The Stress of Her Regard (60 page)

Crawford stared at her. "Of course he wants you dead. Look at the goddamn
hole
in the pavement where you'd still be lying, smashed like your sis—like a bug, if I hadn't pulled you away!"

He walked back and crouched by her. "Listen to me," he said. "Are you listening? Good. He wants you to die and be buried so that you can hatch like an egg and give birth to the seed he's sown in your blood, the extension of himself that will climb out of your grave. And then after a while you'd give birth to what would once have been
our child
, but would by this time be one of these creatures."

He laughed grimly. "Talk about there being no 'well-at-any-rates'! Our child would be like Shelley or Keats, condemned to nephelism by the circumstances of birth, except that this child would be deprived of ever having any human life. This may be unprecedented, at least since the good old days before Noah."

Josephine nodded, seeming to have comprehended what he'd said, and he had begun to relax a little, and even to smile, when she suddenly arched powerfully backward, striking her head with a sickening crack against the pavement.

"God!" Crawford squeaked in horror. He lunged forward onto his aching knees and for a moment just cradled her head, his mind as blank as if it had been his own head that had hit the stones; then he laid the torch down carefully and began feeling her skull. Hot blood was rapidly clogging her already matted hair, but she was breathing and her skull was at least not broken in.

He was crying, remembering having given her the same desperate, frightened examination after the two of them had been shot in a street in Rome; then too there had been the powerful reek of garlic and blood, but then it had been because she had kissed him to save him from giving in to the lamia.

He tore a strip from his shirt and tied it around her head so that there would be pressure on the cut. Her hair stuck up ludicrously in all directions.

"She should really be in a hospital," he was mumbling, more or less to Byron, "she's bleeding and she hasn't been eating, you can see that—God knows what that fit was, it was like the convulsions you get if you eat strychnine, but at least it's worn off for now, apparently—"

"Aickman," said Byron, swaying unsteadily, "that wasn't a convulsion."

"You must not have been looking, man! I'm a physician, but
anybody
could see—"

"It was," said Byron, his voice weak but very clear, "a suicide attempt. She learned that the Polidori-thing wants her dead, and so she tried to comply. It's a good thing you had her tied up—otherwise we'd be out in the sea right now trying to catch her."

Crawford laid her head down gently. ". . . Oh." He stood up, absently grateful for the cold wind in his sweat-drenched hair. "I suppose it could . . . I suppose that was it. Yes."

Byron leaned, then caught himself with a quick forward step and sat down hastily. "
I
, however," he whispered, "may shortly be able to show you a genuine convulsion." Both his hands were palm down on the ground, and Crawford could see the blood coursing steadily down his neck.

Crawford shambled over to him, sat down and, hopelessly, lifted one of Byron's hands and put his fingers on the man's wrist. The pulse was fast and thready, and the skin was hot. The characteristic fever of a newly bit vampire victim was already setting in, building on the fever Byron had already had.

Crawford dropped the hand and sat back, at last recognizing the huge, unalterable fact that had changed the evening, made their efforts and heroics pointless.

"You can't physically
make
it to Venice, can you?" he asked, his voice flat with the effort of concealing the bitter resentment he felt; he would never know if Byron had secretly wanted the evening to end this way, but he vividly remembered the two opportunities Byron had had to shoot the vampire—before its first metamorphosis, and in the instant when it was again a man rushing down the hill at them—before it could bite him. And Crawford knew Byron was a good enough marksman to have made either shot. "Over the Apennines, and down the Po Valley . . . especially starting tonight—which," he added with a bleak look up at the hillside, "I'm afraid we would have to do."

All for nothing, he thought. My shredded hand, Josephine's cracked head.

Byron put his hand back on his throat and shook his head. "I'm sorry. I'm nearly certain I'll die if I try it now." He glanced across at Josephine's sprawled form, and sighed. Then he looked back at Crawford, and all of the usual bluster was gone from his eyes. "But let's put it to the test."

Crawford blinked at him, a little ashamed now of his earlier suspicions, but still angry. "No. Thanks, but no." He tried to think. "Maybe I could do it without you," he said, knowing even as he spoke that it wasn't true.

