The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

The boy looked uneasy, but angrier too, and when he drew his hand back again it was clear that he meant to hit Crawford a good deal harder this time. Crawford thought this blow might, in his weakened state, knock him unconscious.

  “Like this,” he said quickly, and thrust his own little finger into his mouth. He tasted bean soup on it, and the thought that he might also be tasting Shelley’s heart very nearly made him vomit.

  The boy’s hand was still drawn back for the blow, but he had paused, staring.

  Crawford bit down on his finger. He couldn’t really feel any pain, so he bit harder, wanting some blood to scare the boy with. The hard pounding of his heart seemed to make coherent thought impossible.

  The Hunt boy didn’t seem to be impressed; he brought his hand farther back and squinted at Crawford’s face.

  A vast bitterness almost made Crawford close his eyes, but he kept them locked on young Hunt’s; and even as he wondered if there might have been any other way out of this, he expressed all of his despair by clenching his jaw on the last finger joint with every particle of strength he had left. Cartilage crunched between his teeth, and the horror of that seemed only to give him more strength.

  Crawford’s hand flew away from his mouth, spraying blood across the floor.

  The last joint of his little finger was still in his mouth, severed. He spit it out hard, bouncing it off the boy’s nose.

  Then the boy was gone, screaming hysterically as he ran through ever more distant rooms, and Crawford rolled over onto his hands and knees and crawled away toward the stairs, dragging the paper bundle with him and leaving a trail of blood smeared across the stone floor.

  Giuseppe found him on the stairs and carried him to his room.

  Byron visited him shortly after Giuseppe had tied a bandage around his fresh finger-stump. The lord looked pale and shaken.

  “That’s …” said Crawford weakly, “the heart, there. On the table.”

  “What the hell did you do?” asked Byron in a quiet but shrill voice. “Hunt’s brat is saying that you bit off your finger! Is that what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have a fit? The boy says you—spit the finger at him! Everyone’s shouting downstairs. Moreto got down there and seems to have eaten your finger. Goddamn it, why do I get involved with such horrible people? I’ve got Hunt and his sow and litter underfoot, because of this impossible project of his magazine, but that wasn’t enough for me, was it? I had to get into an even more impossible project, with a man who bites his fingers off, and his wife, who pulls out her eyes!”

  Crawford’s shoulders were shaking, and he honestly couldn’t have said whether he was laughing or crying. “Who’s,” he choked, “Moreto?”

  Byron stared at him. “Who the hell do you think Moreto is?” He was frowning, but the corners of his mouth were beginning to twitch. “One of the servants? Moreto’s my dog.”

  “Oh.” Crawford was definitely laughing. “I thought it might be that old woman in the kitchen.”

  Byron was laughing too now, though he still seemed to be angry. “Just because you’re driven to drink cologne doesn’t mean I starve my help.” He leaned against the wall. “So how did you come to bite off your own finger? A seizure of some sort, I assume.” He stared at Crawford. “I mean, it was an accident, right?”

  Crawford was still shaking. He shook his head.

  “Jesus. Then … why?”

  Crawford wiped his eyes with his maimed hand. “Well, it—it really seemed, at the time, to be the only way to keep him from feeding Shelley’s heart to the dog.”

  Byron shook his head wonderingly. “That’s … mad. I’m sorry. That you could imagine such a thing is plenty of evidence that you’re not ready for this undertaking of ours. Good God, you could have … yelled for help, couldn’t you? The cook was right there. Or just walked away from the boy, surely? Or hit him? I just don’t see—”

  Now Crawford was crying. “You didn’t see. You weren’t there.”

  Byron nodded, and seemed to be working not to let pity—or it could have been disgust—show in his face. He crossed to the bedside table and picked up the paper-wrapped bundle. “I’d better hide this. Hunt will probably notice its loss soon.” He hefted the heart. “Even if he just picks up the box, he’ll realize it’s light.”

  “No,” Crawford choked. “The box weighs the same.”

  “The box,” Byron said carefully, “weighs the same. What did you put in it?”

  “A—oh, God—a rooster head. From the kitchen.”

