The Stress of Her Regard (61 page)

He looked at the dark form of Josephine, only a yard away, and after a moment he realized that the glints of light in her face were reflections of the dimly moonlit stable in her open eyes. He smiled at her, and started to get up.

Then he noticed that she was hunched up on one elbow, and staring out of the carriage window and not at him. Crawford followed the direction of her gaze—and jumped when he saw several erect forms standing on the straw-covered stable floor outside the carriage.

There was a regular squeaking noise—the carriage springs. He looked back at Josephine and noticed that she was rocking her hips against the upholstered seat.

And she was still staring out the carriage window.

Teeth glinted in the hollow faces of the things outside, but Crawford couldn't work up any fear; he could only look at the dim outlines of Josephine's emaciated body under the ragged dress; he thought his own clothes must explode, the way Polidori's had earlier in the evening, if he weren't able to get out of them.

He reached across the carriage and tremblingly cupped her hot right breast; the contact stopped the breath in him, and made his heart beat like a line of cannons being fired by one continuous, insanely quick-burning fuse.

She snarled at him, and her head jerked down and her jaws clicked shut only an inch from his hand.

Even in the dim light and the musty air it was clear that she was excited too—in fact sexual heat had flexed the whole fabric of the air to a tightly strained point, the way imminent lightning causes hair to stand up on scalps, and Crawford imagined that the horses, their very fleas, must be having erotic dreams.

With nothing but hot jealousy Crawford looked through the glass at the creatures Josephine so very evidently found more attractive than himself—and then he remembered something that had been said to him by a young woman he'd encountered six years ago in the streets of Geneva, on the day he'd first met Byron and Shelley: ". . . we could share in their interest in us, Michael, and at least be interested in each other that way . . ."

At least one of the forms swaying outside the glass was female—if he opened the door and gave himself to her, to the crowd, would he thus be able to have a willing Josephine at second hand, at least? Vicariously?

By . . . proxy?

The carriage already smelled of vinegar and blood, but the word brought back with extra clarity the memory of the woman with whom he had killed the lamia on the beach below the Casa Magni—the woman who had made love with him willingly, joyfully.

He didn't want to have her now if her attention was on someone, something, else.

Byron had laid in a good stock of minced garlic, and Crawford opened a fresh jar and smeared the stuff around the cracks of all the windows and both doors.

As soon as the smell began to drift outside the carriage, the figures in the stable diminished into sluglike things and crawled away across the straw-littered floor and up the wall and out through the stable window. Crawford watched until the last of them had heaved its bulk over the sill and thumped away outside into the moonlit night.

Then he checked the knots on Josephine's bonds, being resentfully careful not to touch her at all as he did it; and finally he sat back and opened his flask and drank himself into oblivion.

At Michaelmas dawn the old man burst into the stable with a priest, and as the stable owner harnessed the horses the priest shouted angry, incomprehensibly fast Italian sentences at Crawford, who just nodded miserably.

The carriage was on the road again before the sun had quite cleared the mountains ahead.

"Making friends everywhere you go, hey?" shouted Crawford from the driver's bench to the sleeping Josephine as he snapped the reins over the horses backs. "Good policy."

They drove north under the blue summer sky, through the Cisa Pass between the vertically remote and snow-fouled peaks of the Apennines—the sun was rising ahead of them, and the sunlight was hot in the moments when the mountain wind was not rasping down through the sparsely wooded pass—and by midmorning Crawford knew, from Byron's maps and roadside markers, that they were very near the border between Tuscany and Emilia.

The road had got narrower, and the rocky wall on his right and the abyss to his left had both grown steeper, and when he knew that they must be within a hundred yards of the border crossing, Crawford gave up on finding a place to pull over, and simply halted the carriage in the road. At least there didn't seem to be any traffic right now. He hurriedly climbed down and opened the carriage door—and then gagged and reeled away.

