The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  He certainly had no reason not to—she and Mary and he were in agreement about the unnatural laws, forced on people by the twin oppressors Church and State, concerning marriage and monogamy. And now at the age of twenty she seemed more beautiful to him than she ever had—just thinking about the way she had fallen asleep against him in the gondola, the black ringlets of her hair spilled across his shoulder and one warmly soft breast pressed against his arm, made his heart pound again and almost set him tiptoeing to her room.

  Idealist though he was, he was a shrewd enough judge of women to know that she wouldn’t be alarmed or particularly reluctant.

  But it would certainly complicate his situation. Experience had made her realistic, but she couldn’t help taking any such—liaison?—as at least partially a promise of getting her daughter Allegra back, and he was not by any means sure he’d be able to talk Byron into that.

  It was getting late. A stagnant smell had begun drifting into the hallway on the draft from the window, and he guessed that the canals, when all the gondolas and grocers’ boats were retired for the night and no longer agitated the water into the bright choppiness so dear to painters and tourists, gave off this nocturnal evidence of their great age.

  It humbled him, and he went quietly to his own room.

  The next afternoon Shelley had gone alone in a low, open gondola to the palace Byron had leased. Shelley had been uneasy, for he hadn’t told Byron he was coming, and he knew Byron detested Claire and had said that if she were ever to arrive in Venice he would pack up and leave.

  The previous evening’s storm had blown away, leaving the sky starkly blue behind the pillared and balconied palaces of green and pink stone that walled the broad waterway, and Shelley had blinked at the needles of sunlight reflected from the gold trim and gleaming black hulls of the gondolas that were ranked like slim cabriolets in front of the Byzantine structures.

  Dozens of the narrow craft were moored to striped poles that stood up in the water a few yards out from the palace walls, and several times Shelley noticed wooden heads—mazzes—at the tops of the poles; once he was even close enough to see the gleam of a nail-head in one of the crudely carved faces. Shelley had heard that the mazzes now represented opposition to the Austrian rulers of Italy. It’s still resistance to the Hapsburgs, he thought.

  The gondola passed under the ornate, roofed bridge that was the Rialto, and soon afterward the gondolier began trying to point out the palace Byron was renting, on the left ahead.

  The Palazzo Mocenigo was actually several big houses which had at one time been united by one long, neoclassical façade of gray stone. No one was visible on the balconies or at the huge triple windows of the palace as the gondola glided across the water toward it, and when the gondolier had poled them in under the shadow of the palace, and brought the craft to a rocking stop at the puddled stone steps, Shelley couldn’t see anyone in the dimness beyond the open arches of the ground floor.

  He stepped out, paid the gondolier, and was looking back out across the wide face of the canal when, simultaneously, the gondola he’d just quitted emerged into the sunlight with a flash of gold, and the door on the landing behind him was echoingly unbolted.

  The person who pulled the door open was Byron’s English valet, Fletcher, and he remembered Shelley as a frequent visitor at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland; his master, he told Shelley now, had only awakened a little while ago and was in his bath, but would certainly be glad to see him when he emerged. He held the door open so that Shelley could enter.

  The ground floor of the palace was damp and unfurnished, and it smelled of the sea and of the many sizeable cages that were stacked against the back wall; stepping around a couple of locally useless carriages in the dimness, Fletcher led him to an ascending marble stairway, and by the sunlight slanting down from above, Shelley was able to see the animals in the cages … monkeys, birds and foxes. He knew that if he had brought Claire, she would have theatrically insisted on searching the cages for Allegra.

  Upstairs, Fletcher left him in a wide, high-ceilinged billiard room on the second floor, and went to tell Byron he was here; and as soon as Shelley had leaned back against the billiard table, a little girl wandered into the room from the direction Fletcher had taken.

