The blond young woman who’d talked to Crawford about the rainbow came hobbling over with a blanket and a bucket of water—and before she let Crawford dunk the blanket she shook into the water a handful of what seemed to be white sand. “Salt,” she said impatiently, as if Crawford should have thought of it himself. “It makes the water a better conductor of electricity.”
Byron seemed startled by the remark, and looked more closely at her.
“Great, thank you,” Crawford said, too busy to bother with her odd remark. He balled up the blanket and plunged it into the water, and then draped the sodden fabric over Shelley’s thin frame—noting, as he tucked it around him, a wide, corrugated scar on the young man’s side, below the prominent ribs. One of the ribs, in fact, seemed to be missing.
The English girl who had called for a doctor smiled up at Crawford. “You must have been a ship’s surgeon,” she said, “to have instinctively called for a sail.”
Both Byron and Crawford looked at her uncomfortably.
“Oh, hello, Claire,” said Byron. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Yes,” Crawford put in shortly. “I was in the Navy in my youth.”
Just then another man came bustling up. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “I’m a physician, let me pass.”
“The situation’s well in hand, Pollydolly,” said Byron. “It seems Shelley has had a sunstroke.”
“According to whose diagnosis?” The man with the implausible name glared around at the crowd and then focussed on Crawford. Crawford noticed that he was young—in his twenties, probably, and trying to hide the fact behind his ostentatious moustache and blustery manner. “Yours, sir?”
“Yes,” said Crawford, “I’m a surgeon—”
“A barber, that is to say.” The newcomer smirked. “Well! While I won’t deny that Shelley could benefit from the services of—of one of your trade, I can’t applaud your—your methods of—”
“Oh, save it, Polly,” interrupted Byron. “This man seems to be doing fine—look, Shelley’s coming around now.”
The young man on the pavement had half sat up, and was hugging Claire; he hadn’t yet opened his eyes. “Her conscious tail her joy declared,” he said in a thin, high voice, obviously reciting something; “the fair round face, the snowy beard, the velvet of her paws, her coat that with the tortoise vies …”
Obviously embarrassed for his friend, Byron laughed. “That’s from Thomas Gray’s poem about the favorite cat that drowned in a tub of goldfish. Here, let’s see if we can’t get him up—”
“Mommee!” Shelley yelled suddenly. “It wasn’t Daddy, it was the tortoise-thing from the pond! You must have known, even if it did make itself look like him! It lives in the pond, in Warnham Pond….” His eyes flew open then, and he blinked around without evident recognition at the faces over him. Crawford and the thin, sick-looking young woman were standing next to each other, and Shelley’s gaze stayed on them for a moment, then darted away.
Warnham, Crawford was thinking. That’s where I lost my wedding ring.
Byron grabbed Shelley under the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Can you walk, Shelley? Here’s your coat, though some helpful soul has mopped the street with it. Sir,” he added, turning to Crawford, “we’re in your debt. I’m staying at the Villa Diodati, just north along this shore of the lake, and the Shelleys are my neighbors—do visit us, especially if … if we can be of any aid to a fellow traveller.”
Byron and Claire each took one of Shelley’s arms and led him away, and the physician with the ludicrous name followed, after shooting Crawford a baleful squint. Crawford again noticed that Byron was limping, and now he remembered reading that the young lord was lame—clubfooted.
The crowd was dispersing, and Crawford found himself walking beside the thin girl who had asked him if he knew a way around rainbows. “Sometimes they appear to be reptiles,” she remarked, as casually as if she were resuming a conversation.
Crawford was worrying about having admitted to being a surgeon and onetime Navy man. “I daresay,” he answered absently.
“I mean, I’m certain it wasn’t really a tortoise.”
“I suppose that is unlikely,” he agreed.
“My name is Lisa,” she said.
“Michael.”
She rocked her head dreamily, and Crawford noticed her high cheekbones and large, dark eyes, and he was again sourly aware of how attractive he would once have found her.
“Have you ever seen one that regal?” she asked him softly. “His mother was damned fortunate. The closest to real love I ever had was the hand of a statue…. I lived with it for years, but then I became anemic, and people noticed that I couldn’t be out in the sun anymore, and so the priests came with the salted holy water and killed it. I suppose I’m grateful—I’d certainly be dead today if they hadn’t—but I still look for rocks on the slopes of the mountains.”
“The hand of a statue,” echoed Crawford, thinking again about Warnham.
“I was luckier than most,” she said, nodding as if in agreement. She glanced at him shyly and licked her lips. “Have you brought with you any …” She blushed, then went on in a lower voice, “… any loaves of St. Stephen? We could, you and I could, be together through them—” She took his hand and drew it across her cheek, then kissed the palm; the gesture seemed forced, but for a moment he had felt the hot, wet tip of her tongue. “—we could share in their interest in us, Michael, and at least be interested in each other that way….”
Crawford realized that this was what Keats had told him about, and had something to do with what des Loges had wanted him to do; and he admitted to himself that he recognized the same ill glitter in Lisa’s eyes that he had seen in the eyes of Keats and that government clerk, Brizeux—he would have to study his own face in a mirror sometime.
“I’m sorry,” he told her gently. “I don’t have anything.”
“Oh.” She dropped his hand, though she kept walking beside him. “You have had recently, though—you shine with it like ignis fatui, will-o'-the-wisps, over a stagnant pond.”
He glanced sharply at her, but she was looking listlessly ahead and seemed to have meant no offense.
“Maybe you could come to the mountains with me sometime and look for rocks,” she said, beginning to draw away from him. “I know a couple of high places where landslides have exposed the metal, that silvery metal that’s as light as wood, and we could check all the rocks nearby, for live pieces.”
He nodded and waved as she receded into the crowd. “Sounds like fun,” he said helplessly.
Visits to a few of the nearby hotels and inns convinced him that he couldn’t afford to lodge within Geneva’s walls, so he took a coach through the villages northward along Lake Leman’s east shore; and in one of them he found a room for rent in a sixteenth-century log house, the windows of which looked down over narrow lanes to a beach grooved by the keels of the fishing boats that had been dragged from there down to the lake that morning.
He slept until dark, and then spent most of the night staring out across the lake at the remote, sky-banishing blackness that was the Jura; sometimes he turned to face the northeast corner of his room and, beyond the panelling, beyond the house and the hills of the Chablais and the Rhône River, he could sense the separate majesties of the Bernese Alps far away in the night—Mönch, the Eiger, and the Jungfrau.
Some time after midnight the sky began slowly to ripple and gleam in vast curtains like the Aurora Borealis, and the stars went out; the massed trees around the lake began to shine faintly, and for just a few moments, like someone who hears a distant music when the wind is right, he thought he could feel through his heels the reverberations of a long-ongoing litany from the very heart of the stony earth. He slept, and dreamed of the cold woman again.