He crouched by her, and for several seconds just looked at her lean, strained face. She had still been awake when he had gone to sleep, staring at the ceiling and flexing her bound wrists and ankles, and he wondered when she had finally let herself sleep.
He shook her shoulder gently, and her eyes sprang open.
“It’s me, Michael,” he said, trying to make it sound reassuring, even though he knew that his was the face she least cared to see. “Sit up so I can give you some water.”
She hiked herself up and obediently sipped from the glass he tilted to her mouth. After a few sips she shook her head, and he held the glass away.
“You can untie me,” she said hoarsely. “I won’t try to run.”
“Or kill yourself?”
She looked away. “Or kill myself.”
“I can’t,” he said wearily. “Even if it was just you, I wouldn’t. I love you, and I won’t cooperate in your death. But anyway, it’s not just you. There’s a child.”
“It’s his,” she said. Her voice was listless. “I really think it’s his. They can have children by us, you know.”
Crawford thought of Shelley’s half sister, who had grown inside Shelley’s body while he was still in his mother’s womb, and had by that prolonged contact infected him and made him not entirely human. Josephine’s haggard face reminded him of the wooden Christ-face he had imagined yesterday, and he prayed that the human fetus was all that Josephine carried.
“The child is human,” he told her. “Remember I’m a doctor that specializes in this. You were already pregnant when you first—when you first had intercourse with Polidori.” He looked away so that she wouldn’t see the rage in his eyes. “Even if Polidori has succeeded in impregnating you too—they can do that, the inhuman fetus grows with, or even in, the human one that was already there—our child is still there, and will be at least as human as Shelley was.”
She closed her eyes—he saw with sudden compassion that her eyelids were deeply wrinkled—and tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh,” she said miserably.
For perhaps a full minute neither of them spoke. A horse poked its head around a stall partition and peered at the two of them, then snorted and stepped back out of sight.
Josephine sighed. “So it might even be … twins.”
“Yes.”
Josephine shuddered, and Crawford recalled that she herself had been one of a pair of twins, and that her mother had bled to death within minutes of giving birth to her.
The stable owner walked back into the building and, still not looking over at Crawford and Josephine, opened another stall. Crawford tensed, ready to jump on Josephine and cover her mouth—but when it became clear that she wasn’t going to shout for help he was grateful for the interruption; he needed to think.
Would it help, he wondered as the man led another horse out, to remind her of her mother’s death? It had, with the help of her sister Julia, effectively wrecked her youth. Would being reminded of it make her more suicidal, or more concerned for the well-being of her child? Would it help to remind her of what Keats went through so that his sister would not become the prey of his vampire?
She had now gone two full nights without giving blood to Polidori, and Crawford remembered, from his long-ago week in Switzerland, how hard it was to do without that erosion of personality, once one had grown used to it.
She’s probably only now beginning to be able to think for herself, he thought. And she’ll be hating it. Will she acknowledge the responsibilities that she can now clearly see, or will they be so appalling that she’ll just want to return to the selfless haze?
“I thought,” she said when the man had left, “that there’d be no difference if I
killed myself. If the baby was his, suicide would just … speed up its birth.”
“And your … rebirth.”
She nodded. “I’d finally be able to stop being me, Josephine; I really would be just a walking … thing.”
“But now,” said Crawford carefully, “you know that our child would be too.”
Josephine’s eyes were wide now, and it occurred to Crawford that she looked trapped. “But we,” she whispered, “we killed her, the woman that loved you. I can’t … know that, I can’t let myself know that.”
Crawford took her shoulders. “It wasn’t Julia,” he said. “It wasn’t your sister. I know you know that, but you haven’t … what, digested it. The thing we killed was a goddamn flying lizard, like that thing that tried to kill you—and our child—two nights ago. It was a vampire.”
She lowered her head and nodded, and he saw a tear fall onto the knot at her wrists.
Too tired to worry anymore, he released her shoulders and began untying the knot.
When the stable owner came in again, Josephine and Crawford were standing together by the carriage, clinging to each other. The man smiled and muttered something about a more before going to the next stall.
They traded Byron’s carriage for a less elegant but fresher-smelling one, loaded all their baggage into it, and then paid for a room at a hotel just so that they could bathe and get into clean clothes. Crawford even shaved—and, after agonizing about it for a minute, decided not to hide the razor.
Crawford was careful to wait in the hall while Josephine took her bath and got dressed; he was dimly and incredulously beginning to hope that the two of them might someday marry after all—if they weren’t killed in Venice, and if she was carrying only one child—but he could imagine her withdrawing totally if he even seemed to be attempting familiarities right now.
When she stepped out of the room Crawford thought she must have left years in the bath water: her hair was clean and combed, and lustrous even in the dimness of the hall, and in one of Teresa’s dresses that Byron had packed for her she actually looked slim rather than gaunt.
He offered her his arm; after only the slightest hesitation she took it, and together they walked to the stairs.
They walked down the sunlit Emilian Way to the Piazza Grande, and at an outdoor table under a statue of Correggio they ate hard-boiled egg slices in tomato sauce with grilled bread and olive oil, and drank most of a bottle of Lambrusco.
Beggars were huddled in the sun in front of the Renaissance arches of the Palazzo del Commune, and a barefoot old couple in ragged clothes had ventured out among the tables; the man was wringing a devastated hat in his hands and was talking to the well-dressed people at a table near Crawford. Thankful for his own clean clothes and good food and wine, Crawford pulled a bundle of lire from his pocket and waited for the couple to make their way to the table at which he and Josephine sat.
Then he noticed the Austrian soldiers. They must have come into the square several seconds earlier, for they were already spread out and walking purposefully across the square. Two of them seized the old couple and began marching them away, and, looking past them, Crawford saw that the soldiers had rounded up all the beggars and were herding them out of the square.
Suddenly ashamed of his apparent affluence, he crumpled the bills and let them fall to the pavement. In the breeze the wad of paper scooted away across the flagstones like a little boat.
“Parma’s new Austrian masters don’t seem to approve of beggars,” he said to Josephine as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Let’s go—I hate seeming to be part of the crowd they’re protecting from them.”