The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  And Byron had decided to spend the summer in Montenero, ten miles to the south. It looked to Crawford as though the English colony in Pisa was breaking up; Byron and Shelley had formed the hub around which the rest of them had revolved like spokes.

  Crawford and Josephine would stay on, of course. They worked as a brother-and-sister doctor-and-nurse team with the medical faculty at the university, and he was confident that their value there would keep the official anti-English sentiment from affecting them.

  Byron was the cause of it all, anyway, and he was leaving. His current paramour was a young lady named Teresa Guiccioli, whose brother and estranged husband were known to be active in the anti-Austrian Carbonari, and Byron had apparently been initiated into the secret society himself, and frequently bragged about having stored guns and ammunition for the informal army when he had been a guest in the Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna.

  The Pisan government had not been pleased when Teresa and her brother, and then Byron himself, had moved to their city; and the hostilities had reached a near crisis a month ago, when Byron and Shelley and four other members of the local English circle had got into a scuffle with a rude Italian dragoon at the south gate. The dragoon had punched Shelley in the face with the guard of a saber, and in the ensuing mêlée one of Byron’s servants had stabbed the dragoon with a pitchfork; the man had eventually recovered from the wound, and the servant had been imprisoned, but now government spies routinely followed Byron and Teresa and her brothers.

  Crawford certainly hoped that he and Josephine were under no suspicion.

  He had continued to practice medicine as Michael Aickman after he and Josephine fled Rome. He’d been afraid von Aargau might have removed his faked credentials from the official records in Rome, but the university here had been impressed enough by his documentable experience and obvious competence to dispense with checking his papers too thoroughly, and he and Josephine had come here with the hope that at last they could settle down. Crawford thought they could live together as brother and sister for the rest of their lives—neither one of them was likely to marry.

  He was forty-two now, and nearly always walked with a cane because of the stiffness that he’d never been able to work out of his left leg, and he spent a lot of his free time reading and gardening; and Josephine had been getting steadily saner during this unstressful last year. The wines and cooking of Tuscany had filled her figure out too, so that she looked a good deal like her dead sister now, and the Italian sun had tanned her skin and brought out a whole spectrum of copper and gold and bronze in her long hair. She and Crawford had become friendly with the Pisan English, and were frequently guests at Byron’s Wednesday-night dinners, but the two of them were really more Italian than English now.

  Crawford had been looking down to his right at the surging water and, when he looked up to make sure not to pass the white marble façade of Byron’s house, he did see the old man, who was also walking with a cane—but Crawford was too busy with his own thoughts to give the man more than a passing glance.

  Byron stepped out onto the second-floor balcony now, his graying hair blowing in the breeze, and Crawford started to wave up at him, but halted the motion when he saw the grim expression on the lord’s thinned face. A moment later Percy Shelley strode out of the Palazzo’s front door. He too looked upset.

  “Percy!” Crawford called, lengthening his stride. “What’s the matter?”

  Shelley blinked at him for a moment as if without recognition, then shook his head. “Can you and your sister come with us to La Spezia?” he asked harshly. “I have reason to believe that we’ll be needing …your sort of medical expertise.”

  Crawford had never really managed to like Shelley. “I don’t see how we could, Percy, not right now. Mary or Claire is pregnant?”

  “As a matter of fact we think Mary might be again—but that wasn’t exactly …” He gestured impatiently. “I can pay you both more than you’re making at the university hospital.”

  Crawford knew this wasn’t true—Shelley was in debt to any number of people, even his English publisher. “I’m sorry. We really couldn’t leave Pisa. You know Josephine isn’t well. Her nervous condition …”

  For a moment Shelley looked ready to argue—then he just shook his head and stalked past him; a moment later he was hurrying angrily down Byron’s private landing steps to his moored skiff, his boots tapping on the wet stone.

