The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  The shore had so receded behind them that Crawford, looking back, couldn’t make out the dock anymore, and Shelley let the sail spill the wind; within moments the boat had rocked to a stop and was drifting. Crawford thought he caught a hint of light and movement in the sky, but when he looked up there was nothing to see except the dark clouds.

  Shelley looked up too, a little nervously. “Wild lamiae? We ought to be protected from them, at least, now that she’s here—though one almost drowned me on this lake a couple of months ago.” A minute went by in silence, and he relaxed.

  “So,” Shelley went on, “you did marry her. They can’t initiate it, there has to have been a token of invitation on your part. I wonder why you can’t remember it. Did you … I don’t know, speak marriage vows to a rock, put a wedding ring on a winged lizard …” He grinned. “… have sex with a statue in a church?”

  Crawford’s stomach had gone cold. “Christ!” he whispered. “Yes, I did!”

  Shelley’s eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. “Really? A statue in a church? I don’t mean to seem vulgarly curious, but—”

  “No, no, I put a wedding ring on the finger of a statue. In Warnham, a month ago. And when I went back, late at night, to get it, the—later I decided it was a dream—the statue’s hand was closed, so I couldn’t get the ring off.”

  “That was it,” said Shelley flatly. “That was her. And it wasn’t as … random an action, I’ll wager, as you imagine; just like the loss of your finger, hmm? She was there, she was directing things. She needed a vehicle aboard which to follow me to Europe, so she maneuvered you into volunteering to be one.”

  “Did she kill my wife? The woman I married the next day, who … who was killed on our wedding night, while I slept?”

  Shelley bared his teeth in a snarl of sympathy. “Christ, did that happen? Yes, it has to have been her. She’s … a jealous god.” He tugged at his hair. “There was a girl I was interested in in Scotland, in 1811, shortly after I cut my sister out of myself; Mary Jones the girl’s name was. My sister killed her—tore her to pieces. The authorities said it must have been done with big sheep shears, and they picked the biggest, stupidest citizen as the culprit, but anyone could see that no human being with anything less than a, a cannon could have so destroyed the girl’s body.”

  “Right, exactly,” Crawford said in a clipped whisper, “that’s what happened to Julia. But you know something? I’m … not sorry. Damn me for saying it, but I’m not sorry. I mean, I wish Julia were still alive, that is, I wish I’d never met her—I wish I had known I was marrying her, the … the cold woman, your sister, so that I could simply have avoided Julia. Is that horrible of me?”

  “Profoundly, yes.” Shelley shifted around, draping an arm over the tiller bar. “But I’m glad to hear that you feel that way—it means you’ll probably cooperate with the plan I have in mind. You see, I have a wife and children—and, on top of that, I’m about to get a divorce and re-marry; and my half sister, your wife, will kill all of these people if she can, just as she killed your Julia. But she can’t cross water, especially salt water, by herself—she’s got to ride across with a human to whom she’s closely related: by blood, as in my case, or by marriage, as in yours. Now, she married you in order to chase me across the channel—”

  “That’s a lie,” Crawford said.

  Shelley gave him a pitying look. “Very well, it’s a lie. In any case, wouldn’t you like to make sure that when I return to England she stays here with you, and doesn’t ride back across the channel with me?”

  “She wouldn’t,” said Crawford, his voice louder and belligerent. “You’re just flattering yourself. Go ahead, go back to England—she won’t follow you.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Shelley soothingly. “I’m sure you are. But why don’t you help me make it certain, by just cooperating with me on a couple of … procedures. Nothing complicated, I got my wife to do them just before I left England in May. I just want you to—”

  “I don’t have to physically bind her to me—and I won’t insult her, and shame myself, by trying.”

  Shelley stared at him, and though it was too dark to see clearly, his expression seemed to be one of bewilderment. “Very well. Right. Then let’s put it this way—how would you like to learn, learn from her brother, remember, what sorts of behavior you should avoid, if you want to keep her? What she likes, what she hates?”

  “I don’t need this.” Crawford stood up, rocking the boat. “And I know how to swim.”

  He dove over the side.

  The lake water was cold, and seemed to clear his head of the feverish complacency that had been surrounding him like a warm fog; now there was just panic. I should climb right back aboard, he thought, and find out how to keep her from following him … and then do the opposite. How can I want to keep her? My God, she killed Julia! And now somehow you—

  His head broke the surface of the water and he was breathing the evening air, and he forgot all about going back to the boat. The prospect of swimming several hundred yards while wearing boots and a coat didn’t seem daunting, and he turned toward the shore they’d embarked from and began crawling through the water with a steady, ponderous stroke. Behind him Shelley was calling to him, but he didn’t bother to listen.

  As he swam, the water seemed gradually to become a denser fluid, like mercury—so that he floated higher and could propel himself along with less effort, almost as if the water were repelling him; and a warm wind had sprung up at his back, thrusting at his clothes and hair and lending him impetus. Thank you, he thought to the mountains and the sky. Thank you, my new family.

