The paving stones ahead were streaked with light, and faintly on the breeze they could hear music and laughter. “Trelawny will be carousing,” said Byron hoarsely, “and the Hunts will probably have already gone to bed, in their sensible way. I should be able to get to my room without anyone asking me about this bandage.” He reached back into the carriage and pulled out a cane, which he handed to Crawford. “You remember it?”
Crawford nodded, a faint, sad smile touching his bearded face. “Your sword cane. I remember you waving it around in a lightning storm at the foot of the Wengern.”
“It’s yours now. Twist the metal collar of it, that ring there, and you can draw it. It’s good French steel.” Byron seemed ill at ease. “You know where the money and guns are in the carriage. And poor Shelley’s heart. And I’ve got my passport and you’ve got yours. I don’t imagine you’ll—”
He stopped, and took Crawford’s good hand in both of his. “I’ve been a lot of trouble, haven’t I? During these, what, six years.”
Crawford was embarrassed, and glad that the flaring torch was above and behind Byron so that he couldn’t see if there were tears in the lord’s eyes. “A lot of trouble,” he agreed.
Byron laughed. “You’ve been a good friend. It’s not terribly likely that we’ll see each other again, so I do want you to know that. You’ve been a good friend.”
“Oh hell.” Crawford freed his hand and hugged the man, and Byron pounded him on the back. “You’ve been a good friend too.”
Clearly embarrassed himself, Byron stepped back. “Do you think it’s midnight yet?”
Crawford laughed softly. “It feels like tomorrow’s midnight—but no, it can’t be past ten.”
“In two hours it will be Michaelmas. St. Michael’s day.” Byron waved clumsily. “Kill our dragon for us, Michael.”
“You’ll know,” said Crawford. “You’ll be there, in all but the flesh.”
Byron nodded dubiously. “That’s right. Jesus. Don’t go getting us up too early in the morning.” He turned and began limping away, toward the inn.
Crawford leaned into the carriage and made sure Josephine’s pulse and breathing were still steady, then closed and latched the door, wearily climbed back up onto the bench and snapped the reins.
He drove northeast until he’d crossed the arching stone bridge over the Vara River, and then he took the old road that paralleled the Marga River, between high mountain shoulders that were a deeper black than the starry sky.
The road was getting steeper as it curled up into the Apennines, but the moon was high and the horses were fresh, and Crawford felt better with every mile he put between the carriage and the stony thing that lay injured but aware somewhere on the hillside behind the Casa Magni.
Finally it was the cold and his own exhaustion that made him stop. The torch had long since burned out.
Seven miles northeast of the Vara a stream flowed into the Marga from up in the mountains, and around the bridge over the stream were clustered the light-less wooden buildings of a little village called Aulla. Crawford found a stable and banged on the broad door until a light appeared in a window overhead, and the door was eventually unlocked and slid open by an old man with a lantern.
Crawford paid him to take the two horses out of harness and groom them,
and to fetch a cup of vinegar from somewhere, and to ignore the fact that Crawford and his companion chose to sleep in the carriage.
When everything had been done and the old man had returned upstairs, Crawford checked Josephine—her breathing and pulse were still regular—and then carefully poured about a tablespoonful of the vinegar into the jar of Byron’s blood, to prevent its clotting, and closed the jar and tucked it safely into one of the bags on the floor.
Josephine was lying on the rear seat, and he lay down on the front one; in order to fit he had to tuck his legs up and bend his head down over his knees, but he managed it, and was asleep in seconds.
He woke again, hours later, feeling painfully constricted and breathless. He had sat up, and gingerly stretched his legs out and rearranged his clothing and loosened his belt, before it became clear to him, to his dull astonishment, that it was sexual excitement that had forced him awake.
He looked at the dark form of Josephine, only a yard away, and after a moment he realized that the glints of light in her face were reflections of the dimly moonlit stable in her open eyes. He smiled at her, and started to get up.
Then he noticed that she was hunched up on one elbow, and staring out of the carriage window and not at him. Crawford followed the direction of her gaze—and jumped when he saw several erect forms standing on the straw-covered stable floor outside the carriage.
There was a regular squeaking noise—the carriage springs. He looked back at Josephine and noticed that she was rocking her hips against the upholstered seat.
And she was still staring out the carriage window.
Teeth glinted in the hollow faces of the things outside, but Crawford couldn’t work up any fear; he could only look at the dim outlines of Josephine’s emaciated body under the ragged dress; he thought his own clothes must explode, the way Polidori’s had earlier in the evening, if he weren’t able to get out of them.
He reached across the carriage and tremblingly cupped her hot right breast; the contact stopped the breath in him, and made his heart beat like a line of cannons being fired by one continuous, insanely quick-burning fuse.
She snarled at him, and her head jerked down and her jaws clicked shut only an inch from his hand.
Even in the dim light and the musty air it was clear that she was excited too—in fact sexual heat had flexed the whole fabric of the air to a tightly strained point, the way imminent lightning causes hair to stand up on scalps, and Crawford imagined that the horses, their very fleas, must be having erotic dreams.
With nothing but hot jealousy Crawford looked through the glass at the creatures Josephine so very evidently found more attractive than himself—and then he remembered something that had been said to him by a young woman he’d encountered six years ago in the streets of Geneva, on the day he’d first met Byron and Shelley: “… we could share in their interest in us, Michael, and at least be interested in each other that way …”
At least one of the forms swaying outside the glass was female—if he opened the door and gave himself to her, to the crowd, would he thus be able to have a willing Josephine at second hand, at least? Vicariously?
By … proxy?
The carriage already smelled of vinegar and blood, but the word brought back with extra clarity the memory of the woman with whom he had killed the lamia on the beach below the Casa Magni—the woman who had made love with him willingly, joyfully.
He didn’t want to have her now if her attention was on someone, something, else.
Byron had laid in a good stock of minced garlic, and Crawford opened a fresh jar and smeared the stuff around the cracks of all the windows and both doors.
As soon as the smell began to drift outside the carriage, the figures in the stable diminished into sluglike things and crawled away across the straw-littered floor and up the wall and out through the stable window. Crawford watched until the last of them had heaved its bulk over the sill and thumped away outside into the moonlit night.
Then he checked the knots on Josephine’s bonds, being resentfully careful not to touch her at all as he did it; and finally he sat back and opened his flask and drank himself into oblivion.