The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  “Or Greece. Now I think Greece would be good enough.”

  “But even if your vampire did find you again, it’d need a fresh invitation, wouldn’t it?”

  The corners of Byron’s mouth turned downward in a bitter smile. “Yes—but even though you never gave in and asked yours back, as your wife and I both did eventually, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a … powerful temptation. I’m sure there were moments of loneliness and fear, in which even you just about gave in.”

  Crawford lifted his eyes and looked past Byron, up the coast to the point where the shoreline seemed to dissolve in the wavering heat-mirages, and he nodded. “So,” he said after a moment, “we go to Lerici, catch Josephine and tie her up, and take her to Venice, and then use Shelley’s heart to draw the eye out of whichever of these sisters has got it, and catch it.” He grinned and looked down at his pale, trembling hands. “And then run like hell.”

  “That’s it.” Byron’s face was shining with sweat, and the hand in which he was holding his glass had at last begun to tremble. “Here,” he said, thrusting the glass at Crawford, who managed to take it without dropping it and the bottle into the sea.

  Byron ducked under the surface, and when his head bobbed back up into the air he even seemed to have swallowed some of the seawater.

  “Are you all right?” Crawford asked.

  Byron nodded and tossed his head back. He was using his arms too to tread water now, and didn’t ask Crawford to return the glass. “I’m fine,” Byron said shortly. “I seem to—lately I seem to think better if I’m surrounded by salt water; and even better if I’m actually immersed in it.”

  “I think it insulates you from the nephelim influence,” Crawford told him. “The only times I really wanted to escape the nephelim net, when I was infected, were moments when I was under water. You recall Noah didn’t escape by climbing a mountain.” He stared at Byron, who was panting now. “You’re doing a lot of swimming lately, it seems. Are your Carbonari precautions beginning to falter?”

  “Don’t—” Byron began angrily; then he shook his head. “I guess you do have the right to ask.” He swam to the boat and flung his elbow over the gunwale and let his arms and legs relax. The boat tilted with his weight, and Crawford had to grab the bottle to keep it from falling over.

  “Yes,” Byron said, “the precautions don’t seem to be a permanent solution. Hell, I’m like a drunk who keeps telling himself that there is some way to have his gin and have a normal life too. I thought I could hold—whatever you want to call it, Lord Grey de Ruthyn, Margarita Cogni—it—at bay; so that I could still write, but at the same time that I would be free to go out in the sun, and that Teresa and my remaining children would be safe. But lately I’ve been getting weaker during the day, and less able to concentrate.

  I don’t think I’ve been entirely without a fever for months. I want to do this, this exorcism, while I still have the strength—both of mind and body.”

  Crawford thought of the strength of his own mind and body. “Will we be bringing Tita along with us, or Trelawny?”

  “No.” Byron brought his other arm to the gunwale and laboriously hoisted himself up into the boat. His shoulders were even redder now than they had been when Crawford noticed them earlier, and had begun to blister. “No, Tita won’t touch that kind of work since that night in Venice when the pillar rose up out of the water, and I know that Trelawny wouldn’t believe us if we told him what his revered Shelley really was.”

  Byron took hold of the oars and, weakly, maneuvered the boat back close to the boarding ladder so that Tita could climb down and row them to shore. “It’ll just be you and me—and Josephine.”

  “God help us,” said Crawford softly.

  “If there is one.” Byron grinned. “A whole lot of ghastly things have turned out to be possible, remember.”

  By four o’clock the fire had burned down enough so that they could approach the oven without being scorched. The rib cage and pelvis had collapsed into broken, charcoal-like chunks, but the heart was still whole, though blackened. The sight of it made Crawford dizzy again, and he sat down in the hot sand.

  Byron took a deep breath. “Tre,” he said, “could you get the heart for me?”

  Trelawny shook his head firmly. “I tried to get the skull for you. Hunt has asked for the heart.”

