by Tim Powers
He felt strong disapproval radiate from the person behind him, but ignored it.
He heard Josephine return, and smelled the tea she had brought.
And suddenly it was Julia’s destroyed body that he was probing with such grotesque intimacy, and the room was again the one in which he’d spent his wedding night in Hastings. He drew back with a smothered yell and looked around wildly; Josephine and Shelley were the only other people in the room—God knew whom he had imagined to be standing behind him—and Josephine was trembling so hard that tea was shaking out of the pot she held as she stared in horror at the fearful bed.
It’s a hallucination, Crawford told himself desperately. This is like what happened in Keats’s apartment in Rome.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was Mary in the bed, and Shelley was looking at him anxiously. Crawford turned to Josephine—her face had relaxed again, but she was just staring blankly out the window, into the fog. Clearly she had shared the hallucination. “Josephine,” he said, to no response. “Goddammit, Josephine!”
She stirred, and blinked at him.
“What’s the year, and where are we?” he demanded.
She closed her eyes, then after a moment whispered, “Twenty-two, Gulf of La Spezia.”
“Good. Remember it. Now get the bandage out of the teapot and wring it out and hand it to me—it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit hot, I want to try diaphoretics anyway, until the ice gets here.” Easily said, he thought, but how are we to induce real sweating without burnt hawthorn or calx of antimony or elder flowers or camphor? More than ever he regretted the loss of his medical kit in Pisa.
He saw Josephine’s questioning look when he turned to her to take the bandage. “Well, wrap her up in blankets, at least, when I’m done here,” he said, “and then have her drink as much of that tea as she can.” He turned back toward the bed.
The whole front of Julia’s head was crushed, but there was a shifting of the bloody flesh where the eye sockets might have been, and he guessed she was trying to open her eyes. A hole opened beneath them, and managed to pronounce the words, “Why, Michael…?”
He closed his own eyes again. “Percy,” he said unsteadily, “go to the kitchen and get me garlic, anything with garlic in it. We’re getting that kind of resistance here.”
“Why, Michael …?” said Josephine behind him in an eerily accurate echo.
When he opened his eyes he saw Mary again—he gave her what he tried to make a reassuring smile, then glanced past her, out the window. The sky was still lost behind the fog, and he prayed that the sun would disperse the stuff soon.
The visual hallucinations stopped when Shelley followed his instructions about rubbing the window frame with the garlic bread he’d found, though Crawford—and, visibly, Josephine—continued to hear Julia’s voice outside, repeatedly asking him, “Why?”
Crawford’s measures slowed the bleeding, and when the ice was brought upstairs at nine-thirty he had Trelawny fill a metal hip-bath with salted water and chunks of the ice; then he had Shelley help him lift Mary out of the bed and lower her into the tub.
She shuddered violently at the chill, but it very shortly stopped the bleeding.
The fog was breaking up, and distantly across the Gulf the ridge of Portovenere glowed green and gold in the morning sun. Crawford stripped the bed, wrapped the tiny fetus of Shelley’s dead child in the ruined sheets, and walked out into the dining room. Shelley followed him.
“There’s a shovel downstairs,” Shelley said bleakly, “in the corner by the spare oars.”
Shelley dug the grave, in the slope behind the house; it didn’t have to be very deep, but tears were running down his cheeks and it took him nearly half an hour. At last Crawford laid the bloody bundle in the hole.
He straightened, and Shelley began shovelling dirt into the hole, and Crawford mentally said goodbye to the child that had been in his care. He had lost babies before, but—perhaps not rationally—this loss filled him with more guilt than had any of the others.
“She didn’t honor your deal, did she?” he asked Shelley in a brittle tone.
Shelley threw the last shovelful of dirt onto the low mound. “No,” he said hollowly. “She did take what I offered—I won’t ever write any more poetry, she gnawed out that part of my mind—but I guess she … didn’t remember, not for very long, anyway, what her part of the bargain was supposed to be.”
“This is what—the third child you’ve lost to her? The fourth, that’s right. And this time Mary nearly went too. You’ve got one child left, Percy Florence, upstairs. How long do you think it’ll be before she kills him?” Crawford had sometimes taken the two-year-old boy out rowing in the little boat when his father was off in the Don Juan, and he didn’t like to think of coming out here again some morning to bury Percy Florence.
Shelley blinked around at the walnut trees standing up from the slope, then out at the sea. “I don’t know. Not long, I suppose. I wish she could be stopped, but this was my best—”
“It was not,” interrupted Crawford harshly. “In Switzerland, when you talked to me in that boat on the lake, you told me that it’d be a bad idea for me to pitch you into the water, remember? You said that if you were to drown it would probably kill her, because of how closely you’re linked, being twins and all. Well, if you want to save Mary and your remaining son, why don’t you do that? Drown yourself? Why didn’t you do it years ago, before she killed your children?”
He had expected Shelley to get angry, but instead he seemed to consider seriously what Crawford had said. “I don’t know,” he mumbled again, then plodded slowly away toward the house, leaving Crawford to carry the shovel.
