The sight of Shelley’s split and blackened heart had made him think of his own, which was pounding so hard in his rib cage that his head was bobbing in time to it. God knew what the Hunts and the servants would make of his burdens if he were to pitch over dead right now. Even Byron would wonder what had possessed him.
He couldn’t hear the children—apparently they had run right through the house and out the back door. Panting, Crawford limped once more across the hall and through the arch into the Hunts’ parlor.
He slapped the box back up onto the mantel and forced himself to actually run back toward the arch.
He made it into the hall, but the effort had cost him. His vision was dimming and he had to sit down on the stone floor with his knees drawn up, clutching the paper-wrapped heart tightly to be sure his numbed, trembling hands wouldn’t drop it. His ankles had started bleeding again, and his heels kept slipping.
“What have you got?”
Crawford looked up. One of the Hunt boys, apparently about seven years old, was standing over him. The child slapped Crawford’s clasped hands. “What have you got?” he repeated. “Something from the kitchen, I can tell.”
“Scraps,” Crawford gasped. “For the dog.”
“I’ll take ‘em to him. I want to make friends with him.”
“No. Lord Byron wants me to bring them to him.”
“My mum says you’re a nasty man. You surely do look nasty.” The boy stared speculatively at Crawford. “You’re a weak old thing, aren’t you? I’ll bet I could take the scraps from you.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Crawford, in what he hoped was an intimidatingly adult tone. He tried to straighten his legs and stand up, but his heels slipped in his blood again and he wound up just thumping the floor with his withered buttocks. The dizziness and nausea that the heart induced in him were very strong.
The boy giggled. “I’ll bet you were taking scraps for yourself, so you could chew ‘em up raw in your room,” he said. “Lord Byron never said you could have ‘em, did he? You’re a thief. I’m gonna take that bag away from you.” The boy was excited and breathless—clearly the idea of having a grown-up whom he could torment with impunity was a heady one.
Crawford opened his mouth and started to shout for help, but the boy began singing loudly to cover Crawford’s noise, and at the same time he reached out and slapped Crawford hard across his white-bearded cheek.
To his own horror, Crawford could feel tears seeping out at the corners of his eyes. There wasn’t time for this. If the heart were discovered, Hunt would lock it up securely and ship it straight back to London—and what if the boy brought it to the dog and the dog actually ate it?
He tried again to stand up, but the boy pushed him roughly back down.
Crawford was close to panic. The lives of Josephine and his unborn child—their lives as humans, at least—depended on his escaping from this little boy, and he wasn’t confident that he’d be able to do it.
He started to yell again, and again the boy began singing—“O say, thou best and brightest, my first love and my last”—and slapped him backhanded on the other side of his face. The boy was panting now, but with pleasure instead of exertion.
Crawford took a deep breath and let it out, and then he spoke, very quietly. “Let me take it and go,” he said evenly, “or I’ll hurt you.” Over his sickness he tried to concentrate on what he was saying.
“You couldn’t hurt me. I could hurt you, if I wanted to.”
“I’ll …” Crawford thought of Josephine, whom he was so ludicrously failing to save. “I’ll bite you.”
“You couldn’t bite a noodle in half.”
Crawford stared hard at the boy, and slowly smiled, keeping his eyes wide open to magnify the wrinkles over his cheekbones. He held up his left hand and waved the stump of his wedding-ring finger at him. “See that? I bit that off, once when I was bored. I’ll bite your finger off.”
The boy looked uneasy, but angrier too, and when he drew his hand back again it was clear that he meant to hit Crawford a good deal harder this time. Crawford thought this blow might, in his weakened state, knock him unconscious.
“Like this,” he said quickly, and thrust his own little finger into his mouth. He tasted bean soup on it, and the thought that he might also be tasting Shelley’s heart very nearly made him vomit.
The boy’s hand was still drawn back for the blow, but he had paused, staring.
Crawford bit down on his finger. He couldn’t really feel any pain, so he bit harder, wanting some blood to scare the boy with. The hard pounding of his heart seemed to make coherent thought impossible.
The Hunt boy didn’t seem to be impressed; he brought his hand farther back and squinted at Crawford’s face.
A vast bitterness almost made Crawford close his eyes, but he kept them locked on young Hunt’s; and even as he wondered if there might have been any other way out of this, he expressed all of his despair by clenching his jaw on the last finger joint with every particle of strength he had left. Cartilage crunched between his teeth, and the horror of that seemed only to give him more strength.
Crawford’s hand flew away from his mouth, spraying blood across the floor.
The last joint of his little finger was still in his mouth, severed. He spit it out hard, bouncing it off the boy’s nose.
Then the boy was gone, screaming hysterically as he ran through ever more distant rooms, and Crawford rolled over onto his hands and knees and crawled away toward the stairs, dragging the paper bundle with him and leaving a trail of blood smeared across the stone floor.
Giuseppe found him on the stairs and carried him to his room.
Byron visited him shortly after Giuseppe had tied a bandage around his fresh finger-stump. The lord looked pale and shaken.
“That’s …” said Crawford weakly, “the heart, there. On the table.”
“What the hell did you do?” asked Byron in a quiet but shrill voice. “Hunt’s brat is saying that you bit off your finger! Is that what happened?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have a fit? The boy says you—spit the finger at him! Everyone’s shouting downstairs. Moreto got down there and seems to have eaten your finger. Goddamn it, why do I get involved with such horrible people? I’ve got Hunt and his sow and litter underfoot, because of this impossible project of his magazine, but that wasn’t enough for me, was it? I had to get into an even more impossible project, with a man who bites his fingers off, and his wife, who pulls out her eyes!”
Crawford’s shoulders were shaking, and he honestly couldn’t have said whether he was laughing or crying. “Who’s,” he choked, “Moreto?”
Byron stared at him. “Who the hell do you think Moreto is?” He was frowning, but the corners of his mouth were beginning to twitch. “One of the servants? Moreto’s my dog.”
“Oh.” Crawford was definitely laughing. “I thought it might be that old woman in the kitchen.”
Byron was laughing too now, though he still seemed to be angry. “Just because you’re driven to drink cologne doesn’t mean I starve my help.” He leaned against the wall. “So how did you come to bite off your own finger? A seizure of some sort, I assume.” He stared at Crawford. “I mean, it was an accident, right?”