  Shelley tried to follow him, but the wind over the lake was impossibly erratic, and finally he had to let the sail flap loose. His night-vision had been diminishing ever since he had taken the knife to his own lower ribs in 1811, but he could still see well enough to make out the wide whirlwind that drew spray up in a dim funnel and centered on the receding lump of agitation that was his brother-in-law.

  Simultaneous lightning crazed the night sky over the Jura on one horizon and Mont Blanc on the other, and a few moments later the thunder rolled back and forth across the lake, sounding to Shelley like the majestic laughter of the mountains.

  For the next week Crawford never went out by day. Often when the sun had set behind the black slopes of the Jura he would climb up the rocky foothills by starlight, or slouch down the steep cobblestoned lanes to the shore of the lake, and then just wander aimlessly. He was acutely aware of smells now, relishing the wild spice scents of the upland flowers, and repulsed by the smoke that whirled away along the shore at dusk when the returned fishermen were cooking their garlicky sausages. There were no tourists out here, and the locals seemed to hurry away when he approached them, and so whole days went by without his speaking a word.

  The memories of his past life had lost their driving power—his only concern these days was to be back in his room every evening by midnight for the arrival of her.

  And he had only one worry, but it was a consuming one—she was becoming less substantial. The dreams were losing their vividness, and he could find only the faintest red spots now when he looked for her bites in the mornings; he treasured the memory of the first bite, and sentimentally kept picking at it so that it wouldn’t heal.

  He had never turned the mirror back to face the room, but he knew what he would see if he did—the bright, ill-looking eyes and hectically spotted cheeks that distinguished the faces of so many of the people he’d been meeting lately.

  When he came back up the hill on the tenth night, he found half a dozen people awaiting him outside the rooming house. One of them was the old woman who owned the place. His bag had been packed, and it sat on the grass behind them.

  “You cannot stay here any longer,” said the landlady clearly in French. “You did not tell me that you are consumptive. The quarantine laws are very strict—you must go to the hospitals.”

  Crawford shook his head, impatient to
get upstairs. “It is not genuine consumption,” he managed to reply in the same language. “Honestly, I am a doctor, and I can assure you that I suffer from an entirely different malady, one that—”

  “One that can perhaps bring worse things yet down upon us,” said the burly man nearest Crawford’s bag. “The teeth of the middle.”

  For a moment Crawford thought the man was making a reference to his bitten finger stump, but then he remembered that that was the name of a cluster of nearby mountains: the Dents du Midi.

  Crawford was afraid it might be midnight now, and that she might be waiting for him … or not waiting. “Look,” he said unsteadily in English, “I’ve paid for the goddamn room, and I’m going to—”

  He tried to push past them, but an outflung palm thrust him back with such force that he wound up sitting on the grass well behind where he’d been standing. His portmanteau thudded onto the ground next to him.

  “Within my grandfather’s lifetime people like you were burned alive,” the landlady called. “Be grateful that you are simply required to leave.”

  “But it’s the middle of the night!” Crawford gasped, still nearly breathless from the push. “Uh, mais, c’est en pleíne nuit! They close the Geneva gates at ten! What do you expect me to—”

  The burly man pulled something silvery out from under his coat, but Crawford didn’t wait to see whether it was a crucifix or a knife; rolling painfully to his feet, he seized his bag and, wheezing curses, limped away down the hill.

  He hoped to walk to Geneva and talk or bribe his way into the city, and then get a room somewhere, but she came to him while he was still on the road.

  He had his portmanteau slung over his back as he strode along, and all at once it seemed to grow shockingly heavy; he fell under its sudden weight and rolled several yards down the lakeward slope … and then, with an overwhelming burst of gladness, he realized that the glowing-eyed creature that was crouched on his back and lowering its open mouth toward his neck was her. And he was awake—this was no dream.

  When her teeth punctured the skin of his throat he was abruptly somewhere else … even someone else. He was lying on a bed, and he knew he was on the west coast of France, booked to sail for Portsmouth tomorrow. Mary Godwin, his wife-to-be, slept beside him, but his thoughts tonight were of his present wife, Harriet, and their two children, all three of whom he had left behind in England. Then he became aware that his thoughts were being monitored, and he hastily closed his mind … and Crawford was himself again, sprawled across the dewy grass slope under the stars while the cold woman drew hot blood from his throat.

  He realized dimly that the flow of his blood into her had briefly linked his mind to Shelley’s.

  But now she was speaking to him in his mind, and he forgot everything else. She didn’t use words, but he learned that she had to go away somewhere to fulfill a five-year-old promise, and that there were only two vessels available to her for such a voyage—and one of them was leaving now. She would give his … name, face, identity … to certain sorts of … people, who would try to protect him if he got into danger.

  And he had better be … faithful to her.

  He tried to remonstrate, to tell her how much he needed her, but even though he shouted at her, staring into her weirdly luminous eyes as her ivory face hovered over him, he wasn’t sure she heard him.

  Eventually she left him, but it was too cold on the grassy hillside for him to go to sleep. He got to his feet, refastened his clothes and, with infinite weariness, resumed his interrupted walk to Geneva.