"No, you couldn't. You don't know . . . nearly enough about the eye, and the Graiae. For one thing, the eye isn't usually free to jump—it was jumping in 1818 because Shelley was right there when they woke up, but ordinarily it stays with one of the columns. There are a number of chants that
will
free it up, but you have to be able to gauge a number of factors to know which chant will work on the night you're there. I studied these things at an Armenian monastery there for months, but I'm not even sure
I
could do it."

After a moment Crawford nodded reluctantly. He knew Byron was right.

There was a word Crawford was trying to think of, something with the dryness of a legal term, but which had come to have a physically unpleasant meaning for him . . . a taste of iron and vinegar.

Then he had it. "Proxy," he said, his voice hollow with hope and nausea.

"Proxy?"

"You can be there—enough to advise me, and to draw the attention of Lord Grey and then lose him—and still be here. How's your neck bleeding?"

"Steadily, thank you." Some of the old irritability was seeping back into Byron's voice. "Aren't you supposed to know about bandages and such things?"

"I'll put a bandage on it in a moment. First, give me your jar of garlic."

Byron dug it out and handed it to him, and Crawford opened it and with his fingers dug out as much of the minced garlic as he could and dropped the stuff onto the pavement. Then he held the jar against the skin of Byron's neck. "I just need a bit of your blood."

For a moment Byron looked as if he would resist—then he just nodded weakly and lifted his chin and turned away so that Crawford could hold the jar to the bite.

When the jar was half full, Crawford shut it and set about bandaging Byron's neck.

"When I drink this blood," he began.

"
Drink
it?" Byron exclaimed. "You spent too much time in that
nefando
den!"

"Just enough time, actually. I remember thinking that when those men drank my blood I was able to look out of their eyes, see myself on that cross, if only dimly and fitfully, from the other side of the room. And when I drank Shelley's blood—"

Byron gagged. "You really are a neffer, Aickman."

"When I drank Shelley's blood," Crawford went on steadily, "I was able to see and feel everything he did, and I was even able to talk to him, converse with him."

Byron was interested in spite of himself. "Really? I wonder if something similar may be the original basis for the Christian Eucharist."

Crawford rolled his eyes impatiently. "Conceivably. So when I drink this, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to be you, to some extent, and you be me. So you'll know when I've got there, and am ready to start. Now listen, I'll spill what I don't drink, so Lord Grey will come rushing to your rescue in Venice as surely as my lamia rushed to where I'd spilled Shelley's and my blood. The thing is, and do pay attention to this,
you must not be visible to him anywhere else when I do it
, or he won't be fooled. Shelley made himself invisible to his half sister by being out in the boat—seawater, right? So you have Fletcher or Trelawny or somebody bring a tub of seawater into your room, and you make sure you're immersed in it when I spill your blood in Venice."

They set out for the road above the house, where Trelawny had left the carriage. Byron held the torch and Crawford half carried, half dragged the unconscious Josephine, and they managed to work their way to the back of the house in only a few minutes.

The upward sloping path behind the house was more difficult; Byron couldn't climb more than a few feet before needing to sit down and breathe deeply for a while, and Crawford found, to his confused horror, that the only way he could get Josephine up the slope was to tie a fresh length of the rope around her ankles and loop it around a higher trunk and then lean into the free end, so that his own weight dragged her up the hill backward; though it delayed them still further, he couldn't help pausing frequently to go to her and pull her skirt back up over her knees.

His heart was pounding alarmingly, and not just from the physical effort; he kept imagining that he heard Polidori whispering over the crash of the surf and the rustle of the branches and the scuffing and slithering and panting of his own progress, and during one of the pauses for rest he was sure he heard a soft chuckling from the darkness beyond the torch's frail light.

At last he had got Josephine up to the road, and had rolled, hiked and folded her into the carriage. Byron followed her inside and Crawford climbed slowly up to the driver's bench with the torch, which he wedged into a bracket in the luggage rail. The two horses harnessed to the carriage seemed impatient to be gone.

