Only Sputo slept that night; Josephine refused to go below, and della Torre worked the tiller with one hand so that he could clutch a pistol in the other, and his eyes were scanning the currents of the sky as much as the dimly visible river ahead of them, and Crawford paced ceaselessly from one side of the boat to the other, peering out at the dark lands moving past.
The creature’s screams and the gunshots must have been heard by some villagers, he thought, and fishermen and other boatmen out on the Po. Would the Austrians hear of it? What would they make of it?
Several times he heard distant singing, and once when a breeze brought a few particularly clear notes he looked back at della Torre, who just shook his head.
And once there was a rushing in the sky, high in the empty vaults through which the clouds sailed, but though both men crouched tensely, pistols drawn and cocked and aimed upward, the sound was not repeated, and after several minutes they cautiously relaxed again.
Crawford allowed himself a swig of brandy and leaned against the rail. Sometime during this silent watch he had figured out what it was that must have drawn that air-creature, and he prayed again that Josephine was carrying only a human baby, and not the sort of pair Shelley’s mother had carried.
The thing had been drawn by Shelley’s heart, which was currently packed, still wrapped in butcher paper, in one of Crawford’s bags.
Shelley had been an inadmissible mix of species, like a baby bird who has been handled by humans and now carries their smell; and like a mother bird, most of the pure examples of either species had found him repugnant—though in the case of the human species, the members had not been able to say exactly why he was so intrinsically offensive, and had had to use the excuses of his atheism and his revolutionary poetry and his morals as reasons to disown him and hound him from country to country, so that his only friends had been other outcasts.
His heart still embodied the appalling mix, and was therefore still a tangible offense against the inherent separateness of the two forms of life.
Shelley had once told him about having been attacked by one of the airy creatures in a boat on Lake Leman, and how he had been strongly tempted—since in that case the boat had very nearly been sunk—to use the incident as an excuse for the watery suicide that he had always known could free his family from the consequences of his existence.
Crawford thought now that the main reason Shelley had considered drowning must have been the awareness of rejection by both forms of life on earth. Crawford didn’t want a child of his to have to face the same exile.
At dawn Crawford and Josephine went below, to two separate bunks. Della Torre stayed on deck with the refreshed and chatty Sputo.
Crawford woke up to someone shaking his shoulder.
“Good morning-which-is-evening, Inglese,” said della Torre. “I think you will want to be leaving the boat.”
Crawford struggled up in the bunk, bumping his head on the close underside of the deck. He didn’t know where he was. “Leaving the boat,” he said cautiously, stalling for time.
“We are only a mile short of Punta Maestra, where the Po River empties into the Adriatic Sea. Austrian military boats are blocking the river ahead of us. We’re moving slowly, but you will nevertheless have to swim away—you and the woman both—soon, if you hope not to be noticed. Already it is too late for us to slant in to shore without drawing their attention.” He shrugged. “Sorry.”
Crawford suddenly remembered everything, and he was grateful that he’d been able to get a lot of sleep. “I understand,” he said quietly, rolling out of the bunk and shaking Josephine’s shoulder. “Josephine,” he said. “We’ve got some swimming to do.”
Sputo and della Torre helped them tie their luggage onto a couple of planks.
“These articles are likely to get wet,” della Torre advised Crawford, “when you are swimming.”
“That’s … quite a thought, della Torre,” said Crawford, absent-mindedly speaking in English.
The riverbanks were shrouded in fog, and the setting sun was just a red glow astern, but Crawford could see the line of boats ahead, toward which they were drifting.
For several long seconds he tried to think of some way to keep from having to swim. At last he shook his head and took Josephine’s arm and walked to the stern, and the two of them sat down and took off their shoes and added them to the raft, tying them down securely.
“Thank you,” he said as he swung one leg over the transom, “but I don’t think we quite got our money’s worth. If we come back this way, I’ll want a ride back up the river.”
Della Torre laughed. “You’re going to Venice, you said? If you manage to come back, we’ll sail you to England.”
Crawford jumped off the back of the boat.
The water seemed icily cold after the recent warmth of the bunk, and when he had bobbed back up to the surface he could only breathe in great, whispered hoots. The makeshift little raft splashed in next to him, followed by Josephine, who, more stoic than Crawford, was breathing normally when she surfaced. Crawford caught his floating hat and set it back on his bald head.
He waved to della Torre—and softly called, “We might just take you up on that!"—and then he and Josephine each took an end of the little raft and began paddling toward the north bank.
CHAPTER 25
They ferry over this Lethean sound
Both to and fro, their sorrow to augment,
And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach
The tempting stream, with one small drop to lose
In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe,
All in one moment, and so near the brink;
But Fate withstands, and, to oppose the attempt,
Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards
The ford, and of itself the water flies …
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
It was only early evening, and the breeze that swept the lagoon from over the low sand-hills of the Lido behind the gondola was warm; but Crawford was shivering as he saw the filigreed white bulk of the Doge’s Palace, and the tower of the campanile, rising on the dark horizon beyond the gondola’s beak. The lagoon was calm, and the gondola’s bow hardly rose and fell as the keel skated through the water.
Crawford was holding the jar of Byron’s blood in one hand and Shelley’s charred, paper-wrapped heart in the other. The poets return, he thought nervously.
He dreaded what he was going to have to do, and he took a frail comfort in the expanse of water, glittering with reflections of the many-colored lights of the city, that still lay ahead to be crossed. Several minutes at least you’ve got, he told himself.
For the first time he noticed that the upswept stem of the gondola was metal, and shaped vaguely like a trident blade. He turned around in his seat and waved at the gondolier, then pointed forward at the stem. “Why is it shaped like a blade?” he asked.
The gondolier managed to shrug without breaking the rhythm of his sculling. “Tradition,” he said. “Gondolas in Venice have always had it. It’s called the ferro.”
Crawford nodded and looked forward again. From where he sat the ferro did make a breach across the many-eyed and toothy-looking face of the Doge’s Palace.
He looked worriedly at Josephine, who was slumped on the seat across from him, beside their bag and Byron’s sword cane. She was shivering too, but from fever more than fear.