  Byron was nodding gently, and didn’t seem to be about to stop. “A rooster head. A rooster head.”

  Still nodding, Byron left the room, closing the door softly.

  Crawford and Byron both developed high fevers, and during the ensuing week Byron’s sunburned skin peeled off in great patches, and he took delight in making jokes about snakes shedding their skins.

  Crawford, tormented by his own helplessness and his impatience to find and save Josephine and his unborn child, didn’t find the jokes funny.

  For quite a while he could work up no enthusiasm about food or any activity, but forced himself to eat three meals a day, and to exercise—at first simply lifting the iron lamp on his bedside table a few times was enough to set him sweating and trembling, but by the end of the second week of his convalescence he had improved enough to ask Giuseppe to fetch him a couple of bricks, and he soon got to the point where he could lift them from below his waist to above his head fifty times in a row.

  Shortly after that he began going downstairs and outside to the narrow kitchen garden to do his exercises, for there was a stout overhead beam there, on which various trellises were anchored, that proved to be sturdy enough for him to do chin-ups on. Byron’s cook visibly disapproved of his presence in her garden until one day when he helped her pick and carry several bags-full of basil leaves; after that she stopped frowning at him, and once or twice even smiled and said Buongiorno.

  Byron seemed to recover more quickly. Crawford saw him frequently at dinner, but these days Byron was always accompanied by a vapidly gossipy friend called Thomas Medwin, one of the old Pisan English circle, and, on the two occasions when Crawford had tried to hint to the lord that he’d like to discuss their proposed journey, Byron had frowned and changed the subject.

  And when Medwin finally left, on the twenty-eighth of August, Crawford found himself unable to talk to Byron at all. The lord spent all his time locked in his room reading, or lounging with Teresa Guiccioli in the main garden, and when Crawford had one day presumed to interrupt the two lovers, Byron had angrily told him that any further intrusions would result in his abandoning their plans altogether.

  Byron slept late into the afternoons, apparently spending the entirety of the nights drinking and feverishly scribbling more stanzas of Don Juan. He never went out in the Bolivar anymore, and had apparently given up riding.

  When Crawford felt well enough to go outside, he took to walking up the Lung’Arno and crossing the bridge over the Arno’s mud-yellowed water—on which Shelley had so loved to sail—and knocking at the door of the Tre Palazzi, where Mary Shelley was once again staying. He hoped to get her to intercede for him with Byron, but she was still too distracted by Shelley’s drowning, and angered by Leigh Hunt’s refusal to let her have Shelley’s heart, to pay much attention to him.

  Crawford thought he knew why Hunt was so adamant. One recent evening, after a long dinner-table conversation about Percy Shelley, Hunt had retired downstairs to his own rooms—and had then been heard to yell in alarm. Byron had sent a servant down to find out what the matter was, and Hunt had assured the man that he had simply stubbed his toe … but a few minutes later the entire household was made helplessly aware that Hunt had, for once, abandoned his often-boasted conviction that children should never be beaten.

  Crawford often wondered now, half-fearfully and half-amused, whether Hunt had believed his children’s no doubt passionate denials of any knowledge as to how a rooste
r head had got into the box that was supposed to contain Shelley’s heart.

  On the eleventh of September, Mary moved out of the Tre Palazzi, bound for Genoa. It occurred to Crawford later that Mary might in fact have been speaking well of him to Byron while she’d been in Pisa, for on the day after her departure Byron summoned Crawford to the Palazzo Lanfranchi’s main garden, in which the lord and his mistress Teresa sat over a leisurely lunch under the spreading orange tree branches, and told Crawford curtly that the house was shortly to be closed down and vacated, and that Crawford would have to leave.

  Crawford decided to give Byron a few days to cool off and then to just confront him somewhere, now that there seemed to be nothing to lose—at least there were currently no houseguests.

  But four mornings later Crawford awoke to discover that Byron’s old friend John Cam Hobhouse had arrived for a week’s visit. Crawford remembered Hobhouse from the trip they’d taken through the Alps six years before—Hobhouse had been a fellow student of Byron’s at Trinity College, and was now a politician, worldly and sophisticated and witty, and Crawford despaired of ever getting Byron’s undivided attention.