  Shelley recognized Allegra instantly, though she had grown taller even in just these last four months, and was beginning to show the Byronic dark hair and piercing eyes—and when he took some billiard balls from the table and, smiling, crouched down to roll them one by one across the threadbare rug to her, she smiled back, clearly recognizing her old playmate; and for several minutes they amused themselves by rolling the balls back and forth.

  Claire had given birth to her while they were all living back in England, at a time when that country had begun to weigh on Shelley: only a month before her birth he had learned of the suicide of Harriet, his first wife; and two years before that, his first child by Mary had died of some sort of convulsion near London. The infant Allegra had for a while been more company to him than Mary or Claire, and he had missed her during these last four months.

  “Shelley!” came a delighted call from another room, and when he looked up he saw Byron striding toward him from an inner archway. The man wore a colorful silk robe, and jewels glinted in the brooch at his throat and the rings on his fingers.

  Shelley got to his feet, being careful not to let surprise show in his smile—

  for Byron had put on weight in the two years since Shelley had seen him in Switzerland, and his hair was longer and grayer; he looked, Shelley thought, like an aging dandy, making up in finery for what he had lost in youth.

  Byron seemed to know his thoughts. “You should have seen me last year,” he said cheerfully, “before I’d met this Cogni girl; she’s my—what, housekeeper now, and she’s thinning me down fast.” He peered past Shelley. “Claire’s not with you, I hope to God?”

  “No, no!” Shelley assured him. “I’m just—”

  A tall woman appeared in the archway then, and Shelley paused. She stared suspiciously at him, and he blinked and stepped back, but after a moment she appeared to make up her mind favorably about him, and smiled.

  “Here’s Margarita now,” said Byron, a little nervously. He turned to her and, in fluent Venetian Italian, explained that Shelley was a friend of his, and that she was not to turn the dogs on him or throw him into the canal.

  She bowed, and said to Shelley, “Benedetto te, e la terra ehe ti fara.”

  “Uh,” said Shelley, “grazie.” He squinted at her, and wished the curtains were not drawn across the tall windows at the far side of the room.

  Little Allegra was standing behind Shelley’s leg now, gripping it tight enough to hurt, and after a moment he looked down at her and noticed how wide her eyes were, and how pale she was.

  Her grip loosened when Margarita turned around and disappeared back into the depths of the house.

  “Where’s Mary?” Byron asked. “Have you all moved out to this coast? You were staying at that spa, last I heard, near Livorno.”

  “Mary’s still there. No, I came here to talk to you about…” He touched Allegra’s dark curls. “… about our children. There was something you said in a letter—”

  Byron held up a pudgy hand. “Uh,” he said, “wait.” He turned away and walked to the curtained window, and when he turned back Shelley could see that he was frowning and chewing his knuckles. “I think I remember the letter. I don’t think I still believe—still find mildly interesting, that is, I never believed—the things I wrote about. I told you to destroy it—did you?”

  “Yes, of course. In fact I’m here in person only because you told me I wasn’t to write to you here about it. But whether you still credit the story or not, my daughter Clara is sick, and if those Armenian—”

  “Hush!” Byron interrupted, glancing quickly toward the archway. Shelley thought there was exasperation, but a little fear, too, in the look. The smile he turned on Shelley a moment later seemed forced
. “I’ve got horses stabled on the Lido, and I often go riding in the afternoons. Want to come along?”

  “Very well,” answered Shelley after a pause. Then, “Are we bringing Allegra?”

  “No,” said Byron irritably. “She’s—there’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

  Shelley glanced down at Allegra; she looked unhappy, but not extremely so. “If you say so,” he said.

  The warm morning breeze was from the mainland, and from Shelley’s sunny hilltop vantage point the priest’s Latin was just a low, intermittent murmur, like the droning of bees in a far field.

  Mary was looking up the slope at him now, and even from this distance he thought he could read anger in her expression.

  Don’t blame me, he thought unhappily. I did everything I could to avoid this, everything short of sacrificing my own life.

