For a moment Shelley just held onto the rail; then his shoulders slumped, and he nodded; and though he snatched the floating bucket and scrambled to help, Byron thought he looked rueful and a little ashamed, like a man who finds his own willpower to be frailer than he had supposed.
For the next several minutes the four men worked furiously, sweating and gasping as they hauled up bucketful after bucketful of water and flung it back into the lake, and the man working the sail had, by swinging the boom way out to starboard, managed to get at least a faint surge of headway in spite of the loss of the rudder. And the wind was losing its fury.
Byron risked pausing for a moment. “I—was wrong in my—estimation of your courage,” he panted. “I apologize.”
“Quite all right,” Shelley gasped, stooping to refill his bucket. He dumped it over the gunwale and then collapsed on one of the benches. “I overestimated my grasp of science.” He coughed, rackingly enough to make Byron wonder if he was consumptive. “I recently eluded one of those creatures and left it behind in England—it’s practically impossible for them to cross water, and the English Channel is a nice quantity of that—but somehow it didn’t occur to me that I might run across more of them here … much less that they’d … know me.”
He hefted his bucket. “Switzerland especially,” he went on, “I had thought, would be free of them—the higher altitude—but I think now that what drew me here to the Alps is the same … is the recognition … that this is … I don’t know. Now I don’t think I could have fled to a more perilous place.” He dragged his bucket through the water, now shin deep, and then got to his feet and hoisted the bucket up onto the rail. Before dumping it he nodded around at the Alpine peaks ringing the lake. “They do call, though, don’t they?”
The laboring boat had rounded the point, and ahead they could see the beach of St. Gingoux, and people on the shore waving to them.
Byron poured out one more bucketful of water and then tossed the bucket aside. The cloud had passed, and looking south to the Rhône Valley he could see sunlight glittering on the distant peaks of the Dents du Midi. “Yes,” he said softly. “They do call. In a certain voice, which a certain sort of person can hear … not to his benefit, I believe.” He shook his head wearily. “I wonder who else is answering that particular siren song.”
Shelley smiled and, perhaps thinking of their recent emergency, quoted from the same play his wife and Byron had been quoting four days ago. “I suppose it’s many another who is ‘like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.'”
Byron blinked at him, once again not sure what to make of what he said. “'Many another'?” he said irritably. “You mean many others, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure,” said Shelley, still smiling faintly as he watched the shoreline grow steadily closer. “But no, I think I mean each like two spent swimmers.”
A rescue boat was being rowed out toward them across the sunny water, and already some of the sailors on it were whirling weighted rope-ends overhead in wide, whistling circles. The sailors on Byron’s boat scrambled to the bow and began clapping their hands to show their readiness to catch and moor the lines.
BOOK ONE: A TOKEN OF INVITATION
Of the sweets of Faeries, Peris, Goddesses,
There is not such a treat among them all,
Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,
As a real woman, lineal indeed
From Pyrrha’s pebbles …
–John Keats, Lamia
And Venus blessed the marriage she had made.
–Ovid, Metamorphoses Book X, lines 94 and 95
CHAPTER 1
… and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Lucy,” the barmaid was saying in an emphatic whisper as she led the two men around the foot of the oak stairway, “which I’d think you could remember by now—and keep your damned voice down until we get outside.”
The flickering lantern in her hand struck an upwardly diminishing stack of horizontal gleams from the stair edges rising away to their right, and Jack Boyd, who had just asked the barmaid her name for the fourth time that evening, apparently decided that taking her upstairs would be a good idea, now that he had at least momentarily got straight what to call her.
“God, there’s no mistaking you’re one of the Navy men,” she hissed exasperatedly as she spun out of the big man’s drunken embrace and strode on across the hall to the dark doorway of the reserve dining room.
The off-balance Boyd sat down heavily on the lowest stair while Michael Crawford, who’d been hanging back in order to be able to walk without any undignified reeling, frowned and sadly shook his head. The girl was a bigot, ascribing to all Navy men the faults of an admittedly conspicuous few.
Appleton and the other barmaid were ahead of them, already in the dark dining room, and now Crawford heard a door being unbolted and pulled open, and the sudden cold draft in his face smelled of rain on trees and clay.
Lucy looked back over her shoulder at the drunken pair, and she hefted the bottle she had in her left hand. “An extra hour or two of bar service is what you paid for,” she whispered, “and Louise’s got the glasses, so unless you two want to toddle off to bed, trot yourselves along here—and don’t make no noise, the landlord’s asleep only two doors down this hall.” She disappeared through the dining room doorway.
Crawford leaned down unsteadily and shook Boyd’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “you’re disgracing me as well as yourself.”
“'Disgracing'?” mumbled the big man as he wobbled to his feet. “On the contrary—I intend to marry …” He paused and frowned ponderously. “To marry that young lady. Her name was what?”
Crawford propelled him into the dining room, toward the open door in the far wall and the night beyond it. Lucy was waiting for them impatiently in the far doorway, and by the wavering glow of her lamp Crawford noticed the lath and plaster panelling on the walls, and he remembered the ornate double chimney-stacks he’d glimpsed over the roof when the stagecoach had turned off the Horsham road this afternoon; evidently the inn’s Georgian front had been added onto an old Tudor structure. He wouldn’t be surprised if the kitchen had a stone floor.
“We’ll make it a double wedding tomorrow,” Boyd went on over his shoulder as he bumped against chairs in the dark. “You wouldn’t object to sharing the glory, would you? Of course this means I won’t be able to be your groomsman—but hell, I’m sure Appleton would be groomsman for both of us.”
The pattering hiss of the rain was much louder when they were out on the roofed porch, and the chilly air sluiced some of the wine fumes from Crawford’s head. The porch, he saw, began at the door they’d come out of and extended south, away from the landlord’s room, almost all the way to the stables. Appleton and Louise had already sat down in two of the weather-beaten chairs that stood randomly along the deck, and Lucy was pouring wine into their glasses.
Crawford stepped to the edge of the porch so that the curtain of rain tumbled past only inches in front of his nose. Out in the dark yard he could dimly make out patches of grass and the shaggy, waving blackness of trees beyond.