The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  “What is it?” asked Crawford.

  “You should know,” Shelley told him with hollow gaiety. “It was your idea.” When Crawford still stared blankly at him, Shelley added, with some impatience, “That I drown myself.”

  Crawford flinched. “I—I wasn’t serious. I was just—”

  “I know. Angry at the death of that unborn child. But you were right, it is the only way to save Percy Florence and Mary.” He smiled now—maliciously, Crawford thought. “But you’ll have to do something too. And I wonder if you won’t find it harder than my own task.”

  The next day the sun burned more hotly than ever in the empty cobalt sky, and when Captain Roberts returned from a run up the coast for supplies—largely more wine—he reported that the narrow streets of Lerici were crowded with religious processions imploring rain.

  That night was the Feast of St. John, and after sunset the people of San Terenzo came dancing down the coastline through the surf, singing holy songs and waving torches; Shelley stood at the rail of the terrace, even after night had fallen and the songs had degenerated into drunken, savage chanting and the figures in the surf had begun to throw rocks at the Casa Magni.

  Finally a torch was flung at Shelley, and missed only because Crawford pulled him out of the way, and Shelley dazedly allowed himself to be led back inside. The noise continued until only shortly before dawn, when the fishermen went reeling and singing back to their boats and nets.

  The shouting and the oppressive heat had kept anyone from getting any real rest, and when Crawford went downstairs to watch the fisher-folk go lurching and splashing home he saw the dim silhouette of Mary Shelley standing by the seawall and talking to someone up on the wooded slope beyond it.

  He hurried toward her, thinking that one of the drunken fishermen might be bothering her, but he paused when he heard her laugh softly.

  “John, you know I’m married,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly go with you. But thank you for the … attention.”

  She turned back toward the beach and Crawford saw that she was holding a dark rose up to her chin, so that its petals seemed to be a part of the bruising that mottled her throat. He looked past her at the shadowy slope, but could see nothing there—though he could hear a slithering rustle receding up through the trees. Crawford walked forward, sliding his feet in the sand so that she’d hear him approaching and not be startled when he spoke. “That was Polidori?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She sniffed the rose and stared out at the dark sea.

  “You shouldn’t be speaking to him,” Crawford began wearily. He hoped the coming day wouldn’t be so hot as to make sleeping impossible. “He … he’s not …”

  “He told me about it, yes,” she said calmly. “His suicide, back in England. He thinks they’re the Muses, thinks these vampire things are. Maybe he’s right—though they weren’t that for him. Even after he summoned one and let himself be bitten, he still couldn’t write anything publishable … and so he killed himself.” She shook her head. “The poor boy—he was always so envious of Percy and Byron.”

  “If you know that much about him,” Crawford said, forcing himself to be patient, “then you must know how dangerous such people are once they’ve been resurrected. That is not Polidori, not anymore—that’s a vampire inhabiting his body, like a hermit crab using some sea-snail’s shell. Are you listening to me, damn it? Hell, ask Percy about all this!”

  “Percy …” she said dreamily. “Percy is stopping being Percy, have you noticed? The man I love is … what … receding, diminishing like a figure in a painting with deep perspective. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to communicate with him even by shouting in his ear.”

  “Ask me then, I’m your doctor, right? Have you invited Polidori into your presence yet?”

  “No—though he hinted that he’d like that.”

  “I daresay. Don’t do it.” He stepped closer to her and put his hand on her chin to tilt her face up. “Percy Florence will die, if you do,” he said, staring hard into her eyes. Was she getting any of this? “Repeat that back to me, please,” he said in his best professional tone.

  “Percy Florence will die, if I do,” she said weakly.

  “Good.” He released her. “Now go to bed.”

  She tottered back toward the house, and Crawford sat down in the sand; he was aware of someone watching him intently from up the slope, but the sky was lightening toward blue, and he knew that the thing that had been Polidori wouldn’t try to approach him.

