The summer was gone, along with a lot else—but since climbing the Wengern it all seemed to have taken place in someone else’s life, someone Crawford had known and felt sorry for a long time ago. He was reminded of Shelley’s story about having cut his encysted sister out of his side, and he felt as though he had now done something similar.
Maybe, he thought with a smile, Josephine only pulled part of me back up from that abyss I jumped into—maybe some part of Michael Crawford did go plummeting away into those cloudy canyons.
The lake current was taking the boat in close to the north shore, almost into the shade of the overhanging pine branches, and when the little vessel rounded the point of a low, wooded promontory, Crawford saw several men on the shore running away from a large boulder that sat in the shallows. Smoke seemed to hover behind it.
One of the men glanced at the boat, and then flailed to a stop. “Frauen!” he yelled to his companions, “im boot!”
“Women in the boat, they say,” remarked Hobhouse, who was lounging on a thwart at the stern end.
Byron lifted his oar out of the water and squinted at them. “Of course there are women in the boat,” he said. “Did he think we’d be rowing it ourselves?”
Crawford pointed at Byron’s oar. “Well, you are, after all.” He looked ahead again. The boat was bearing down on the boulder, and smoke was definitely curling up from behind it.
The men on the shore were yelling urgently to the people in the boat.
Crawford didn’t understand what they’d said, but Byron and the boat-women evidently had—they all began working the oars furiously to put distance between the boat and the shore; and they had managed to slant sharply out away from it when the boulder abruptly became a cloud of flying stone fragments, and a resounding crack punched a wall of air and hard spray against the boat and its passengers; splinters flew as rock bits clipped the rails, and when Crawford had cuffed the spray out of his eyes he saw a cloud of smoke unfolding above a patch of choppy, foamy water where the boulder had sat. He turned to the portside and saw rings appearing farther and farther out on the lake as rock pieces went skipping away across the flat water. In the distance the Jungfrau looked on impassively.
Byron and Hobhouse were on their feet, and they both shouted furious curses until the men on the shore had run away into the woods.
“Damn me!” Byron said, sitting down and pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket. “No one’s hurt? Pure luck—those idiots could have killed us.”
The women were talking excitedly among themselves, but they seemed to have recovered from the shock, and soon resumed their rowing.
“I think it was bad luck that they saw you rowing,” said Crawford. “It made them think we were by ourselves, unaccompanied by any innocent locals.”
Hobhouse groaned. “You really should be writing novels, Aickman! Why do all of Byron’s physicians feel called on to indulge so in—in morbid fancies? Those men were just careless louts trying to get an obstruction off their beach without going to the trouble of hauling it away! Look, if they had wanted to murder us, why didn’t they simply shoot us? Or, if they had their hearts set on actually blowing us up, why not simply pitch a bomb at us? Why go to the trouble of dragging a big damned rock down to the water and blowing it up when we’re nearby?”
“Maybe because it was a rock,” said Crawford. “That is to say, because it was a rock. Things that can protect you, that can … oh, say, raise a shadow to prevent you from drinking poisoned brandy,” he went on, glancing at Byron, “might not have the power to block or deflect pieces of one of the sentient stones, one of the living ones. Maybe they can’t interfere with family. Is this making sense?”
“Oh, yes, excellent sense,” said Hobhouse nervously. “Do take my hat, old fellow. And maybe a nap would be a good idea—after all, yesterday was a strenuous—”
“Hush a moment, Hobby.” Byron leaned forward. “Go on, Aickman. Let’s say that is the only way they could have killed someone with such protections. Why would they want to do it? If someone wanted to stop us from going to the mountain, that’s one thing; but why try to kill any of us now? We would pose no further threat to them. We have no more connection with these things.”
Crawford reluctantly let his gaze go back to the Jungfrau. “Maybe that’s not altogether true,” he said softly.
Byron shook his head and picked up his oar. “I don’t believe it—and I won’t believe it, watch me. I don’t mean to seem to speak ex cathedra, but I think you have to concede that, in these matters, I have a good deal more—”
Crawford was scared, and it made him irritable. “More like ex catheter, actually.”
Byron barked one hard syllable of laughter, but his eyes were bright with resentment. “Hobhouse is right,” he said. “I have unfortunate taste in doctors.” He resumed his seat beside the prettiest rower, and began animatedly talking to her in German.
Hobhouse gave Crawford an amused look that was not without sympathy. “I think you’ve lost a position,” he said.
Crawford sat down and reached over the gunwale to trail the fingers of his four-fingered hand in the cold water. “I hope I’ve lost a lot more than that,” he said.
The sunlight had begun to slant in through the window from the west, and Mary Godwin put down her pen, stretched back in her chair and looked out the window at the housefronts and gardens and fence-walking cats along Abbey Churchyard Lane.
Their unconventional household—herself, Shelley, their nearly eleven-month-old son William, and the ever more obviously pregnant Claire—had been back in England for just a little more than three months; and often, especially at times like this when she had spent a few hours rewriting her novel, she was startled to look up and see the low Welsh mountains on the horizon beyond the Bristol Channel instead of the snowy majesties of the Alps.
Shelley had seemed nervous during the crossing from Le Havre to London, though it had been an uneventful trip—the only annoyance had been when the London customs officer had leafed through every page of the manuscript of Lord Byron’s third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, evidently supposing that Shelley was trying to smuggle lace into the country between the sheets of paper. Shelley had been entrusted with delivering the manuscript to Byron’s publisher, and he didn’t want anything to happen to it.
She waved a page of her own manuscript in the air now to dry the ink. She was apparently the only one to have taken up the challenge Byron had tossed out on that rainy evening almost exactly six months ago, when she and Claire and Polidori and Shelley and Byron had been sitting in the big upstairs room at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Leman, after Shelley had had that nervous seizure and run out of the room.
“I really think we should each write a ghost story,” Byron had said when Shelley had returned and the awkward moment had passed. “Let’s see if we can’t do something with this mud-person who’s been following poor Shelley about.”
She’d had a nightmare shortly afterward—a figure had seemed to be standing over her bed, and at first she had thought it was Shelley, for it had resembled him closely; but it had not been him, and when she had reared up in horror it had disappeared.