  Byron glanced worriedly down at Crawford. “That’s absurd,” he told Trelawny, “I knew Shelley longer than either of you! You’re both guests in my home! I demand that—”

  He paused and stared at Hunt and Trelawny. Crawford could guess what the lord was thinking: Trelawny wouldn’t budge, and Hunt might, out of injured pride, actually move out of the Casa Lanfranchi, taking the heart with him; and if Byron made a scene about wanting the thing, Hunt might very well ship it to his home in London at the first opportunity.

  “Sorry,” Byron said. “It’s just been a trying day. Of course you can have it, Leigh—I’ll make do with a bit of bone.”

  Hunt had brought a little box to carry away relics in, and now he held it open while Trelawny leaned over the blackly littered oven and snatched out the heart. He whistled in pain, but juggled the thing toward Hunt, who managed to catch it in his box and slam down the lid as if the heart might try to escape.

  Hunt glanced at Byron nervously, but the lord was smiling—though Crawford noticed that his jaw muscles were tightly flexed. Byron took out a handkerchief and with it picked out a segment of a rib. “This will do for me,” he said in a neutral voice.

  The ashes and remaining bone fragments were scraped into the little lead and oak coffin Byron had bought, and then the health officers helped Trelawny slide poles under the oven and carry it down to the surf. Steam billowed up when they lowered it into the water, and Crawford thought the sudden hiss sounded like the sea reacting in pain.

  An hour later Trelawny and Byron and Hunt and Crawford were having dinner in Viareggio. Byron puzzled Hunt by asking the innkeeper if they could drink their wine from amethyst glasses—plain glass ones turned out to be all that was available, but the four of them got drunk on the house’s harsh red wine anyway, and on the drive back south to Pisa in Byron’s Napoleonic coach they sang and laughed hysterically.

  Crawford recognized their mirth as a reaction to the horror of the day; but in his own laughter, and Byron’s, he heard too an edge of fear, and as the shadows of the roadside trees lengthened across their route he couldn’t help throwing frequent glances at Hunt’s little relic box on the seat beside Trelawny.

  CHAPTER 21

  And bats with baby faces in the violet light

  Whistled, and beat their wings

  And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

  And upside down in air were towers

  Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

  And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

  —T. S. Eliot,

  The Waste Land

  The next day was a Saturday, and Crawford did little besides eat and sleep.

  He was awakened early Sunday morning by birds twittering and hopping around in the branches of the tree outside his window, and for at least an hour he just lay in the bed, enjoying the softness of the mattress and the warm weight of the blankets.

  Eventually the door swung inward quietly, and Byron’s servant Giuseppe peered in at him; seeing that Crawford was awake, the man left and returned shortly with a bowl of bean soup. Crawford ate it happily and had lain back in the bed, vaguely wishing he’d asked the servant to fetch him some books … when it occurred to him that Josephine must only recently have gone to sleep. He hoped she was still staying at the Casa Magni, and not sleeping out among the trees somewhere.

  He looked at the scraped-clean soup bowl on the bedside table and wondered what she was eating these days. She should be eating liver and raisins, he thought, just to restore the blood she’s certainly losing every night; and she should be eating for two now. I wonder if she even knows that she’s pro
bably pregnant.

  “Damn,” he whispered wearily, and swung his narrowed legs out from under the blankets. He was wearing a long nightshirt, and he pulled it down over the depressing spectacle of his white, bony knees. A moment later he took a deep breath and stood up, swaying and dizzy at the sudden altitude, and then shuffled to the door.

  Giuseppe came in just as he was reaching for the knob, and the door hit Crawford in the shoulder; he lost his balance and sat down hard on the rug.

  The servant shook his head impatiently and bent down and, with humiliating ease, wrapped his hands around Crawford’s upper arms and hauled him back up to a standing position.

  The man pointed over Crawford’s shoulder at the bed.

  It took an effort of will for Crawford not to rub his bruised arms. “Very well,” he said, “but tell Byron when he wakes up that I have to talk to him.”