The clouds had broken up, and the moonlight was bright enough so that he was able to drive at a fairly good speed; within minutes they had reached the streets and overhanging buildings of Lerici, and he reined in the horses in front of a house a few hundred feet from the inn where Byron's party was staying.

Crawford climbed down and opened the door, and Byron got out, as carefully as someone's great-grandfather. Crawford couldn't help remembering the vital young man he'd first met in a Geneva street in 1816.

The paving stones ahead were streaked with light, and faintly on the breeze they could hear music and laughter. "Trelawny will be carousing," said Byron hoarsely, "and the Hunts will probably have already gone to bed, in their sensible way. I should be able to get to my room without anyone asking me about this bandage." He reached back into the carriage and pulled out a cane, which he handed to Crawford. "You remember it?"

Crawford nodded, a faint, sad smile touching his bearded face. "Your sword cane. I remember you waving it around in a lightning storm at the foot of the Wengern."

"It's yours now. Twist the metal collar of it, that ring there, and you can draw it. It's good French steel." Byron seemed ill at ease. "You know where the money and guns are in the carriage. And poor Shelley's heart. And I've got my passport and you've got yours. I don't imagine you'll—"

He stopped, and took Crawford's good hand in both of his. "I've been a lot of trouble, haven't I? During these, what, six years."

Crawford was embarrassed, and glad that the flaring torch was above and behind Byron so that he couldn't see if there were tears in the lord's eyes. "A lot of trouble," he agreed.

Byron laughed. "You've been a good friend. It's not terribly likely that we'll see each other again, so I do want you to know that. You've been a good friend."

"Oh hell." Crawford freed his hand and hugged the man, and Byron pounded him on the back. "You've been a good friend too."

Clearly embarrassed himself, Byron stepped back. "Do you think it's midnight yet?"

Crawford laughed softly. "It feels like tomorrow's midnight—but no, it can't be past ten."

"In two hours it will be Michaelmas. St. Michael's day." Byron waved clumsily. "Kill our dragon for us, Michael."

"You'll know," said Crawford. "You'll be there, in all but the flesh."

Byron nodded dubiously. "That's right. Jesus. Don't go getting us up too early in the morning." He turned and began limping away, toward the inn.

Crawford leaned into the carriage and made sure Josephine's pulse and breathing were still steady, then closed and latched the door, wearily climbed back up onto the bench and snapped the reins.

He drove northeast until he'd crossed the arching stone bridge over the Vara River, and then he took the old road that paralleled the Marga River, between high mountain shoulders that were a deeper black than the starry sky.

The road was getting steeper as it curled up into the Apennines, but the moon was high and the horses were fresh, and Crawford felt better with every mile he put between the carriage and the stony thing that lay injured but aware somewhere on the hillside behind the Casa Magni.

Finally it was the cold and his own exhaustion that made him stop. The torch had long since burned out.

Seven miles northeast of the Vara a stream flowed into the Marga from up in the mountains, and around the bridge over the stream were clustered the lightless wooden buildings of a little village called Aulla. Crawford found a stable and banged on the broad door until a light appeared in a window overhead, and the door was eventually unlocked and slid open by an old man with a lantern.

Crawford paid him to take the two horses out of harness and groom them, and to fetch a cup of vinegar from somewhere, and to ignore the fact that Crawford and his companion chose to sleep in the carriage.

When everything had been done and the old man had returned upstairs, Crawford checked Josephine—her breathing and pulse were still regular—and then carefully poured about a tablespoonful of the vinegar into the jar of Byron's blood, to prevent its clotting, and closed the jar and tucked it safely into one of the bags on the floor.

Josephine was lying on the rear seat, and he lay down on the front one; in order to fit he had to tuck his legs up and bend his head down over his knees, but he managed it, and was asleep in seconds.

He woke again, hours later, feeling painfully constricted and breathless. He had sat up, and gingerly stretched his legs out and rearranged his clothing and loosened his belt, before it became clear to him, to his dull astonishment, that it was sexual excitement that had forced him awake.