Shelley restrained a shrug. The juggling had been good, but if the idea had been to land the coin on the blood, the trick had been an absolute failure; of course, after all the bouncing around it had done, it would have been incredible if it had landed on it.
He turned to Byron with raised eyebrows.
Byron was staring at the coin sourly. “Well,” he said, “it is still possible—though I still think it’s damned foolish.” He nodded to the fat man and then turned and stalked out of the court. Shelley also nodded, though bewilderedly, and followed him.
They were out of the alley and halfway across the Piazzetta when Shelley noticed Byron cock his head as if listening; Shelley listened too, and heard a cracked old voice singing something in what sounded like Spanish—or was it archaic French?
He looked around and saw that the singer was a startlingly aged man a dozen yards away, hobbling north across the square, away from the Ducal Palace and the two tall columns by the canal; the man leaned heavily on a cane that clicked when it touched the warped pavement.
Shelley remembered Byron’s report of an unbelievably old Austrian being carried toward Venice in order to have his life prolonged even further, and he wondered if this aged fellow was here for the same reason; somehow he thought not.
Just then the old man looked up and met his gaze, and waved—Shelley noticed that his left hand was missing a finger—and called something that sounded like Percy.
Startled, Shelley waved. “Do we know him?” he asked Byron.
“No,” Byron replied, grabbing his arm and pulling him away, toward where their gondola waited. “But I’ve heard the song before.”
Claire looked up the hill toward where he was standing and, though she didn’t move her head, she rolled her eyes in a way that clearly summoned him. He sighed and stood away from the olive tree’s twisted branch and started back down.
The little box was being carried over from the boat, and Hoppner, the English Consul, had removed his hat. The hot morning sun gleamed on his bald head and on the varnished box.
Several emotions tightened Shelley’s chest as he stared at the box; but when he noticed that the lid had been nailed shut his only feeling was one of relief.
The Lido was a long, narrow spit of sandy, weedy hillocks, streaked with shadows in the late afternoon, and aside from a few fishermen’s net-draped huts, the wooden building that was Byron’s stable was the only structure visible along the desolate island.
Byron’s grooms had left for the Lido at the same time that Byron and Shelley left the Palazzo Mocenigo, and had been waiting on the shore for a while when the two of them stepped out of the gondola onto the low dock.
The day had turned chilly, and Byron quickly had the grooms saddle up two horses; minutes later the two men had ridden across the spine of the Lido and were galloping away down the eastern shore, the Adriatic on one hand and the low, thistle-furred hills on the other.
For a while neither of them spoke; the wind was snatching the tops from the waves and flinging occasional gusts of spray across their faces, and Shelley tasted salt when he licked his lips.
“When you wrote to me,” he called finally, “you said that in Venice a means could be found to free ourselves and our children from the attentions of the nephelim.”
“Yes, I did,” replied Byron tiredly. He reined in, and Shelley did the same, and they walked their horses down the slope toward the water.
“It’s … just possible,” Byron said, “that one can, here, just as in the Alps, break their hold and break their attention—lose them, the way you can lose tracking dogs by walking up a stream. You’ve got to invoke a blindness—for one thing, it can only be done at night.” He spat into the water. “Evidently you can even restore life to a freshly perished corpse, if the sun hasn’t yet shone on it; vampires’ victims never truly die, of course, but if you do this right you get the resurrection without the vampirehood—the person is still a normal, mortal human, revived from death just this once.”
Byron laughed. “And of course then you’d be best advised to take ship immediately to the other side of the globe, so that your devil won’t be likely to stumble across you again—put a lot of salt water between yourself and her. I was thinking very seriously about South America.” He gave Shelley a defiant stare. “I no longer think I need to.”
Byron was clearly not comfortable with the subject, so Shelley tried to approach it obliquely. “It sounded as though you asked that man about an eye,” he said. “Whether or not it had been restored.”
“The eye of the Graiae,” Byron said. His horse had come to a halt and begun chewing up clumps of the coarse grass. “You remember the Graiae.”
“The … what was it, three sisters that Perseus consulted before going off to kill the Medusa?” Abruptly, and irrationally, he was sure it had been Perseus, not Percy, that the very old man had shouted to him in the Piazzetta earlier.
“Right,” said Byron. “And they only had one eye among them, and had to hand it back and forth to take turns seeing, and Perseus snatched it from the hand of one of them, and wouldn’t give it back until they answered his questions. When I first came here after leaving Switzerland, I spent a lot of time at a monastery full of Armenian priests and monks on one of the islands in the lagoon; I was … nervous about some metaphysical nonsense that doctor told me.”
“Who, Polidori? Oh! No, you must mean the very neffy one—Aickman.”
Byron looked annoyed that Shelley remembered the name. “That’s the one. He and I climbed the Wengern after you went back to England, and it really did exorcise us, as I told you it would—I felt the psychic infection sweated out of me, and I’m still not sure what we saw and what we only imagined we saw up on the summit.”
He squinted out across the Adriatic. “Odd to be speaking of restoring the eye—I think I saw a woman cut out her own eye up there. In any case, this Aickman fellow, afterward, tried to convince me that the … shall we call them lamiae? … would still, even after the exorcism, keep track of us, still be able to recognize us as good prospects, as people with a weakness for their particular … infection.”
Shelley thought of the woman he’d seen at Byron’s palace. “What are you writing these days?” he asked.
Byron laughed again and shook his head, but Shelley thought the laugh was forced. “No, no, I haven’t relapsed. I am writing my best thing to date, a … sort of epic, called Don Juan, but the fact that it’s good is to my credit, not some … some vampire’s.” He was looking Shelley in the eye as he spoke, as if to prove his sincerity.
“Oh, I don’t doubt you,” Shelley began, “it’s just—”
“In any case,” Byron interrupted, “you are hardly the one to be lecturing me about all this.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were chilly.
“You’re right, you’re right,” Shelley said hastily. “Uh, back to what I was saying. Was it word of this … exorcism possibility … that brought you to Venice in the first place?”