The Stress of Her Regard (50 page)

"Have you managed to jettison those . . . things, those memories, now?" Her face was relaxed, but her heart was pounding.

"Yes."

"Do you hate my . . . do you hate Michael?"

"No. I did, before. I hated him and Byron and Shelley and all the people who had what I so wanted—the channel to the Muses. I gave everything I had, I gave
me
, but the Muses still withheld that, though they took me."

"Are you sorry now that you gave in?" she asked, surprised at the urgency in her own voice. "Since they didn't keep the bargain you thought you were making?"

"No," he said. "Now I live forever. I don't
need
to write poetry any longer—I
live
poetry now. The nights are mine, and the songs of the earth, and the old rhythms of the worlds and the atoms, that never change. I've faced the Medusa, and what looks like stony doom to men is actually birth. Men are born out of the hot wombs of humanity, but that's only . . . like a chick in the egg developing feathers. The real, lasting birth is the next one, the birth out of the cold ground. Everything you wished you could leave behind is left behind."

The moon was sinking low out over the water, highlighting with silver fire the tips of the waves that had closed over Shelley and his slain and petrified sister.

"Polidori is me, and I am him," her companion said in a different voice.

"His sister," Josephine said. "Your sister. She's dead."

"Yes," said her companion calmly. "It's rare that we die, but she is dead."

"I killed her, helped kill her."

"Yes."

Tears glittered suddenly on Josephine's right cheek. "I-I'm sorry I abandoned you in the Alps," she said hoarsely. "And I'm sorry I refused you in that street in Rome, in front of Keats's house. And I'm sorry I helped kill your . . . sister." She walked on in silence for a while. "Sisters shouldn't be killed," she whispered.

"Nobody should be killed," said her companion. "We offer eternal life to everyone."

Josephine stopped, and faced him, though her eyes were closed. "Will you still have me?" she asked in a humble, hopeful monotone.

"Of course," he said, placing his hand gently behind her neck and lowering his head to her throat.

Mary and Claire and Jane Williams were nearly hysterical with worry when the next day dragged on till noon without any sign of the
Don Juan
, and Crawford agreed to go back to Livorno to ask whether or not Shelley had actually set out. Josephine was ill in bed, so, alone, already trying to figure out how he would break the news to the ladies on his return, he walked north along the beach to Lerici, where he hired a boat.

He arrived in Livorno in the evening and found Trelawny and Roberts still at the Globe, and their expressions of worried hope turned to despair even before they could ask him any questions, for Crawford's face let them know that the
Don Juan
had not arrived at the Casa Magni after having disappeared into the storm two days earlier.

Byron was still in Pisa, and after a bleak, muted conversation in the lobby, Trelawny volunteered to ride north to tell him that it seemed sure that Shelley and Williams were drowned.

Trelawny left early the next day and was back in the late afternoon. Hunt and Byron, he said, had both been visibly upset by the news, and Byron sent a servant back with Trelawny to act as a courier, and had insisted that Trelawny take the
Bolivar
out and search for the
Don Juan
until Shelley's fate was absolutely known; and the next day, as the courier took a fast boat north to deliver a tersely unhopeful letter to the Casa Magni, Trelawny and Roberts and Crawford sailed slowly in the same direction, closely skirting the coastline and scanning the shore for any sign of Shelley's boat.

Crawford had gone with them, rather than with the courier, because the task of facing the women seemed vastly beyond him. During the past two days his feeling of disorientation had only grown worse—he was bewildered by, and unable to come up with ready answers to, even such innocuous remarks as "Good morning," and it was actually a relief that Josephine had not spoken to him since the day of the lamia's killing.

No sign of the
Don Juan
was found that day.

Back at the Globe that evening they learned that Mary and Claire and Jane Williams had returned with Byron's servant that afternoon, and had gone on to Pisa to stay with Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi to await word. Josephine, it appeared, had elected to stay on at the Casa Magni with Shelley's servants. Crawford was obscurely glad of it.

