The Stress of Her Regard (39 page)

Far from getting angry, though, Byron actually looked abashed. "Oh, you're right, I know. But they do always die. And now they think Mary's pregnant again! You'd think he'd give up sex—abandon the whole notion as a bad job."

As I've done, thought Crawford.

They rode on without speaking, and the only sounds were the sea wind in the trees, and the sandy thudding of the horses' hooves. Crawford pondered Byron's remark about a silver bullet. Did Shelley imagine that Byron was the prey of a vampire? He
had
been, of course, before getting to the top of the Wengern.

Crawford looked across at his companion, noting the hollowed cheeks under the graying hair, and the brightness of Byron's eyes. And the poetry he was writing these days was the best he'd ever done—Shelley had said recently that he could no longer compete with Byron, and that Byron was the only one
worth
competing with, now that Keats was dead.

Suddenly Crawford was sure that Byron
had
given in again—probably while he'd been staying in Venice, to judge by Shelley's description of the woman he'd been living with there. Would it have been the same vampire that had been preying on him before? Probably. As he'd guessed in Switzerland six years ago—to Byron's displeasure—they seemed to keep track of their previous lovers even when they'd been barred from them.

But Teresa Guiccioli was obviously not any sort of vampire—she frequently accompanied Byron and his friends on the afternoon rides, and even went to Mass at the cathedral. How was Byron keeping her safe from the jealous attentions of his supernatural lover?

He found himself thinking of the feel of his own vampire's cold skin, and he hastily fumbled under his coat for his flask. He hadn't had sex with anyone—anyone
human
—since his disastrous wedding night six years ago, and he had come to the bleak conclusion that making love to the thing that was Shelley's twin had spoiled him for sex with his own species.

He still sometimes thought about the painful but releasing kiss Josephine had given him in front of Keats's house a year ago in Rome, but the memory never quickened his pulse, and he and Josephine had never referred to it.

He and Byron had reached the field at the outskirts of the Castinelli farm where they always did their shooting, and Byron swung down off his horse and grinned up at Crawford. "Join you in that?"

"Certainly." Crawford handed the flask down and then dismounted, and walked with Byron to the ravaged tree around which they habitually set up their targets. Byron took a second deep sip of the brandy, then handed the flask back, and as Crawford tethered the horses he crouched over some stakes they'd pounded into the ground last time. He was wedging half-crown pieces into the splintered heads of a couple of the stakes.

"Allegra's dead," he said over his shoulder.

"Oh."

Crawford had never met the five-year-old daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont, and though he knew that Claire cared passionately for the child, he had no real idea of how Byron had felt about her—clearly he blamed himself at least to some extent, since he had made such a point earlier of impugning Shelley's ability to take care of children.

"I'm sorry," Crawford said, blushing at how inane it sounded.

"I had her in a, a convent, you know," Byron went on, still facing away from him and adjusting the stakes. His tone was light and conversational. "I've got certain protections for myself and Teresa, but they're not foolproof, and I thought . . . that in a consecrated place, far away from me and everyone else who's known to these creatures . . . but it doesn't seem to . . ." His shoulders were rigid, and Crawford wondered if he was weeping, but his voice when he spoke again was just as steady. "Our poor children."

Crawford thought of his own agonized resisting of the urge to invite his lamia back—which in his case was, among other things, resistance to the offer of enormous longevity—and he thought too of the cost at which Keats had managed to save his own younger sister.

"Your," Crawford began, wondering if Byron would challenge him to a duel for what he was about to say, "your poetry means that much to you?"

Byron stood up lithely and limped back toward the horses, still without having faced Crawford. In one flash of motion he drew two of the pistols and spun toward Crawford and the tree; and, in the next stretched instant of panic, Crawford had time to wonder if this was where he would die, and to notice that Byron's hands were shaking wildly and that his eyes were shining with tears.

The two detonations were one ear-hammering blast, but Crawford caught the brief, shrill
twang
of at least one of the coins as it was punched away across the field.

One muscle at a time, Crawford relaxed, dimly aware through the ringing in his ears that Byron had reholstered the pistols and was walking back toward the tree; and beyond the glittering dots swimming in front of his eyes he watched him limp on past the tree, out into the grass; Byron's head was down, and he was apparently looking for the coins, both of which were gone.

"It has," Byron called back after Crawford had crossed to the tree and was leaning against it. "Meant so much to me," he added. He was kicking at the grass ten yards away and peering intently at the ground. "I . . . I suppose I really
did
know what Lord Grey was, what
sort
of thing he was, at least, when I opened my bedroom door to him in 1803. By the time I found out that I had doomed my mother and imperiled my sister, of course, it was too late. Still, I didn't want to believe that he was responsible for my . . . life's work, my writing, the thing that I . . . that made me
me
, do you know what I'm saying?"

"Yes," Crawford managed to reply.

"I did
suspect
it—and so I've always taken inordinate delight in physical accomplishments—swimming and shooting and fencing and carnality. But none of those things are enough—not to justify all the deaths and hatreds and . . . betrayals, that have been my life." He stooped and picked up a wad of silver, then held it up with a frail smile. "Not bad, eh? The coin's wrapped right around the ball." He began limping back toward the tree.

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 metronoming 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."

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

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 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 shore side 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.