The Stress of Her Regard (43 page)

Shelley was, in fact, devoting all his attention to refitting the
Don Juan
, presumably to make it a more imposing vessel, better able to stand comparison with Byron's ostentatious
Bolivar
. He and Roberts and Williams were adding a false stern and bow to make the vessel look longer, and had dramatically increased the amount of canvas she could spread.

They also reballasted her; Crawford pointed out that the vessel rode a little higher now than it had before the refitting, but Shelley assured him that they knew what they were doing.

On the evening of Trelawny's departure, Crawford was standing with Shelley and Claire on the terrace and watching the
Bolivar's
sails recede to the south against a cloudless bronze sunset, when Josephine stepped out onto the terrace from the dining room and gave Crawford an unfriendly look.

"Can I speak to you in our room, Michael?"

Crawford turned to bare his teeth out at the sea and squint his eyes shut, then let his face relax as he turned around. "Of course, Julia," he said, following her back inside.

Shelley had given up his room when Josephine told him that she and Crawford were married, and Crawford now missed his old bunk in the servants' quarters.

She shut the door when he had followed her into the room. "I told you this morning," she said, "that I wanted a definite answer from you about when we're leaving this ghastly place."

"Right." He sighed, and sat down in a chair by the window. "Shelley's sailing south to Livorno a week from yesterday, to meet Byron and this Leigh Hunt fellow. Shelley said you and I can ride along."

"Why how frightfully generous of him!—considering that you've been working here for nearly two months without a penny of pay. You still haven't explained to me why you failed to demand passage on the
Bollix
or whatever its foolish name was."

"Yes, I did. Mary Shelley—and Claire, lately—are patients of mine, and I don't want to leave them while their conditions are in doubt." He tried to look sincere as he said this—the truth was that he had been delaying leaving the Casa Magni because he thought she was more likely to recover her real, Josephine personality here, where she'd lost it, than in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Livorno, or back at home in the now alien nation of England.

"Very well." Her tone was brittle with resentment. "But we stay not one day longer than next Monday, do you understand me? This place is horrible and these people are horrible. Have you made that Shelley person understand
yet
that you and I are
not
brother and sister?"

"Oh yes," he said hastily. Actually he had only got Shelley to stop referring to them as such.

"How does he think we
could
be, and be married?"

"I don't know." Incest is nothing unusual to this crowd, Julia, he thought—Shelley and his "sister," Byron and his half sister—but it wouldn't help to tell you that.

"And when will you abandon this ridiculous 'Aickman' name?"

"As soon as we leave," he told her, not for the first time.

She turned her head parrotlike to peer out the window. "I would think you'd be more concerned about getting proper medical help for your own wife," she said, "than applying your evidently inadequate skills to
strangers
. This eye that you've proven unable to do anything about is getting
worse
."

I doubt that, he thought, unless you've managed to crack it.

Yesterday he might have taken this complaint as a good way to try to remind her of the Wengern and all the rest of the events of her life as Josephine, but after last night's dinner he had finally given up trying to provoke that.

In the afternoon yesterday he had forcibly held her down on their bed and told her about Keats, and fleeing Rome, and living in Pisa and working at the university there, and he'd been optimistic when her sobs and protests had ceased and she had relaxed under him; but when he had got off her—and, in a tone made hoarse by hope, said, "Welcome back, Josephine"—she had sat up so jerkily that he had almost thought he heard the clatter of gears and ratchets in her torso.

She had stayed in her mechanical mode all evening, snapping her neck from one position to another and moving awkwardly as if on hinged limbs, and Claire had fled the dining room and young Percy Florence had burst into tears and demanded that his mother take him away from the "wind-up lady." When she recovered, some hours later, she was Julia again.

And so he had abandoned, at least for the moment, the idea of calling Josephine back—he had decided that he was at least minimally better off with Julia than with the wind-up lady.

He was eerily sure that Josephine's body was doing a perfect imitation of his dead wife, based on its two decades of close acquaintance with the subject; in effect he was only getting to know his wife now, six years after her death, and he was dismayed to find that he didn't like her at all.

She had made it clear two days ago that she would not welcome any sexual advances as long as the two of them were still in this house, and he was sure that part of her chronic resentment arose from the fact that this declaration had not sent him packing.

The truth was that he no longer wanted sex with her. He knew now that he loved poor Josephine—who, for all he knew, might be dead herself, no longer even a dormant spark in her own abdicated brain.

The thought reminded him of Shelley's agonized speculation that Allegra might still be alive and aware somewhere in her own nightmarishly revivified skull. We're all prisoners in our own heads, he thought now as he considered the memories that bound himself, but at least most of us can speak to other people through the bars, and sometimes reach between them to clasp someone else's hand.

"I did meet one gentleman here," Julia went on, "an Englishman, last night on the beach. One of Shelley's friends who came on that ship, I suppose. I hope he didn't leave on it today. He's a
physician
," she added, emphasizing the word. Crawford was only a surgeon. "He said
he
could restore sight to my eye. He
promised
it."

Crawford blinked in puzzlement for a moment—then he was on his feet, and leaning down to speak directly into her face. "Don't go
near
that man," he said harshly. "Don't ever invite him in, do you understand me? This is important. He's a . . . a murderer, I promise you. If you ever again speak to him I swear I will never leave here, and my London practice can go to hell."

She smiled, visibly reassured. "Why, I believe you're
jealous
! Do you really imagine that I'd flirt—or do anything
more
than flirt, at least—with another man, when I'm married to a successful doctor?"

He forced an answering smile.

Shelley launched the refitted
Don Juan
on Saturday—he and Williams and Roberts kept her out all day and well into the evening, slanting and tacking across the calm water of the Gulf, and returning her to her mooring only when the moon began to be veiled with clouds; Shelley's spirits remained substantially restored until, during the late dinner, Claire tremulously told him that twice dining the evening she had seen him pacing the terrace . . . before the
Don Juan
had returned.

