The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  This didn’t deter Crawford, and within a month he had a post at the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome, on the bank of the Tiber between the imposing dome of St. Peter’s on one side and the fortifications of the Castel Sant’Angelo on the other.

  He took an apartment on the far side of the river, a couple of rooms overlooking the fountain of Neptune in Navona Square, and every morning that he wasn’t on an assignment for von Aargau he would walk through narrow streets to the Ponte Sant’Angelo and cross that bridge, always a little happier if there were other pedestrians on the bridge too, for then he didn’t feel so outnumbered by the tall stone angels that topped pedestals every few yards along the stone balustrade on either side.

  The Hospital was actually a collection of hospitals, each devoted to a different sort of sufferer; Crawford worked in the foundling hospital, caring for the infants that were delivered anonymously through a little wall grate that was opened when a bell was rung outside on the street. The infants always arrived at night, and Crawford never saw any of the reluctant parents who rang the bell, and sometimes when he was giddy with exhaustion it seemed to him that no one was ever out there when the bell rang and the babies appeared in the basket, that the infants were put in the basket by the city itself, perhaps in the person of one of the stone angels from the bridge.

  He didn’t see von Aargau after leaving Venice, but every month or two someone representing the wealthy young man would call on him at his apartment. Crawford frequently worked more than ten hours at a time, but these messengers would never visit him at the hospital, preferring to wait in the street outside his apartment even if it was cold or raining; once he had asked one of them about it, and the man had explained that they weren’t comfortable on the Vatican side of the river.

  The assignments they brought him were always for the same ailment—a pseudo-tuberculosis that von Aargau insisted be treated with garlic and holy water and closed windows … and often laudanum, to make sure the patient would sleep through the night.

  Of course Crawford was aware of the implications of the treatment—and he hadn’t failed to note the paired puncture marks on the bodies of many of these special patients. But he had long ago come to accept the fact that his life would never again remotely resemble what it had been before that night, four and a half years ago, when he had put his wedding ring onto the finger of a statue in the back yard of a Kentish inn; and at least this arrangement permitted him to do the only thing in life that still seemed to have any value: caring for the newly born, the little helpless people who had not yet had the chance to act, to fall from grace.

  Number 26 was at the south end of the Piazza di Spagna, and Crawford stepped through the archway of the old house and climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, where he stepped out into the hall and began counting the room doors as he walked along the worn wooden floor; he’d been told that his new patient had the two corner rooms, overlooking the Piazza. Piano music—something by Haydn—rippled softly on the still air.

  He found the right door and knocked on it, and as he waited for a response he reviewed what he’d been told of this case.

  The patient was a young Englishman, a poet, and he suffered from consumption—but it was a sort of consumption that called for a course of treatment exactly the opposite of what von Aargau usually recommended. In this case no garlic was to be administered, or even permitted into the room, and any religious paraphernalia was to be thrown out, and the windows were to be left open at night.

  Crawford knew very well that in any civilized medical college von Aargau’s methods would be cause for derision and expulsion—conceivably even imprisonment—but he had seen dying patients recover because of them.

  The piano music had stopped the instant he had knocked, and now furniture creaked and thumped on the other side of the door for several seconds. Finally the door was unbolted and, when it was pulled open by a harassed-looking young man, Crawford guessed from the present haphazard placement of several of the chairs that they had been braced against the door moments earlier.

  Crawford was puzzled until he noticed the piano—certainly rented—that stood in the far corner of the room. Italian law required that every piece of furniture in a room occupied by a consumptive be burned after the invalid had died, and so these people couldn’t risk having the landlady burst in unannounced and catch the sick man in this expensively furnished room.

  “Si?” the young man quavered, speaking with a thick English accent. “Cosa vuole?”

  “English is fine with me,” said Crawford, stepping around him into the room. “I’m Michael Aickman, a doctor. I’ve been sent to look at a young man named John Keats—I gather he’s to be found through here,” he said, crossing to the inner door.