  After doing his exercises—he could now do twenty chin-ups in a row—Crawford spent the day walking around Pisa, noting places he’d been to with Josephine and savagely wishing that the two of them had got married when they had first arrived in the city, and that they had never renewed contact with the damned poets. Back at Byron’s house, he drank brandy in his room for a couple of hours, then went downstairs and ate polenta and minestrone in the kitchen. Feeling sleepy at last, he went back out into the hall.

  He paused outside the kitchen arch. In the dim illumination of a couple of lamps in niches in the walls, the Palazzo Lanfranchi’s main hall looked like a disorganized warehouse these days—crates of books and statuary and dishes were stacked everywhere, and a dozen ornate swords and rifles stood like umbrellas in a barrel by the door. The usual sour milk and stale food smell of the children was overwhelmed by the musty exhalations of old leather.

  Crawford sidled between the crates to the barrel, and he had lifted out an old saber and drawn it from its scabbard and was sighting along the blade when footsteps sounded on the pavement outside and the door was ponderously opened.

  Hobhouse stepped in, glimpsed Crawford and ducked right back out with a smothered yell. A moment later Byron sprang in with a pistol in his hand, but relaxed, frowning, when he saw Crawford.

  “It’s just St. Michael,” he called out through the open door, “looking for the serpent.”

  Crawford hastily sheathed the sword and poked it back into the barrel as Hobhouse re-entered.

  “You might not recognize this old boy,” Byron said to Hobhouse, “but he was my personal physician during that trip we took through the Alps in ‘16.”

  Hobhouse stared at Crawford. “Yes, I do remember,” he said quietly. “You fired him for talking about living stones. St. Michael, eh?” To Crawford he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Both Byron and Crawford looked at him in surprise.

  “You … said something about brandy,” Hobhouse remarked to Byron.

  The lord nodded. “Upstairs,” he said, pointing the way with the pistol he still carried. He noticed it and set it down on one of the crates.

  “No, bring it along,” said Hobhouse, “and your physician too.”

  Byron was still frowning, but smiling now too. “He’s no longer my—”

  Hobhouse was already making his way through the angling corridor between the crates. “Whatever he is,” he called back over his shoulder, “bring him along.”

  Byron shrugged and waved toward the stairs. “After you, Doctor.”

  The paintings had been taken down from the walls of Byron’s dining room, and faint white squares on the plaster marked where they had been. Hobhouse closed the windows while Byron poured brandy.

  Hobhouse sat down and took a sip. “I talked to your half sister Augusta recently,” he said to Byron. “She showed me some stones you sent her, that summer when we toured the Alps. Little crystals, from Mont Blanc. And she showed me some of your letters.”

  “I was drunk that whole summer,” Byron protested, “those letters are probably just—”

  “Tell me about your involvement with this Carbonari crowd.”

  “I—” Byron cocked an eyebrow at his old friend. “I could tell you I’m helping them overthrow their new Austrian masters, couldn’t I?”

  “Of course you could. But I was there when you met Margarita Cogni, remember?” Hobhouse turned to Crawford. “It was in Venice in the summer of 1818; we were out riding one evening, and met two peasant girls, and Byron set about impressing one, and I the other.”

  He looked back to Byron. “When I got mine alone,” Hobhouse went on, “it developed that she wanted to bite me. And she led me to believe that the Cogni woman had the same interests. I’ve always had to save you from … inappropriate women, and you recall I tried to talk you into ridding yourself of her too. But at the time I thought I was simply trying to rescue you from a mistress with perverted tastes.”

  Byron looked shaken. “Christ, man, I’m glad you didn’t let her bite you.” He sighed and took a long sip of the brandy. “The Carbonari are trying to drive out the Austrians, you know—and I do think that’s a good cause.”

