The Stress of Her Regard (51 page)

Very slowly he walked to the bed, and he laid his hand on her forehead. The skin was hot, and his eyes had adjusted enough to the dimness for him to notice how pale she was.

He reached out and, hesitantly, pulled the damp strands of hair away from her throat. Two red puncture marks showed clearly on her white skin.

"No," he remarked quietly, almost conversationally, though his heart was thudding rapidly behind his ribs. "No, this isn't what's happened. Not . . ." He sat down on the floor beside the bed, and he only knew he'd begun crying when Josephine's drawn face blurred and dissolved into the pattern of the curtains, like an imagined face seen in the contours of crumpled bedclothes, that disappears when the viewer moves.

Not
now
, he thought, not now that I'm finally free of the lamia, now that Josephine and I are both too old and broken to climb the Alps again. . . .

When he blinked away his tears he saw that her eyes were slightly open, squinting down at him where he sat. "Darling!" she whispered. "Come along, tonight. We can all share each other. . . ." Her lips curled in a strained smile.

Then he was running down the stairs two at a time until his bad left leg buckled and he rolled down to the sandy pavement of the ground floor, twisting an ankle and cracking his head hard against the stones.

He remembered the despair-inducing field that had hung about the top of the Wengern like a subsonic vibration, and he wished he could bask once more in its oppressive influence, for he was afraid he lacked the necessary strength of character to shoot himself, or take poison, or jump from a height, without that kind of help.

Ah, but don't worry, he told himself bleakly as he limped across the sand and into the surf and then began laboriously wading back out toward where the anchored boat waited for him; there must certainly be other ways—not as
abrupt
as guns or cyanide or high balconies, but in the long run every bit as effective, I'm sure. And I have just enough faith left in myself to be confident that I'll find one.

My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,
And it is not life that makes me move.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Byron was squinting against the sun-glare on the water of the narrow Livorno canal below him to his right, and in spite of the nasty things he'd heard about his destination he was looking forward to getting there, for his informants had all agreed that the place was very dark.

He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, partly so as not to be recognized in this shabby district, but mostly for protection from the sun—his skin had always tended toward paleness, but lately he seemed to sunburn as easily as some British clerk on his first holiday.

Byron was in an irritable temper. His errand today would probably turn out to have been a waste of his time, and time was something he didn't seem to have much of these days; what with the Hunts and their Cockney brats staying in the Casa Lanfranchi on the floor below his own rooms, and Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley and Jane Williams mooning around in their grief, and all the conferences with the Italian health authorities, he was lucky to have been able to get any work at all done on
Don Juan
.

And tomorrow he had to go along for the exhumation and cremation of the body of Ed Williams, and the day after that there was the same job to be done with the body of Shelley.

He wasn't looking forward to it. The bodies had been buried in the shallow, sandy graves nearly four weeks ago, and he wasn't sure which would be more upsetting: digging the bodies up again, or finding the graves empty. The latter was a distinct possibility—the seawater, and the garlic and silver the health authorities had buried them with, would have slowed them down, but still they'd been in the ground a lot longer than Allegra had. But perhaps small bodies were converted more quickly.

Byron paused, for ahead of him to his right was the narrow stone canal bridge he'd been told to watch for—three stylized wolves were rendered in bas-relief on the water-facing wall of it, and Byron saw without surprise that vandals had hammered away two legs from the middle figure and one from the far one. What was left was a four-legged wolf, a two-legged one, and one with three legs.

He peered under the foot of the bridge's near side, and his heart sank to see the black wooden stairs leading down toward the water. He had been half hoping that the stairs would be gone, and the place they led to closed and abandoned.

He squinted up at the rusty iron balconies of the surrounding houses, but no one seemed to be staring at him from behind any of the flower pots and clotheslines, so he tucked his hat brim down and reluctantly stepped forward.