After stowing the shovel, Crawford took off his bloody shirt—he hadn’t had time yet this morning to put on shoes—and walked out across the pavement onto the sunlit sand and waded into the clear blue water. When the waves were lapping around his waist he kicked himself forward and began swimming, and he rolled in the waves and scrubbed at himself until he was sure all the blood was off him. It didn’t make him feel much cleaner.
He lay flat in the water and floated, listening to the pulse of his own blood. His bloodstream was currently a closed loop, not open to anyone, and for a while he thought about Shelley’s submission to his lamia, and then he made himself stop thinking about it.
He was pretty far out by now—fifty yards, he guessed. Treading water awkwardly in his long trousers, he turned and looked back at the old stone edifice all of them were living in. The awning over the terrace was ragged and faded, and the walls and arches were streaked with rust stains, and at this moment he couldn’t see why anyone would come here except to die and leave their bones to bleach on the white sand.
A robed figure stepped out from the darkness between the arches and began picking its way over the sun-bright rocks, and he recognized it as Josephine. Apparently she wanted a thorough bath too.
At the surf line she threw off her robe, and he was surprised and alarmed to be able to see, even at this distance, that she was naked. Shelley and Claire, and even the Williamses sometimes, liked to go swimming nude, but Josephine had certainly never done it before. Crawford hadn’t even known she could swim.
She swam out at a southward slant, and he decided she hadn’t noticed him bobbing far out on the glittering face of the water; he paddled along after her, more slowly because of the drag of his trousers.
They were a good hundred yards south of the Casa Magni when her head disappeared beneath the surface, and suddenly Crawford guessed what her purpose was. In an instant he had shucked off his trousers and was swimming as powerfully as he could toward where she had disappeared.
A cluster of popping bubbles told him he had found her—apparently she was emptying her lungs as she sank—and he jackknifed in a surface dive and struggled down against the buoyancy of the salt water. He could see her white body below him, and he kicked himself farther down. The sudden rush of water hurt hi
s eyes, and he was weirdly reminded of swimming through the thickened air on top of the Wengern.
He grabbed a handful of her hair, and then began thrashing back up toward the rippling silver sheet overhead that was the surface; she clawed at his hand and forearm, and he could feel his lungs heaving with the effort to breathe in water, but he knew that if he let her succeed in drowning he would almost certainly decide to follow her, so he kept tugging and kicking.
At last his head broke the water, and he was whoopingly gasping air, and then, in a move that pushed him back under, he hoisted her up so that her head was out of the water. Her naked back was pressed against his chest, and he could feel her lungs working.
Not too late, he thought desperately.
He grabbed her under the arms when he came up again, and with his free arm and his legs he began dragging them back toward shore. She was moving weakly, but he couldn’t tell if she was trying to help or to get free of him. He managed to keep her face above the water most of the time.
His vision was darkening and his bad leg was beginning to cramp when at last he felt sand under one bare foot, and he managed to conjure up one last
explosion of effort that left them both sprawled naked on the hot sand.
Though bleakly sure that any more work would burst his heart, he rolled her over onto her stomach, spread his hands on her ribs just under the shoulder blades, and bore down, feeling the sand abrading her skin under his palms. Water gushed from her mouth and nose.
He did it again, forcing more water out, and then again; at last, with the colored sparkling of unconsciousness filling his sight, he rolled her onto her back and pressed his mouth onto hers and blew his own breath into her lungs—waited a moment while it rushed back out—and then put his mouth to hers once more.
The exhalation he gave her took his consciousness with it.
He couldn’t have been insensible for more than a few seconds, for the water she’d spewed out was still a patch of bubbles on the sand when he raised his head from her breast and stared anxiously into her face.
Her eyes were open, and for one long moment met and held his. Then she rolled out from under him and spent a good minute coughing up more water. She was facing away from him, and seemed to be almost clothed in clinging sand.
At last she got unsteadily to her feet. Crawford watched her, then hastily got up himself when he saw that she was walking back toward the water.
“I’m only rinsing off the sand,” she snapped when she heard his footsteps splashing behind her in the shallows.
He stayed close to her; and, when he saw that she really didn’t intend to swim out again, he decided that getting rid of the caking sand was a good idea, and he got down and let the waves wash over him, too.
Then they were walking back up the sand slope, and she took his hand. They kept walking, through the dry, floury sand, to the sudden coolness of the leaf-carpeted shadows under the trees, and when he released her hand it was just so that he could put his arms around her. She lifted her face to his and held him tightly.
He kissed her, deeply and with all the passion he had thought lost forever; and she was responding feverishly. In a moment they were lying in the leaves, and with each thrust into her it seemed to Crawford that he was pushing further away all the awarenesses of failure and death and guilt.
Later Crawford walked naked back up the beach to the Casa Magni, almost grateful now for the solitude of the area, and he managed to get upstairs to his bunk without being seen by anyone but Claire Clairmont, who had clearly started drinking early today, and simply blinked at him as he strode past her. Once dressed, he went into the women’s servants’ room and bundled up some clothes for Josephine.
When he returned to the clearing in which they had made love, he found her sitting up and staring out at the sea. She took the clothes with a grateful smile, and when she had dressed she hugged him for several seconds without speaking.