  In Le Havre, in northern France, Percy Shelley stepped aboard the ship that was to take him to England …

  … And Crawford was alone. She was gone, not only somewhere else but not watching over him anymore. The night was instantly darker; his night-vision had suddenly diminished, and he began dragging his feet as he walked so that he could feel the texture of the road and notice if he strayed off it.

  Shelley had been right after all—and had failed to leave her on this side of the channel.

  CHAPTER 8

  I saw pale kings, and princes too,

  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

  Who cry’d—'La belle Dame sans merci

  Hath thee in thrall!’

  I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam

  With horrid warning gaped wide,

  And I awoke, and found me here

  On the cold hill side.

  —John Keats,

  La Belle Dame Sans Merci

  … seals—necklaces—balls &c.—& I know not

  what—formed of Chrystals—Agates—and other stones—all

  of & from Mont Blanc bought & brought by me on & from

  the spot—expressly for you to divide among yourself and the

  children …

  —Lord Byron,

  to Augusta Leigh, 8 September 1816

  Lord Byron didn’t appreciate having to be up early and having to be in a carriage with Dr. Polidori; either burden alone, he felt, he could have taken, indeed often had taken, in stride—but both at once today was asking too much. He really couldn’t be held to blame if he lost his temper.

  Byron’s gigantic travelling carriage was making poor headway through the traffic around Geneva’s north gate; the carriage had been built in England, copied from the celebrated one of Napoleon’s that had been captured at Genappe, and it contained a bed and a table and silverware … but it was an unwieldy vehicle for maneuvering through crowds.

  The young physician didn’t seem to mind the delay, though. Polidori had done a lot of strenuous exercises before they had set out, making a show of his disciplined gasping, and now he was squinting at the distant mountains visible against the blue sky behind the gables and spires of the town, and he was whispering under his breath.

  Byron couldn’t stand it. He knew that it was some wretched bit of the physician’s own verse that he was reciting. Why did the man have to have literary ambitions?

  Mostly because the physician disapproved, Byron poured himself another glass of Fendant wine.

  Sure enough, Polidori glanced over at him and frowned. “That’s your fifth glass of wine today, my lord, and you’ve only been up for a couple of hours!” He cleared his throat. “It has been … medically and mathematically proven, that wine, in excessive amounts, has … catastrophic effects in the … digestive sphere—”

  “When I meet a man with a digestive sphere, Pollydolly, I’ll send him straight to you. What I’ve got is a stomach, and it’s partial to drink.” He held the wine up to the sunlight and admired the way the sun made an amber smoldering in the glass. “Liquor’s an old friend of mine, and it’s never betrayed my trust.”

  Polidori shrugged sulkily and resumed staring out the window; his lower lip was sticking out more than usual, but at least he had stopped his sotto voce recitations.

  Byron grinned sourly, remembering an exchange he’d had with the envious young physician four months ago, when the two of them had been travelling up the Rhine. “After all,” Polidori had said, “what is there that you can do that I cannot?” Byron had grinned and stretched languorously. “Why, since you force me to say,” he had answered, “I think there are three things.” Of course Polidori had hotly demanded to know what they could be. “Well,” Byron had replied, “I can swim across this river … and I can snuff out a candle with a pistol ball at a distance of twenty paces … and I can write a poem of which fourteen thousand copies sell in one day.”

  That had been fun; especially since Polidori had been unable to argue. Byron demonstrably had done all those things—except swim the Rhine, but he was known to be a powerful swimmer, who had once swum across the mile of treacherous sea between Sestos and Abydos in Turkey—and Polidori couldn’t even claim to be able to do one of them. That dialogue, like this morning’s, had sent the young physician into a sulk.

  The crowd had finally opened up in front of them, and Byron’s driver was able to whip up the horses and get the carr
iage out through the gate.

  “Finally,” snapped Polidori, shifting awkwardly on his seat as if to imply that

  the carriage’s construction ought to have provided passengers with more room.

  Just to annoy the young man further, Byron leaned forward and opened the communication panel. “Stop a moment, would you please, Maurice,” he called to the driver. He was about to say that he wanted to let the horses rest for a while; but then, glancing out the window, he saw an arm and the back of a head showing like nearly submerged reefs above the sea of daisies along the side of the road.

  “What now, my lord?” sighed Polidori.

  “It’s some physician you are,” Byron told him sternly. “People are dying by the side of the road, and all you can be bothered to do is recite poetry and tell me about digestive trapezohedrons.”

  Polidori was aware that he was missing something. He blinked out of one of the windows in what would have been, if aimed in the right direction, a brave show of alertness. “… People dying?” he mumbled.

  Byron was already out of the carriage and limping across the grassy shoulder. “Over here, you imbecile. Exercise your arts on this poor—” He paused, for he had rolled the limp body over, and he recognized the face.

  So did Polidori, who came stumping up then. “Why, it’s just that false doctor who nearly gave Shelley pneumonia! Did I tell you I made some inquiries, and found out that he’s actually a veterinarian? I expect he’s just drunk. There’s no—”

  Byron had looked closely at the wasted face, though, and was remembering how close he had come to a similar disaster in his youth—and he remembered too the protective carnelian-quartz heart a friend had subsequently given him, and the strangely crystalline skull he himself had later dug up at his family estate and had made into a goblet.