  Crawford looked up at the balcony, but Byron had gone back inside. He let his gaze fall back to the street, and at last he noticed the old man—and a moment later he had quickly stepped forward into the recessed doorway of Byron’s house, and was rapping the knocker hard against the wood of the door, for he thought he had recognized him.

  He thought it was … what had the name been? … des Loges, the crazy-talking old man who had got the Aickman passport for him in France—and then asked him to drown him in exchange for the favor—six long years ago and more than five hundred miles from here.

  “Come on, Fletcher,” he whispered to the locked door. He told himself that des Loges couldn’t have recognized him—he no longer looked anything like the young, dark-haired Michael Crawford who had crawled up onto the beach at Carnac in late July of 1816.

  And perhaps it hadn’t been des Loges at all. What would the man be doing here?

  Could he be looking for Crawford?

  The thought scared him, and he hammered the knocker again, harder.

  At last Byron’s servant dragged the door open, an expression of grieved surprise on his seamed face.

  “Sorry to have been so insistent, Fletcher,” Crawford said breathlessly, and a moment later the servant’s eyebrows climbed even higher, for Crawford had hurried inside and pulled the door closed himself. “There’s a … an old creditor of mine out there, and I don’t want him to see me.”

  Fletcher shrugged and nodded, and it occurred to Crawford that, over the years, Byron had probably burst into a number of the houses he’d lived in with the same excuse for haste.

  “Shall I announce you,” Fletcher inquired, “or were you just …?”

  “No, he actually is expecting me. We were supposed to ride out to shoot in the maremma.”

  “I’ll tell my lord you’re here,” said Fletcher, starting up the stairs, “though he might not be in the mood.”

  Crawford lowered himself onto one of the sofas, and then stared unseeingly at the painted flowers on the high ceiling and wondered what had so upset Shelley and Byron. Had they had a fight?

  It wasn’t impossible. Shelley was often visibly annoyed by Byron’s bawdy talk, and by the slight but ever-present condescension which the fact of being an English peer gave him, and, above all, by his refusal to speak to Claire or let her visit their daughter Allegra, whom he had left behind in a convent in

  Bagnacavallo, on the opposite coast of Italy.

  Shelley would be reluctant to break with Byron, for the lord was the most important contributor and subsidiser of the Liberal, the proposed magazine that was to publish Byron’s and Shelley’s newest poetical works and save Shelley’s friends the Hunt brothers from bankruptcy—Leigh Hunt and his wife and children were already supposed to be in transit to Pisa from England—but the right provocation at the right moment could have set off Shelley’s temper.

  Even before he and Josephine had arrived in Pisa, over a year ago now, Crawford had known that Shelley was living in the city, and that Byron was expected—but he’d confidently dismissed a momentary suspicion that it was Shelley’s inhuman twin, rather than the university, that had made the place look good to him.

  In fact he had at first planned to have nothing to do with the English poets … but then he had met Byron one evening a couple of months ago on the Lung’Arno.

  Crawford had instantly recognized Byron, and after a moment of hesitation he walked up to him and introduced himself. Byron had been chilly at first, but after they had shaken hands he was suddenly full of cheer, recounting nostalgically exaggerated sto
ries about Polidori and Hobhouse and some of the inns they’d stayed in during that tour of the Alps six years earlier. Before the two of them had parted that evening, Crawford had found himself accepting an invitation to dinner at the Palazzo Lanfranchi that Wednesday night.

  Josephine hadn’t accompanied him that first time, and Shelley had been a little more surprised than pleased to see Crawford again, but gradually Crawford and Josephine had become a part of the group of English who were drawn to Shelley’s house on the south side of the river and Byron’s on the north.

  Josephine seldom spoke, and sometimes upset the Shelleys by staring intently into vacant corners of a room like a spooked cat, but Byron claimed to like her occasional abrupt, random statements, and Jane Williams, who with her husband was staying with the Shelleys, was trying to teach her to play the guitar.

  Byron never referred to having met Josephine on the Wengern, and Crawford believed he had managed to make himself forget most of that day.