He and Trelawny and Roberts kept up the search for five more blurry days, only quitting when word reached them that two bodies, one of them tentatively identified as that of Edward Williams, had been found washed up on the beach near the mouth of the Serchio River, fifteen miles north of Livorno.

The health authorities buried the bodies before Byron and Hunt could get there to look at them, and presented Byron with a bill for the interments; Trelawny showed the bill to Crawford, angry about the charges for health measures, which included "certain metals and vegetable bulbs." Crawford told him there were probably better things to be worrying about.

Another body was found the next day, five miles farther north. The port officials were fairly sure it was Shelley's. Trelawny blustered and threatened and made liberal use of the fact that Byron was an English peer, and eventually got them to agree to postpone the burial until the body could be identified.

On Friday the
Bolivar
sailed north once more, and dropped anchor when they saw half a dozen Tuscan soldiers waving at them from the beach near Viareggio. Crawford, leaning on the
Bolivar's
rail, wondered idly why so many soldiers were necessary to stand watch over one drowned body.

Roberts lowered the boat, and he and Crawford and Trelawny rowed ashore through the low surf.

As Crawford was splashing in through the shallows he noticed the sprawled form around which the soldiers were standing. Several canvas bags lay on a wooden pallet nearby, and there were four shovels stuck upright in the dirt like sailless masts. A crowd of ragged civilians, presumably fishermen, watched from a sandy rise a hundred yards away. Crawford looked down at the body.

The flesh of the face and hands had been nibbled away, right down to the bones, and the soldiers assured the Englishmen that fish had done it.

Trelawny and Roberts just nodded blankly, but Crawford looked up the beach to the crowd of unsavory spectators, and he remembered an old man who had dressed up as a clergyman to get into Guy's Hospital and steal blood from a certain sort of corpse, and he wondered what the Italian word for
neffy
was, and he thought he knew why so many soldiers were here. He considered walking up to the silent figures, but was afraid he would lose all contact with the sane world if he saw . . . say, a fork . . . in the hand of one of them.

He turned away and spat in the sand, for the taste of Shelley's blood was hovering in the back of his throat like a bad smell.

He returned his gaze to Shelley's stripped skull. Some of the flaxen hair still adhered to it, and he remembered the way that hair used to blow in disarray around his face after Shelley had excitedly run his hands through it. He tried to derive some sense of sadness from seeing Shelley in this state of ruin, but he found that he couldn't see the corpse at his feet as anything more than a corpse; he had said goodbye to the man eleven days earlier, when the blood he'd drunk had linked him to Shelley as he clung to the rail of the foundering boat.

Trelawny on the other hand was striding up and down the beach with his hands balled into fists, cursing to cover his very evident grief. Roberts looked more embarrassed than anything else.

Even without a face, the body was clearly Shelley's. It still wore the nankeen trousers and the reefer jacket, from the pocket of which Trelawny had melodramatically pulled Leigh Hunt's copy of Keats's
Poems
. Crawford noticed that it was folded open to the poem "Lamia."

The officer in charge of the soldiers was yawning and shrugging, as if to indicate how routine and unremarkable the whole proceeding was, and when he spoke it was in English, as if to distance himself even further. "This body," he said, "must be buried now, very now. You should burn him later, and the bodies down the coast also. It is the final law. And with this . . .
wherewithal
. . . placed muchly upon the bodies, first, when they are buried." He waved at the canvas bags. "Health necessities, of the law."

"More of their damned health necessities," growled Trelawny. "Like the vegetables and metals they made Byron pay for." He turned to Crawford. "What the hell's he trying to say?"

"I think," said Crawford, "he means that we have to bury the bodies now, but can dig them up later for cremation. And when we bury them we have to dump those bags onto the corpses."

"What
is
that?" asked Trelawny, his black beard seeming to bristle with suspicion. "In the bags?"

Crawford crossed the sand to the bags, touched one, and then smelled his finger. "Quicklime," he said before the officer could think of the English word. "It gets tremendously hot on exposure to water, any dampness." The other two Englishmen looked ready to object, but Crawford looked again at the spectators and said, "I think it's a good idea."

