The Stress of Her Regard (36 page)

"I think we're too late," he said to Josephine, whose hand he still held.

"No," she said. He looked at her, and then followed her stare toward the door to the other room.

Keats stood there, the real Keats, leaning against the frame, his eyes blazing from his wasted face as he watched the illusion on the far wall, and Crawford suddenly knew that the woman on the hill with the phantom healthy Keats was an illusory image of the woman he was engaged to marry.

Then the illusion faded, and the copy of Keats's poems on the table flew up into the air. The book swelled and grew in size as it moved toward the wall where the illusion had been projected, and when it was nearly as tall as Crawford the covers swung open like a pair of doors, presenting the text on two of the pages. The spine of the giant book bumped against the wall, and clung.

The verses printed on the pages seemed to glow darkly against the white paper . . . and then suddenly it was a different book hanging there, clearly a book of poems Keats had not yet written, and the verses fairly sprang off the rapidly turning pages into Crawford's mind—and, he could see, into the minds too of Josephine and Keats himself.

The music was unbearably sad now, conjuring images of future sunsets none of them would live to see, evening breezes none of them would live to feel; and it had a Latin tone to it, reminding the hearers that they were in Italy, in
Rome
, where the grandest accomplishments of mankind were as commonplace as the onion-sellers on the streets . . . and that the invalid Keats, who would so desperately appreciate it all, would die before seeing any of it.

The Temptation of St. Keats, Crawford thought. He looked around for his flask, and saw it on the table where the book had been, and he wished passionately that he dared to cross the room to it.

The woman Crawford had seen on the illusory hill was in the room now, watching the succession of brilliant poems, and after a moment she turned and held out a hand toward the dying young man standing in the bedroom doorway. Her eyes glittered like crazed glass in the lamplight, and Crawford wondered if she still much resembled Keats's fiancée . . . and if it still mattered.

Crawford noticed that when she turned away the magnified pages faded—and when he looked again at his flask it rose up in the air and flew across the room to him; without bothering about how it had happened, he took it out of the air and unscrewed the cap and took a deep gulp of the brandy.

The real book was in one of the woman's hands, and Keats's bony hand reached out toward the other, and Crawford drank some more, hoping to drown all concern for the doomed sister of the young poet, all concern for all betrayed sisters, and brothers. . . .

He looked away, toward the wall where the book had been hanging—the book was gone, and he was jolted to see instead the image of Julia, his dead wife, smiling and walking down a country lane, between tall chestnut trees; as she walked, pieces of her were falling off into the dirt—first a hand, then an entire arm, then a foot—though she moved along as smoothly as ever, and her smile didn't falter. Behind her came a little dark thing that clicked and whirred as it moved, and it was picking up the fallen pieces and fitting them on over its own rusty limbs.

Josephine's hand tightened convulsively in his, and he looked at her—her single eye was fixed intensely on the illusion.

He looked back at it—and then stared in horror, for what he saw now was storm-surf and cliffs under a steel-colored sky, and the keel of an overturned boat sliding across the foam-streaked faces of the waves. He knew he would see his brother's raised arm any moment now, if he didn't look away. . . .

And there it was! No, the scene had changed—the shifting blue surface was now a field of flowers, and the person waving was a young girl; a moment later he heard her yell,
Johnny. . . .

Crawford looked back toward Keats, and saw that he had lowered his hand and was staring at the illusion. The woman followed his gaze and then, with an impatient hiss, clicked her fingernails together, and the street-side wall was restored, all visions banished. The room seemed suddenly very dark.

Crawford guessed that Josephine, and then himself, and then Keats, had been involuntarily projecting the scenes, had for a few moments made helpless use of the lamia's magical tools while her attention had been distracted by Keats's near surrender. His summoning of the flask must also have been done by magic borrowed from her.

And the final vision, the vision of Keats's sister, had undone all her work. Keats was shaking his head and turning back toward the bedroom. The woman followed him, and Josephine dragged Crawford after them. In the corner Severn was torturing a high-pitched, urgent tune out of the piano, but no one seemed to be listening.

