The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  Her torn lips actually curved into a smile. “Maybe to see my own future, in a way. I hope. No, to … see what’s inside people. Inside people. It gives us … it gives me … dreams, and the dreams are pulling me out of …” She paused, then shook her head in despair of expressing whatever her thought was.

  “What kind of dreams?”

  “Of performing surgery on myself—always in the dreams I’m on the table, sitting up a little, and I’ve knifed open my whole torso, and I’m digging around in my own entrails and pulling things out to throw away. If I can just get rid of all of them …”

  Crawford stared at her, the expression on his haggard face a mix of concern and horror. “Things? What things?”

  She shuddered, and swayed against him as if she were about to faint. “Gearwheels,” she said; “springs, bolts, chains, wires …” She let the sentence drift off.

  Crawford put his arm around her and wordlessly held her.

  Crawford led her southwest to Navona Square, and then, peering from around the corner of a shop, he watched the square and the window of his apartment for several long minutes. When at last he was fairly sure that no Austrians had traced him here yet, he told Josephine to wait, and hobbled across the square and into his building, re-emerging a few minutes later with a valise and a walking stick. It had been a risky action, but he had felt that he and Josephine would have no chance at all without some money and his medical kit, and if they were to make any progress at all he needed to be able to take some of the weight off of his shot leg.

  A greengrocer had stopped his cart near the alley where Josephine was waiting, and the man was now setting out baskets of leeks and potatoes on the cobblestones, and from the open door of a bakery across the street Crawford could smell hot rolls and coffee; he was considering going over there and spending some of his money, but then he heard the greengrocer call across to the baker, asking if he knew why there were so many soldiers riding up and down every street and alley a few blocks north.

  Crawford gave Josephine the valise, then took her elbow again and began hitching himself along southward. The stick didn’t seem to help much, but despite his throbbing, stiffening leg he was unwilling to hire a carriage, both because the drivers had probably been told to watch for them and because he didn’t want to use the little money he had on anything less than food and shelter.

  Eventually he realized that the stick was supposed to be held in the hand away from the bad leg, and after that discovery the walking became a good deal less painful. The sweat began to cool on his face, and he was able to relax a little.

  It occurred to him that Josephine had not answered his question. “So how did you wind up with Keats?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Dr. Clark gets a lot of his nurses from the St. Paul’s Home, and when it’s for an English tourist he prefers an English-speaking nurse.”

  “Then why did you stay on with him? He didn’t need surgery.”

  “No,” she said, seeming to recover energy as they walked, “and when I was assigned to him I almost didn’t stay, I almost quit. But he … had a look, that I

  used to have; and he was trying to get away from it too … and he was trying to save his sister … I don’t know, I suppose I decided I could learn more about what’s inside people by working for him.”

  She looked squarely at Crawford for the first time in quite a while, her one eye red but alert below the slanted scarf, and when he saw the cuts on her lips he found himself remembering the glass-splintery kiss they’d shared in the street, and he touched his own lacerated mouth.

  “It can’t have been easy,” he said, his voice quiet, “to get a glassblower to make a glass eye filled with chopped garlic.”

  “Actually he did it for nothing. He said he understood why I wanted it, why I wanted to have an emergency source of garlic ready to hand at all times; he said he admired me for it.”

  Crawford thought about the flask he had been keeping for roughly the same purpose, and he wondered if the man he’d bought it from had admired him for it; he certainly hadn’t seemed to.

  The thought of the flask made him take it out and uncap it, though, and he tilted it up to his mouth; the alcohol stung in the cuts on his lips and tongue, but the rich pungency did so much to restore his energy and alertness that he made Josephine take a mouthful too.

  Three times they saw parties of soldiers on horseback in the streets north of them, and twice they heard children demanding to be allowed to go see the dozens of boats that were landing and disgorging soldiers along the Tiber’s banks, so Crawford and Josephine walked southeast, making their way through twisting alleys and lanes and avoiding the wider streets, and finally, when they followed the narrow Via di Marforio to its end and then descended a set of steps, they found that they were at the eastern end of the shallow valley that was the Roman Forum, and had left the noise and activity of modern Rome behind.