They buried Shelley under the hot sun, and dumped a bag of the quicklime over him and then hastily shovelled sand down on top of the steaming effigy. The crowd of spectators broke up and drifted away, and Crawford and Trelawny and Roberts waded out to the boat and rowed back to the
Bolivar
.

They sailed back to Livorno as the sun went down over the Ligurean Sea beyond the starboard rail. By early evening they were back at the Globe Hotel, but Trelawny paused only long enough to empty a glass of wine before riding south to break the final news to Byron and the ladies.

Crawford sat up late, drinking alone on a balcony overlooking the harbor. The water was dark, but streaked here and there with yellow light from the portholes of a few boats with people staying aboard, and the waterfront was quiet on this Friday night; the only sounds were the faint wash of the surf and the wind fluting in the roof tiles behind and above him.

As had happened once before, in Byron's coach outside the walls of Geneva, the wine seemed to clear his wits rather than dull them, even though the glass he was now drinking from was plain glass instead of amethyst.

Sometime during the long, morbidly hot day he had decided that tomorrow he would use the last of Shelley's money to hire a boat back to the Casa Magni . . . and then ask Josephine to marry him. His life hadn't been one he'd have chosen, but Josephine was the best and most important part of it, and—now that he had begun to recover from the shock of having killed the lamia—he knew he couldn't bear to lose her.

Only by promising himself that he would marry her and make the rest of her life happy and contented could he bear to think of what her life had consisted of since she'd left England—the injuries, the cold and hunger, the loneliness, the recurrent madness . . . or to remember the innate gallantry and loyalty of her, the moral strength that had several times been much greater than his own. . . .

In fact, it occurred to him as he poured a fresh glass of wine, her life in England seemed to have been a nightmare too. Clearly she had always been implicitly blamed for her mother's death, both by her father and by her sister Julia, whom he had so carelessly married so long ago. He remembered Julia cheerfully telling him about Josephine's pathetic attempts to
be
Julia, and about Julia's callous public shattering of those pretenses.

The fact that Josephine could still love anyone, that she could still care so much about people—like himself and Keats and Mary Shelley and the children—that she would put her abused life in danger to do it, was evidence of a soul that should all along have been treasured, cherished.

The world had no place for her, and would certainly break her—probably soon—if he didn't do what he could to protect her.

The medical profession was undoubtedly closed to them now, in Italy, at least, but surely there was a quiet life to be had, somewhere, for two tired and damaged people. Surely the world had no further malice toward them.

Cheered by the wine and by his new resolve, he went to bed early, for he wanted to be at Casa Magni by noon.

The boat he had hired had no smaller boat for passengers to debark in, and so after the captain lowered the anchor to wait for him, Crawford had to wade waist-deep through the low surf to the beach in front of the Casa Magni; one of Shelley's woman-servants waved to him from the terrace, and was waiting for him in the dining room when he had crossed the sand-streaked paving stones of the ground-floor room and ascended the stairs.

The servant, whose name, he recalled, was Antonia, hurried across the carpeted floor to him. "There's only me and Marcella and Josephine still here, sir," she said quickly in Italian. "Is there word on Mister Shelley?"

"He's dead, Antonia," Crawford answered in the same language. "They found his body on the beach yesterday, twenty miles south of here. Williams is dead too."

"Ah, God." Antonia crossed herself. "Their poor children."

Crawford just nodded. "They'll get along," he said in a neutral tone. "Where is Josephine?"

"She's in the room that used to be Shelley's."

And was afterward hers and mine, for a while, Crawford thought as he crossed to the closed door. He tapped softly on it. "Josephine? It's me—Michael. Let me in, there's something I've got to talk to you about, and I have a boat waiting—for us."

There was no reply, and he turned back toward Antonia with a questioning look.

"She has been ill, sir," Antonia said. "The sun hurts her eyes. . . ."

Crawford turned the knob and pulled the door open. The curtains were drawn against the sunlight, but he could see Josephine lying across the bed in her nightgown, her sweaty hair trailing across her face and throat as if she were a drowned body carried up here to await identification. The window was open, though the curtains scarcely shifted at all in the still, hot summer air.