The Stress of Her Regard (46 page)

Byron seemed startled, and not pleased, by these coherent sentences from her; but before he could answer, there came a catlike wail from the dark courtyard outside, rasping on nerves like a bow on violin strings. The wail continued for several seconds before diminishing away in a couple of syllables that sounded like
"Papa."

The pistol was shaking in Byron's hand, but he got to his feet and walked to the glass doors.

"Papa, Papa, mi permetti entrare, fa freddo qui fuori, ed e buio!"
came the weirdly childlike voice. Crawford translated it mentally:
Papa, Papa, let me inside, it's cold out here, and dark!

Once before Crawford had seen the little girl who was now hovering in midair outside the glass, but she was plumper now. Her eyes were bright, and fresh red blood was smeared on the white skin around her mouth, and the palms of her hands were flattened against the glass. She was looking into Byron's face, and all at once smiled hideously.

The skin was tight over Crawford's cheekbones, and he forced himself to stay by Josephine and not run.

Byron had gone white and his hands were trembling, but he was nodding gently.
"Si, tesora, ti piglio dal freddo."

Without taking his eyes off of the child's body he raised his voice and said, "Aickman—Josephine—go upstairs to your rooms. Please. This is between the two of us."

Crawford opened his mouth to protest, but Josephine caught his arm. "It's all right," she whispered. "Let's go."

They crossed the wide room to the dark hall, and before they rounded the corner Crawford looked back. Sobs were visibly shaking Byron, but the pistol was steady.

They heard the shot when they were on the stairs, and several minutes later, from the window in Crawford's room, they saw the limping figure of Byron carrying the small body out across the moonlit grass. Crawford remembered having seen a church in that direction, and he wondered if Byron could be confident of finding a shovel.

"He
said
a new one might be killed with that ammunition," said Josephine solemnly as she unbuttoned her blouse. "And she was certainly a new one." She folded the blouse, shed her skirt and then crawled into bed. "Remember what Claire always used to say?" By moonlight Crawford could see Josephine's haggard smile. "Well, she can't say it anymore. At last he's done something for Allegra."

After several minutes of silence they became aware of a distant, inhuman singing that seemed to resonate up from the earth and down from the sky; the chorus was a tapestry of long-sustained notes, but, though it was majestically tragic, it evoked only awe and humility in Crawford, for it was clearly not composed for human emotions.

A gentle rocking woke Crawford at dawn. For a few sleepy moments he thought he was on shipboard, but when he noticed the flowers bobbing in the vase on the bedside table he remembered that he was in Byron's house, and he realized that what he was feeling must be a mild earthquake. The rocking quickly subsided, and he went back to sleep.

There were giants in the earth in those days . . .

—Genesis 6:4

Crawford and Josephine were awakened later in the morning by Shelley's shrill voice down in the yard—when Crawford got up and pulled the curtains back and looked down, he saw that Shelley was directing the loading of the Hunts' luggage onto the roof of his rented carriage, and seemed impatient to be on the road.

Byron could be seen pacing back and forth through the long, stark shadows of the olive trees that bordered the dusty yard, and the fact that he was awake at this hour, and not even bothering to watch as his servants strapped his own luggage onto the rack at the back of his Napoleonic carriage, led Crawford to believe that the man had not slept at all.

The stripes of darkness across the flat dirt made the yard resemble to Crawford a wide stairway, like the flight of steps he'd seen from Keats's second-floor window in Rome two years ago, and he morbidly wondered which members of this party were heading uphill, and which were headed down. Byron seemed likely to be one of those people Crawford recalled who simply stayed in one place on the stairs, waiting for some tourist to pay them to pose for a portrait—and what sort of character was Byron calculated to suggest? Certainly none of the saints.

Crawford unlatched the window and pushed it open, and the already warm summer air that sighed into the room was scented with coffee and pastries somewhere nearby—apparently being ignored by all the busy people below.

Crawford and Josephine got dressed and went downstairs, and since they were staying in Livorno and not going on to Pisa, they had the leisure to eat a lot of the informal breakfast Byron's servants had prepared.