Josephine only rolled her eyes impatiently and muttered something about alcoholism, but Shelley threw down his fork, got up, and pulled the drapes across the windows. "From now on we'll keep these closed after dark," he said.

Remembering Josephine's meeting with what must have been the resurrected Polidori, Crawford nodded. "A good idea."

Claire, halfway through her third tumbler of brandy, frowned, as if she could nearly remember some reason why Shelley should be opposed in this; she hastily drank some more of the brandy, and the momentary kinks of alertness relaxed out of her face.

There was something ill about Edward Williams' smile that made Crawford stare at him even before he spoke. "But we can—we can open them later, can't we, Percy?" Williams asked nervously. "I only mean that—that it's sort of pleasant to be able to look out over the Gulf at night."

Crawford glanced at Shelley, and saw that he had noticed it too.

"No, Ed," Shelley said tiredly. "Look at the goddamned Gulf all you want during the day. The drapes stay closed from sundown to sunup." He looked at Crawford and Josephine. "I think the Aickmans will be willing to . . .
wash the windows
with a solution that will help to enforce this."

"Windows!"
protested Josephine. "Impossible! My husband is a
doctor
, and
I'm
certainly no one's
maid
! How do you dare to imagine that—"

"I'll do it, Percy," said Crawford quietly. "After everyone's gone to bed."

Josephine got up from the table and stormed into their room.

A couple of hours later, when the lights had been snuffed, Crawford smashed several dozen garlic cloves into a bucket of salt water, then dragged it into the dining room and pulled the drapes back and, with an old shirt, slopped the mixture across the window panes and the flat stones of the floor.

He was glad that there were no lights in the room, for he didn't want to be able to recognize the several human forms that were bending and gesticulating silently in the darkness on the terrace outside.

Shelley and Roberts and the English boy Charles Vivian took the
Don Juan
out by themselves the next day, for Williams had a fever and only wanted to lie in bed all day, Crawford offered to examine him and do what he could in the way of prescribing something, but Williams hastily assured him that it wasn't necessary. Crawford was nearly moved to tears to see the sick brightness in the man's hitherto clear and humorous eyes.

At about noon Crawford put on a pair of cut-off trousers Shelley had given him and went downstairs. The wind was shaking the trees on the slope behind the house, and the
Don Juan
, running with the wind, was a speck of white on the southern horizon. Crawford walked into the water and began swimming. Since the death of Mary's fetus a week ago he had been taking a long swim every day.

The water was bracingly chilly, and revulsion at his situation made him swim out quite a distance before he relaxed and floated on his back, at last letting himself enjoy the sun on his face and chest.

Today was Sunday. They were to sail for Livorno tomorrow, and then he would have to decide what to do about Josephine. He couldn't possibly go back to England with her—could he, in good conscience, book passage for both of them and then jump ship, leaving her to travel alone? No—whether she was his wife or the woman he loved, he was bound to take better care of her than that. And Josephine might one day come back. He couldn't assume that she was gone forever.

Twice more he had felt the lamia's nearness in the night—both times "Julia" had recoiled from him, thinking he was about to violate their agreement about not having sex until they left Spezia—and he knew Shelley was still helplessly paying his part of the bargain. The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, he thought, mentally repeating a line from one of Shakespeare's sonnets that Shelley had haltingly recited recently.

Crawford wondered if the lamia did the same things with Shelley that she had done with him—and if Shelley was satisfying her as he had. He couldn't believe Shelley was. And he wondered if Williams was actually having sex with the resurrected Allegra, or just being chastely bitten by her.

He didn't know what to do about Williams—drag him into the Alps and up the Wengren? With
Julia
along?—and though he had garlicked the windows and threshold of the children's room, and given Jane Williams ludicrous-sounding instructions not to let the children talk to strangers when they were outside, he bleakly wondered how long it would be until one of them, probably Percy Florence, began wasting away.

At last he let his legs sink and looked back toward the house, and a slight chill passed across his belly; he had drifted out while he'd been carelessly floating, and was now about twice as far from shore as he had thought. His heart was thumping hard in his chest as he began swimming back toward shore.

He couldn't see that he was making any progress at all, and he cursed his four-fingered left hand and his stiff left leg.

After several minutes he was breathless from swimming against the tide, and he thought that in spite of his struggles he had drifted out farther. The sun was hot on his balding scalp, and glittered blindingly on the glassy waves.

He forced himself to breathe slowly and tread water. You swim in at a
slant
, he told himself, that's what everybody says. This is
not
where you die, understand me?

He tried to see which way the tide had taken him, so as to be able to swim inward in the same direction, but now he couldn't make out where the house was. The stretch of green-speckled brown that was the mainland seemed featureless, and farther away than ever. The harsh purple sky and the sun seemed to be squeezing it away.

He took several deep breaths and then kicked himself up as high out of the water as he could, and yelled,
"Help!"
—but the effort left him breathless, and the sound had not seemed to carry.

Tread water, he told himself; you can do that all day, can't you? Hell I remember a time in the Bay of Biscay when Boyd and I trod water for two hours straight, as an endurance contest, with friends swimming out to us to deliver fresh bottles of ale, and we only quit because it was clear that waiting for one of us to give up would require that the contest continue until well past dark. This current is much likelier to sweep you ashore somewhere than to take you right out of the Gulf into the open sea.

But even though he traded off between using his arms and using his legs, he could feel his muscles tightening like wires under his skin. Nearly a decade had passed since that contest, and he had clearly lost his youthful fitness somewhere along the line during the intervening years.

He forced himself to breathe evenly and slowly.