“No, my friend, believe me, patience is all that’s required,” Byron said softly, taking Crawford’s left elbow and leading him toward the doors. “I can assure you that if you’ll only wait, the world will flay you much more thoroughly than you ever could yourself.”
Back inside, Byron tossed the foil onto a couch and poured wine into two fresh glasses. A couple of dogs wandered into the high-ceilinged room, followed after a moment by one of Byron’s tame monkeys; neither man paid them any attention, and the animals began tossing couch pillows around.
“What were you punishing yourself for?” Byron asked Crawford in a conversational tone as he handed him a glass.
Crawford took it in his right hand, and blood quickly slicked the base and ran unnoticed down his sleeve. He considered the question as he drank. “Deaths I did nothing to prevent,” he said finally.
Byron grinned, but in such a fellow-soldierly way that Crawford couldn’t take offense. “People close to you?”
“Brother … wife … and wife.” Crawford took a deep, ragged breath. “I tell you, seeing that thing, that vampire, recede … is like watching a tide recede from some evil waterfront. All the horrible old skeletons and wrecks and deformed creatures are exposed to the sun and the air, and you would rather have drowned in the high tide—than lived to see these terrible things again.”
“You’re a fugitive?”
Crawford considered lying, but then decided that sometimes one fugitive could trust another. He nodded.
“And a genuine doctor?”
Crawford nodded again. “The veterinary story, the whole Michael Aickman identity, is … a pose. My real name is—”
Byron shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”
The monkey had snatched both of the cushions and climbed up onto the back of the couch, to the noisy outrage of the dogs. A tall, burly man strode into the room, saw the disturbance and crossed to the couch.
“Damn it, Byron, you’re running a bestial pandemonium here!” he called, having to speak loudly because the monkey was protesting his attempts to take the cushions away.
“That’s old news, Hobby,” replied Byron. “Ask any of the tourists at the d’Angleterre.” He limped back to the table and poured a third glass and held it out to the newcomer. “This is my new medical man, by the way—Michael, this is John Cam Hobhouse—John, Michael Aickman.”
“Got rid of that idiot Polidori, did you? Good work.” Hobhouse pried both cushions out of the monkey’s grip and pitched them through the open doorway. The animals all scrambled after them in a rush, and the room was suddenly quieter. He took the glass and sat down on the couch and stared at Crawford. “Do you write poetry? Dramas?”
The question surprised Crawford, for during the past couple of months he had found himself composing verses in his head—it always happened at night, while he was waiting for sleep to take him, and it was always as involuntary as the jerking of a limb during a dream of falling; but he hadn’t written any of the verses down, so he shook his head. “Not me.”
“Thank God.”
“Hobhouse has always been a steadying influence on me,” said Byron. “He kept me out of scandals when we were adolescents at Cambridge, and two weeks ago he came here all the way from England just to chase Claire Clairmont away.”
Hobhouse laughed. “I’m honored if my arrival had that effect.”
“Hobby was even groomsman at my wedding, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that I turned out to be marrying a modern Clytemnestra.”
Crawford recalled that, in Aeschylus’s Orestia, Clytemnestra had been the wife and murderess of Agamemnon. “Some of us just shouldn’t attempt marriage,” he said with a smile.
Byron looked at him sharply. After a moment he said, “I’m about ready to leave Switzerland … move on south to Italy. How does that sound to you?”
The idea made Crawford obscurely uncomfortable, as Byron seemed to have known it would. “I … don’t know,” Crawford said. He glanced through the window into the night. I can’t, had been his first thought; this is where she’ll come looking for me, when she comes back.
His face reddened as he realized it, and he reminded himself that he wanted to be rid of her—wanted, as a matter of fact, to stay here for a while to test Byron’s idea that the nephelim shackles could be shaken off in the high Alps.
“But before we go,” Byron went on, “I want to take a tour of the Bernese Alps. I spent a day on Mont Blanc recently with Hobhouse and another friend, but I don’t yet feel that I’ve really made the … beneficial acquaintance of these mountains.” He winked at Crawford, as though to imply that there was a meaning in his words that was for Crawford alone. “Hobhouse tells me he’s free to come along for the trip—are you?”
Crawford exhaled with relief. “Yes,” he said, trying to sound casual.
Byron nodded. “You’re wiser than Shelley. I think the only way to be quit of the sirens is to answer the call, go right up into their pre-Adamite castles, and then by the grace of God come back down alive and sane. To go back without having done that is to … come to terms with an illness, rather than get a cure.”
Hobhouse snorted impatiently at what he clearly considered to be a snatch of poetic nonsense—but Crawford, who knew something about illness and cures, shivered and gulped his wine.
CHAPTER 9
The stones are sealed across their places;
One shadow is shed on all their faces,
One blindness cast on all their eyes.
—A. C. Swinburne, Ilicet
The rain continued throughout the next day, and it seemed to Crawford that Byron spent most of the day limping up and down the damp stone stairs and shouting at people; the irascible lord found fault with the way the servants were packing his clothes, and he kept changing his mind about what dainties he wanted the cook to stock the travelling-basket with and, having splashed through the courtyard to the stables, he swore aloud at the grooms’ perverse inability to grasp his instructions about how the horses should be harnessed.
Crawford, who had encountered such masters on shipboard, expected to see in the servants’ faces the resentful stubbornness that promised slow and minimal work, but Byron’s servants just rolled their eyes and grinned and tried to follow their employer’s most recent instructions; clearly Byron inspired at least as much loyalty as irritation among them.
The following morning dawned sunny, and the touring party managed to set out at seven o’clock. Crawford sat with Byron and Hobhouse and Byron’s valet in a big, open charabanc carriage, rocking sleepily on the cold leather upholstery and blinking back through the dappled sunlight at the grooms and servants who were bringing along the saddle horses. Crawford was glad the monkey had been left behind with the house staff.
All day they travelled eastward along the road that skirted the north shore of the lake, and when dusk had claimed all of the landscape except the distant rose-lit peaks of Mont Blanc and the Aiguille d’Argentière, they stopped for the night at an inn in the port village of Ouchy, just below the blocked-out piece of sky where the lights and spires of Lausanne fretted the slope of Mont Jurat.
Byron retired early, but the sheets on his bed proved to be damp, and he spent ten minutes swearing and stripping them off and flinging them around before he finally wrapped himself up in a blanket and returned to bed.
The company was up, if grumbling, at five the next morning, and they were all dressed and fed and mounted and clattering away eastward while the workmen around the quay were still shovelling up frozen horse-droppings in the shadows of dawn; and only the highest pastures had begun to glow emerald in the peak-descending sunlight when the travellers, who had been aware of the dark face of the lake edging higher and higher up the embankment at their right, found the road ahead of them sheened with water, so that the trees bordering the right side of it seemed to have grown up out of the lake in single file, a sunrise phenomenon as wondrous as the rings of mushrooms Crawford remembered finding on dewy lawns when he was a boy in Scotland. To make the carriage lighter in case a wheel should find a submerged pothole, Crawford and Byron and Hobhouse got out and rode horses, and the horses’ hooves, splashing in the fetlock-deep water, made a wake that stretched far out across the brightening lake.