He had left the windows half-open, but the sun had nevertheless made a garlic steam-room of the carriage's interior. Josephine was only semiconscious. He checked her pulse and breathing—they were still regular, and Crawford wondered what he would have done if they had not been.

There was a strongbox under the front seat, and Crawford made sure that all of Byron's pistols and all the knives from the cutlery set were in it, and that it was locked and the key in his pocket. He climbed back outside for a breath of fresh air, then leaned in for one more look around.

He supposed she could break one of the windows and saw open her neck on the jagged edges, or open the door and throw herself off the precipice, but he would hear her beginning either of those, and could conceivably get down in time to stop her—and she looked too weak for any strenuous suicide anyway.

He leaned out for another breath, and then quickly but gently untied the knots he'd pulled tight twelve hours ago in front of the Casa Magni.

He closed the door and climbed back up to the driver's bench and started the carriage rolling again.

At the border crossing Josephine was so clearly ill and incoherent, and Crawford's explanation that she needed to get to the hospital in Parma so desperately convincing, and his bribe so handsome, and the smell of garlic so appalling, that the border guards quickly let them continue on the road east, the road that would lead them down out of the mountains.

A few hundred yards farther on, Crawford halted the carriage and climbed down. He roused Josephine enough to get her to eat some bread and cheese with him, and he made her drink some water, reminding himself to plan a rest stop before too long.

She cursed him weakly as he retied her hands and ankles. After a minute he realized that he was cursing her in return, and he made himself stop.

Hand-sized wooden crucifixes stood on poles every few miles along the roadside, sheltered by tiny shingled roofs, and as the sun climbed by imperceptible degrees to the zenith, and then began to throw Crawford's shadow out under the horses' hooves, Crawford found himself praying to the weather-grayed little figures.

He wasn't precisely praying to Christ, but to all the gods who had represented humanity and had suffered for it; curled around his mental image of the wooden Christ were vague ideas of Prometheus chained to the stone with the vulture tearing at his entrails—and Balder nailed to the tree, around the roots of which flowers grew where the drops of his blood fell—and Osiris torn to pieces beside the Nile.

He had his flask with him on the driver's seat, and the brandy worked with the fatigue and the monotonous noises and motions of driving to lull him into a state that was nearly dreaming.

He wished he had the time, and the hammer and nails, to stop the carriage and go pound an
eisener breche
into the face of one of the little wooden Christs—it would be a gesture of respect and a declaration of solidarity, not vandalism—and, after a couple of hours of wishing it, he began to imagine that he was doing it.

The figure, in his hallucinatorily vivid daydream, lifted wooden eyelids and stared at him with tiny but unmistakably human eyes, as red blood ran down the pain-lines of the crudely chiselled face, and then it opened its wooden mouth and spoke.

"Accipite, et bibite ex eo omnes."

It was Latin, and he translated it mentally:
All of you take and drink of this.

He was pretty sure it was a line from the Catholic Mass, said when the priest changed the water into Christ's blood.

Crawford noticed now that a rusty iron cup hung under the crucifix, and that the blood had run down the legs into the cup. He reached for the cup, but a cloud passed over the sun then, and the figure on the eclipsed cross was himself, and while he was watching himself from someone else's eyes he thrust an
eisener breche
into the side of the crucified figure.

Water ran out of the wound, and he didn't have to taste it to know that it was salty—seawater. The water puddled and deepened, and filled the cellar and spilled out into the Arno, which somehow was also the Thames and the Tiber, and flowed out to sea; the little roof over the crucifix became a boat, but it was too far out at sea by now for Crawford to know which boat it was. The
Don Juan
? The ark? One boat to save us by sinking, Crawford thought dizzily, one to save us by surviving.

He realized that his flask was empty, and that the sun had set behind them. They were down among the wooded foothills now, and he blinked back over his shoulder at the red-lit mountain peaks, through whose stony domain this little box of warm organic life had travelled, and he shivered and thanked the hallucinated Christ, or whoever it had been, for the horses, and even for Josephine.

