from Josephine, sucked the end of it to stiffen it, and began lacing up the deepest incision.

After a long minute of the delicate work he drew each successive inch of it tight, so that the incision in the peritoneum had been drawn closed, and nothing gave way.

He breathed a sigh and held out his hand for another piece of ribbon.

When they had stitched up the muscle layer and finally the skin, Werner was still breathing, though he hadn’t recovered consciousness. Blood was seeping from the incision, but not at an alarming rate.

Crawford stood up, his scalp itching with awareness of the ceiling stones six yards over their heads. He crouched by the blood-smeared statue, got his hands under it, and then made himself straighten his legs and stand, though the effort darkened his vision and started his nose bleeding again. “Out,” he gasped. “Quickly, the way we came.”

Josephine snatched up the leather bag, and they reeled and limped toward the door that led to the wide hall.

The statue just fit through one of the narrow windows that had had the glass blown out of it by the Austrian cannon. Not trusting his own battered ears, Crawford wouldn’t move on until Josephine assured him several times that she had heard it splash into the canal below.

At last he nodded, took her hand, and started toward the stairs.

Figures were running back and forth across the square, and twice Crawford heard the boom of gunfire echo back from the lacy pillared wall of the Doge’s Palace, but no one approached them until they had limped and shuffled past the massively tall but inert Graiae columns and had started toward the stairs and the gondolas.

A man stepped out of one of the shadowed arches of the palace and held up his hand. Crawford raised his sword and his still unfired pistol.

“I’m Carbonari,” the man said quickly, and when Crawford made his eyes focus he recognized the bearded face. It was the leader of the group of Carbonari they had met in the hall upstairs.

“There’s a boat to take you to the Lido,” the man said, speaking quietly and quickly, “in the little canal below the Drunkenness of Noah.” He stepped behind Crawford and Josephine and began pushing them along by their elbows.

He marched them down the length of the south face of the palace, with the broad waters of the Canale di San Marco stretching away a quarter of a mile wide on their right, and just at the foot of the Ponte della Paglia he pushed them to the left, away from the stairs and between two of the pillars of the palace. Ahead lay the canal into which Carlo had jumped earlier, and Crawford saw a gondolier waiting for them with one foot up on the pavement and the other on the stern of his narrow craft.

“The Austrians are in confusion,” their guide said tersely, “and the guards of their secret king have gone mad. We are grateful to you.” He gave them one last forward shove. “But don’t ever come back to Venice,” he added.

Crawford looked up, and belatedly realized what his guide had been referring to, a minute earlier—above the pillars at this southeast corner of the building was a sculpture of Noah reeling below a grapevine, spilling wine from a cup and about to lose the robe that was loosely bunched around his waist.

As he and Josephine climbed into the gondola he kept his eyes on poor Noah, who, it seemed to Crawford, had had every excuse to get drunk and lose his trousers, after having piloted the entirety of organic life to safety.

Crawford uncapped his flask and passed it to Josephine as the gondolier cast off, and when she handed it back he raised it to Noah and then drained off the swallow of brandy that was left. The Bridge of Sighs was behind him, but he looked ahead, toward where the towers and domes of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore rose against the night.

When they were well out on the water, and the gondolier had begun to lean into the oar to turn them east toward the lagoon, Crawford fumbled Shelley’s shirt-wrapped heart out of Josephine’s bag. He whispered a prayer to the splintered, weathered head of Christ, and then leaned across the gunwale and held the charred-smelling, flapping thing at arm’s length out over the dark water.

Nothing disturbed the calm skin of the water but the faintly reflecting points of jellyfish hanging like pale splashes of milk at the surface, and the ripple of the boat’s wake sweeping out to both sides behind them in the starlight.

When the low waves cast by the knife-narrow prow had eclipsed the whole of the ancient city in their skirt, and no slightest swirl gave evidence of the third sister moving below, he sat back and tucked the heart into the bag.

The nephelim were dormant again, for the first time in eight hundred years.

He put his arm around Josephine, and she laid her head on his shoulder and slept.

My illness is quite gone—it was only at Lerici—on the fourth night, I had got a little sleep and was so wearied that though there were three slight shocks of an Earthquake that frightened the whole town into the Streets—neither they nor the tumult awakened me…. There seem to have been all kinds of tempests all over the Globe—and for my part it would not surprise me—if the earth should get a little tired of the tyrants and slaves who disturb her surface.

—Lord Byron, to Augusta Leigh,

7 November 1822