The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Byron’s letter was all Shelley ate that night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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