The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  As he and Josephine climbed into the gondola he kept his eyes on poor Noah, who, it seemed to Crawford, had had every excuse to get drunk and lose his trousers, after having piloted the entirety of organic life to safety.

  Crawford uncapped his flask and passed it to Josephine as the gondolier cast off, and when she handed it back he raised it to Noah and then drained off the swallow of brandy that was left. The Bridge of Sighs was behind him, but he looked ahead, toward where the towers and domes of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore rose against the night.

  When they were well out on the water, and the gondolier had begun to lean into the oar to turn them east toward the lagoon, Crawford fumbled Shelley’s shirt-wrapped heart out of Josephine’s bag. He whispered a prayer to the splintered, weathered head of Christ, and then leaned across the gunwale and held the charred-smelling, flapping thing at arm’s length out over the dark water.

  Nothing disturbed the calm skin of the water but the faintly reflecting points of jellyfish hanging like pale splashes of milk at the surface, and the ripple of the boat’s wake sweeping out to both sides behind them in the starlight.

  When the low waves cast by the knife-narrow prow had eclipsed the whole of the ancient city in their skirt, and no slightest swirl gave evidence of the third sister moving below, he sat back and tucked the heart into the bag.

  The nephelim were dormant again, for the first time in eight hundred years.

  He put his arm around Josephine, and she laid her head on his shoulder and slept.

  My illness is quite gone—it was only at Lerici—on the fourth night, I had got a little sleep and was so wearied that though there were three slight shocks of an Earthquake that frightened the whole town into the Streets—neither they nor the tumult awakened me…. There seem to have been all kinds of tempests all over the Globe—and for my part it would not surprise me—if the earth should get a little tired of the tyrants and slaves who disturb her surface.

  —Lord Byron, to Augusta Leigh,

  7 November 1822

  EPILOGUE

  WARNHAM, 1851

  I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think that they will sing to me.

  –T. S. Eliot

  “Italians?” echoed Lucy, pausing, her polishing-cloth suspended an inch above the worn surface of the bar. “I can’t do nothing about Italians.”

  “They speak English,” the innkeeper told her. “And their address is in London. All they want is some wine to drink on the back porch before supper. Do you think you could …?”

  Lucy had resumed her polishing. “Italian men? I hear they’re as bad as sailors. They’d better not get fancy with me.”

  It was a token objection; though she was still slim, Lucy was in her fifties, and her face was scored by decades of hard work.

  “It’s a very old couple and their son. They’re not wanting to get drunk, Lucy, just-”

  “Oh, very well.” She put down her cloth and set a bottle of claret and a corkscrew and three glasses on a tray. “But the new girl can do the cleaning up tonight.”

  “Certainly, certainly,” agreed the innkeeper.

  Lucy walked around from behind the bar, picked up the tray, and walked out of the taproom.

  Ahead of her was the oak staircase that led up to the rooms; she turned left at the foot of it and walked through the spare dining room to the back door; holding the tray in one hand, she pulled the door open and stepped out onto the porch, where her three customers were sitting at a little table in the shade.

  The son was about thirty. He didn’t look Italian at all—his hair was brown and straight, combed back off his forehead, and his eyes were pale blue. His smile as she set out the bottle and glasses was only polite.

  “Thank you,” he said, and there was a trace of an accent in his voice.

  She turned to the old couple.

  They really were old. The man was bald except for a short fringe of white hair above his ears, and his face was as dark and seamed as a piece of oiled driftwood. A stout, worn walking stick hung on the arm of his chair, and Lucy imagined that when he gripped it, his brown, gnarled hand must seem to be part of the stick.

  His wife’s hair was gray. She just kept her eyes on Lucy’s hands as the old barmaid twisted the corkscrew into the neck of the bottle, but a smile deepened the lines in her lean face, and seemed to indicate the cause of many of the lines.

  When Lucy had poured wine into the three glasses, the old man raised his glass, in a hand that was missing at least one finger.

  “Thank you, Lucy,” he said.

  Crawford sipped at the wine and looked out over the inn’s backyard. The leaves on the trees glowed green and gold with the noon sun over them, and he tried to imagine that he was thirty-five again, and that Boyd and Appleton would shortly be emerging from the door behind him.

  He couldn’t imagine it.

  The far end of the yard was a peach orchard now—God knew when the old carriages had been dragged away. He wondered if the ancient carved pavement he’d tripped on in the rain thirty-five years ago was still out there. He didn’t care to go and find out.

  John was looking at him uneasily. They’d taken the London-and-Brighton train south as far as Crawley, and then hired a carriage-ride west to Warnham, and John wanted to be back in London tonight to see his own wife and children.

  “So,” John said, “here we are, wherever this is, exactly. You two wanted to tell me …?”

  “How your father and I met,” said Josephine. “How you were conceived, and how we got married.”

  John blinked. “I … always thought you … would never bring it up. I thought you didn’t … that it wasn’t a story you wanted to tell.”