At one point Shelley took Crawford aside and gave him a hundred pounds. Crawford took the money, but squinted at Shelley.

"Are you certain you want to give me all this?" he asked.

Shelley blinked, noticed the bank notes in Crawford's hand, and then shook his head and reached for them. "No, I—I should give it to poor Hunt—or have it sent back to Mary, in Spezia—I—"

Crawford kept two ten-pound notes and handed the rest back. "Thanks, Percy."

Shelley stared at the money Crawford had given back to him, nodded and smiled uncertainly, then stuffed it into a pocket and wandered away.

By eight o'clock the last of the Hunts' children had been rounded up and bundled aboard the rented carriage—Byron wouldn't permit any of them in his own—and the adults climbed into one carriage or the other, and latched the doors, and then the vehicles got under way, flanked by servants on horseback.

Not all of Byron's servants were leaving, and he had left instructions that Crawford and Josephine were to be allowed to borrow a spare carriage and a couple of horses for the trip back to Livorno. By the time they had got themselves organized, though, the sun had begun baking the dusty road in earnest, and they decided to wait for the cool of dusk.

Crawford took a couple of Byron's books out into the shaded courtyard and tried to read, but he kept getting distracted by the thought of the child he had seen out here the night before. He was sure the blood on the child's mouth had been Ed Williams's, and he wondered who Ed would get to consume him now.

Josephine spent most of the day lying down—Crawford assumed at first that she was napping, but at around noon he looked in on her and noticed that her eyes were open, staring patiently at the ceiling. He went back out to the courtyard and tried again to read.

West of Montenero the land sloped down for two or three miles to the coast of the Ligurean Sea, and when the sun had sunk enough to make a black silhouette of Elba, Napoleon's island of exile, Crawford became aware of a rhythmic chanting from the road below the house.

He tucked one of Byron's pistols into his belt before limping down the dirt road to investigate the sound, but found only a dozen villagers and a couple of priests standing around a wagon to which a weary-looking donkey was harnessed.

The priests were intoning prayers and sprinkling the dry road dust with holy water, and at first Crawford thought it was some local ritual that had nothing to do with him; then a very old man with a walking stick came hunching out of the sparse crowd and smiled at him . . . and Crawford wondered if a pistol would do any real good here anyway.

"They're
aware
," said des Loges in his barbaric French, "of the sort of place you people have lately come from." He waved at the villagers and the priests. "Portovenere, I'm told. You'd be amazed to know how long it's had that name, and in how many languages. The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch had some things to say about the place, when he wasn't moaning about his unattainable sweetheart Laura."

He laughed and looked around at his bucolic companions, then squinted back at Crawford. "I think that at the right word these people would attack the house up there—note the knives several of them have, and the pitchfork that gentleman at the rear carries. The English lord who was here, Byron, is a member of the Carbonari, yes? These people approve of that—but Byron is gone now, and they can smell the—
Siliconari
—on you. They can smell it on me too, which isn't helping." He waved his stick back up the road. "Do you suppose you and I could talk?"

Crawford thought of Josephine, helpless back at the house. "All right," he said, suddenly very tired. "Tell them I'm . . . tell them I've put a nail in a
mazze
, though, will you? We don't need their . . . help."
Siliconari
, he thought-probably a pun on
silex
, the French and Latin word for flint.
Silex. silicis. silici.

des Loges laughed and rattled off a quick phrase in Italian to the priests, who did seem to relax a little, though they didn't stop sprinkling the holy water.

Des Loges stared at Crawford from time to time as the two of them limped ungracefully up the steep, dusty road to the dirt-paved yard. The shadows of the trees were lying to the east now, but the effect reminded Crawford of the stairway illusion he'd noticed that morning, and he wondered now whether he was headed uphill or down himself.

"You're divorced!" exclaimed des Loges at last as they approached the front door. "But the Venice attempt was a failure, the one your friends made four years ago—you must have gone all the way up into the Alps, am I right?"

"Right," answered Crawford. "With Byron, in 1816. And he's backslid since, and I haven't, so I don't see why your priests admire him and fear me."

