The Stress of Her Regard (40 page)

Even in his bunk in the men's servants' room in the back of the house, Crawford 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' 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.

Mary tended to hide out in her room, and the Williamses stayed together, often out on the boat with Shelley, and so it was almost with a sense of relief that Crawford recognized the man he met on the beach on a twilight evening a month after that first outing aboard the
Don Juan.

Crawford and Josephine had been busy all day attending to Mary, who had begun bleeding from the womb and for a swelteringly strenuous couple of hours had seemed on the verge of having a miscarriage; the fit had eventually passed, to Shelley's intense relief, and Mary had fallen into a restless, sweaty doze. Josephine had returned to the children and Shelley had stalked back to his own room to resume the writing that so absorbed him, and Crawford had gone for a long walk south along the beach, only turning back when the sun had dipped behind the island off the tip of Portovenere.

As soon as he turned his steps back toward the north, Crawford had noticed the man standing on the sand a hundred yards ahead of him, and when Crawford had taken a couple of dozen steps in that direction he had recognized him.

It was Polidori, the arrogant young man who had been Byron's poetry-writing personal physician before Byron had dismissed him, and given the job to Crawford, in 1816. The carefully tended little moustache and the curled hair and the self-consciously dignified stance were unmistakable.

Crawford waved and called out to him, and Polidori turned to stare in response.

Crawford started toward him along the sand—but at one point the shoreline led Crawford inland around a boulder, and when his course took him again out to where he could see some distance of beach, Polidori was gone, presumably up the wooded slope.

Still holds a grudge, thought Crawford. I wonder why he's visiting Shelley.

As he trudged up to the Casa Magni, Crawford saw Shelley at his usual station for this time of night, leaning from the rail on the second floor and staring out over the sea. Shelley started violently when Crawford hailed him, but relaxed when he saw who it was. "Good evening, Aickman," he called down quietly.

"Evening, Percy," returned Crawford, pausing below the terrace. "Didn't mean to startle you. What did Polidori want?"

Shelley's momentarily regained composure was suddenly gone. His narrow fingers gripped the rail like the claws of a bird, and his whisper was shrill as he told Crawford, "Get up here—and say nothing to anyone."

Crawford rolled his eyes impatiently, but obediently blundered through the empty ground floor to the stairs, climbed them to the dining room level and passed by Jane Williams and Mary and Josephine without speaking, though he picked up a glass and filled it from a decanter on the table, and then walked out to join Shelley on the terrace. The wind was from the sea, and he looked nervously out across the face of the water before looking at Shelley.

"So why are you afraid of Polidori?" he asked quietly, taking a sip of the wine.

Shelley stared at him. "Because he's dead. He killed himself last year, in England."

"Well, your information's faulty. I saw him down the beach not half an hour ago."

"I don't doubt you did," said Shelley unhappily. "This is an easy place for them to come to, the Port of Venus." He waved out at the ocean. "Remember Allegra?"

Crawford was suddenly very tired. "What," he asked listlessly, "are you saying."

"You know what I'm saying, damn you. If someone dies after being bitten by a vampire, and nobody . . . kills the body in the right way, he comes back, he digs his way out of his grave and
comes back.
Though it's hardly
him
anymore. I stopped Clara . . . but the nuns at Bagnacavallo didn't stop Allegra, and clearly nobody pounded a stake into Polidori's corpse either."