  Crawford had wondered what it had been about that handshake that had so warmed Byron to him, until one day a couple of weeks ago when he’d been drinking with Byron, and the lord had held up his own right hand, on the palm of which Crawford saw a black mark similar to the one that had been burned into Crawford’s hand when he had stuck the knife into the face of the wooden statue in Rome, accidentally summoning the Carbonari.

  “Yours is darker,” Byron had observed. “They must have used a fresher knife in your initiation, when they had you stab the mazze. Did you know that any one knife is only good for so many stabs? After enough use in initiations all the carbon has been thrown off into flesh, and the knife isn’t steel anymore, just iron.”

  Crawford had just nodded wisely, and he was careful never to contradict Byron’s impression that he had been initiated into the Carbonari … partly because he suspected that he had been, that night.

  Byron was limping down the stairs now, and Crawford looked away from the ceiling.

  “Good afternoon, Aickman,” Byron said. He was slim and tanned after having lost a lot of weight he’d apparently put on in Venice, but today he looked harassed and unsure of himself. “What did Shelley say to you out there?”

  Crawford stood up. “Just that he wanted Josephine and me to go with them to La Spezia.”

  Byron nodded ruefully, as though this confirmed something. “He won’t be coming along today—and I’m damned if I’ll go over there to fetch Ed Williams—so I guess it’s just you and me.” He gave Crawford a look that was almost a glare, then grinned. “You won’t be putting any silver bullets into me, will you?”

  “Uh,” said Crawford, mystified, “no.”

  The two of them rode out through the Porta della Piazza, the same southern gate where Shelley had been punched and the Italian dragoon stabbed a month ago, but though pistols bristled from the tooled leather holsters that fringed Byron’s hussar saddle, the soldiers of the Pisan guard looked down from the walls with nearly none of the alarmed suspicion that they had shown in previous weeks. They all knew that Byron was leaving the city soon. Also, there were only two armed riders today. Previous shooting parties had consisted of half a dozen or more.

  “The Shelleys and their damned children,” snapped Byron when the walls were well behind them, and wild olive trees and thickets of saw-grass lined the road. “Have they reared one? Percy Florence is still alive and in his second year, but how much longer do you imagine he’ll survive? Their son William died three years ago, you know—a year after little Clara died in Venice—and way back in 1814 or so they had a child that died after two weeks. They hadn’t even named it yet! And I seem to recall that he had at least one child by his first wife—

  no doubt any such are long dead. I don’t think Shelley is interested in the welfare of children—particularly if they’re his own.”

  “That’s obviously nonsense,” Crawford said, driven by his knowledge of Shelley to risk contradicting Byron. “You know how he feels about his children … when he’s had them.”

  Far from getting angry, though, Byron actually looked abashed. “Oh, you’re right, I know. But they do always die. And now they think Mary’s pregnant again! You’d think he’d give up sex—abandon the whole notion as a bad job.”

  As I’ve done, thought Crawford.

  They rode on without speaking, and the only sounds were the sea wind in the trees, and the sandy thudding of the horses’ hooves. Crawford pondered Byron’s remark about a silver bullet. Did Shelley imagine that Byron was the prey of a vampire? He had been, of course, before getting to the top of the Wengern.

  Crawford looked across at his companion, noting the hollowed cheeks under the graying hair, and the brightness of Byron’s eyes. And the poetry he was writing these days was the best he’d ever done—Shelley had said recently that he could no longer compete with Byron, and that Byron was the only one worth competing with, now that Keats was dead.

  Suddenly Crawford was sure that Byron had given in again—probably while he’d been staying in Venice, to judge by Shelley’s description of the woman he’d been living with there. Would it have been the same vampire that had been preying on him before? Probably. As he’d guessed in Switzerland six years ago—to Byron’s displeasure—they seemed to keep track of their previous lovers even when they’d been barred from them.