"Actually they're not that fond of Byron either, but he's rich and powerful, and you're not, and he
is
doing a lot for the Carbonari."

Des Loges shook his head, and Crawford thought there was a glint of admiration in the ancient man's eyes. "I never even seriously considered going to the Alps myself—the trip would have been a fearful ordeal for me, and I assumed it would be certainly fatal anyway; or, worse, that it would leave me crippled and unable to try anything else." He shrugged. "So why not just get the right man to drown me at home."

Crawford knocked on the door and self-consciously diverted the conversation from the subject of his failure to drown the old man six years ago. "It nearly
was
fatal. The trip to the Alps. There are some . . . astonishing creatures in those mountains."

Des Loges nodded agreeably, accepting the conversational shift. "And you went in 1816? Old Werner was passing through in those years—his arrival in Venice was what wrecked the scheme your friends . . . and I . . . had there in 1818. His presence in Switzerland must have had the locals particularly upset—there must have been some Carbonari activity—and it would have had the old creatures particularly agitated, too, having the"—he used a word that Crawford could interpret only as
animating focus
—"pass so close. Did you see Werner, by any chance? He'd have been avoiding the highest passes, since
he
certainly wouldn't be wanting a divorce, but you might have glimpsed his party."

Crawford had begun to shake his head when des Loges added, "He'd have been travelling packed in ice, with an escort of Austrian soldiers."

And it seemed to Crawford that he did remember something like that—a wagon stuck in the mud at dusk, and Byron whimsically climbing up onto its bed to help oversee the efforts to push the vehicle free.

"Maybe I did," he said. "Who is this Werner?"

Des Loges didn't answer, for one of Byron's servants was finally pulling the door open. The servant stared with distaste at des Loges, but stood aside when Crawford told him that the old man was a guest of his—though this revelation earned Crawford himself a coldly reconsidering look.

"I'll tell you about him," des Loges said. "Where can we talk?"

The servant's look of disdain had deepened visibly upon hearing des Loges's calamitous French. "Uh, up in our room," Crawford said. "Wait here while I tell my . . . wife, my current one, that we're coming up."

Josephine was sitting on the floor when Crawford returned to the bedroom with des Loges, and Crawford couldn't tell whether she looked at the horribly old man with fascination or loathing, or both; he did see her hands working in her lap, and he knew she was once more mentally running through the halls of the multiplication tables.

Des Loges sat down in a chair by the window and put his feet up on the bed. "You asked about Werner," he said. "Werner is the . . . high king of the Hapsburgs, you might say—the secret but absolute head of the Austrian empire. And he's been that for a long time—he's even older than I am, by a good four centuries. He was born in about the year a.d. 1000, in the old Hapsburg castle on the river Aar, in the Swiss canton of Aargau."

Crawford was standing by the window, looking down the road toward where they'd left the priests and the villagers, but he looked around sharply at the name of the canton, and des Loges raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

"Uh, never mind," Crawford said. He turned back toward the window, for he thought he had caught a flicker of movement in the dusky road. "Look, I'm not all that curious about this fellow. What do—"

"You have to be," des Loges interrupted. "He's the man responsible for all our troubles. He wanted immortality, and he was in Switzerland, so he was very aware of the stories about the Alps being the stronghold of the old gods, being in fact the old gods themselves, frozen in stone by the changed sunlight but not killed. He climbed the mountains at night, young Faust that he was, and he managed to awaken the mountains enough to talk to them, and he learned about their people, the nephelim, the pre-Adamite vampires, whose petrified bodies could still be found here and there, dormant like seeds in the desert waiting for the right kind of rain."

Des Loges held up his withered hands, the palms about a foot apart. "They looked like little statues," he said. "Little petrified ribs of some pre-Adamite Adam, waiting for the breath of life once more. And Werner found one, and had it surgically and magically inserted into his body, so that it could wake up on his
account
, in a manner of speaking, using his psychic credit. He became a bridge that way, an unnatural overlap, a sort of representative of both races at once, and he—the fact of him—both diminished humanity and revived the nephelim."