He was relieved, for during the walk back from the Casa Magni he had tried to imagine what he would find when he got to where he had left her—he had pictured finding her gone, and her body washing up some days later; or catching a glimpse of her, mad-eyed and with her fingers chewed bloody, scampering away through the trees like a wild beast; or hunched up as he’d seen a few over-stressed sailors get, with her knees to her face and her arms around her legs and nobody at all at home behind her eyes. He had hardly dared to hope that she’d be not only alive and sane but cheerful too.
Then she leaned back and looked up at him happily. “Found you at last, darling!” she said. “What on earth have you been doing in this desolate place, with all these horrible people?”
“Well,” he said, suddenly cautious, “we’re working for Shelley, you and I are.”
“Nonsense. You’ve got your practice in London, and I certainly don’t work! Do finish up whatever dreary little affairs you have here, and quickly—my mother must be wild with worry by this time, even though I’ve been sending her letters.”
He was far too tired to argue now. “I guess you’re right,” he sighed, holding her close again so that she wouldn’t see the weariness and disappointment in his face, “Julia.”
Trelawny left aboard the Bolivar two days later, though Captain Roberts stayed on at the Casa Magni so as to be able to help Shelley sail the Don Juan down to Livorno—for Leigh Hunt and his family were finally due to arrive there in two weeks; at last Hunt and Shelley and Byron would be able to start their magazine, though Shelley seemed to have lost some of his enthusiasm for the project.
Shelley was, in fact, devoting all his attention to refitting the Don Juan, presumably to make it a more imposing vessel, better able to stand comparison with Byron’s ostentatious Bolivar. He and Roberts and Williams were adding a false stern and bow to make the vessel look longer, and had dramatically increased the amount of canvas she could spread.
They also re-ballasted her; Crawford pointed out that the vessel rode a little higher now than it had before the refitting, but Shelley assured him that they knew what they were doing.
On the evening of Trelawny’s departure, Crawford was standing with Shelley and Claire on the terrace and watching the Bolivar’s sails recede to the south against a cloudless bronze sunset, when Josephine stepped out onto the terrace from the dining room and gave Crawford an unfriendly look.
“Can I speak to you in our room, Michael?”
Crawford turned to bare his teeth out at the sea and squint his eyes shut, then let his face relax as he turned around. “Of course, Julia,” he said, following her back inside.
Shelley had given up his room when Josephine told him that she and Crawford were married, and Crawford now missed his old bunk in the servants’ quarters.
She shut the door when he had followed her into the room. “I told you this morning,” she said, “that I wanted a definite answer from you about when we’re leaving this ghastly place.”
“Right.” He sighed, and sat down in a chair by the window. “Shelley’s sailing south to Livorno a week from yesterday, to meet Byron and this Leigh Hunt fellow. Shelley said you and I can ride along.”
“Why how frightfully generous of him!—considering that you’ve been working here for nearly two months without a penny of pay. You still haven’t explained to me why you failed to demand passage on the Bollix or whatever its foolish name was.”
“Yes, I did. Mary Shelley—and Claire, lately—are patients of mine, and I don’t want to leave them while their conditions are in doubt.” He tried to look sincere as he said this—the truth was that he had been delaying leaving the Casa Magni because he thought she was more likely to recover her real Josephine personality here, where she’d lost it, than in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Livorno, or back at home in the now alien nation of England.
“Very well.” Her tone was brittle with resentment. “But we stay not one day longer than next Monday, do you understand me? This place is horrible and these people are horrible. Have you made that Shelley perso
n understand yet that you and I are not brother and sister?”
“Oh yes,” he said hastily. Actually he had only got Shelley to stop referring to them as such.
“How does he think we could be, and be married?”
“I don’t know.” Incest is nothing unusual to this crowd, Julia, he thought—Shelley and his “sister,” Byron and his half sister—but it wouldn’t help to tell you that.
“And when will you abandon this ridiculous ‘Aickman’ name?”
“As soon as we leave,” he told her, not for the first time.
She turned her head parrotlike to peer out the window. “I would think you’d be more concerned about getting proper medical help for your own wife,” she said, “than applying your evidently inadequate skills to strangers. This eye that you’ve proven unable to do anything about is getting worse.”
I doubt that, he thought, unless you’ve managed to crack it.
Yesterday he might have taken this complaint as a good way to try to remind her of the Wengern and all the rest of the events of her life as Josephine, but after last night’s dinner he had finally given up trying to provoke that.
In the afternoon yesterday he had forcibly held her down on their bed and told her about Keats, and fleeing Rome, and living in Pisa and working at the university there, and he’d been optimistic when her sobs and protests had ceased and she had relaxed under him; but when he had got off her—and, in a tone made hoarse by hope, said, “Welcome back, Josephine"—she had sat up so jerkily that he had almost thought he heard the clatter of gears and ratchets in her torso.
She had stayed in her mechanical mode all evening, snapping her neck from one position to another and moving awkwardly as if on hinged limbs, and Claire had fled the dining room and young Percy Florence had burst into tears and demanded that his mother take him away from the “wind-up lady.” When she recovered, some hours later, she was Julia again.