  The young man had looked relieved at not having to speak Italian, but now he looked worried again. “Can’t Dr. Clark come? Did he send you? The nurse has just gone for the mail, and she’s got to go home shortly after she gets back, but—”

  “No, I’m not from Dr. Clark. I work at Santo Spirito, across the river, but I’m on an independent assignment now. Excuse me, but I was told that Mr. Keats is very ill, and I’d like to begin immediately—could you tell him I’m here?”

  “But we … we can’t afford another doctor! Even now Clark is giving us a break on his fee, and the nurse is working for nothing. You—”

  “My bill is prepaid—by an anonymous good Samaritan who watches over people like destitute poets who get ill. So if you would announce me?”

  “Well …” The young man stepped in front of Aickman and rapped on the door. “John? There’s a doctor here, he says somebody’s paid him to take care of you … maybe it was Shelley, or Brown back in England.”

  Aickman frowned slightly at the first name, and suddenly needed a drink. “I’ll wait out in the hall while you talk,” he said quickly, turning away and fumbling under his coat.

  In the hall he twisted the cap off his flask and then tilted it up to his mouth; after several deep swallows of the brandy, he replaced the cap and tucked the flask back into his pocket. Usually he covered the smell on his breath by chewing cloves of garlic, but he’d been told that this Keats person wasn’t to be exposed to the stuff, so he’d left it behind. Oh well, he thought—maybe this young man won’t sniff a gift physician in the mouth.

  The thought struck him as funny, and he was still chuckling to himself when he re-entered the apartment.

  The young man at the door sniffed the air and stared at him. He turned quickly to the closed door, and Aickman heard him whisper, “My God, John, your instincts are good—he’s drunk!”

  Crawford was about to get stern with this ungrateful pauper when there was a laugh from beyond the closed door, and then a frail voice called, “Drunk? Oh, very well then, Severn, let him in.”

  Severn rolled his eyes but pulled the door open, and Crawford strode past him into the next room as imperiously as he could. Severn followed him.

  It was a narrow room, with a bed against one wall and a window in the other. The young man in the bed was emaciated and hollow-eyed, but looked as if he had once been sturdily built—and when he looked up, Crawford recognized him.

  This was the same youth who had helped him evade Josephine in London four years earlier, and who had been the first to tell him about the nephelim. What had been the name of that evil pub Keats had taken him to, under London Bridge? The Galatea, that was it.

  Keats seemed to recognize him, too, and for a moment he looked frightened; and the smile he put on now seemed forced. “Doctor …?”

  “Aickman,” said Crawford.

  “Not … let me see … Frankish?”

  What a memory the boy had! “No.”

  The air in the room was thick with the yeasty, bakery smell of a starving human body—conventional medical wisdom held that consumptives should eat virtually nothing. Crawford crossed to the window, unlatched it and pushed the frames open.

  “Fresh air’s important in the treatment of the
sort of Phthisis you suffer from,” Crawford said. “It’s fortunate that your bed’s close to a window.”

  Below him he could see the tourist painters, and the broad steps sloping up the hill, and the clusters of shivering saints huddled against the balustrades. The spire in front of the church of Trinità dei Monti cast a long winter shadow, as if it were the gnomon of a sundial meant to indicate seasons rather than hours. Beyond the church was simply wooded green hills, for this was the northern edge of the city.

  “Another thing that is—” he began, then paused. He had been leaning on the windowsill, and now there was grease on his hand. Even without bringing his hand to his nose he could smell garlic. “What’s this?” he asked quietly.

  Keats looked wary, but Severn laughed. “We have our dinners sent up here from the trattoria downstairs,” Severn explained, “and it costs us a pound a day, but the food was just terrible at first! So finally one evening John here just took the plates from the porter and, smiling the whole time, dumped them all out the window, and handed the empty plates back! Since then they’ve brought us excellent food—and the landlady didn’t even charge us for the dinners that wound up in the square.” He peered at Crawford’s hand. “Uh, I guess he accidentally got a little on the windowsill while he was at it.”

