The two of them had had to walk eastward last night for several hours, slogging through marshes as often as walking on roads, to get past the line of Austrian boats blocking the Po, and by the time they had found an early-morning fisherman who would agree to sail them north to the Lido, Josephine had been hot and trembling and unsure about where they were or what year it was. More often than not she had seemed to believe that they were back in Rome, fleeing south from Keats’s apartment through the ruins of the Roman Forum.
And several times she’d been doubled up with cramps, though when he’d become alarmed she’d told him that she had them frequently, and that they always passed within a few minutes. He worried that something might be going wrong with her pregnancy—certainly her life recently wasn’t the sort of regimen he’d have recommended for an expectant mother.
The white pillars of the Church of San Giorgio were squarely off the portside now, a hundred yards away across the low waves, and the gondola was slanting across the wide mouth of the Canale di San Marco toward the domes of the Church of San Zaccaria, a hundred yards to the east of the Ducal Palace. Crawford could now see the two columns standing on the seaward side of the brightly lighted Piazza.
Within minutes San Giorgio was astern, and away off to port was the broad, boat-spangled corridor of the Grand Canal; the façades of the tall palaces, seen end-on, were a Byzantine glory of lights and arches and ornate balconies.
Crawford stared at the spectacle until he noticed a turbulence in the water out between the gondola and the lights.
“Faster,” he called to the gondolier, who sighed but increased the rhythm of the oar.
Crawford realized that they were on the fringes of the Graiae’s focus—the agitation in the water had undoubtedly been the third sister, heaving blindly under the surface at the perception of the heart moving past.
It was time. He laid the heart on his knees, and then, with infinite reluctance, he opened the jar. If only this cup could pass away, he thought with forlorn irony—and he took a deep breath and raised it to his lips.
Somehow his disgust was so great that he didn’t even gag at the garlic and vinegar and rust taste. When only a couple of spoonfuls remained in the jar, he surreptitiously poured the stuff out onto the floorboards and placed the sole of one shoe in the puddle; then he dropped the empty jar into the sea, feeling as though he were handing it to a friend. He recalled that, until the Austrians had taken over, the doges had annually taken part in an ancient ritual that was supposed to marry the city to the sea. Help me tonight, he mentally asked the dark waves.
The canal scene faded, and he was lying on his back in a narrow bed under a low wooden ceiling. His eyes burned and his throat was dry.
“Good evening, my lord,” he said in English. The lips were cracked and chapped.
“You’re there,” he felt the body say. “Am I, yet?” The head rolled to the side, and Crawford could see a tub of water on the floor.
“Not quite yet. When I step ashore you will be. I’ll give you plenty of warning so you can be in the tub when I do it.”
“Damn this scheme of yours,” said Byron. He was quiet for a moment, then said softly, “God, she is the most beautiful city on Earth,” and Crawford knew Byron was looking at Venice through his eyes while he was seeing Byron’s room in Lerici.
With a slight effort of will Crawford resumed his own body. The gondolier was staring at him dubiously, and Crawford realized that he must have seemed to be talking to himself. Byron had clenched Crawford’s hand on the package that contained Shelley’s heart, and Crawford loosened the fingers a little.
The gondola had slanted back westward, and the bow now pointed just east of the Ducal Palace. Close ahead were bristling ranks of docked gondolas moored at right angles to the wide stone stairs, and Crawford’s gondola had already passed between two of the outer mooring poles.
“Get in the tub,” he said.
Crawford saw the docked gondolas grow nearer and then flank them as the one he was in was deftly edged into a space between two others, and he tensed for the exertions to come—but he nevertheless gave an involuntary shout, for he could suddenly feel cold water up to his waist.
Josephine jumped and stared at him, and he managed to wave reassuringly. “It’s all,” he said through chattering teeth, “going according to plan, yes, great God. We’re … in the tub.”
Behind him the gondolier was muttering something about l’Inglese pazzo, the insane Englishman.
In his head he heard Byron say, “Do you like that, Aickman? I’m letting you do the feeling for a while.”
Then Crawford thrashed in the tub, for his body in Venice had stood up without his volition. He was seeing what his body was looking at in Venice but feeling what Byron’s body felt in Lerici.
“The … blood,” Crawford made his own body say, “is on the sole of … our left shoe. Don’t rub it off or get it in the water before you step ashore.”
The gondolier had stepped onto a little floating dock that projected a few yards out into the water, and he reached a hand down to Josephine and helped her up out of the gondola and then handed her the bag and the cane.
Crawford found himself waving the help away and then hopping on one foot up onto the dock and then down its thumping boards to the lowest of the stone steps. God only knew what the gondolier was making of this.
On the pavement he paused for a moment on one leg. “So this is what a sound right leg feels like,” said Byron through Crawford’s mouth.
“Don’t try the left one,” said Crawford through the same mouth. He was growing accustomed to the water in the tub, and was able to talk without chattering the teeth they shared. “A pistol ball in Rome made a mess of the thigh muscles.”
Byron lowered the left foot and pressed its wet sole against the step.
Like the whisper of a loosed arrow diminishing in one ear and then being audible to the other, Crawford felt a focus of attention leave the body in the tub and arrive at the body standing on the step.
“You’re here now,” said Crawford tightly. “Go.”
Crawford relaxed in the tub and simply rode his body passively, like a man riding a horse that knows the way.
Byron was walking across the canal-side pavement awkwardly, apparently from his lifetime habit of putting his weight on his left leg, and he was tearing the paper off of the heart.
“You do understand that I’m Byron?” he asked Josephine, who was reeling along beside him. “Even though I’m in Aickman’s body?”
Josephine frowned in concentration, but finally nodded. “Yes,” she said. “You’re going to free the eye for jumping from one sister to the other, and then you’re going to try to catch it in the heart.”
“Very good. Now in a moment I’ll want you to walk away from me, stand clear, and watch me and the people around me; I’m going to be busy, and might well miss something. Act like a tourist who’s out shopping. Hell, do some shopping—Aickman, how much money do you have left?—Uh, about two hundred lire—Two hundred? Out of two thousand? And I suppose the horses and carriage are gone?—Well, yes—Damn me!” Crawford could feel Byron clenching Crawford’s fists. “Well, if we’re not killed here we’ll talk about that later. Where is it?—In our right coat pocket.”
Byron dug out the bills and handed them to Josephine. “Here. Buy some touristy junk but keep watching for anyone, especially soldiers, watching me. Got that?”