The stairs were so close to the bridge that he had to duck to get in under the weathered stone arch of it, and their construction was unsteady enough to make him hold the rails firmly, despite the muck they were smearing onto his suede gloves. He could hear voices now from below, and he was grateful for the weight of the pistol in his coat pocket.

The stairs led down to a shadowed dock that extended a couple of yards out over the slow-moving water, and a doorway had been cut into the stones of the canal wall to his left. The wooden door was open, but only dim spots of light gleamed in the darkness within. A dank breeze, rumbling with hoarse voices and heavy with the reeks of wet clay and liquor and unwashed bodies, sighed out through the stone mouth like an exhalation from the earth's own sick lungs.

Byron whispered a curse and stepped inside. His eyes quickly adapted to the dimness.

Bottles on shelves lined one wall behind a long counter, and tables with little lamps on them had been set up on the uneven flagstones of the floor. The hunched forms in several of the chairs, he now noticed, were people; from time to time one of them would mumble something to a companion or lift a glass and drink from it.

A man in an apron was visible now behind the counter, and by the light of a candle on one of the shelves Byron saw the man raise his eyebrows inquiringly. Byron waved vaguely to him and turned back to the room, trying to see into the farthest corners—and suddenly he realized that the low-ceilinged room was much vaster than he had at first thought. The little dots of light that he had assumed were tiny candles set in a fairly close wall were actually the lamps on distant tables.

Through taverns measureless to man
, he thought, mangling a line from Coleridge's "Xanadu,"
down to a sunless sea.

He started forward, slowing to peer into the lamplit face of every person he passed; the bartender called something after him, but Byron dug a pound note out of his pocket and flicked it away over his shoulder, and the man relapsed into silence. Byron could hear him pad out from behind the bar, and then after a moment return.

The floor sloped down as Byron moved farther away from the canal-wall door, and the smells grew worse. The scattered mutter of dozens of conversations or monologues echoed and re-echoed in waves of amplification and interference until Byron thought that out of the noise there must eventually emerge one disembodied, aggregate voice, pronouncing some sentence that it would be fatal to hear.

There was masonry ahead of him, and he wondered if he had at last reached the far wall of the place—then he saw that it was just a blocky pillar, with more darkness receding away on either side of it; but there was a crowd gathered there.

They seemed to be chanting very quietly, and Byron saw that there was a life-sized crucifix mounted on the pillar. A cup, apparently a gold chalice, was ceremoniously being passed from man to man.

Are they saying
Mass
? Byron wondered incredulously. The Eucharist, down
here
?

He moved closer—and noticed that the crucified figure's feet were in a metal bowl, and that dark blood was running down the ankles; and then the figure rolled its white-bearded head and groaned, and flexed its bound hands.

Byron nearly screamed, and he found that his hand had darted into his jacket to seize the butt of his pistol. He lurched to the nearest table and, ignoring the languid protests of one solitary drinker, took the lamp and hurried back to the scene he had thought was a celebration of the Catholic Mass.

One of the men who had just drunk from the chalice licked bloody lips and smiled at Byron, whose face was now lit from underneath.

"Are you the afternoon shift, lover?" the man asked in Italian as he passed the chalice on to one of the other men. "You look like a fresher keg than our boy up there."

Byron opened his mouth to answer furiously, and he might even have shot the man—but then the figure on the cross opened its eyes and looked down at him, and Byron recognized him.

Crawford recognized Byron too.

Oh God, he thought, go away, I'm within days of getting it all over with, the long suicide is almost consummated, don't drag me back. I won't be dragged back.

He had been here for a month now, opening his veins for the thirsty neffers on a fairly exhausting schedule, and he had been remotely pleased at the way the process had seemed to be fragmenting his identity. Several times when some customer had drunk some of his blood he had seemed to
become
that customer, able to stand back with the taste of his own blood in his mouth and look up at his own crucified body.
Puo vedere attraverso il sangue
, in fact—which was Italian for
You can see through the blood
—seemed to be some sort of motto of the place.