  But Teresa Guiccioli was obviously not any sort of vampire—she frequently accompanied Byron and his friends on the afternoon rides, and even went to Mass at the cathedral. How was Byron keeping her safe from the jealous attentions of his supernatural lover?

  He found himself thinking of the feel of his own vampire’s cold skin, and he hastily fumbled under his coat for his flask. He hadn’t had sex with anyone—anyone human—since his disastrous wedding night six years ago, and he had come to the bleak conclusion that making love to the thing that was Shelley’s twin had spoiled him for sex with his own species.

  He still sometimes thought about the painful but releasing kiss Josephine had given him in front of Keats’s house a year ago in Rome, but the memory never quickened his pulse, and he and Josephine had never referred to it.

  He and Byron had reached the field at the outskirts of the Castinelli farm where they always did their shooting, and Byron swung down off his horse and grinned up at Crawford. “Join you in that?”

  “Certainly.” Crawford handed the flask down and then dismounted, and walked with Byron to the ravaged tree around which they habitually set up their targets. Byron took a second deep sip of the brandy, then handed the flask back, and as Crawford tethered the horses he crouched over some stakes they’d pounded into the ground last time. He was wedging half-crown pieces into the splintered heads of a couple of the stakes.

  “Allegra’s dead,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Oh.”

  Crawford had never met the five-year-old daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont, and though he knew that Claire cared passionately for the child, he had no real idea of how Byron had felt about her—clearly he blamed himself at least to some extent, since he had made such a point earlier of impugning Shelley’s ability to take care of children.

  “I’m sorry,” Crawford said, blushing at how inane it sounded.

  “I had her in a, a convent, you know,” Byron went on, still facing away from him and adjusting the stakes. His tone was light and conversational. “I’ve got certain protections for myself and Teresa, but they’re not foolproof, and I thought … that in a consecrated place, far away from me and everyone else who’s known to these creatures … but it doesn’t seem to …” His shoulders were rigid, and Crawford wondered if he was weeping, but his voice when he spoke again was just as steady. “Our poor children.”

  Crawford thought of his own agonized resisting of the urge to invite his lamia back—which in his case was, among other things, resistance to the offer of enormous longevity—and he thought too of the cost at which Keats had managed to save his own younger sister.

  “Your,” Crawford began, wonder
ing if Byron would challenge him to a duel for what he was about to say, “your poetry means that much to you?”

  Byron stood up lithely and limped back toward the horses, still without having faced Crawford. In one flash of motion he drew two of the pistols and spun toward Crawford and the tree; and, in the next stretched instant of panic, Crawford had time to wonder if this was where he would die, and to notice that Byron’s hands were shaking wildly and that his eyes were shining with tears.

  The two detonations were one ear-hammering blast, but Crawford caught the brief, shrill twang of at least one of the coins as it was punched away across the field.

  One muscle at a time, Crawford relaxed, dimly aware through the ringing in his ears that Byron had reholstered the pistols and was walking back toward the tree; and beyond the glittering dots swimming in front of his eyes he watched him limp on past the tree, out into the grass; Byron’s head was down, and he was apparently looking for the coins, both of which were gone.

  “It has,” Byron called back, after Crawford had crossed to the tree and was leaning against it. “Meant so much to me,” he added. He was kicking at the grass ten yards away and peering intently at the ground. “I … I suppose I really did know what Lord Grey was, what sort of thing he was, at least, when I opened my bedroom door to him in 1803. By the time I found out that I had doomed my mother and imperiled my sister, of course, it was too late. Still, I didn’t want to believe that he was responsible for my … life’s work, my writing, the thing that I … that made me me, do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” Crawford managed to reply.

  “I did suspect it—and so I’ve always taken inordinate delight in physical accomplishments—swimming and shooting and fencing and carnality. But none of those things are enough—not to justify all the deaths and hatreds and … betrayals, that have been my life.” He stooped and picked up a wad of silver, then held it up with a frail smile. “Not bad, eh? The coin’s wrapped right around the ball.” He began limping back toward the tree.