All at once the body he was in sagged with stunning fatigue, and was panting violently. Sweat sprang out on Byron’s forehead as Trelawny swore in alarm and rushed to the tub, but Crawford managed to choke out a strangled laugh as Trelawny lifted the body from the tub, for he realized what Byron had done.
Just as he had, earlier, let Crawford be the one to feel the cold water of the tub, he had now let his own body take the exhaustion Crawford’s felt. He had used the blood link to send the fatigue poisons to his own body, and send whatever it was that made blood fresh to Crawford’s.
Trelawny had gently laid him down on the narrow bed. “Where’s that damned Aickman when we need him?” he muttered to himself as he flung blankets over Byron’s shivering, gasping, nearly unconscious form.
After a few minutes the panting began to subside, and Crawford opened eyes to see the gondola docks close ahead, and he felt his right hand close around the upright wooden trunk of one of the outer mooring poles.
His body was panting, but evenly. “Did I kill myself?” asked Byron bitterly through Crawford’s mouth.
“No,” said Crawford, staring gratefully at the nearby hulls rocking in the water. “Trelawny thought you’d had it, but … you’re fine now. I’ll bet it did me a world of good,” Byron added. “Does Josephine have dry clothes for you in that bag? Yes. Then let’s get out.”
He climbed up onto the little dock, noticing with respect that he was still somehow clutching the heart.
With even more respect he saw that Byron had swum to the same dock they’d arrived at earlier in the evening. Helps to have a native guide, he thought. “Byron,” he said feelingly, “thank you for … for everything.”
The gondolier who had boated them in from the Lido was standing on the shoreward end of the dock; he had been talking to some other gondoliers, but was now staring at, and clearly recognizing, Crawford.
Crawford took back control of his body and smiled at the man, and he was wondering what he could say to make this unconventional reappearance seem mundane, when he saw Josephine hurrying toward them down the fondamenta, the sword cane and their one remaining bag still blessedly clutched in her hands.
Crawford set the heart down on the dock and then stood up and began taking off his clothes, and the gondolier shouted to several saints and took a step toward him as if intending to throw him back into the water.
Josephine’s call for him to stop was so imperious, though, that he paused; and when she had come panting up and shoved a handful of lire into his hand, he actually bowed. Crawford by this time was naked.
“Take us back to the Lido,” Crawford gasped as he opened the bag Josephine handed him and began pulling on a dry pair of trousers. When he had got them on he wrapped Shelley’s heart tightly in a shirt.
The gondolier shrugged, and waved toward the boat they’d come in on. Josephine stepped into it, followed by Crawford, who was carrying the balled-up shirt.
The gondola was expertly poled out into the water, and Crawford looked back toward the Piazza. The soldiers’ boat was still crisscrossing the water well to the west, and such soldiers as he could see on the pavement of the Piazza were looking out toward it.
The gondolier turned the boat, and now the bow faced the darkness of the lagoon, away from the lights of the city. The breeze was colder now, but Crawford didn’t even bother to dig in the bag for a shirt or jacket or shoes.
“We … goddamn … did it,” he breathed wonderingly. “Great God, my body’s a wreck!” he said helplessly then. “I suppose I’ll live, though—for a while, anyway. Now what about the eighteen hundred lire you spent, and what about the horses and carriage?” Crawford laughed in plain relief. “Byron,” he said, “I will curry your horses and mop your floors for twenty years to pay you back. I—”
He paused, staring at Josephine.
She was sitting with her legs crossed. She had got mud on her shoes at the dock, and now she dragged a finger down the sole, and stared at the resulting ball of mud on her fingertip.
Then she put her finger into her mouth and licked it clean and began scraping her sole again.
Expectant mothers, he knew, often ate odd things—it was as if their bodies knew what the growing babies needed to form themselves.
Abruptly he remembered the clay he’d seen around her mouth when she’d first appeared at the Casa Magni four nights ago—and he remembered too the uncharacteristic pain her three-month pregnancy was giving her.
For several seconds he tried to think of some explanation besides the one he knew must be the true one, and at last he had to abandon them all.
Clearly she carried more than just a human baby.
He became aware that she was looking at him, and he tried to reassume the satisfied smile he’d been wearing moments before.
She wasn’t fooled. “What is it?” she asked.
Byron repeated aloud the thought Crawford had just had. “It’s twins,” Crawford heard his own mouth say.
The gondola surged on through the dark water for a full minute while Josephine stared at the bloodstained floorboards. At last she looked up at him from eyes exhausted of tears. “I think I knew that.”
Crawford leaned forward and took her hand. In his other hand he clutched the shirt that wrapped Shelley’s heart, and he hefted it. “Shelley had a good life,” he said, forcing each word out as if it were a stone he was pushing in through the doorway of a house, “all things considered.”
Now she was sobbing, but still without tears. “What did we accomplish tonight, then?”
“We … freed you, the child’s mother,” Crawford said. “And we bought for the child at least as human a life as Shelley had, as opposed—” He paused. The effort of speaking was almost too much. “—As opposed to a life of pure … stone. We saved Byron, and his children, and Teresa. It was … a … worthwhile endeavor … on the whole.” His own throat was closing, and he turned away so that she wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes.
For a while neither of them spoke. “And all of us,” she said finally in a desolated voice, “have to flee across oceans now, or else be constantly afraid that they’ll find us again, and that we’ll eventually one night be weak enough to invite them back. And our child will be born into their … their slavery. I asked them in, for little him or her.”
She leaned back in her seat and stared up at the stars. “I suppose if you add it all up it’s a victory—of sorts—at least—for most of us,” she whispered. “But God, I wish there was a way to free people, to cut the string between our species and theirs.”
Crawford trailed the fingers of his maimed hand in the water and watched the dim silhouettes of the church domes filing silently past on the portside, and he thought about the link between the species. He mentally re-heard conversations he’d had with Shelley and Byron and Villon.
And at last he took a deep breath and said, “I think there may be.” He turned around to face the gondolier. “Take us back to the Piazza, please.”
“No!” he shouted a moment later in Byron’s unmistakable tones. “No, onward to the Lido. Aickman, listen to me—as soon as the Austrians realize the eye is gone, they’ll just cut somebody’s head off in the Piazza, and the blood will work as an eye. If Josephine is there she’ll be seen, she’ll be back in the net.”
Crawford took back control of his throat. “I’m not going to bring Josephine along. She won’t step out of the gondola, so she shouldn’t be visible to her vampire even if they have already done the blood trick. And I wasn’t in their net even before we took the eye, so it’s no danger to me.” He turned and spoke to the gondolier. “Take us back to the Piazza, please.”