  He remembered Byron derisively quoting some of Polidori’s poetry, back in Switzerland in 1816. Crawford had laughed at the inept lines, as Byron had meant him to, but then the lord had frowned and said that it really wasn’t funny. “He’s terribly serious about all this, Aickman,” Byron had said reprovingly. “He’s a successful doctor, one of the youngest graduates of Edinburgh University, but his only ambition is to be a poet—like Shelley and I. He approached me for the personal physician job just because he thought that by associating with me and my friends he would be able to … learn the secret.” Byron had laughed grimly. “I only hope, for his sake, that he never does.”

  Well, thought Crawford now, he did learn it, Byron. But, though he paid the Muses, they didn’t deliver—it was much like the deal Shelley thought he could make with his sister, my ex-wife.

  The sun was up now, sparking green highlights on the wooded peaks of Portovenere across the Gulf, and the breeze almost seemed to have some coolness in it. Crawford got to his feet and began plodding back through the sand toward the Casa Magni, trying not to step into the indentations of Mary Shelley’s feet.

  During the next five days Shelley spent more and more time out on the Don Juan, letting Roberts and the Vivian boy handle the rigging while he peered at various mountains through a sextant and filled page after page in his notebook—not with poetry anymore, but with obscure, scribbled mathematics. When they returned at dusk he would sometimes try to get Crawford to check his math, but it was largely Newtonian calculus, and entirely beyond Crawford’s skill; Shelley never asked Mary to check it, even though she was clever with numbers and he had clearly begun to doubt his own thought processes.

  Crawford thought the man’s doubts were justified. No longer did Shelley dominate the dinner-table conversation with long arguments about the nature of man and the universe; he now seemed to find it difficult, in fact, even to follow Claire’s ramblings about her shopping expeditions to Lerici—and, though he did still read his mail, Crawford had several times seen him struggling to puzzle out the meaning of a letter, frowning and moving his lips and circling important words.

  At last, seven days after Mary’s near strangulation, Shelley threw his notebook and a lot of his recent correspondence into the fire, and then asked Crawford and Josephine to accompany him on a walk down the shore.

  The sun still shone in the morning half of the sky, but the sand underfoot was hot even through Crawford’s shoes, and he wondered how Shelley could stand plodding through it barefoot. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed yet that it hurt. Josephine was tense, but held Crawford’s hand and even managed a wan smile a couple of times.

  “We leave tomorrow,” Shelley told them quietly. “You two will have to come back here in a week or so, but I want you with me in the meantime.”

  Crawford frowned. “Why do we have to come back?”

  “To do the part that has to be done here,” Shelley said peevishly, “and has to be done by you. So don’t pack everything, leave here any … scientific or medical apparatus you might possess.” He frowned, visibly trying to think. “Actually, Josephine needn’t come back here with you—she could stay with Byron and Trelawny and the rest of the crowd. They’re all going to be gathering back in Pisa.”

  “I go where Michael goes,” said Josephine quietly.

  Crawford squeezed her hand. “And neither of us is going to Pisa,” he said. “We barely escaped being arrested there two months ago. Why do you have to go there, anyway?”

 
“I—because of—oh, of course, to get poor Leigh Hunt set up with Byron. It was because of my urging that he’s sailed down here, with his whole damned family, and since I’ve got to be—stepping out of the picture, I want to see that he’s not left—left—”

  “Helpless?” suggested Josephine.

  “And broke?” added Crawford.

  “In a foreign land, right,” said Shelley, nodding. “You can’t go to Pisa …? Well, we’re stopping off at Livorno on the way, to meet them all, so you could … wait for me there. I’ll be stopping back at Livorno again, before I …”

  Crawford interrupted hastily. “This part that Josephine and I have to do,” he began, but Shelley waved at him to be silent.

  When they had walked another hundred yards along the narrow, rocky shore, Shelley waded out into the shallows. “Let’s talk out here,” he said. “The, uh … the water, will help muffle our words. I don’t want the … vitro to … the sand, I mean, to hear what we say.”

