Though mystified, Crawford nodded. “Got you. Break the necklace.” He dipped a toe into the water and winced at the chill. “You’re … getting divorced?”
“That’s the ceremony I want you to perform,” des Loges told him. “It shouldn’t be any problem. I’m a frail old man, and anyway I promise not to struggle.”
“Do I have to get in the water?”
Des Loges rolled his eyes. “Of course you’ve got to get in the water! How are you going to drown me if you don’t get in the water?”
Crawford grinned. “Drown you. Indeed. Listen, I—” Glancing at the necklace-bordered stone, he realized that it had a square base—and there had been a square dent in the ground where des Loges had said his wife always sat. “How does this divorce work?” he asked unsteadily.
Des Loges was watching the tide anxiously. “You drown me. It’s just a token killing, really—suicide won’t work, you see. Accident or murder only, and with the wife,” he waved toward the stone, “incapacitated. And it has to be you—I knew it had to be you when I first heard you were on your way—because you’re married into the family. They won’t interfere with you; anybody else they could stop, or at least visit vengeance upon.”
Crawford was reeling, and had to kneel down. “That rock, there, in the water by you. Are you trying to—is that your—”
“Brizeux has no family, no children!” des Loges shouted. “There’s no one at stake but he and I, and we know what we’re doing. For God’s sake, the tide’s going out—hurry! You promised!”
As if to give Crawford a head start, the old man bent over and shoved his own face into the water; and with his four-fingered hand he beckoned furiously.
Crawford looked again at the sunken pyramid … and a voice in his head said, No. Getaway.
Crawford turned and ran, as fast as his stiff legs could propel him, east—toward Anjou, and Bourbonnais and, somewhere beyond, Switzerland.
CHAPTER 7
I said “she must be swift and white
And subtly warm and half perverse
And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,
And like a snake’s love lithe and fierce.”
Men have guessed worse.
—A. C. Swinburne, Felise
And always, night and day, he was in the mountains,
and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.
—Mark 5:5
Like the fingers of a vast, invisible harpist, high-altitude winds were drawing plumes of snow from the top of distant Mont Blanc and casting them out across the whole southwest quarter of the sky; and in spite of the sunlight that raised steam from the slate roofs of the riegelhausen around him and made him carry his coat instead of wear it, Crawford shivered with something like sympathy as he watched the faraway mountain, and for a moment he could vividly imagine how these Geneva streets would look from the viewpoint of a person with a telescope on the summit.
Blue sky glittered in the puddles of rainwater between the cobblestones underfoot, and in the west a rainbow spanned the whole valley between Geneva and the Monts du Jura. Looking down from the too bright sky, Crawford saw a young woman approaching him hesitantly from across the street.
Though her fair hair and lace-trimmed red bonnet implied that she was a native, her pallid beauty seemed suited to some less sunny land, and her sick smile was jarring among these gaily painted housefronts—it seemed to Crawford to be somehow fearfully eager, like the smile of an unworldly person loitering around a foreign waterfront in the hope of selling stolen property or hiring a murderer.
“L’arc-en-ciel,” she said hoarsely, nodding over her shoulder at the rainbow but not looking at it. “The token of God’s covenant to Noah, hmm? You look, pardon me, like a man who knows the way around it.”
Crawford assumed she was a prostitute—the Hôtel d’Angleterre was just ahead, after all, and no doubt many of the English tourists who could afford to stay there would appreciate a girl who didn’t require the services of an interpreter—and he was chagrined, but not very surprised, to realize that he was not tempted to take her upstairs somewhere. He had just spent a full month in traversing France, and never during that time, even when he was working alongside very healthy young girls in the vineyards, had he felt any stirring of erotic interest. Perhaps the death of his wife was still too recent … or perhaps his intensely sexual dreams, the near nightmares that plagued him and left him drained and fevered in the mornings, were leaving him no energy for the pursuit of real women.
But before he could reply to her ambiguous remark, there was a scuffling on the side of the street she’d come from.
“It’s that damned atheist, let him lie,” a gruff man’s voice called, and then a girl cried, “A doctor, someone go for a doctor!”
Crawford automatically pushed the young woman aside and loped past her across the street.
“I’m a doctor, let me through,” he said loudly, shoving his weathered but newly bought portmanteau between the people who were clustered in a rough semicircle against the wall of a tavern. They backed away to let him in, and at the focus of the crowd he found a frail-looking youth lying unconscious on the stones, his wispy blond hair clinging damply to his forehead.
“He started talking crazily, wildly,” said a girl who was crouched beside him, “and then he simply fell over.” Crawford realized that she was the one who had called for a doctor. She was English, and idly he noted that he would once have found her, too, attractive, though in contrast to the Swiss girl she was dark-haired and plump.
He got down on one knee and felt the young man’s pulse. It was rapid and weak. “It looks like sunstroke,” he snapped. “Got to get the temperature back down. Get me wet cloths—anything, a sail … curtains, a cloak—and something to fan him with.”
A couple of people ran away, presumably to get the wet cloths, and Crawford pulled off the unconscious man’s jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. A moment later he had peeled it off too, and he tossed both garments over his shoulder. “Soak up some rainwater with these,” he yelled, “and give them back to me.”
Crawford stood up then and began flapping his own coat back and forth over the thin torso. It occurred to him that this young man resembled someone he’d met recently.
“Wasting your time, my good man,” said one foppishly dressed Englishman cheerfully. “That’s Shelley the atheist. Let him die and the world’s a better place.”
Crawford was about to say something about the Hippocratic Oath, but another man had just limped up from the direction of the hotel, and this new arrival swung around to give the tourist a frigid smile. “Shelley is a friend of mine,” he said tightly. “If you have friends, perhaps you would be so kind as to have one of them arrange a time when you and I can meet somewhere at your convenience and … reason with each other?”
“Good God,” muttered someone in the crowd, “it’s Byron.”
Crawford, still flapping his coat, glanced over at the newcomer. He did seem to resemble the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as the drawings in the London papers had portrayed him—with a moody but classically handsome face under a wind-tossed mane of dark curls. Crawford had vaguely heard that the man had left England, but he hadn’t known he had come to Switzerland. And who was this “atheist” Shelley?
The English tourist’s face was dark and he was looking away, back toward the hotel. “I … apologize,” he muttered, then turned and stalked off.