  It was a long, uneven field, cross-hatched with ancient pavements that still mostly held back the rank grass; weathered pillars stood up here and there across the field in just discernible patterns, hinting at the grand temples and basilicas that were long gone. Ahead of the two fugitives and a little to their right loomed a massive square edifice of stone encompassing three arches, and Crawford took Josephine’s hand and started toward the high, broad central arch.

  The rising sun beyond it made a dark silhouette of the huge structure, and Crawford was unable to make out any of the bas-reliefs or Latin inscriptions cut into the stone.

  “The Arch of Septimius Severus,” said Josephine abruptly. “He was one of the cruelest emperors of Rome, but at least there was nearly no literature produced during his reign.”

  Crawford blinked at her. “Is that right? Well, that’s—”

  “Somewhere in the vicinity of this arch would be a good place to deal with our injuries.”

  “I’m not sure I follow—” he began; but then he thought of the producers of literature he’d met since leaving England four years ago, and he nodded slowly. “You think the old boy might still cast a … sphere of influence, eh? Well, what the hell—we certainly can’t afford to scorn any good luck charms.”

  Ahead on the left, three low walls of pink brick made a shadowed little enclosure, and Crawford led her to it. When they were crouched down, out of the sight of any early-morning strollers, he opened his medical kit, unfolded a clean white cloth and spread it across the ancient pavement, and then, hoping that she hadn’t exaggerated her nursing experience, he began laying out instruments.

  Cutting the pistol ball out of Josephine’s scalp was easy and only superficially bloody, and within a few minutes Crawford had sutured up the incision and applied brandy-soaked bandages to it and to the entrance wound. And it was little trouble for her to sew his shirt tight to bind his cracked ribs.

  Getting the ball out of his thigh would be more difficult, as he had to pull down his trousers and then lie on his stomach and give Josephine directions on what to do with the forceps.

  The wound had started to close, and he almost lost consciousness when she began probing with the cold instrument.

  “Sorry,” she said, after he had smothered a scream with his fist.

  “'S all right,” he whispered quickly, wishing he didn’t have to save the last dribble of brandy for dressing the wound. He was suddenly bathed in cold sweat, and he wondered if he was about to be sick. “Talk to me as you do it, will you? Anything.”

  She pushed the closed jaws of the forceps in a little deeper, and it was all he could do to keep from leaping up and yanking it out. The cold steel in his leg contrasted with the fresh, hot blood running down the sides of his thigh and puddling on the gritty pavement under him.

  “Well, I told you why I was there, at Keats’s,” she said calmly. “Why were you there, and working for his vampire?”

  “I wasn’t,” he gasped, “working for the goddamn vampire. Well, I guess I was, but I didn’t—Jesus, slow, do it slower!—I didn’t know it. I was wo
rking for the

  Austrians. Hell, most of the work I did for him, this fellow von Aargau, and the Austrians—goddamn!—was protecting people from vampires.”

  He felt the tip of the forceps touch the silver ball. “Stop,” he said hastily, “you’re there. Now—God help me—back out a little, open the forceps very slowly, and then try to grab the ball. I mean take hold of the ball. Firmly, squeeze it, you understand, but—don’t—do anything jolting.”

  He saw her shadow nod. “The Austrians and the … stone people are allies, I think,” she said thoughtfully as she worked the metal in his leg and the blood puddle reached his knee, “but they’re different kinds of life, and can’t—I’ve got hold of the ball. What now?”

  Crawford gripped the edges of the broken marble paving blocks under him. “Slowly,” he whispered. “Pull.”

  She began pulling, so gently that at first he wasn’t aware of it. “They couldn’t possibly really understand each other’s goals,” she went on. “At best it can only be an alliance of convenience. I’ll bet the only people you protected from vampires were people important to the Austrians.”

  “That’s true,” he said tightly. He could feel the tugging now. “Except for Keats—and that was apparently just an attempt to keep Keats’s vampire happy.” The tugging got stronger.

  “A failed attempt,” said Josephine calmly as she slowly increased the pull, pressing down with her free hand on his bare, blood-sticky thigh. “She’s without a host now. He knew he had to die, and he did. He was even talking about suicide at one time.”

  “Without a host,” Crawford echoed. “After twenty-five years.” Suddenly he remembered Severn’s story about Keats having been kept quarantined in Naples Harbor until his birthday, the 31st of October—and he was certain that the quarantine had been an Austrian courtesy to Keats’s vampire: to delay Keats’s arrival, and disillusionment, and possible death-wish, until the night when the vampire could scout Rome for a newborn infant to adopt, as she had adopted Keats himself a quarter of a century earlier. The Austrians had in effect donated an Italian child so that the vampire would not, no matter what Keats did, be left without a host.