  Crawford and Josephine exchanged a worried look, but crouched to take off their shoes.

  “What about glass?” Josephine called as she straightened up.

  “Glass?” Shelley frowned. “Oh, like if you’re carrying any. Right, leave it there.”

  Josephine reached up to her face and poked her glass eye out and put it in one of her shoes, then took Crawford’s hand again and walked with him out to where Shelley stood.

  “Now pay attention,” Shelley told them. “I may not be able to express all this clearly … later. After now. Ever again.”

  In the early afternoon of the next day the Don Juan sailed out of the Gulf of La Spezia for the last time, bound south for Livorno. Mary and Claire and Jane Williams and the children stayed behind, and Shelley was half-heartedly helping Roberts and Charles Vivian work the sails, and Ed Williams stayed below deck, out of the sunlight, so Crawford and Josephine had the bow to themselves.

  “Six times six is thirty-six,” Josephine was muttering, “seven times seven is forty-nine, eight times eight is sixty-four …”

  She had developed this habit during the last couple of days; it still annoyed Crawford, but after she had explained that it helped keep the Josephine personality in control when she could feel it weakening, he was careful not to let his irritation show. The habit had visibly upset Mary, but Shelley had tended to sit nearer to Josephine while she was doing it, as if the chant was an emblem of something he was losing … or, as Crawford had sometimes uncharitably thought, because the distraught poet was hoping to overhear a correct answer to one or two of the mathematical puzzles that were so clearly beyond him.

  Crawford now simply stared out at the Italian shore that moved imperceptibly past, a mile beyond the port rail. Since yesterday afternoon he had thought of nothing but the thing he was going to have to do in a week, and so when Josephine let the multiplication table stutter to a halt and asked him a question, he answered it with no jolt of a changed subject.

  “Will you be able to do it?” she had asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, still staring at the coastline. “I’ve resisted her before—with your help. And I—” He stopped, for he’d been about to say that now that he had Josephine he was immune to the inhuman woman’s sexual attraction, but it had instantly occurred to him that it might not be true. “I don’t know,” he finished lamely.

  A tired smile made the lines in Josephine’s tanned face more evident. “It’ll mean the deaths of us all if you don’t—as opposed to the deaths of just a couple of us. She’d never let me or the children out of her net.”

  “Perhaps,” he said with exaggerated politeness as he pushed himself away from the rail, “you imagine that I didn’t know that.” He walked away from her, back toward the stern where Shelley was listlessly working the mainsail sheet.

  Behind him he heard the chanted multiplication tables start up again.

  The boat flew along smoothly in a succession of long tacks against the constant wind, and a few hours after sunset they saw ahead the lights that marked the seawall in front of the entrance to the Livorno harbor. They tacked in to the sheltered expanse of water and, after a brief, shouted conversation with the harbor master’s boat, found a mooring next to Byron’s Bolivar; Byron was ashore, at his house in nearby Montenero, and the Don Juan was under temporary quarantine, but the crew of Byron’s ship obligingly tossed some pillows down onto the deck of the smaller vessel so that Shelley’s party could sleep in the open air of the warm night.

  Crawford and Josephine slept up by the bow, while Shelley and Roberts and Charles Vivian sprawled themselves wherever they could find room around the mast and the tiller. Williams paced the deck all night, finally crawling below just before dawn.

  The quarantine officers cleared them the next morning, and everybody except young Charles Vivian went ashore—though Williams complained of being sick, and wore a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off.

  Shelley was almost hysterically cheerful now, and with uncharacteristic lavishness hired a big carriage to take them all the six miles to where Byron and the Hunt family waited for them in Montenero.

  The summer seemed to be getting even hotter, and when, after a dusty hour’s ride, they arrived at Byron’s house, the Villa Dupuy, Crawford was discouraged to see that it was painted a particularly warm shade of brownish-pink.

  Josephine hadn’t spoken during the ride, but Crawford had noticed her fingers working methodically in her lap and had guessed that she was running through the multiplication tables in her head. It hadn’t improved his mood.

