He marched them down the length of the south face of the palace, with the broad waters of the Canale di San Marco stretching away a quarter of a mile wide on their right, and just at the foot of the Ponte della Paglia he pushed them to the left, away from the stairs and between two of the pillars of the palace. Ahead lay the canal into which Carlo had jumped earlier, and Crawford saw a gondolier waiting for them with one foot up on the pavement and the other on the stern of his narrow craft.
“The Austrians are in confusion,” their guide said tersely, “and the guards of their secret king have gone mad. We are grateful to you.” He gave them one last forward shove. “But don’t ever come back to Venice,” he added.
Crawford looked up, and belatedly realized what his guide had been referring to, a minute earlier—above the pillars at this southeast corner of the building was a sculpture of Noah reeling below a grapevine, spilling wine from a cup and about to lose the robe that was loosely bunched around his waist.
As he and Josephine climbed into the gondola he kept his eyes on poor Noah, who, it seemed to Crawford, had had every excuse to get drunk and lose his trousers, after having piloted the entirety of organic life to safety.
Crawford uncapped his flask and passed it to Josephine as the gondolier cast off, and when she handed it back he raised it to Noah and then drained off the swallow of brandy that was left. The Bridge of Sighs was behind him, but he looked ahead, toward where the towers and domes of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore rose against the night.
When they were well out on the water, and the gondolier had begun to lean into the oar to turn them east toward the lagoon, Crawford fumbled Shelley’s shirt-wrapped heart out of Josephine’s bag. He whispered a prayer to the splintered, weathered head of Christ, and then leaned across the gunwale and held the charred-smelling, flapping thing at arm’s length out over the dark water.
Nothing disturbed the calm skin of the water but the faintly reflecting points of jellyfish hanging like pale splashes of milk at the surface, and the ripple of the boat’s wake sweeping out to both sides behind them in the starlight.
When the low waves cast by the knife-narrow prow had eclipsed the whole of the ancient city in their skirt, and no slightest swirl gave evidence of the third sister moving below, he sat back and tucked the heart into the bag.
The nephelim were dormant again, for the first time in eight hundred years.
He put his arm around Josephine, and she laid her head on his shoulder and slept.
My illness is quite gone—it was only at Lerici—on the fourth night, I had got a little sleep and was so wearied that though there were three slight shocks of an Earthquake that frightened the whole town into the Streets—neither they nor the tumult awakened me…. There seem to have been all kinds of tempests all over the Globe—and for my part it would not surprise me—if the earth should get a little tired of the tyrants and slaves who disturb her surface.
—Lord Byron, to Augusta Leigh,
7 November 1822
EPILOGUE: WARNHAM, 1851
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
–T. S. Eliot
“Italians?” echoed Lucy, pausing, her polishing-cloth suspended an inch above the worn surface of the bar. “I can’t do nothing about Italians.”
“They speak English,” the innkeeper told her. “And their address is in London. All they want is some wine to drink on the back porch before supper. Do you think you could …?”
Lucy had resumed her polishing. “Italian men? I hear they’re as bad as sailors. They’d better not get fancy with me.”
It was a token objection; though she was still slim, Lucy was in her fifties, and her face was scored by decades of hard work.
“It’s a very old couple and their son. They’re not wanting to get drunk, Lucy, just-”
“Oh, very well.” She put down her cloth and set a bottle of claret and a corkscrew and three glasses on a tray. “But the new girl can do the cleaning up tonight.”
“Certainly, certainly,” agreed the innkeeper.
Lucy walked around from behind the bar, picked up the tray, and walked out of the taproom.
Ahead of her was the oak staircase that led up to the rooms; she turned left at the foot of it and walked through the spare dining room to the back door; holding the tray in one hand, she pulled the door open and stepped out onto the porch, where her three customers were sitting at a little table in the shade.
The son was about thirty. He didn’t look Italian at all—his hair was brown and straight, combed back off his forehead, and his eyes were pale blue. His smile as she set out the bottle and glasses was only polite.
“Thank you,” he said, and there was a trace of an accent in his voice.
She turned to the old couple.
They really were old. The man was bald except for a short fringe of white hair above his ears, and his face was as dark and seamed as a piece of oiled driftwood. A stout, worn walking stick hung on the arm of his chair, and Lucy imagined that when he gripped it, his brown, gnarled hand must seem to be part of the stick.
His wife’s hair was gray. She just kept her eyes on Lucy’s hands as the old barmaid twisted the corkscrew into the neck of the bottle, but a smile deepened the lines in her lean face, and seemed to indicate the cause of many of the lines.
When Lucy had poured wine into the three glasses, the old man raised his glass, in a hand that was missing at least one finger.
“Thank you, Lucy,” he said.
Crawford sipped at the wine and looked out over the inn’s backyard. The leaves on the trees glowed green and gold with the noon sun over them, and he tried to imagine that he was thirty-five again, and that Boyd and Appleton would shortly be emerging from the door behind him.
He couldn’t imagine it.
The far end of the yard was a peach orchard now—God knew when the old carriages had been dragged away. He wondered if the ancient carved pavement he’d tripped on in the rain thirty-five years ago was still out there. He didn’t care to go and find out.
John was looking at him uneasily. They’d taken the London-and-Brighton train south as far as Crawley, and then hired a carriage-ride west to Warnham, and John wanted to be back in London tonight to see his own wife and children.
“So,” John said, “here we are, wherever this is, exactly. You two wanted to tell me …?”
“How your father and I met,” said Josephine. “How you were conceived, and how we got married.”
John blinked. “I … always thought you … would never bring it up. I thought you didn’t … that it wasn’t a story you wanted to tell.”
“Mary Shelley died last month,” said Crawford, “and so our promise to her is finally voided. And Percy Florence Shelley is Sir Percy now, and I don’t think he’s even aware of the truth about his father.” Crawford laughed, exposing uneven teeth. “I can’t imagine that he believes it, even if he’s been told.”
And you probably won’t believe it yourself, John, he thought; but I owe it to you—and to your children—to tell you anyway.
“Mary Shelley?” said John. “The wife of Percy Shelley? You knew her?”
“Yes.”
Crawford sipped his wine and thought about Mary Shelley. He had given her Shelley’s heart, which had still contained the eye of the Graiae, in ajar of brandy, and she had kept it all her life; and he had wondered sometimes if the eye was still dimly able to cast its static, determinist field, for Mary had subsequently lost all the spirited spontaneity that had drawn Shelley to her so long ago. Her writing had slowed down and become more formal and stilted, and she’d seen fewer and fewer people as the years went by, and he had heard that before her death she had lain motionless and silent for ten days.