The bedroom window was open to the rain, according to the directions Crawford had tried to give this afternoon, and he wondered if poor Severn had been duped into washing the windowsill and asking the vampire in.

Keats had fallen across his unmade bed, and it really looked as though the exertion of standing up had been too great a strain on his ruined lungs—there was a bubbling undertone to his desperate wheezing now.

The woman hurried to him, holding the book of poetry.
"Quickly,"
she said,
"sign the book, save yourself."
She took a pen from the top of the dresser and, when he raised a weak hand to fend her off, she jabbed the pen point into his palm.
"Sign,"
she repeated, holding the pen toward him.

Keats took the book from her, but there was bitter disappointment on his face, and he shook his head again. He looked past her to Josephine, who had been his nurse. "Water," he whispered.

The inhuman woman moved toward Josephine, but Crawford stepped in front of her and coughed garlic fumes in her narrow face; she recoiled, her hair shuddering and contracting away.

Josephine turned to the open window, scraped the palm of her hand along the rain-wet sill and then took a step toward the bed with her hand cupped in front of her.

Keats reached for her.

Suddenly the room was tilting—or seemed to be: when Crawford grabbed at the windowsill to keep his balance he saw that the streets outside were still parallel to the sill and the floor, and for an irrational moment he thought the whole world must be falling over sideways.

Josephine took another step, a very uphill one, but then started to topple backward toward the sitting-room door, which was beginning to seem like part of the floor. Keats, apparently insulated from the gravitational tricks, lunged desperately for her, but was too far away, and too weak to get up and step toward her.

Crawford hiked his good foot up into the window frame and then sprang out across the room in the direction that felt like up, his open hands slammed into the small of Josephine's back, shoving her into balance, and he fell away backward and hit the wall hard enough to blind him for a moment with the pain in his broken ribs.

Josephine had grabbed one of the posts of Keats's bed and, holding herself up by it, she extended the hand in which she still cupped some of the water she'd scraped from the windowsill.

"God help me," Keats whispered, then dipped his finger into the dirty water in Josephine's palm and scrawled with it on the open page. Crawford saw that the poem the book was opened to was "Lamia."

The woman retreated still farther when his finger touched the paper, and the room was suddenly level again—and then Josephine was toppling forward and, in catching herself, she pushed her wet fingertips across Keats's waxy forehead. At that instant the inhuman woman disappeared, with a thin wail that made Crawford's teeth ache.

The music had stopped, though the air still seemed to ring with it, and they could hear Severn blundering about in confusion in the next room. "John?" Severn called. "Are you all right? I seem to have fallen asleep. . . ." Clearly the cat-woman thing had disappeared from his shoulder.

Keats's eyes were closed, but his lips were moving; Crawford leaned closer. "Thank you, both of you," Keats said softly. His eyes opened for a moment and he looked at Crawford. The water that ran down from his forehead found and filled the pain-wrinkles around his eyes and, after a moment, coursed down his cheeks like tears. "I told you once that I might . . . someday need a favor from a reluctant neff-host." He sighed, and turned to the wall. "Now please go. And send Severn in—I want to tell him what my . . . epitaph is to be."

Severn nodded when Crawford delivered Keats's message and, though there were tears in his eyes and he started forward at once, he waved toward the couch. "Sit down," he called softly over his shoulder. "I'll have Dr. Clark right over to look at you two."

But when Severn had gone into Keats's room and closed the door, Crawford took Josephine's elbow and started toward the door. "We can't stay," he whispered clearly to her, hoping she was capable of understanding him. "Anywhere else would be safer—men will be coming here who'll kill both of us."

To his relief, she nodded.

He led her down the hall toward the stairs—several people were staring fearfully out past doors open only a crack, and crossed themselves as the two wet, battered figures limped past—and then down the stairwell to the street and the still saintless steps that fretted the Pincian Hill.

He didn't pause when they left the building, but propelled Josephine quickly out across the square, past the boat-shaped Bernini fountain, to an alley on the far side. He relaxed a little then, but nevertheless made Josephine hurry south along the alley; for when the Austrian forces found that Crawford and she had already got out of the building, they'd certainly search the nearby area.

