Crawford was still shaking. He shook his head.
“Jesus. Then … why?”
Crawford wiped his eyes with his maimed hand. “Well, it—it really seemed, at the time, to be the only way to keep him from feeding Shelley’s heart to the dog.”
Byron shook his head wonderingly. “That’s … mad. I’m sorry. That you could imagine such a thing is plenty of evidence that you’re not ready for this undertaking of ours. Good God, you could have … yelled for help, couldn’t you? The cook was right there. Or just walked away from the boy, surely? Or hit him? I just don’t see—”
Now Crawford was crying. “You didn’t see. You weren’t there.”
Byron nodded, and seemed to be working not to let pity—or it could have been disgust—show in his face. He crossed to the bedside table and picked up the paper-wrapped bundle. “I’d better hide this. Hunt will probably notice its loss soon.” He hefted the heart. “Even if he just picks up the box, he’ll realize it’s light.”
“No,” Crawford choked. “The box weighs the same.”
“The box,” Byron said carefully, “weighs the same. What did you put in it?”
“A—oh, God—a rooster head. From the kitchen.”
Byron was nodding gently, and didn’t seem to be about to stop. “A rooster head. A rooster head.”
Still nodding, Byron left the room, closing the door softly.
Crawford and Byron both developed high fevers, and during the ensuing week Byron’s sunburned skin peeled off in great patches, and he took delight in making jokes about snakes shedding their skins.
Crawford, tormented by his own helplessness and his impatience to find and save Josephine and his unborn child, didn’t find the jokes funny.
For quite a while he could work up no enthusiasm about food or any activity, but forced himself to eat three meals a day, and to exercise—at first simply lifting the iron lamp on his bedside table a few times was enough to set him sweating and trembling, but by the end of the second week of his convalescence he had improved enough to ask Giuseppe to fetch him a couple of bricks, and he soon got to the point where he could lift them from below his waist to above his head fifty times in a row.
Shortly after that he began going downstairs and outside to the narrow kitchen garden to do his exercises, for there was a stout overhead beam there, on which various trellises were anchored, that proved to be sturdy enough for him to do chin-ups on. Byron’s cook visibly disapproved of his presence in her garden until one day when he helped her pick and carry several bags-full of basil leaves; after that she stopped frowning at him, and once or twice even smiled and said Buongiorno.
Byron seemed to recover more quickly. Crawford saw him frequently at dinner, but these days Byron was always accompanied by a vapidly gossipy friend called Thomas Medwin, one of the old Pisan English circle, and, on the two occasions when Crawford had tried to hint to the lord that he’d like to discuss their proposed journey, Byron had frowned and changed the subject.
And when Medwin finally left, on the twenty-eighth of August, Crawford found himself unable to talk to Byron at all. The lord spent all his time locked in his room reading, or lounging with Teresa Guiccioli in the main garden, and when Crawford had one day presumed to interrupt the two lovers, Byron had angrily told him that any further intrusions would result in his abandoning their plans altogether.
Byron slept late into the afternoons, apparently spending the entirety of the nights drinking and feverishly scribbling more stanzas of Don Juan. He never went out in the Bolivar anymore, and had apparently given up riding.
When Crawford felt well enough to go outside, he took to walking up the Lung’Arno and crossing the bridge over the Arno’s mud-yellowed water—on which Shelley had so loved to sail—and knocking at the door of the Tre Palazzi, where Mary Shelley was once again staying. He hoped to get her to intercede for him with Byron, but she was still too distracted by Shelley’s drowning, and angered by Leigh Hunt’s refusal to let her have Shelley’s heart, to pay much attention to him.
Crawford thought he knew why Hunt was so adamant. One recent evening, after a long dinner-table conversation about Percy Shelley, Hunt had retired downstairs to his own rooms—and had then been heard to yell in alarm. Byron had sent a servant down to find out what the matter was, and Hunt had assured the man that he had simply stubbed his toe … but a few minutes later the entire household was made helplessly aware that Hunt had, for once, abandoned his often-boasted conviction that children should never be beaten.
Crawford often wondered now, half-fearfully and half-amused, whether Hunt had believed his children’s no doubt passionate denials of any knowledge as to how a rooster head had got into the box that was supposed to contain Shelley’s heart.
On the eleventh of September, Mary moved out of the Tre Palazzi, bound for Genoa. It occurred to Crawford later that Mary might in fact have been speaking well of him to Byron while she’d been in Pisa, for on the day after her departure Byron summoned Crawford to the Palazzo Lanfranchi’s main garden, in which the lord and his mistress Teresa sat over a leisurely lunch under the spreading orange tree branches, and told Crawford curtly that the house was shortly to be closed down and vacated, and that Crawford would have to leave.
Crawford decided to give Byron a few days to cool off and then to just confront him somewhere, now that there seemed to be nothing to lose—at least there were currently no houseguests.
But four mornings later Crawford awoke to discover that Byron’s old friend John Cam Hobhouse had arrived for a week’s visit. Crawford remembered Hobhouse from the trip they’d taken through the Alps six years before—Hobhouse had been a fellow student of Byron’s at Trinity College, and was now a politician, worldly and sophisticated and witty, and Crawford despaired of ever getting Byron’s undivided attention.
After doing his exercises—he could now do twenty chin-ups in a row—Crawford spent the day walking around Pisa, noting places he’d been to with Josephine and savagely wishing that the two of them had got married when they had first arrived in the city, and that they had never renewed contact with the damned poets. Back at Byron’s house, he drank brandy in his room for a couple of hours, then went downstairs and ate polenta and minestrone in the kitchen. Feeling sleepy at last, he went back out into the hall.
He paused outside the kitchen arch. In the dim illumination of a couple of lamps in niches in the walls, the Palazzo Lanfranchi’s main hall looked like a disorganized warehouse these days—crates of books and statuary and dishes were stacked everywhere, and a dozen ornate swords and rifles stood like umbrellas in a barrel by the door. The usual sour milk and stale food smell of the children was overwhelmed by the musty exhalations of old leather.
Crawford sidled between the crates to the barrel, and he had lifted out an old saber and drawn it from its scabbard and was sighting along the blade when footsteps sounded on the pavement outside and the door was ponderously opened.
Hobhouse stepped in, glimpsed Crawford and ducked right back out with a smothered yell. A moment later Byron sprang in with a pistol in his hand, but relaxed, frowning, when he saw Crawford.
“It’s just St. Michael,” he called out through the open door, “looking for the serpent.”
Crawford hastily sheathed the sword and poked it back into the barrel as Hobhouse re-entered.