  He held up his hand to stop Hobhouse from saying more. “But,” Byron went on, “you’re right, there’s more to my association with them than just that. In the eyes of the Carbonari, the species of which Margarita was a member is much more specifically the enemy than is the literal category of Austrians. The Carbonari have methods of keeping such creatures at bay, and I’ve been making use of those methods. You’ll have noticed that Teresa is entirely human, and unharmed—and so are Augusta and her child, and my ex-wife and her child.

  “'At bay,'” said Hobhouse. “Is there a way to free yourself and your dependents from her—from her species—entirely?”

  “Yes,” said Crawford.

  Hobhouse looked at him, then back at Byron. “And do you intend to do it?”

  “Just out of curiosity,” said Byron stiffly, “do you know what doing it will mean? The most … trivial consequence is that I’ll dry up, poetically.” Crawford noted with admiration that Byron did seem to be honestly trying to regard it as trivial. “I will have written my last line.”

  Hobhouse leaned forward, and Crawford was surprised at how stern the man’s round, mild face could look. “And your children won’t become vampires.”

  “They probably wouldn’t anyway,” said Byron irritably. “But yes, Aickman and I are going to do the trick shortly. And then I’ll be going to Greece, where I shall no doubt encounter another consequence before very long.”

  Hobhouse glanced at Crawford, who shrugged slightly. Don’t look at me, Crawford thought, I can’t tell his sincerity from his posturing.

  “You almost sound,” said Hobhouse carefully, “as if you believe that freeing yourself from this thing, from these things, will cause your death.”

  Byron emptied his brandy glass and refilled it. His hand was shaking, and the decanter lip rattled on the edge of his glass. “I do believe that,” he said defiantly.

  Crawford shook his head in puzzlement. “But people live longer, free from these creatures. You’ve been able to avoid the worst of the emaciation and anemia and fevers that their victims usually suffer, but it’s cost you a lot of effort, and even so hasn’t been entirely effective. Free of your vampire, you’d be really healthy, and with no necessity for your Carbonari measures.”

  “You certainly haven’t lost your doctory tone, Aickman,” Byron said. “Hell, I’m sure what you say is true in most cases, but …”

  After a moment’s silence Crawford lifted a hand inquiringly.

  Byron sighed. “In my case, the creature has preserved me. I know I wouldn’t have lived as long as I have without its … its watching over me. Even though I insulted Lord Grey after he had come into m
y bedroom at Newstead Abbey when I was fifteen, and though I abandoned Margarita Cogni for Teresa, the thing …” He smiled. “It loved me, and loves me still.”

  Crawford caught Hobhouse’s eye, and shook his head slightly. Their regard for us, he thought, is why they’re so destructive of us.

  “And you,” said Hobhouse softly, “love it still.”

  Byron shrugged. “I could love any creature that appeared to wish it.”

  Hobhouse shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “But you … will do it, right, this … exorcism?”

  “Yes, I said I would and I will.”

  “Is there any way I can help?”

  “No,” said Byron, “it’s—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Crawford.

  Both men looked at him, Byron a little warily.

  To Hobhouse, Crawford said, “Make him promise you—promise you, his oldest friend, schoolmate at Trinity and all that—that he won’t publish any more poetry. That would eliminate one of the strongest attractions the nephelim hold for him.” He turned to Byron. “In spite of your manner of seeming to despise poetry, I think it’s a huge part of how you, I don’t know, define yourself. As long as it’s still available out there, I can’t imagine you really wanting to abandon your vampire.”

  Byron had been sputtering while Crawford spoke, and now burst out, “That’s ludicrous, Aickman, for a dozen reasons! For one thing, would you trust me to keep my promise?”

  “A promise you made to Hobhouse—yes. Even more than your poetry, I think your honor is central to your definition of yourself.”

  Byron seemed to flinch. “Well, what would there be to stop me from writing just for myself, for no audience but me and the monkeys? Or publishing under a pseudonym?”

  “On the one hand it wouldn’t be read by the world, and on the other it wouldn’t be perceived as being Byron. For you, there’d be no point in it.”

  Byron was looking hunted. “So you believe that this will eliminate any hesitancies I may have—that since I would have abdicated the poetry anyway, I’d have no reason not to do this.”