  Byron greeted them at the door, and though Crawford was startled to see that the man had put on weight again, Shelley seemed pleased by the change. Shelley appeared to be delighted with everything, in fact, remarking on how glad he was to see that Byron was still living with Teresa Guiccioli, and that she still liked to go outside on sunny days; and he eagerly introduced Crawford and Josephine to a tall, distracted-looking man who proved to be Leigh Hunt, the luckless Englishman who with his wife and six children had taken ship to Italy to co-edit the journal Byron and Shelley had dreamed up last year.

  Byron was clearly hoping to be able to stay up late talking with Shelley, as they had done so often before they had left Pisa, but Shelley claimed to have been exhausted by the trip, and went to bed early.

  Hunt was sulking because of some testy remarks Byron had made about his badly behaved children, and he went to bed early too, and so it was Williams and Crawford and Josephine who sat up with Byron in his high-ceilinged hall and drank his wine and listened to his complaints about his servants and the weather. And Byron seemed glad of the company, though Williams seldom spoke and spent most of the time peering out through a pair of glass doors at a side courtyard, and Josephine several times responded to questions with cheerful statements to the effect that some number multiplied by some other number equalled yet another number; but Byron had heard so many non sequiturs from her in the past that he only grinned and nodded each time she delivered another, and twice demanded that they all drink to the sentiment of the latest one.

  He was in the middle of a story about how several of his servants had recently had a knife fight in the road out front, when everyone’s attention was suddenly drawn to Williams.

  The man had abruptly tensed, so tightly that his body seemed to curl and his forehead was nearly touching the glass of the window, and he was standing on tiptoe.

  Byron had looked across at him in annoyance at first, but there was alarm in his voice now as he said, “What the hell is it, Ed?” Byron clanked his wine glass down on the table and half stood up, but Williams jerked an arm toward him so imperatively that Byron fell back into the chair. A moment later Byron had reddened in embarrassment and repeated his question angrily.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Williams answered quickly. “I just—I’m not going with Shelley to Pisa. Tell him I’m staying here in Livorno to—buy supplies for the run back up to Lerici. I—I’ll be back.”

  Still stiff with tensio
n, he hurried to the front door, and a moment later he had disappeared into the night. He had left the door open, and a warm breeze scented with night-blooming jasmine ruffled Byron’s graying hair.

  Byron’s anger had disappeared. He was staring out through the open doorway with an expression of loss. At last he turned toward the couch where Crawford and Josephine sat, and looked hard at them.

  “You two do seem to be all right,” he said after several seconds. He picked up his wine glass, ignoring the puddle he’d sloshed onto the tabletop, finished what was left in it and then refilled it from the decanter on the floor. “What kind of friend am I, not to have noticed it in him instantly?” He shook his head as he put the decanter down. “How long has that been the case?”

  “A month or so,” said Crawford. “His wife, Jane, seems to be … untouched, so far. Unbitten.”

  “They have to be bidden before you can get bitten,” remarked Byron with a bitter smile. “Damn Shelley.” With a sigh he stood up and limped across the tile floor to a cabinet in the corner and then fumbled in the loose sleeve of his ornate nankeen jacket. “You’re probably curious … as to how I’ve preserved myself and Teresa.” He had found a key and unlocked the cabinet, and took from it a pistol and a cloth bag. “There’s powdered iron in the paint on this house,

  and a garlic-flavored stain deeply bitten into all the wood, and whitethorn and buckthorn around the windows, and of course it’s easy here to eat lots of garlic, and I have several guns around the house loaded with this sort of ammunition.” He tossed the cloth bag to Crawford and then resumed his seat, carrying the pistol pointed at the floor.

  Crawford spilled some of the heavy balls into his palm. They were of silver, with a bit of wooden dowelling, sanded down flush, through the center.

  “Twice I’ve shot at unnatural figures out in the courtyard,” Byron remarked. “No luck.”