Her right eye was wide and staring at him, and she looked like a wild animal broken but alive in a trap—he leaned away from her and gripped the rock more tightly, wondering if he would be able to kick her off into the abyss if she were to attack him—but then something seemed to click inside her head, and she bared her blood-flecked teeth in what might, under dramatically different circumstances, have been a warm smile.
“Michael!” she said. “You rogue, I’ve been looking for you all over Europe! And here I find you on top of an Alp, for Heaven’s sake!” The eye swivelled past him toward Byron. “Hello, I’m Mr. Crawford’s wife, Julia.”
Byron shook his head weakly. “Pleased to meet you,” he said in a barely audible whisper. “Who’s Mr. Crawford?”
“That’s me, my real name,” said Crawford. He got his feet under him, though it chilled his belly to do it and, crouching and gripping the wall, he looked left and right along their ledge. “We’ve got to get down off this mountain—her eye needs medical attention right away … and you and I aren’t at our best, either.”
At the right limit of their ledge the rock wall wasn’t impossibly steep, and seemed bumpy enough to provide hand and foot holds, but he had no idea where climbing it would lead them, and in any case he was pretty sure none of them had enough strength left for a real climb. To the left the ledge became narrower and more outwardly slanted, though it did seem to continue around the mountain for some distance. Neither way looked attractive.
“Let’s try yelling,” he said. “Maybe Hobhouse can get a rope down to us.”
Crawford and Byron took turns shouting, and after only a few minutes their shouts were answered from above; soon a rope came hitching and snaking down the slope from above, finally coming to a stop when its end had passed them, and though it hung a few yards to the right of the ledge, climbing across to it looked like it wouldn’t be difficult. And then hanging on, Crawford thought, won’t be any problem at all—they’ll have to break my fingers off of it.
He turned to Byron, who had been watching over his shoulder. “The girl first, I think. We can tie it around her. I don’t know how she’s stayed conscious this long, and there’s certainly—” He stopped, for he had looked past Byron, and Josephine was gone. “My God, did she fall?”
Byron’s head whipped around to the left. “No,” he said, after a moment. “Look, there’s blood and scuff marks way out along that end. She’s gone that way.”
“Josephine!” Crawford yelled. Then, after a fearful glance toward the summit, “Julia!” There was no answer.
Byron joined in, and they called several more times, with no results except to alarm Hobhouse, who kept shouting down advice about breathing deeply and avoiding looking down.
Finally they abandoned the effort and let themselves be roped up to where the others waited. Hobhouse was pompous with worry, and insisted on knowing what the hell had happened, and Byron rolled together a snowball and threw it at him as a prelude to explaining.
Byron told them only that Aickman’s wife had fallen from the summit with them and was injured and alone on a ledge somewhere below, but the guide didn’t even believe that. He insisted that on the high mountains it was a common thing for tourists—or even seasoned mountaineers—to imagine that they saw people who weren’t really there, frequently people from their pasts; and that often the sufferers of this delusion sat down and waited interminably for the imaginary others to catch up.
In support of his opinion he pointed out how visibly distraught Byron and Crawford both were, and noted the bad knock Crawford’s head had taken and, most telling of all, he observed that only a few minutes had passed between the time Byron and Crawford had disappeared onto the summit and when the party had heard the two of them calling from the ledge below. This one-eyed wife would have had to appear the moment Byron and Crawford had climbed out of sight of the others—just in time to slide with them down to the ledge they’d been roped up from—and then disappear instantly afterward.
And by the time the touring party had descended the mountain without having seen any sign of Josephine or her passage, even Crawford was willing to admit that the guide might be correct. After all, he told himself at one point as he looked back at the peak, you have been feverish lately, and lots of people have been to the top of the Wengern without having encountered thickened air and slowed time, or suicide promptings, or phantoms, or the sphinx.
Byron had retracted the story entirely, and asked Hobhouse and his servants to forget about it—and when his horse and Crawford’s mule both sank up to their shins in the clayey mud of a morass which everyone else had passed over safely, he only laughed. “Don’t try,” he called across to Crawford as they both were floundering in the mud, and the servants were tugging on the reins, “to tell me that the mountain doesn’t want us to leave.”
Crawford kicked his legs to keep from sinking farther into the chilly, clinging mud, and he tremblingly shrugged. “When I’m sure of anything,” he answered, “I’ll let you know.”
The sun was low when Josephine clambered up onto the path and started back toward the village of Wengen.
She was hardly anyone now.
When she had walked all the way back down to where the road widened out and the trees were crowded and aromatic in the darkness on either side, she began to hear faint songs on the branch-combed air, and she knew that things were awakening with the passing of the day.
She was dimly aware that her night-visiting friend had lost his power over her and would need a new invitation to have access to her again.
She wondered if he would get one and, if he did, who would extend it.
She had tied a cloth around her empty eye socket, and her hand was only seeping blood now—they might very well become mortified, but her injuries didn’t seem likely to kill her tonight.
For the moment free of all the hatreds and fears and constrictions that had defined her personalities, she actually sniffed the pine and snow-scented air with enjoyment, and her bloodstained cheeks kinked into a battered version of the small smile of a contented, sleeping child.
Byron’s party continued eastward the next day, crossing the Kleine Scheidegg Mountain and moving on through the green valley between the Schwarzhorn and the Wetterhorn to the Reichenbach Fall, where they halted to rest the horses and mules, and then looping back west to the town of Brienz on the north shore of Lake Brienz.
They stayed at an inn, and though there was fiddling and singing and waltzing downstairs, Byron and Crawford retired early to their rooms. Crawford recognized in them both the signs of recovery from long fever. Crawford didn’t dream at all.
Everybody slept later than usual, but by nine the next morning Hobhouse and Byron and Crawford and a couple of servants were aboard a boat crossing the lake of Brienz, while the horses were being brought around along the north shore. The boat Byron had hired was rowed entirely by women, which struck Byron as so novel that he insisted on taking an oar himself next to the prettiest of the rowers, up in the front.
Crawford was perched in the bow of the long, narrow boat, watching the patterns of early autumn leaves on the flat water sweep past on either side; from time to time he looked up, but always to starboard, where the slate roofs of the village of Oberried serrated the north shore and, far more distantly, the white peaks of the Hohgant and the Gemmenalp dented the blue sky. He avoided looking out over the portside, for the view in that direction was dominated by the towering, broad-shouldered bulk of the Jungfrau, and the glitter of the sun on its snows was uncomfortably like the glitter of watchful eyes.