At dusk a wind from the mountains brought rain, and the rattle of it in the drainpipes woke her up. The room was dark and the curtains were flapping against the dark sky—
—And she couldn’t remember who she was.
She was empty, a staring-eyed vacuum, and it was horrible. Dimly her body knew that there were several personalities who inhabited its head from time to time, and now it wanted one of them, any one of them, to appear; the throat buzzed with a sort of beseeching whimper … and suddenly, as if it was a gift from outside itself, the body had grateful access to language.
“Come,” it croaked. “Come in. I’m open to you. I need you.”
Personality animated the body then—she was Julia again, but she was worried about this new development. Would this recur, this blankness? And could she count on it always being the Julia personality who would step in to fill the vacancy? Would it—
“Good evening, Julia,” came a soft voice from the window side of the room.
She whirled in that direction with a gasp, and saw a bulky silhouette against the emerging stars; and she knew instantly that the Julia personality had not been the only entity that had responded to her body’s desperate invitation.
Oddly, she wasn’t frightened. “Good evening,” she said hesitantly. “Can I … light the lamp?”
The figure chuckled—from its voice she knew it was masculine. “Of course.”
She opened her tinderbox and struck the flint and steel over the lamp’s wick, and yellow light grew and filled the room. She turned around to face her visitor.
He was a big, burly man with a prominent nose, and he was dressed, astonishingly, in the most formal court habit—a purple frockcoat with gold embroidery, a jabot and cravat, white silk stockings and black pumps. Awed, she curtsied.
He bowed and crossed to her, and though he limped, and winced when he reached out for her hand, his eyes were kind when he lifted her hand to his full lips.
“I can help you,” he said, still holding her hand, “with … what you’re here for. I can lead you to the man you want to find. He was protected against you before, but his protector is in another country now.” He shook his head; the motion seemed to hurt him, and Josephine saw red lines like veins or cracks on the skin of his neck. “I wasn’t going to disobey her, and hurt him—I just wanted to look at him—but he and his friend hurt me, terribly. So I’ll help you.”
He released her hand and limped across to the bed and lay down on it. Julia looked at the hand he’d kissed, and realized that the new sheets were fated to go the way of the first set, for blood was dripping energetically from a bite on the knuckles.
Her heart was hammering in her breast, and before she went to join him she turned away to catch her breath. The lamplight had grown brighter, and had made a dark mirror of the window panes, but she had been avoiding looking at her own reflection ever since her identity had started to become fragile two months ago, so she pulled the curtains across the glass. She didn’t notice that, in the reflection, she was alone in the room except for a fragment of broken statuary on the bed.
CHAPTER 10
We talk of Ghosts; neither Lord Byron or M. G. L[ewis]
seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very
face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without
also believing in God. I do not think that all the persons
who profess to discredit these visitations really discredit
them, or, if they do in the daylight, are not admonished
by the approach of loneliness and midnight to think more
respectably of the world of shadows.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley,
17 July 1816
For the next two days Byron’s touring party moved uneventfully east through the Enhault and Simmenthal valleys, and on Sunday the twenty-second of September they crossed the Lake of Thoun to Neuhause and then resumed the horses and carriage for the fourteen-mile trip east through Interlaken and south to the village of Wengen, which lay at the foot of the range that included the Kleine Scheidegg, the Wengern, and beyond them, the more than cloud tall Jungfrau.
The sky was darkening and overcast by the time they found rooms at the house of the local curate, but Byron insisted on saddling a horse and going for a closer look at the mountains while there was still any light at all, and so Hobhouse, Crawford and a guide mounted up to accompany him.
From the cobblestoned road outside the vicarage they could see a waterfall bisecting the dark wall of the mountains, seeming to be more cloud than water in the distance; the slowly swaying column stood nearly a thousand feet from its mist-hidden base to its skyey source, and Byron shuddered and said it looked like the tail of the pale horse on which death is mounted in the Apocalypse. With that observation he galloped away up the road, leaving the other three to follow.
Rain swept over them after they’d gone only a few miles, but it wasn’t until the thunder began frightening the horses that Byron would listen to Hobhouse’s demands that they turn around.
Byron was in a wild mood, and because the man was his patient Crawford rode beside him. Byron was waving his cane over his head—which alarmed Crawford, for it was a new sword cane, and Byron had refused to let the guide carry it for fear that it might draw lightning—and he was shouting verses into the rain.
Twice Crawford recognized phrases he had heard in his dreams.
Hobhouse’s cloak turned out to be anything but waterproof, and so they left him in a cottage and rode on toward the curate’s house to get a man to bring him back an umbrella and a stauncher cloak.
A flare of lightning lit the valley at the same instant that thunder cannoned against the mountains, and Byron stood up in the stirrups to brandish his cane at the sky. He looked across at Crawford and laughed to see him cringing in his saddle.
“Tomorrow we’ll climb to the peaks, never mind what the weather is,” Byron yelled over the rain. After a moment he added, “Do you believe in God, Aickman?”
Crawford shrugged miserably; his own cloak was not much better than Hobhouse’s. “I don’t know,” he called back. “Do you?”
Byron settled back onto the saddle. “I’m a speculator with option to buy,” he said. “But I can’t see how … I mean, can there be supernatural phenomena without there being, too, a God?—In the absence of any God?”
Crawford bleakly reviewed the course of his own life, especially the last two months of it. “I’m afraid,” he called finally, not at all happy with the answer he had come to, “that the more absences there are, the more things are possible. And so if there’s an absence the size of God, then there probably isn’t anything so appalling that we can count on not meeting it.”
His statement seemed to sober Byron. “It’s just as well you chose to disguise yourself as a veterinarian, Aickman,” he called through the rain. “You’d have made an alarming philosopher.” He spurred his horse and rode on, leading the way back to the curate’s house.
The figure silhouetted against the yellow light from the open door proved to be the curate himself, and when the travellers had dismounted he curtly asked to see Byron and Crawford alone in his room.
“Some problem about the fee, I expect,” muttered Byron as the two of them hung up their wet cloaks and followed the old man up the stairs; but Crawford had seen the look of distaste and sorrow on the lean, wrinkled face, and he wondered if they were all simply going to be thrown out, as he had been from the rooming house near Geneva eight days ago.