  “Accidentally,” Crawford repeated thoughtfully, smiling at Keats. “Well, we can’t expect you to get well with putrefying food lying about—I’ll have this nurse of yours wash that off as soon as she gets back. Now it’s important that you—”

  “I don’t want you,” Keats said steadily. “I’m fine with Clark, I don’t need—”

  Crawford promised himself another drink very soon. “I’ve dealt with a dozen cases like yours, Mr. Keats, and every one of my patients has recovered. Can Clark claim a similar record? Is Clark even confident that this is consumption? Aren’t there some symptoms that … puzzle him?”

  “That is true, John,” put in Severn, “Clark did speculate that it might be something to do with your stomach, or your heart….”

  “My brother is dead, Frankish,” said Keats loudly, his wasted face made even gaunter now with anxiety and helplessness. “Tom died in England two years ago, of consumption—” Keats paused to cough harshly, but after a few seconds forced himself to stop. “And,” he went on, his voice hoarse, “he wasn’t even eighteen yet … and two years before that—just after I met you, in fact—he started getting letters in verse from something signing itself Amena Bellafina,’ and I’m sure your Italian is good enough for you to translate that into something like ‘pleasant succession of sweethearts'—though bella can also mean ‘final game'—”

  Keats’s voice had been getting more and more strained, and now he gave way to the cough that had been building up inside him; he fell back onto the bed and rocked there as the terrible coughing tore through his chest and brought bright blood to his lips.

  Crawford knelt beside him and took his thin wrist. Any conventional doctor would be sharpening his lancet now, and calling for a cloth and bowl and bolsters and a sponge soaked in vinegar, but at some point since leaving England Crawford had lost his faith in phlebotomy—somehow bleeding a patient seemed too much like rape now, and he doubted that he’d ever do another bleeding in his life.

  Keats’s pulse was strong, which was uncharacteristic of consumption—but Crawford had known all along that this wasn’t consumption. Camphor, nitre, white henbane—he wouldn’t be prescribing any of those for this ailment.

  Keats was subsiding, breathing deeply, but he seemed to be unconscious.

  “Delirium, Doctor?” asked Severn, and when Crawford glanced up at him he noticed for the first time how exhausted Keats’s friend was.

  “Just about any doctor would tell you so.” Crawford stood up. “How long have you been looking after him?”

  “Since September—five months. We sailed from England together.”

  Crawford led the way back into the other room. “How long have the two of you been here in Rome?”

  “Since November. We landed in Naples on Keats’s birthday, Hallowe’en.”

  “The trip from England took more than a month?”

  “Yes.” Severn collapsed into a chair and rubbed his eyes. “The weather was bad when we left, and for two whole weeks we just sailed back and forth along the south coast of England, waiting for it to clear up; finally we were able to start out across the Channel, but the trip was horrible, and then when we got to Naples we were quarantined aboard the boat for ten days.”

  “Why?”

  “We were told that there had been a typhus epidemic in London.”

  “Huh.” Crawford, who worked in Rome’s biggest hospital and was often called in on cases that required a speaker of English, had not heard of any such epidemic. “Hallowe’en’s his birthday,” he said thoughtfully, remembering now that Keats had told him that four years ago.

  That would be why the medical treatment von Aargau had prescribed was the opposite of what he usually had Crawford do in these pseudo-consumption cases—usually the patients had to be insulated with garlic and holy water and closed windows, so that the source of their diminishment couldn’t get at them; but because of his birth date Keats was an adopted member of the nephelim family. He was different—re-exposure to the poison was the only thing that would keep him alive.

  And, he thought, Keats must know this—so why is he intentionally keeping … her … out?

