by Tim Powers
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, C
rawford 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.
