Hunt turned to Crawford, who had now climbed down beside him. “What does his lordship mean by that, do you suppose?” Hunt asked.
“He probably meant ‘on the contrary,'” Crawford told him.
They followed Byron to where Trelawny stood beside the hole in the sand, and then for several moments they were all silent, staring down at Shelley.
The exposed bones had turned a dark blue, and the once white clothing was now all black. Unlike yesterday’s exhumations, the smell of rot here was overpowering, and the health officers tied handkerchiefs over their faces before freeing the thing from the hole. At least it held together, and when it was laid out on the sand Crawford noticed that the incisor teeth showed no signs of having grown during the month in the earth.
Crawford looked up at Byron. “Not even a glance toward Gorgona,” he said softly. Clearly Shelley had died entirely when his lamia sister had expired on the beach below the Casa Magni.
Byron swore hoarsely and turned away, and angrily wiped his sleeve across his eyes.
Trelawny crouched beside the corpse and gingerly prised from the jacket pocket the copy of Keats’s poems, but it now consisted only of the leather binding, and he sadly laid it back on the dark ribcage.
The body was then shifted onto a blanket, and the four Englishmen walked beside it like pallbearers as the Italians carried it to the oven and gently laid it into the blackened bed. The rotted leather binding still lay on the body’s chest—like, thought Crawford, a Bible clasped in the hands of a dead pope lying in state.
Again Trelawny set fire to the pile of pine logs under the iron table, and again the flames sprang up in a withering rush—but though Byron and Crawford once more braved the shocking heat for several seconds to watch, Shelley’s body sizzled on the iron bed but didn’t move at all. The two men stepped back from the heat and stood away from Hunt and the others.
Though still high, the flames were steadying, and an aura of gold and purple shone around them. Byron glanced at Crawford, who nodded.
“The thing that attacked us in the Alps glowed with those colors,” Crawford said quietly, “just before it petrified.”
“So did the rainbow over the … dramatically petrified Alps. I wonder if human royalty adopted these colors in a spirit of … hanging up the dried head of your slain enemy—though in the cases of these things the dried head can often still bite.”
“Bite’s the word,” Crawford agreed.
Byron mopped his sweating face with a handkerchief. “There’ll be something here,” he muttered to Crawford. “These days you understand at least as much as I do about this business—watch for it.”
Crawford looked back to the black figure reclining in the heart of the flames.
“What—what sort of thing?”
Byron shook his head. “I’m not sure. That’s why I needed you to be here, to help me. It’ll be … whatever so drew the attention of the Graiae to Shelley, in Venice four years ago—and drew the attention of some kind of wild lamia on Lake Leman, two years before that.”
Seeing Crawford’s baffled look, he added, “Whatever made him different from people—different from everybody, even people like you and I.”
“Ah.” Crawford nodded. “Right, he was a member of the family—and by birth, by blood, rather than just by marriage, as I was.” He remembered Shelley’s complaints about bladder stones and the stiffening of his skin and the hardness of his fingernails. “He was mostly human, but part … nephelim, part stone.”
“His bones, then, perhaps,” said Byron hoarsely. He raised his hand uncertainly, almost as if in farewell or apology to Shelley, then looked over to where Trelawny stood, sweat and tears running down the tanned face into the black beard. “Trelawny!” Byron called. “I’d like his skull, if it can be salvaged!”
Trelawny hadn’t caught his words, and made him repeat them—and then visibly comprehended them, and stared at Byron wrathfully. “Why?” Trelawny demanded. “So that you can make another drinking cup?”
Byron’s voice was level when he answered. “No,” he said, limping toward the others, “I will treat it as … as Shelley would have wanted.”
Crawford followed Byron across the sand as Trelawny reluctantly picked up a long-handled boathook and approached the fire. The bearded giant leaned toward the blazing oven and reached in with the hook toward Shelley’s head, but at the first touch of the iron the skull fell to pieces, throwing burning bits of flesh spinning up into the sky. Trelawny reeled back, tossing the hook aside and rubbing singed hair off his forearm.
Crawford caught Byron’s eye and shook his head slightly. It’s not the skull, he thought.
The flames billowed in a breeze from the sea, and Crawford turned away to cool his sweating face. In the last few minutes he had become intensely aware of the charring figure on the iron bed behind him—not as a human figure, much less as something evocative of the man it had been, but as a kink in the fabric of the world, something that violated natural laws, like a stone impossibly hovering in midair. It was as if the heat had crystallized something, quantified something that had only been implicit before.
He looked back at the body, trying to determine the source of the impression, but the body looked like nothing more than dead flesh and bone in a fire.
Crawford looked toward Byron, curious to see if he showed any signs of feeling a wrongness about Shelley’s body, but for the moment Byron seemed to have forgotten that Shelley had not been entirely human—he was just clenching and unclenching his fists as he stared at the pyre of his friend.
Hunt had walked up with the wooden box he’d brought to Williams’s pyre the day before, and now he and Trelawny opened it and began throwing frankincense and salt onto the fire, intensifying the yellow-gold glow of the flames. Trelawny again plodded up close to the oven, this time to pour wine and oil over Shelley’s body.
“We restore to nature through fire,” intoned Trelawny, “the elements of which this man was composed: earth, air, and water. Everything is changed, but not annihilated; he is now a portion of that which he worshipped.”
For awhile no one spoke, and the roaring of the fire was the only sound under the empty sky; at last Byron forced a frail smile. “I knew you were a pagan,” he said to Trelawny, “but not that you were a pagan priest.” Tears glistened in Byron’s eyes, and his voice was unsteady as he added, “You do it … very well.”
Hunt walked back through the hot sand to the carriage, and Trelawny walked around to the other side of the fire. Byron, clearly embarrassed at having shown emotion, was blinking around as if someone had said something he chose to interpret as an insult. Crawford was watching the burning body.
“I think it’s the heart,” he said.
“What is?” asked Byron belligerently. “Oh.” He took a deep breath and expelled it and rubbed his eyes. “Very well—why?”
Crawford nodded toward the fire. “It’s turned black but it’s not burning—though the ribs have collapsed around it.” And only when I stare at it, he thought, do I get that feeling of cosmic wrongness.
Byron followed his gaze, and after a few moments he nodded. “You might be right.” He was breathing hard. “Damn all this. We need to talk—I need to tell you about this thing he and I tried to do in Venice, unsuccessfully, and how I think it can be done successfully.” Byron looked up and down the shore, then down at the sand under his boots. “We can’t talk here—let’s go out to the Bolivar. I’ll swim, and you can go in the boat. I’ll get Tita to go with you and work the oars.”