  “He is awake now,” Giuseppe said, “but too sick to speak to anyone. He will see you when he wants to. Now get back in bed.”

  Crawford wondered why the man seemed to dislike him. Perhaps he’d heard how Crawford had spent the last month, and disapproved of nefandos; or perhaps it was just that the Hunt children had got all the servants in a bad mood.

  Crawford obediently went back and sat down on the bed, but when the servant had left, he once again struggled to his feet.

  There was no one in the hall, and he padded down the cold stone floor to Byron’s room and knocked on the heavy door.

  “Come in, Seppy,” Byron called, and Crawford opened the door.

  Like most inner rooms of Italian houses Crawford had seen, Byron’s bedchamber was dark and cheerless. The bed in which the lord lay was an immense black canopied structure with, Crawford noticed, the Byron coat of arms painted on the foot of it.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” asked Byron irritably, sitting up.

  “I hear you’re sick.”

  “I doubt that you came to ask about my health.” He lay back on the tasselled pillows. “Yes, I’m sick. I think he resents it when I spend so long in the sea. She’s jealous of the time spent out of her control, and so hits me with the fever redoubled, as punishment.”

  Crawford knew that both pronouns referred to the same creature. “Let’s start soon,” he said, taking the liberty of sitting down in an ornate chair near the bed. “Hunt may ship the damned heart to England any day, and you’re not getting any stronger.”

  “Don’t be importuning me, Aickman—I’m doing this for your damned wife—”

  “And yourself and your remaining children.”

  “—And don’t interrupt me, either! I can’t possibly travel in this condition! And you’re a ruin yourself, look at you! We daren’t risk attempting this until we’ve … done everything we possibly can to make our success likely.”

  A writing board and sheets of manuscript lay on the bed by Byron’s hand, and

  Crawford’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room enough for him to see that the sheets were scribbled with six-line stanzas. It was probably more of Don Juan, the apparently endless poem Byron had started writing in Venice in 1818.

  Byron had followed the direction of his gaze, and now opened his mouth angrily—but Crawford waved him to silence.

  “Did I say anything?” Crawford asked. “I didn’t say a word.”

  Byron seemed to relax a little. “Right. Well, if you want to be so active, why don’t you go steal the heart? Hunt’s got it on a shelf downstairs.”

  “Out of reach of his children, I really do hope.”

  Byron blinked. “Not if they were to fetch a chair, now that you mention it—if there still is an unbroken chair down there. Yes, I think it would be a good idea if you went and did it right now.”

  Byron clearly wasn’t going to offer to accompany him, so Crawford left the room and tottered to the stairs and started down.

  Byron’s bulldog sat on the landing, but merely lifted its head to squint at Crawford as he shuffled nervously past. Crawford recalled Byron having told the dog not to “let any damned Cockneys” up into his apartments. He smiled now as he descended the last of the stairs. On your way back, he told himself, be sure to say Hello, doggie in your most cultured accent.

  Once in the main hall, he shuffled quickly to the arch that led to the room the Hunts were using as their parlor. The room was empty, though the scribbling on the walls reminded him that the children might appear at any moment.

  The box was on the mantel, and he crossed to it and took it down. The top wasn’t locked—impulsively he opened it and stared down at the charred lump inside it.

  Again he got that feeling of a profound contradiction in terms. It nauseated him, and he closed the box.

  He walked back out to the hall, but had taken only two steps toward the stairs when he heard someone fumbling at the heavy front door behind him; he quickly side-stepped through a narrower arch on his right, and found himself in a wide, stone-flagged room dimly lit by sunlight through a couple of small hexagonal windows.

  The air was warmer here, and heavy with the smells of garlic and cured ham. The old woman who was Byron’s cook glanced up at him disapprovingly from her seat by the fire, but just shook her head and returned her attention to the pot of broth she was stirring.

  Crawford could hear the cheery scream and clatter of the Hunt children in the main hall. Were their parents following? Leigh Hunt would certainly notice the absence of the box, and might well begin shouting about it before Crawford could get safely back upstairs.