  “Mary Shelley died last month,” said Crawford, “and so our promise to her is finally voided. And Percy Florence Shelley is Sir Percy now, and I don’t think he’s even aware of the truth about his father.” Crawford laughed, exposing uneven teeth. “I can’t imagine that he believes it, even if he’s been told.”

  And you probably won’t believe it yourself, John, he thought; but I owe it to you—and to your children—to tell you anyway.

  “Mary Shelley?” said John. “The wife of Percy Shelley? You knew her?”

  “Yes.”

  Crawford sipped his wine and thought about Mary Shelley. He had given her Shelley’s heart, which had still contained the eye of the Graiae, in ajar of brandy, and she had kept it all her life; and he had wondered sometimes if the eye was still dimly able to cast its static, determinist field, for Mary had subsequently lost all the spirited spontaneity that had drawn Shelley to her so long ago. Her writing had slowed down and become more formal and stilted, and she’d seen fewer and fewer people as the years went by, and he had heard that before her death she had lain motionless and silent for ten days.

  Trelawny had asked her to marry him in about 1830, but by then the authoress of Frankenstein had already begun to settle into the inertia that was to characterize the remainder of her life, and she had refused him.

  Trelawny had followed Byron to Greece after Shelley’s death and, after Byron had died there of swamp-fever while trying to organize an army to drive out the Turkish invaders, Trelawny had stayed on for a while as a sort of mercenary-adventurer. Later he had gone to America, where he swam the Niagara River within hearing distance of the Falls, and Crawford had heard that he had returned to England and got involved with a married woman and was now living in Monmouthshire.

  Crawford had often thought of Byron, who had died in 1824. Crawford and Josephine had not seen him again after the Venice adventure—they had meant to look him up and thank him, but then he had died in Missolonghi at the age of thirty-six, and it had been too late.

  “I’m sorry,” said Crawford, “what did you say?”

  “I said,” John told him patiently, “did you know Shelley too?”

  “Yes. And Byron, and Keats. You’re named after Keats, incidentally, I doubt that we ever told you
. And it all started,” he said, waving his glass at the grassy yard, “here.” He put the glass down and massaged his left hand; perhaps because of the maimed fingers, it had begun aching lately. The whole arm ached, all the way up to the shoulder.

  Josephine refilled all three glasses. “Go ahead,” she said.

  The sun was low in the west by the time he had finished the story, and the long grass was streaked with the shadows of the old oaks that bordered the yard.

  John was shaking his head. “And did the … did this Werner person … what happened to him?”

  Crawford grinned. “We kept track of the news from Venice for a while, after that, after we’d left. A week later there was a report of a couple of rooms collapsing in the Doge’s Palace. It was blamed on structural weakening caused by the earthquakes.”

  “A week later?” John asked.

  “Your father’s a good surgeon,” Josephine said.

  “So … so he never did find his statue, or any statue, and get to renew the overlap.” John’s voice was quiet—he might doubt all this eventually, but clearly he was accepting it now.

  “Apparently not,” Josephine said. “But the … potentiality is always out there.”

  “That’s why you two were always warning me against inviting strangers into the house.”

  “Right, John,” said Crawford. “And I trust you’ve done what we’ve said, and passed the advice on to your own children.”

  “Well, yes, I just—never quite—knew the whole extent of why.”

  Crawford finished his wine. “You do now, son.”

  He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  Somehow he could still see the yard, the trees and the grass … but it couldn’t be the yard of the inn at Warnham, for he could see for miles, across a valley, on the floor of which stood hundreds of tall stones, and he was pulling a wagon in which sat a wickedly grinning old man, older by far than even himself, and the old man was singing a French song with a merry tune but sad lyrics….

  Keats, young and healthy again, was riding a horse past them. He waved as he passed, and Crawford thought there was gratitude in the look he flashed to him as he galloped away.

  And Byron was there, his hair still more dark than gray. The lord was smiling as he raised a smoking pistol, for his shot had punched the coin far out over the maremma. “Our poor children,” Byron said.

  Shelley was farther away. Perhaps he was looking for the coin Byron had shot at, for he was walking aimlessly through the grass—but it wasn’t the saw-grass of the maremma—he was in a garden, and Crawford knew he was looking for himself, for his own image.

  Somewhere out in these meadows Crawford knew that he would find Josephine again, eventually. He knew he would find her … he always had before.

  He stepped forward, not limping now, and strode off after his friends.

  The sun was red and low now, and the yard was in shadow.

  “Wait for us inside, would you, John?” said Josephine softly as she stroked Crawford’s limp hand. “We’ll both be … ready to go soon now.”

  Their son stood up and walked back into the inn, and Josephine held her husband’s still-warm hand and listened to her own heartbeat. “Don’t stray far, Michael,” she said softly. “I know you can’t do it without help.”

  She leaned back in her chair and breathed the evening air deeply, still holding Crawford’s hand. “Two times two is four,” she said dreamily. “Two times three is six. Two times four is eight. Two times five is ten …”

  After a while the litany faded into silence, and stars began to appear in the darkening sky. Until John came out again there was no sound in the yard—no frogs called, no insects sang, the tree branches stood silent, and no breath disturbed the motionless air.