Josephine too looked sickened by the spectacle, and stood up. “I think we’ve done Parma,” she said in a sprightly imitation of the voice of an English tourist. “Do let’s be moving on toward Venice.”
Crawford was delighted to see even weak, ironic humor in her. “The Tintoretto Last Supper!” he exclaimed fatuously, trying to maintain her mood.
“The Verrocchio Colleoni!” she chimed in; then, perhaps because she’d seen drawings of that grim mounted statue, her affected smile collapsed. “Back to the hotel?”
“Just for the carriage. Our old clothes they can keep.”
Austrian guards were checking everyone who was leaving the city through the high stone arch of the north gate, but the soldier who checked their carriage just leaned in the window and looked at Josephine, then peered up at Crawford with a disapproving air; he sniffed officiously and waved them on.
The carriage moved forward out of the shadow into the hot sunlight, and then the horses bounded forward, as if tired of the slow pace of city traffic. The road northward curled away ahead of them across the Po Valley, and for several hours Crawford drove happily between wide fields of yellow earth on which the vines and peach trees made geometrical figures in livid green.
A number of horses and carriages passed them, but he was not anxious to reach the nightmare end of this journey, and he wanted the horses to be fresh for the drive through Lombardy and Venetia tomorrow, so he maintained their leisurely pace.
In a couple of hours they had reached a village called Brescello that sat on the marshy banks of the Po. Crawford thought about stopping, but the air was full of some kind of lint that was making him sneeze, and he tilted his hat back and squinted along the western riverbank to see where the bridge was.
Suddenly the carriage rocked violently on its springs, and a black-bearded young man was sitting beside him.
Crawford darted a hand toward the pistol under his coat, but the man caught his wrist with a browned hand. Crawford instinctively looked at the hand, thinking of breaking the grip—and then noticed the black mark between the thumb and forefinger. It looked very much like the two-year-old stain on his own palm.
He looked up into a pair of fierce brown eyes. “Carbonari,” the man said.
Crawford nodded, a little relieved. “Si?” he said.
The man spoke rapidly in what Crawford at first thought was French; then he recognized it as the patois of Piedmont, which lay westward up the valley, and he managed to translate it mentally. “You must go down the river,” the man had said, “not across into Lombardy. Running water—it throws them off the scent.”
“Uh … who,” asked Crawford carefully, unconsciously trying to match the accent, “do you think we are?”
The man had taken the reins from Crawford and was goading the horses east down a narrower dirt track, away from the bridge.
“I think,” he said, “that you are the couple who traded in a carriage reeking of garlic, in Parma this morning; the couple who got by the border guards at the Cisa Pass yesterday because of a sick woman, and a big bribe to men who are in some trouble now.”
Suddenly Crawford remembered the guards in the Piazza that morning, who had been arresting everyone who looked as shabby as Crawford and Josephine had the day before; and he remembered the guard who had passed them through the Parma gate after having sniffed the carriage. Crawford was profoundly glad that he and Josephine had happened to abandon Byron’s vehicle.
The new carriage was among wooden shacks now, and the lint in the air was worse. Crawford sneezed six times in succession.
“They’re steeping the harvested flax crop,” Crawford’s guide said. “The air will be full of the stuff for days.” He threw a quick glance sideways at Crawford.
“You have no drink to offer a fellow soldier?”
“Sorry. Here.” Crawford handed him the flask, and the man drank everything that was in it and handed it back. “Thanks. My name’s della Torre.”
“I’m—” Crawford began, but the man quickly held up his stained hand.
“I don’t want to know,” he said. “There was a description of the two of you, mentioning your Carbonari mark, in a message an Austrian courier was bringing from Lerici yesterday. Our people killed him in the mountains.” He looked over his shoulder, back toward the bridge. “Clearly the courier they killed was not the only one they sent.”
“Have the Austrians followed us here?” Crawford asked. “Perhaps we should abandon this carriage too….”
“Yes, you should and you will, but not at this moment. They are not here yet—I passed them half an hour ago on the road from Parma, on a faster horse than any of the soldiers had, and I only got here a few minutes ago.”
“Do you know … what it is they want us for?” Crawford asked. Shelley’s heart? he wondered; the men I killed in Rome? Both?
“No,” said della Torre, “and I don’t want to know. I just assume you’re on Carbonari business.”
“I am that.”
A series of decrepit wooden docks segmented the roadside on their left now, and della Torre slanted the carriage into a narrow alley between two ware house like buildings on one of the docks. Crawford heard a squeal and splintering snap as some part of the carriage caught against the corner of one of the buildings and apparently broke off.
Della Torre ignored it. “There will be a boat here,” he said, and hopped down to the resounding boards.
Several big, scarred-looking men emerged from a dark doorway in the building they’d collided with, and della Torre began arguing with them so immediately that Crawford thought they must be old enemies resuming some long-standing conflict.
Alarmed both by the pursuing Austrians and by his new ally, he climbed down and opened the carriage door. Josephine was asleep, and he reluctantly shook her shoulder.
She opened her eyes, but there was no particular alertness in them.
“We’re abandoning the carriage,” he said to her clearly, “and proceeding by boat. You might want to step out.”
“Boat?” she asked doubtfully.
“Boat,” he said. “What’s wrong? Do you want him to be able to follow you?” She closed her eyes. “You know I don’t,” she said. She climbed out of the carriage and stood by him, swaying. He put his arm around her. “But,” she whispered, “you know my blood does.”
Della Torre walked around the carriage; he was slapping his forehead. “The men of Emilia are corrupt,” he said when he had paused before Crawford and lowered his hand. “These men want a thousand lire for the use of one of their boats. It is their best boat, understand, and in it I and one of them can take you to Porto Tolle, on the Adriatic, in two days at the most.”
Crawford’s stomach felt hollow. He only had about fifteen hundred lire. Still, he couldn’t see that he had any choice but to deal with these people, and there didn’t seem to be time to try to talk the price down.
“We’ll take it,” he said, despising the way his voice sounded like a very old man’s.
Della Torre nodded bleakly, then shrugged. “For nothing, though, they will take responsibility for the carriage and horses that the Austrians are looking so hard for.”
I daresay they will, thought Crawford bitterly. But, “Very well,” he said. And how much of this are you skimming off? he wondered.