“I’ll be ready tonight,” Byron said resentfully, limping away through the shallow water toward the sand. “Just see to it that you are.”
At dusk Byron and Crawford left the inn and walked slowly and without speaking down the Lerici streets, past windows and doorways that were already beginning to glow yellow with lamplight under the purpling sky, to the lowest, farthest-seaward edge of pavement. Byron gave Crawford an ironic look, and made the sign of the cross before stepping carefully down from the masonry into the sand.
Crawford smiled tightly and followed him, and they plodded side by side down the shoreline. Each of them carried in his pockets ajar full of minced garlic and a pistol loaded with a wood-and-silver ball, and Crawford kept having to hitch up his pants because of the weight of the coil of rope twined to his belt; the slip-knotted loop thumped his thigh, separate from the coil, at each step. Byron was swinging an unlit torch as if it were a walking stick.
The wind was cold from Portovenere across the Gulf, and Crawford shivered and tucked his chin into his coat collar, wishing his scarf hadn’t been packed up in the luggage he and Byron would be taking with them later tonight.
After a few minutes of walking, they heard the rattle and jingle of a carriage going by on the road over the beach. Byron nodded. “Tre’s right on time,” he said quietly.
With my scarf, thought Crawford. “I hope he’s done what you said, about bringing a spare horse to ride back to Lerici on.”
“So do I,” said Byron. “He’s far too chivalrous about women—and ignorant of the nephelim—to condone a forcible kidnapping.”
They trudged on as the sky darkened, and soon they heard the repeated triple-thudding of a horse riding back, northward toward Lerici.
“He did what I said,” observed Byron. “Our carriage awaits us above the Casa Magni.” He began coughing, pressing his face into the collar of his jacket to muffle the noise, and Crawford hoped his fever wasn’t as bad as it seemed to be. “Teresa is very upset,” Byron whispered when he had recovered, “at having to go on to Genoa without me.”
Crawford knew this was an appeal for sympathy, but he was too aware of Josephine, somewhere ahead, to spare concern for Byron or Teresa. “If she ever gets pregnant, she’ll be glad of this.”
He thought Byron might get angry at his callousness, but after a long, plodding silence Byron just said, “You’re right.”
Soon Crawford caught Byron’s arm, and pointed ahead. Faintly against the nearly black sky, above the silhouettes of the pines, stood the rectangular bulk of the Casa Magni.
There was no faintest light in any of its windows.
“Do you think she’s still here?” asked Byron when they had walked around to the sand-gritty pavement between the house and the sea. He had wedged the torch into a crack in the rocks, and had fished a tinder box from his pocket and was striking showers of dazzling sparks from the flint.
“Yes.” Crawford spoke with certainty.
The sparks had ignited a frail flame in the lint in the box, and Byron quickly unwedged the torch and held the splintery, frayed end of it over the light; in a moment the resinous wood was flaring, lighting in its orange glow the startled-looking arches and windows of the house, and he closed the tinder box and tucked it back into his pocket.
“Call her, then,” said Byron, holding the torch up so that the trees were visible on the hill behind the house and shadows crawled and darted among the trunks.
“Josephine,” said Crawford loudly. His voice disappeared in the vast night like wine spilled on sand. “Josephine!” he shouted. “I need you!”
For several moments the only sounds were the continuing rustle of the wind in the pines and the waves crashing at his back. Crawford looked up at the terrace railing, remembering how Shelley would lean there, staring out at the Gulf waters, during the long June evenings.
Then in the pauses between the waves he could hear a soft but echoing shuffling from the darkness behind the ground-floor arches—and a moment later a figure in a tattered dress was visible standing in the central arch, the arch through which Josephine had single-handedly dragged the rowboat on the day she had saved him from drowning.
“Michael,” said Josephine hoarsely. Some dark substance was caked around her mouth, as if she’d been eating, but she looked weak and starved, and her eyes were enormous.
Crawford took a step forward, and she instantly disappeared back into the darkness. “Don’t … approach me,” she called. “I’m not supposed to let people approach me.”
“Fine,” said Crawford, backing away with his palms held out. “Look, I’m way back here—you can come out again.”
For several moments there was silence—he and Byron exchanged tense glances—then Crawford heard sandy scuffling inside, and, very slowly, she re-emerged into the flickering orange light. Crawford tried to see if she looked pregnant, but wasn’t able to tell.
“Can you approach us?” Crawford asked.
She shook her head.
“Not even so that we can talk? Maybe I want to rejoin the flock. Byron here is … one of you, I’m sure you can see it in him.” He felt Byron shift beside him, and he could tell from a wobble in the light that he had moved the torch from one hand to the other. Crawford prayed that he wasn’t getting impatient, wasn’t going to say anything.
“I can’t do anything for you,” Josephine said. “You know that. You need one of them to look favorably on you.” She smiled, and he could see what her skull would someday look like. “They will, though, Michael. Find one of them and ask for forgiveness. They’ll give it. I’m forgiven for … for what you and I did.”
Her bare feet on the flagstones looked like white crabs.
Crawford blinked back tears. “I want you to come with me, Josephine. I love you. I—”
She was shaking her head. “I think I loved you,” she said, “but now I love someone else. We’re very happy.”
He squeezed the rope, the useless rope. “Listen to me,” he said desperately.
“No,” she said. “The sun is down, and he’s waiting for me.” She started to turn.
“You’re pregnant,” he said loudly.
She had paused. Crawford thought he had heard a sound on the dark hillside, something different from the hiss of the sea wind in the branches, but he didn’t look away from her.
“Think about it,” he went on quickly, “you were a nurse, you know the symptoms. It’s our baby, yours and mine. Maybe this … life is what you want for yourself, but is it what you want for our child?”
For several long seconds she didn’t speak. “You’re right,” she said finally, wonderingly. “I think I must be pregnant.” Her face was expressionless, but tears gleamed now on her hollowed cheek.
Again there was a faint sound from the hillside. Crawford glanced up there for a moment but couldn’t see anything among the dimly lit pines.
She turned back toward the sea and took a hesitant step out from the arch, and Crawford broke the twine that held the rope to his belt; the coiled rope was in his hand now.
She had noticed Byron now, and was staring at him as anxiously as a half-tamed cat.
Byron waited until a wave had crashed on the rocks and receded. “It’s all right,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear. “Two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four is eight.” His voice was almost harsh with compassion, and Crawford wondered if he was remembering her rescue of them on the peak of the Wengern.
“Come with us,” said Crawford.