Luminous gray had begun to infuse the sky to the east, and the long clouds were like wet bandages slowly absorbing blood as the first rays of dawn touched the steeples and towers overhead. Crawford had found a rolling, half-up-on-the-toes gait that eased some of the pain in his left thigh, though he still found himself putting a lot of his weight on the uncomplaining Josephine. Both of them suffered occasional violent fits of shivering, sometimes so bad that they had to stop.

At the Church of San Silvestro he paused to rest and, as he leaned against the stone wall and let his hot lungs slow down, he read a plaque on the wall claiming that the head of John the Baptist was kept somewhere on the premises. It reminded him of Keats's poem "Isabella," and he wondered feverishly what the priests watered the head with, and what they hoped would grow.

"The convent here," began Josephine suddenly, startling him, "is the post office now. I went there for Keats and Severn yesterday, to see if any of Keats's friends in England had sent him money. Nobody had."

"It would have been too late anyway," Crawford observed. He stared at her. She seemed to be lucid, and he wondered who she thought she was. "How did you wind up
here
? It wasn't because of me, was it?"

"No." she said. "Originally it was for haruspication." She leaned against the wall next to him and stared into the brightening sky. The white of her eye was blotted with bright red. "A doctor told me that word, when he figured out why I was a nurse. He made me leave. That was in . . . I don't know, Fabriano, Firenze. . . . I'm a nurse everywhere I go now. I need to be."

Even in his pain and exhaustion Crawford vividly remembered her brief stint as a nurse in St. Thomas's Hospital four years ago, and he wondered if she had discovered this necessity then. "So what's . . . haruspication?"

"Divination by the examination of entrails," she said, clearly reciting a phrase she'd been told. "I get a lot of jobs because most nurses don't like to work surgery; I need to, though, I—need to look in there."

Crawford knew he'd be having trouble following this even if he'd been alert and uninjured. "To . . . what, see the future?"

Her torn lips actually curved into a smile. "Maybe to see my own future, in a way. I hope. No, to . . . see what's inside people. Inside
people
. It gives us . . . it gives
me
. . . dreams, and the dreams are pulling me out of . . ." She paused, then shook her head in despair of expressing whatever her thought was.

"What kind of dreams?"

"Of performing surgery on myself—always in the dreams I'm on the table, sitting up a little, and I've knifed open my whole torso, and I'm digging around in my own entrails and pulling things out to throw away. If I can just get rid of all of them . . ."

Crawford stared at her, the expression on his haggard face a mix of concern and horror. "Things? What things?"

She shuddered, and swayed against him as if she were about to faint. "Gear-wheels," she said; "springs, bolts, chains, wires . . ." She let the sentence drift off.

Crawford put his arm around her and wordlessly held her.

Crawford led her southwest to Navona Square, and then, peering from around the corner of a shop, he watched the square and the window of his apartment for several long minutes. When at last he was fairly sure that no Austrians had traced him here yet, he told Josephine to wait, and hobbled across the square and into his building, re-emerging a few minutes later with a valise and a walking stick. It had been a risky action, but he had felt that he and Josephine would have no chance at all without some money and his medical kit, and if they were to make any progress at all he needed to be able to take some of the weight off of his shot leg.

A greengrocer had stopped his cart near the alley where Josephine was waiting, and the man was now setting out baskets of leeks and potatoes on the cobblestones, and from the open door of a bakery across the street Crawford could smell hot rolls and coffee; he was considering going over there and spending some of his money, but then he heard the greengrocer call across to the baker, asking if he knew why there were so many soldiers riding up and down every street and alley a few blocks north.

Crawford gave Josephine the valise, then took her elbow again and began hitching himself along southward. The stick didn't seem to help much, but despite his throbbing, stiffening leg he was unwilling to hire a carriage, both because the drivers had probably been told to watch for them and because he didn't want to use the little money he had on anything less than food and shelter.