Somewhere ahead lay the ancient walled city of Parma—once a Gallic town, then an important Roman city, and now a possession, with the blessing of the Austrians, of the French; its royal gardens and promenades were supposed to be among the most beautiful in Italy. Crawford just hoped that whatever stable he would find for them to sleep in would have straw lying around, so that he and Josephine could sleep out of the malodorous carriage.

Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast,
As on we hurry through the dark;
The watch-light blinks as we go past,
The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark . . .

—George Crabbe

Perhaps because Parma was occupied by Austrian-sanctioned forces, no priest came to the stable to harry the vampire's woman out of town. The stable owner slid open the heavy wooden door at dawn, and plodded inside to open one of the stalls and lead a horse out, but he didn't even look toward where Crawford and Josephine lay on a luxuriously thick pile of straw, covered by a spare horse-blanket.

Crawford wished Byron had thought to pack blankets.

The man led the horse outside, and Crawford threw the blanket aside and stood up. He went to the carriage, but the jug of water had somehow picked up the ubiquitous garlic smell, and he cursed and took one of Byron's crystal glasses to a horse-trough and dipped up some water. It didn't taste bad, and he refilled the glass and took it over to Josephine.

He crouched by her, and for several seconds just looked at her lean, strained face. She had still been awake when he had gone to sleep, staring at the ceiling and flexing her bound wrists and ankles, and he wondered when she had finally let herself sleep.

He shook her shoulder gently, and her eyes sprang open.

"It's me, Michael," he said, trying to make it sound reassuring, even though he knew that his was the face she least cared to see. "Sit up so I can give you some water."

She hiked herself up and obediently sipped from the glass he tilted to her mouth. After a few sips she shook her head, and he held the glass away.

"You can untie me," she said hoarsely. "I won't try to run."

"Or kill yourself?"

She looked away. "Or kill myself."

"I can't," he said wearily. "Even if it was just you, I wouldn't. I love you, and I won't cooperate in your death. But anyway, it's
not
just you. There's a child."

"It's his," she said. Her voice was listless. "I really think it's his. They can have children by us, you know."

Crawford thought of Shelley's half sister, who had grown inside Shelley's body while he was still in his mother's womb, and had by that prolonged contact infected him and made him not entirely human. Josephine's haggard face reminded him of the wooden Christ-face he had imagined yesterday, and he prayed that the human fetus was all that Josephine carried.

"The child is human," he told her. "Remember I'm a doctor that specializes in this. You were already pregnant when you first—when you first
screwed
Polidori." He looked away so that she wouldn't see the rage in his eyes. "Even if Polidori
has
succeeded in impregnating you too—they can do that, the inhuman fetus grows with, or even in, the human one that was already there—
our
child is still there, and will be at least as human as Shelley was."

She closed her eyes—he saw with sudden compassion that her eyelids were deeply wrinkled—and tears ran down her cheeks. "Oh," she said miserably.

For perhaps a full minute neither of them spoke. A horse poked its head around a stall partition and peered at the two of them, then snorted and stepped back out of sight.

Josephine sighed. "So it might even be . . . twins."

"Right."

Josephine shuddered, and Crawford recalled that she herself had been one of a pair of twins, and that her mother had bled to death within minutes of giving birth to her.

The stable owner walked back into the building and, still not looking over at Crawford and Josephine, opened another stall. Crawford tensed, ready to jump on Josephine and cover her mouth—but when it became clear that she wasn't going to shout for help he was grateful for the interruption; he needed to think. Would it help, he wondered as the man led another horse out, to remind her of her mother's death? It had, with the help of her sister Julia, effectively wrecked her youth. Would being reminded of it make her more suicidal, or more concerned for the well-being of her child? Would it help to remind her of what Keats went through so that his sister would not become the prey of his vampire?

She had now gone two full nights without giving blood to Polidori, and Crawford remembered, from his long-ago week in Switzerland, how hard it was to do without that erosion of personality, once one had grown used to it.