  She was provided with a field of hosts to choose from, Josephine, he thought bitterly. And he wondered if the infant the vampire had chosen was one of the ones that had been anonymously handed to him through the grating in the wall of the foundling’s hospital at Santo Spirito.

  “Here it comes,” said Josephine, “don’t tense up.”

  The forceps, gripping the pistol ball, was much wider now than when it had gone in, and Crawford could feel it tearing muscle as Josephine kept inexorably tugging upward. His eyes and jaws were clenched shut and he was breathing in great, whispered sobs, and the sweat was puddling under him and diluting the blood around his leg.

  At last he felt it pop out and, though the blood began to well more quickly from the wound, he went limp in relief. Even when she doused the wound with the last of the brandy he didn’t twitch at the pain, and after she had tied a bandage around the thigh he was even able to pull his trousers up by himself.

  He rolled over carefully, then sat up, feeling chilly and weak. “Thank you,” he told her hoarsely. “I’ve never worked with a steadier nurse.”

  She turned away, toward the sun, and then awkwardly bent down to pick up the ball Crawford had cut out of her scalp. She rolled the two silver lumps in her palm, then drew her hand back as if to throw them out across the ruinscape.

  “Don’t!” he said.

  She lowered her arm and looked at him questioningly.

  “They’re silver,” he said, “and we don’t have much travelling money.” He began struggling up onto his feet, using his walking stick like a barge-pole.

  “Are we travelling together?” she asked, with no expression discernible on her face.

  He paused, realized that his words had implied that … and that in fact it was what he would prefer. He straightened up, and then nodded cautiously. “If you’d like to. We can travel as brother and sister, and get work at some hospital somewhere. Uh … I do have to ask this; if the question makes no sense to you … just tell me so.” He took a deep breath. “Do you still think I killed Julia?”

  She walked away from him, picking her way over fragments of fallen pillars, and she stopped beside a eucalyptus bush and picked one of its poisonous leaves and, as she absently tore it to pieces, stared out across the ruins to the ivy-masked arches that fretted the steep face of the Palatine Hill.

  Crawford followed more slowly, bracing his stick in the cracks in the old pavement.

  When he stood beside her he opened his mouth to speak, but she held up her hand. “You think I don’t know that I’m Josephine,” she said quickly, as though it was something that had to be said but that no one wanted to hear, “and that it’s Julia that’s—that’s d-dead.” She shook her head, a grin of unhappiness cramping her face, and tears spilled from her eye and made highlights on her lean cheek. “I do know it, I do; I just … can’t stand it. Julia was such a …so much better a person than I ever was. She was always terribly kind to me, in spite of all the trouble I was to her. I should be dead, and she should be the one that’s still alive.”

  She looked away from him but held out her scarred, deformed left hand, and he took it. “I know you didn’t kill her. And I know what did.”

  Hand in hand, but with not the slightest erotic interest, they made their halting way forward across the shattered floor of the Forum, toward the southeast, where the high, crumbled red shoulder of the Colosseum rose above the skyline of more modern churches.

  “Have you ever had that done,” she asked him after a while, “what I did for Keats right there at the end? If not, I could do it for you anytime you liked. Anyone can, you know. What do the Catholics call it?”

  Crawford tried to remember the details of the previous night. The mid-morning sun was drying his clothes, and he felt a lot better than he had a couple of hours ago, but exhaustion still clung to him like children on his back. “What,” he said finally, “letting him sign his book, with the water from the windowsill? I don’t think the Catholics—”

  “No,” she said, “when I smeared my wet hand across his forehead, so as to—”

  “I thought that was accidental,” Crawford said, “just you catching your balance.”

  She looked at him in exasperation. “No. It was what made his vampire leave. Damn it, what do they call it, not Confirmation—”

  “Oh.” Crawford stopped walking for a moment. “Yes. Yes, I might want you to do that for me sometime—let me think about it.” He started walking again, and added, as an afterthought, “Baptism, they call it.”

  BOOK TWO

  1822: SUMMER FLIES

  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 n
ear 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.