  Just as he thought the word her, he noticed the title of a book lying on the table—Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems … by John Keats. He picked it up.

  “John’s second book of poems,” Severn said.

  The weight of the vial in his pocket reminded Crawford that he had to wait for the nurse, and no serious remedial measures could be taken for Keats until dark anyway, so he looked over at Severn. “I’d like to wait and talk to this nurse you mentioned. All right if I read some of this?”

  Severn waved. “Surely. Can I make you some tea?”

  Crawford took out his flask and unscrewed the cap, ignoring Severn’s scandalized stare. “Just a glass, thanks.”

  Lamia was a narrative poem about a Corinthian youth who married a creature that was sometimes a woman and sometimes a sort of winged, jewelled serpent, and how he died after a friend banished her. Isabella told the story of a well-born girl whose brothers killed her plebeian lover, whose head she later dug up and planted in a pot of basil which she subsequently watered with her tears. Crawford wondered if the two poems weren’t really the same story—a female mating beneath her station, to the unintended ruin of the genuinely loved male.

  At last footsteps approached up the hall, and Severn put down the magazine he’d been reading and got to his feet. “That will be Julia, the nurse,” he said.

  Crawford stood up too, still holding Keats’s book—but he dropped it when

  Severn opened the door and the nurse walked in.

  For a moment he was sure it was Julia, his Julia, his second wife, who had died so horribly in a Hastings inn; then he noticed that the shape of the jaw was subtly wrong, and the forehead was too high, and he coughed to stifle an embarrassed laugh.

  But when she glanced at him he saw that one of her eyes didn’t track properly, and wasn’t quite the same color as the other one, and the hairs actually stood up on the back of his neck when he realized who this was.

  “Julia,” Severn was saying, “this is Dr. Aickman. The hospital across the river sent him—gratis!—to look in on John.”

  Josephine nodded at Crawford with no evident recognition, and he was reminded of how much he had aged since she had last seen him. “Dr. Clark agreed to taking you on as a consultant?”

  Crawford was trying to figure out if anything besides sheer, appalling coincidence could have led her here, and he missed her question and had to ask her to repeat it. When she did, he shook his head wearily and reached down to the table for his flask.

  “No,” he said, lifting it to his mouth.
“Excuse me,” he said a moment later as he lowered it and wiped his mouth with his free hand. “No, but I can show you credentials and testimonials that I guarantee outrank anything Clark can produce—and I can guarantee Mr. Keats’s recovery.”

  Josephine didn’t look reassured. “And has Mr. Keats had anything to say about this?”

  “John doesn’t want him,” put in Severn, apparently offended afresh by Crawford’s drinking. “Aickman wants John to sleep with the window open … oh, and he wants you to wash off the windowsill.”

  It was clear from the way Severn said this that he expected the nurse to be offended at being asked to perform a menial chore, but Crawford saw the flash of real alarm in her eyes.

  “Who sent you?” she asked quietly. “Not the Santo Spirito, they don’t object to garlic and holy water and closed windows!”

  Severn stared at her blankly, but Crawford stepped closer to her and spoke directly into her face. “I never said the Santo Spirito sent me. All I say is that my methods will heal him.” He remembered that she suffered from some sort of nervous malady herself, and wished he could pry her jaws open and dump the contents of the vial down her throat right now.

  At the same time he was blurrily aware that he wasn’t handling this as tactfully as he could; the reference to Shelley, and then the sudden intrusion of Josephine and a hundred memories from his supposedly dead past, had jolted him. He only carried the flask in order to be able to render himself unconscious during those times, generally late at night, when he was tempted to invite his nonhuman spouse back—and here he’d been sucking at it liberally in the middle of the day.

  Von Aargau had made him memorize a procedure to use if some assignment should prove to be beyond him, and he was afraid he might very well have to use it, for the first time, today. Von Aargau had frowned when he’d described it, though, and very clearly, hoped that Crawford would never have to do it.