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Trelawny had asked her to marry him in about 1830, but by then the authoress of Frankenstein had already begun to settle into the inertia that was to characterize the remainder of her life, and she had refused him.

Trelawny had followed Byron to Greece after Shelley’s death and, after Byron had died there of swamp-fever while trying to organize an army to drive out the Turkish invaders, Trelawny had stayed on for a while as a sort of mercenary-adventurer. Later he had gone to America, where he swam the Niagara River within hearing distance of the Falls, and Crawford had heard that he had returned to England and got involved with a married woman and was now living in Monmouthshire.

Crawford had often thought of Byron, who had died in 1824. Crawford and Josephine had not seen him again after the Venice adventure—they had meant to look him up and thank him, but then he had died in Missolonghi at the age of thirty-six, and it had been too late.

“I’m sorry,” said Crawford, “what did you say?”

“I said,” John told him patiently, “did you know Shelley too?”

“Yes. And Byron, and Keats. You’re named after Keats, incidentally, I doubt that we ever told you. And it all started,” he said, waving his glass at the grassy yard, “here.” He put the glass down and massaged his left hand; perhaps because of the maimed fingers, it had begun aching lately. The whole arm ached, all the way up to the shoulder.

Josephine refilled all three glasses. “Go ahead,” she said.

* * *

The sun was low in the west by the time he had finished the story, and the long grass was streaked with the shadows of the old oaks that bordered the yard.

John was shaking his head. “And did the … did this Werner person … what happened to him?”

Crawford grinned. “We kept track of the news from Venice for a while, after that, after we’d left. A week later there was a report of a couple of rooms collapsing in the Doge’s Palace. It was blamed on structural weakening caused by the earthquakes.”

“A week later?” John asked.

“Your father’s a good surgeon,” Josephine said.

“So … so he never did find his statue, or any statue, and get to renew the overlap.” John’s voice was quiet—he might doubt all this eventually, but clearly he was accepting it now.

“Apparently not,” Josephine said. “But the … potentiality is always out there.”

“That’s why you two were always warning me against inviting strangers into the house.”

“Right, John,” said Crawford. “And I trust you’ve done what we’ve said, and passed the advice on to your own children.”

“Well, yes, I just—never quite—knew the whole extent of why.”

Crawford finished his wine. “You do now, son.”

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

Somehow he could still see the yard, the trees and the grass … but it couldn’t be the yard of the inn at Warnham, for he could see for miles, across a valley, on the floor of which stood hundreds of tall stones, and he was pulling a wagon in which sat a wickedly grinning old man, older by far than even himself, and the old man was singing a French song with a merry tune but sad lyrics….

Keats, young and healthy again, was riding a horse past them. He waved as he passed, and Crawford thought there was gratitude in the look he flashed to him as he galloped away.

And Byron was there, his hair still more dark than gray. The lord was smiling as he raised a smoking pistol, for his shot had punched the coin far out over the maremma. “Our poor children,” Byron said.

Shelley was farther away. Perhaps he was looking for the coin Byron had shot at, for he was walking aimlessly through the grass—but it wasn’t the saw-grass of the maremma—he was in a garden, and Crawford knew he was looking for himself, for his own image.

Somewhere out in these meadows Crawford knew that he would find Josephine again, eventually. He knew he would find her … he always had before.

He stepped forward, not limping now, and strode off after his friends.

The sun was red and low now, and the yard was in shadow.

* * *

“Wait for us inside, would you, John?” said Josephine softly as she stroked Crawford’s limp hand. “We’ll both be … ready to go soon now.”

Their son stood up and walked back into the inn, and Josephine held her husband’s still-warm hand and listened to her own heartbeat. “Don’t stray far, Michael,” she said softly. “I know you can’t do it without help.”

She leaned back in her chair and breathed the evening air deeply, still holding Crawford’s hand. “Two times two is four,” she said dreamily. “Two times three is six. Two times four is eight. Two times five is ten …”

After a while the litany faded into silence, and stars began to appear in the darkening sky. Until John came out again there was no sound in the yard—no frogs called, no insects sang, the tree branches stood silent, and no breath disturbed the motionless air.