  I suppose I should have done that. I suppose I should have. But I did a lot nonetheless—far more than even you, the authoress of Frankenstein, could ever know, or believe.

  The Grand Canal broadened out as it merged with the wider Canal della Guidecca and, when the domes of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute were shifting massively past across the oceanic horizon on their right, Byron had the gondolier pull in at the left shore, among the ranks of gondolas moored in front of the Piazzetta. The gondola’s blade-shaped prow bumped the step, sending a cloud of startled pigeons swirling noisily up into the sunlight.

  The Ducal Palace loomed at Shelley’s right, and its bottom two stories of Gothic pillars made it look to Shelley like a Venetian palace deprived of the sea, the once secret opulence of its supporting pilings exposed now to the air.

  Byron told the gondolier to wait, and when they had got out and walked up the half-dozen steps, he led the way out across the warped mosaic pavement of the square. Shelley slowed to stare up at the white statues atop the pair of hundred-foot-tall columns fronting the water, but Byron only snarled and limped on ahead.

  “I … thought we were going to the Lido,” Shelley ventured when they were halfway to the square tower that stood across the Piazza from the Basilica of St. Mark. “Isn’t that farther—”

  “This whole enterprise is certainly foolish,” Byron snapped, “but I need to make sure it’s not absolutely impossible too. I lived near here when I first came to Venice—there’s a man we have to see.”

  Despite Byron’s lameness, Shelley had to hurry to keep up with him. “Why should it be impossible? I mean, why lately? Surely the Austrians won’t—”

  “Shut up!” Byron glared back the way they’d come; then he went on in a clipped whisper, “They will, and soon, according to what I’ve heard.”

  Shelley knew his friend’s moods well enough to wait for him to speak at times like this. For most of a minute they walked together in silence past the pillars of the palace’s west face.

  “For a couple of years now,” Byron said, more calmly, “a man has been … is … being moved south from Switzerland, laboriously and at huge expense … he’s Austrian, some kind of ancient patriarch who can pretty much command anything he likes. He’s incalculably old, and determined to become a good deal older.” He squinted sideways at Shelley. “I think I actually saw the wagon he was being carried in, during my tour of the Alps two years ago. There was a box in it like a coffin, leaking ice water.”

  “Ice water,” Shelley repeated cautiously. “Why would—”

  Byron made a quick motion with a jewelled hand. “That part’s not important. He needs to get here. The necessity of getting him here may be the main reason the Austrians took Italy, and why they put a stop to the annual ritual marriage of this city to the sea … in any case, we can’t discuss it now. Wait till we’re on the Lido, with the lagoon between us and this place.”

  Several identical long banners had been hung vertically from the roof of the Libraria Vecchia on their left, and were curling and snapping in the breeze and throwing coiling shadows onto the sunlit pavement below; Shelley could make no sense of the trio of symbols painted on each of them—at the top was what seemed to be a downward-pointing crow’s-foot, then a vertical line, and then at the bottom an upward-pointing crow’s-foot with the middle toe missing, like a capital Y. Holes had been punched right through the thick paper at the ends of the lines, as if the marks were the footprints of something with claws.

  “What does that symbol mean?” he asked Byron, pointing at the banners.

  Byron glanced toward the library, then away. “I don’t know. I’m told it started showing up here and there during the last four years.”

  “Since the Austrians took possession,” said Shelley, nodding. “Four points, then two, then three … and they look like footprints. What walks on four points, then two, then three?”

  Byron stopped and looked at the banners, and his eyes were a little wild. He started to speak, then just shook his head and hurried on.

  Shelley followed, wishing he could pause to look around at the structures ringing the broad square—he gaped up beyond the towering pillars at the vast gold-backed paintings in the highest arches of the basilica as the two of them hurried past, but Byron wouldn’t halt, or even slow down. Shelley got a quick look at the brightly blue-and-gold-faced clock-tower, and a glimpse of bronze statues on the top platform of it, before Byron had dragged him around the corner of the basilica.

