“Right.”
Byron looked up at Crawford with hatred. “I’ll … do it.” He raised his eyebrows sarcastically. “I presume it would be acceptable if I publish the stuff I’ve already written? There’s quite a bit of it.” “Certainly,” said Crawford. “Over the next few years you can … bleed it out.”
Byron barked one harsh syllable of laughter, then turned to Hobhouse. “I promise,” he said.
Hobhouse reached across the table and squeezed his old friend’s hand. “Thank you,” he said.
CHAPTER 22
Quaff while thou canst: another race,
When thou and thine, like me, are sped,
May rescue thee from Earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
—Lord Byron,
“Lines Inscribed upon
a Cup Formed from a Skull”
Hobhouse left six days later.
The Casa Lanfranchi by this time was in chaos. The Hunts were staying at a nearby inn until Byron should have got all his belongings packed for the trip to Genoa, but Byron’s dogs and monkeys had been moved into a couple of emptied rooms in the house while their cages and kennels were disassembled and packed, and the animals made up for the racket of the vacated Hunt children. Byron occasionally pretended to have forgotten that the children had left, and interpreted the barking and chattering as idiot demands and complaints in Cockney voices.
Byron was drinking wine all day and gin all night, and he alternated from moment to moment between giddy cheer and resentful gloom. He told Crawford that on the same day that he had rescued Crawford from the nefando den he had made arrangements to see a notary and get his will drawn up, but that Teresa had become so upset at the very idea of his ever dying that he had had to cancel the appointment. She had made him promise to forget the idea, and Byron liked to imply that he was sure to die in this upcoming enterprise, and that it would be Crawford’s fault that Teresa would get none of his money.
At last, on the twenty-seventh of September, Byron was ready to leave. Most of his servants and possessions were being shipped north aboard a felucca out of Livorno, while he and Teresa and Crawford would travel by land in the Napoleonic coach; the animals had been noisily confined in temporary cages and packed into and on top of two carriages that would accompany their master’s.
Shelley’s heart was in an under-seat cabinet in Byron’s carriage, still wrapped in butcher paper.
Byron was irritable at having had to get up early, and he curtly ordered Crawford to ride up on the bench with the coachman. Teresa was accompanying them only as far as Lerici, and would complete the journey to Genoa with Trelawny, and Byron told Crawford that he wanted as much time alone with her as he might have left.
The three carriages got under way at ten, but it took half an hour for them to move a hundred yards down the Lung’Arno: the horses of other carriages were panicked by the screeching of the monkeys and parrots, and children and dogs crowded up around the wheels, and women in second- and third- floor windows leaned out to throw flowers and handkerchiefs. Crawford took off his hat and waved it at them all cheerfully.
The festival mood dissipated when they turned north on a broader street—mounted Austrian soldiers rode ahead and behind, emphasizing the government’s approval of Byron’s departure, and Crawford could see, off to his left, the buildings of the University, where he and Josephine had worked together so peacefully for a year.
The famous Leaning Tower was tilted away from them, making it seem that they were travelling downhill.
Byron insisted on stopping a number of times throughout the day’s drive, to eat, and drink, and reassure the animals, and walk around in the roadside grass with Teresa. Crawford hid his impatience, and didn’t even look northward if Byron was watching him, for he was sure that the lord would interpret the intensity of his gaze as a protest against the delays, and out of spite insist on even more of them.
It was dusk when the three carriages finally turned west on a seaward road, crossed the bridge over the Vara River and rolled into Lerici. The carriage the Hunts had travelled in was empty behind the inn, and the Bolivar rode at anchor in the little harbor, but when Crawford and Byron and Teresa got out and went into the hotel, they learned that Hunt and Trelawny had set out to walk south along the coast to the Casa Magni. Crawford and Byron went back outside.
“They’ll be composing sonnets to Shelley,” Byron said as he watched his coachman unstrapping the luggage from the top of his carriage. A chilly wind blew in from off the sea, and he shivered and buttoned up his jacket, though his face shone with sweat in the light from the inn’s windows. “No point in going down there ourselves.”
Crawford looked south longingly. “Shouldn’t we … reconnoiter? Josephine is down there somewhere….”
Byron coughed. “Tomorrow, Aickman. If she sees you sooner, she might simply flee, mightn’t she? Inland to Carrara, drawn by the marble they make all the statues out of, or across the Gulf to Portovenere. If you can’t—” He began coughing again, then swore and pushed open the inn’s door.
Crawford followed him back inside. “Are you … well?” he asked nervously.
“No, I’m not well, Doctor—do I look well?” Byron took a flask from his pocket, unscrewed the cap with trembling fingers, and took a long sip. The fumes of Dutch gin roused nausea in Crawford. “I’m vulnerable here,” Byron went on. “My Carbonari measures are getting less effective anyway, but in this cursed Gulf they’re tenuous indeed.” He looked toward the stairs. “I was mad to have brought Teresa here at all.”
“Do you think,” began Crawford; then he considered how he’d been about to finish the question—that you’ll be able to go with Josephine and me?—and he stopped, not wanting to let Byron think the issue might be in doubt. “Do you think you should get some sleep then?”
“Brilliant prescription. Yes.” Byron screwed the cap back onto the flask and pocketed it. “Don’t get me up early tomorrow.”
Byron limped away toward the stairs, shivering visibly, and as Crawford watched him recede he wondered if Byron would be able to go, or, if so, would be able to survive the trip to Venice and the exertions they’d be in for there.
For that matter, he thought, will any of us survive it.
Not wanting to meet Hunt and Trelawny when they returned, Crawford went upstairs to his own room.
His room was narrow and windowless, and the bed’s mattress seemed to be blankets wrapped around dried bushes, but he fell asleep as soon as he lay down, and dreamed all night that Josephine had already died, and been buried; and, a cold, silver-eyed vampire now, had clawed her way back up to the air and was giving solitary birth beside the erupted grave. Toward dawn the baby’s scalp began to be visible between the inhuman mother’s thighs, and Crawford forced himself to awaken rather than see its face.
The skin around his eyes was stiff with dried tears, and he washed his face in the basin before getting dressed and going downstairs. He ignored the corn-meal smell of hot polenta wafting from the kitchen and walked to the inn’s front door, trying to suppress his limp.