Perhaps Byron would leave. Crawford blurrily hoped so.

But Byron was shouting, and he had driven away the neffies who had the chalice, and now he was climbing up to untie Crawford's wrists from the horizontal beam.

The neffies began shuffling back toward the cross, but Byron, hanging on to the upright beam, drew his pistol with his free hand and pointed it at them, and they moved away again.

Crawford had been in this position for hours, and when Byron got the ropes loose he fell forward into his arms. Byron climbed back down, supporting Crawford's weight, and lowered him gently to the stone floor.

"What the hell are you doing," Crawford mumbled, "leave me alone, I don't need rescue."

"Maybe you don't," panted Byron, "but there's those that do. Is that stuff in these glasses likely to be plain drink? Not blood or piss or something?"

"Brandy, mostly," Crawford said, hoping that Byron might just have blundered his way in here looking for alcohol. "Grappa, you know."

Byron got up and snatched a glass off of the table he'd taken the lamp from, and drank half of it in one gulp. Then he crouched and started to tilt the glass toward Crawford's lips, but stopped. "My God," Byron said, "you
already
stink of brandy."

Crawford shrugged weakly. "Brandy in, blood out. It's a living."

Byron spat in disgust. "It's a dying," he said, looking around to make sure the neffies kept their distance. "Listen, you can come with me or stay here. Shelley's body is to be burned the day after tomorrow, and I think I know a way to use his ashes to get free of the nephelim net. I—"

"I'm already free of it," Crawford said. "You go ahead."

"What about your girl, Julia or Josephine or whatever her name really is? Shelley's servants have come back to Pisa, and I know you saw her at the Casa Magni, and recognized what was wrong with her."

"She's buttered her bread and now she can lie in it," said Crawford. He reached up and took the cup from Byron and drained it. "She knew what she was doing when she gave in. I stay here."

Byron nodded. "Fine. I'm not going to . . .
abduct
you, just escort you out of here if you decide you want to come. I'm only doing even this much because I . . .
do
remember what happened on the peak of the Wengern six years ago. You and your Josephine saved my life. If you don't come with me I'll do what I can to save her myself."

"Fine." Crawford struggled to his feet and stood swaying in the fetid breeze, massaging his numb, bleeding wrists. "I hope you do better with her than I did. Do you suppose you could help me back up there, and retie me?"

Byron was angry. "I'll be happy to, as soon as you know the stakes."

"Goddamn it, I
know
the stakes. Josephine's going to die if she doesn't shed her vampire. Well guess what, she
likes
her situation. Everybody who's in it likes it. I liked it, while I had it. The people in this place would eat
poison
if they could experience it for half an hour."

Byron looked at the men hovering nearby, and sneered. "I think you overestimate their courage. They just like to sniff."

"
You
haven't been all that eager to ditch it, have you?" Crawford added. "Now that you're writing so well?"

A bitter smile hollowed Byron's face. "Josephine isn't the entirety of the stakes."

"Your sister and children are your concern. And as for Mary, and Williams's children, I've already—"

"That's not it either," Byron said. "Josephine's pregnant."

For the first time since finding this place, this job, Crawford felt real panic building up in him. "Not by me, she's not. I'm sterile."

"Apparently you're not. Antonia, Shelley's old servant, is confident that Josephine missed her period last month and this month, and Josephine certainly wasn't—
cohabiting
—with anyone
else
in July."

"Stress," Crawford said quickly, "can easily make a woman miss her periods, that's probably exactly what's—"

"Maybe," interrupted Byron. "But what if it
isn't
stress?"

Crawford's heart was pounding, and he tried to drink out of the glass again, but it was empty. "This is a lie," he said, in a voice that he made as steady as he could. "You're just saying this to get me to leave here."

Byron shook his head decisively. "I'd never stop anyone from killing himself, as long as he truly knew what he was doing. And now you know what you'll be doing by staying or leaving.
I'm
leaving here in a moment. I only want to know if I'll have to carry you along too."