  A smaller square lay beyond the church, and Byron led them across it and into one of the narrow alleys between the buildings that were its north boundary.

  Suddenly they had left all grandeur behind. The alley was scarcely six feet wide, and the overhead tangle of chimney flues and balconies and opened shutters kept it in deep shadow except where occasional lamps burned far back in the shops that occupied the ground-floor Gothic arches. It seemed to Shelley that anyone could find any shop here just by following his nose, so clear were the smells of fruit stalls, metal workers and wine shops, but the vendors nevertheless shouted the virtues of their wares up and down the alley, and Shelley could feel a headache coming on.

  After a few moments he became aware of a regular metallic pinging amid the cacophony, and glancing to the side he saw that Byron was rhythmically bouncing a coin off the pillars he passed. Shelley was about to ask him to stop it when a ragged boy ran up and said something in hopelessly staccato Italian.

  Byron gave him the coin and rattled out a reply, then turned around, retraced a few steps and limped through an arch into a tiny courtyard. Iron stairs curled away upward, and potted plants on the steps raised a jungle of leaves to block any stray rays of sunlight, but Shelley could see a crowd of ragged men standing by the far wall.

  There was a metallic clinking here too—the men were lagging coins at the wall, each trying to land his coin closest to the wall, the winner taking all the coins.

  After a moment one of them, a fat old man who was visibly drunk, scrambled over to the wall and began scraping up the accumulated money while the others swore and dug in their pockets for more.

  Several of them noticed Shelley and Byron then, and began edging away, but the fat one looked up and then reminded his fellows sharply that gambling was legal “in questo fuoco”—Shelley was puzzled by the phrase, which seemed to mean “in this focus.”

  Byron asked the man something that sounded like Is the eye restored yet?

  The fat man waved broadly and shook his head. “No, no.”

  Byron insisted that he needed to be sure, and that the man check right now.

  The drunken man raised his arms and began protesting to various saints, but Byron crossed the tiny courtyard and handed him some money. The man relented, though with almost theatrical reluctance.

  He waved at the other gamblers and they repocketed their coins and hurried away toward the arch. When they were gone he bit his finger—hard, to judge by his expression—shook a drop of blood onto the paving stones, and then walked to the far wall, tossing one of his coins and catching it.

  “Stand back,” whispered Byron.

  The man was f
acing the wall now, but squinting over his shoulder at the spot of blood and humming atonally as he repeatedly tossed and caught the coin; then he was looking straight at the wall in front of him and tossing several coins—juggling them, in fact—and the humming was echoing weirdly between the close walls. Shelley could feel the hair standing up on his arms, and the scar in his side began to throb.

  Suddenly one of the coins was flung very hard straight up—Shelley watched it, and saw it glint for an instant in the sunlight high above, and then it fell back into the shadow and he could only hear it pinging as it tumbled down through the iron stairway; finally it spun off a flowerpot and clinked to the ground and rolled across the pavement, wobbled for a moment and fell over flat. It was several yards away from the spot of blood.

  Shelley restrained a shrug. The juggling had been good, but if the idea had been to land the coin on the blood, the trick had been an absolute failure; of course, after all the bouncing around it had done, it would have been incredible if it had landed on it.

  He turned to Byron with raised eyebrows.

  Byron was staring at the coin sourly. “Well,” he said, “it is still possible—though I still think it’s damned foolish.” He nodded to the fat man and then turned and stalked out of the court. Shelley also nodded, though bewilderedly, and followed him.

  They were out of the alley and halfway across the Piazzetta when Shelley noticed Byron cock his head as if listening; Shelley listened too, and heard a cracked old voice singing something in what sounded like Spanish—or was it archaic French?

  He looked around and saw that the singer was a startlingly aged man a dozen yards away, hobbling north across the square, away from the Ducal Palace and the two tall columns by the canal; the man leaned heavily on a cane that clicked when it touched the warped pavement.