“I—” Crawford laughed uneasily. “I used to work for him. Werner von Aargau, he’s called these days. You and I saw him—or his vehicle, at least—when we were going through the Alps. Do you remember a wagon that was bogged down in mud? You jumped up into the bed of it to oversee the job of freeing it, and you said there was a box in it full of ice. I’m pretty sure our Austrian was in that, in the box.”
“Huh. Well, he’s no concern of ours. The thing is, when the Graiae are awake but without their eye, then everything is very randomized, supremely uncertain. And this priest I got to know there said that if you were in the focus of them while they were blind, you could shed the attention of a vampire. The vampire can’t track you in the … the spiritual darkness, the chaos of unresolved probabilities. The creature can’t hold its beam of attention on you. Of course you’d have to cross a lot of salt water directly afterward so that the vampire wouldn’t eventually be drawn back to you.”
“America, you once told me.”
“Or Greece. Now I think Greece would be good enough.”
“But even if your vampire did find you again, it’d need a fresh invitation, wouldn’t it?”
The corners of Byron’s mouth turned downward in a bitter smile. “Yes—but even though you never gave in and asked yours back, as your wife and I both did eventually, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a … powerful temptation. I’m sure there were moments of loneliness and fear, in which even you just about gave in.”
Crawford lifted his eyes and looked past Byron, up the coast to the point where the shoreline seemed to dissolve in the wavering heat-mirages, and he nodded. “So,” he said after a moment, “we go to Lerici, catch Josephine and tie her up, and take her to Venice, and then use Shelley’s heart to draw the eye out of whichever of these sisters has got it, and catch it.” He grinned and looked down at his pale, trembling hands. “And then run like hell.”
“That’s it.” Byron’s face was shining with sweat, and the hand in which he was holding his glass had at last begun to tremble. “Here,” he said, thrusting the glass at Crawford, who managed to take it without dropping it and the bottle into the sea.
Byron ducked under the surface, and when his head bobbed back up into the air he even seemed to have swallowed some of the seawater.
“Are you all right?” Crawford asked.
Byron nodded and tossed his head back. He was using his arms too to tread water now, and didn’t ask Crawford to return the glass. “I’m fine,” Byron said shortly. “I seem to—lately I seem to think better if I’m surrounded by salt water; and even better if I’m actually immersed in it.”
“I think it insulates you from the nephelim influence,” Crawford told him. “The only times I really wanted to escape the nephelim net, when I was infected, were moments when I was under water. You recall Noah didn’t escape by climbing a mountain.” He stared at Byron, who was panting now. “You’re doing a lot of swimming lately, it seems. Are your Carbonari precautions beginning to falter?”
“Don’t—” Byron began angrily; then he shook his head. “I guess you do have the right to ask.” He swam to the boat and flung his elbow over the gunwale and let his arms and legs relax. The boat tilted with his weight, and Crawford had to grab the bottle to keep it from falling over.
“Yes,” Byron said, “the precautions don’t seem to be a permanent solution. Hell, I’m like a drunk who keeps telling himself that there is some way to have his gin and have a normal life too. I thought I could hold—whatever you want to call it, Lord Grey de Ruthyn, Margarita Cogni—it—at bay; so that I could still write, but at the same time that I would be free to go out in the sun, and that Teresa and my remaining children would be safe. But lately I’ve been getting weaker during the day, and less able to concentrate.
I don’t think I’ve been entirely without a fever for months. I want to do this, this exorcism, while I still have the strength—both of mind and body.”
Crawford thought of the strength of his own mind and body. “Will we be bringing Tita along with us, or Trelawny?”
“No.” Byron brought his other arm to the gunwale and laboriously hoisted himself up into the boat. His shoulders were even redder now than they had been when Crawford noticed them earlier, and had begun to blister. “No, Tita won’t touch that kind of work since that night in Venice when the pillar rose up out of the water, and I know that Trelawny wouldn’t believe us if we told him what his revered Shelley really was.”
Byron took hold of the oars and, weakly, maneuvered the boat back close to the boarding ladder so that Tita could climb down and row them to shore. “It’ll just be you and me—and Josephine.”
“God help us,” said Crawford softly.
“If there is one.” Byron grinned. “A whole lot of ghastly things have turned out to be possible, remember.”
By four o’clock the fire had burned down enough so that they could approach the oven without being scorched. The rib cage and pelvis had collapsed into broken, charcoal-like chunks, but the heart was still whole, though blackened. The sight of it made Crawford dizzy again, and he sat down in the hot sand.
Byron took a deep breath. “Tre,” he said, “could you get the heart for me?”
Trelawny shook his head firmly. “I tried to get the skull for you. Hunt has asked for the heart.”
Byron glanced worriedly down at Crawford. “That’s absurd,” he told Trelawny, “I knew Shelley longer than either of you! You’re both guests in my home! I demand that—”
He paused and stared at Hunt and Trelawny. Crawford could guess what the lord was thinking: Trelawny wouldn’t budge, and Hunt might, out of injured pride, actually move out of the Casa Lanfranchi, taking the heart with him; and if Byron made a scene about wanting the thing, Hunt might very well ship it to his home in London at the first opportunity.
“Sorry,” Byron said. “It’s just been a trying day. Of course you can have it, Leigh—I’ll make do with a bit of bone.”
Hunt had brought a little box to carry away relics in, and now he held it open while Trelawny leaned over the blackly littered oven and snatched out the heart. He whistled in pain, but juggled the thing toward Hunt, who managed to catch it in his box and slam down the lid as if the heart might try to escape.
Hunt glanced at Byron nervously, but the lord was smiling—though Crawford noticed that his jaw muscles were tightly flexed. Byron took out a handkerchief and with it picked out a segment of a rib. “This will do for me,” he said in a neutral voice.
The ashes and remaining bone fragments were scraped into the little lead and oak coffin Byron had bought, and then the health officers helped Trelawny slide poles under the oven and carry it down to the surf. Steam billowed up when they lowered it into the water, and Crawford thought the sudden hiss sounded like the sea reacting in pain.
An hour later Trelawny and Byron and Hunt and Crawford were having dinner in Viareggio. Byron puzzled Hunt by asking the innkeeper if they could drink their wine from amethyst glasses—plain glass ones turned out to be all that was available, but the four of them got drunk on the house’s harsh red wine anyway, and on the drive back south to Pisa in Byron’s Napoleonic coach they sang and laughed hysterically.
Crawford recognized their mirth as a reaction to the horror of the day; but in his own laughter, and Byron’s, he heard too an edge of fear, and as the shadows of the roadside trees lengthened across their route he couldn’t help throwing frequent glances at Hunt’s little relic box on the seat beside Trelawny.