  Several sheets of butcher paper lay on a wooden counter by his right elbow, along with some chickens in various stages of dismemberment, and on a sudden inspiration Crawford spread out one of the sheets of paper, opened the box, and rudely dumped Shelley’s heart out onto it; then he snatched up a big, wattled rooster head and dropped it into the box. He closed the lid and hefted the box—noting with anxious satisfaction that its weight was roughly the same as it had been when it had contained the heart—and then wrapped the paper tightly around the heart and picked it up in his other hand.

  The sight of Shelley’s split and blackened heart had made him think of his own, which was pounding so hard in his rib cage that his head was bobbing in time to it. God knew what the Hunts and the servants would make of his burdens if he were to pitch over dead right now. Even Byron would wonder what had possessed him.

  He couldn’t hear the children—apparently they had run right through the house and out the back door. Panting, Crawford limped once more across the hall and through the arch into the Hunts’ parlor.

  He slapped the box back up onto the mantel and forced himself to actually run back toward the arch.

  He made it into the hall, but the effort had cost him. His vision was dimming and he had to sit down on the stone floor with his knees drawn up, clutching the paper-wrapped heart tightly to be sure his numbed, trembling hands wouldn’t drop it. His ankles had started bleeding again, and his heels kept slipping.

  “What have you got?”

  Crawford looked up. One of the Hunt boys, apparently about seven years old, was standing over him. The child slapped Crawford’s clasped hands. “What have you got?” he repeated. “Something from the kitchen, I can tell.”

  “Scraps,” Crawford gasped. “For the dog.”

  “I’ll take ‘em to him. I want to make friends with him.”

  “No. Lord Byron wants me to bring them to him.”

  “My mum says you’re a nasty man. You surely do look nasty.” The boy stared speculatively at Crawford. “You’re a weak old thing, aren’t you? I’ll bet I could take the scraps from you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Crawford, in what he hoped was an intimidatingly adult tone. He tried to straighten his legs and stand up, but his heels slipped in his blood again and he wound up just thumping the floor with his withered buttocks. The dizziness and nausea that the heart induced in him were very strong.

  The boy giggled. “I’ll bet you were taking scraps for yourself,
so you could chew ‘em up raw in your room,” he said. “Lord Byron never said you could have ‘em, did he? You’re a thief. I’m gonna take that bag away from you.” The boy was excited and breathless—clearly the idea of having a grown-up whom he could torment with impunity was a heady one.

  Crawford opened his mouth and started to shout for help, but the boy began singing loudly to cover Crawford’s noise, and at the same time he reached out and slapped Crawford hard across his white-bearded cheek.

  To his own horror, Crawford could feel tears seeping out at the corners of his eyes. There wasn’t time for this. If the heart were discovered, Hunt would lock it up securely and ship it straight back to London—and what if the boy brought it to the dog and the dog actually ate it?

  He tried again to stand up, but the boy pushed him roughly back down.

  Crawford was close to panic. The lives of Josephine and his unborn child—their lives as humans, at least—depended on his escaping from this little boy, and he wasn’t confident that he’d be able to do it.

  He started to yell again, and again the boy began singing—“O say, thou best and brightest, my first love and my last”—and slapped him backhanded on the other side of his face. The boy was panting now, but with pleasure instead of exertion.

  Crawford took a deep breath and let it out, and then he spoke, very quietly. “Let me take it and go,” he said evenly, “or I’ll hurt you.” Over his sickness he tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

  “You couldn’t hurt me. I could hurt you, if I wanted to.”

  “I’ll …” Crawford thought of Josephine, whom he was so ludicrously failing to save. “I’ll bite you.”

  “You couldn’t bite a noodle in half.”

  Crawford stared hard at the boy, and slowly smiled, keeping his eyes wide open to magnify the wrinkles over his cheekbones. He held up his left hand and waved the stump of his wedding-ring finger at him. “See that? I bit that off, once when I was bored. I’ll bite your finger off.”