Shelley stood up, still holding the little body, and walked slowly to the window. Only the top spires of the churches still glowed gold.
He turned back to Mary, and even through her tears she saw his expression clearly enough to visibly flinch at it.
“It’s still not too late,” he said, echoing what Byron had said to him less than half an hour ago. “But I have to take her … out, for a while.”
Hoppner protested, waving at the doctor to enlist his aid, and he looked relieved when Mary stood up to speak.
But she didn’t say what he’d apparently expected. “Maybe,” she said to Hoppner in a voice harsh with grief and fear, “you’d better let him take her.”
Hoppner began remonstrating with her now, in a louder voice, but she didn’t take her eyes off of Shelley’s face. “No,” she said, interrupting Hoppner, “he just … wants to take her to church, to pray over her. He’ll bring her back by …”
“By dawn,” said Shelley, striding toward the door.
When his gondola emerged into the Grand Canal from the narrow Rio di Ca’ Foscari, he recognized the man poling a nearby craft as Tita, Byron’s gondolier, and he waved; in a moment Byron’s gondola had pulled in alongside, and Byron was gripping the two gunwales to hold the boats together.
He saw Clara’s corpse, and swore. “Pass her across,” he said, “and get in yourself; I’ve just heard that there are Austrian soldiers in the Piazza—they’re apparently getting ready to restore the eye—and they’d catch on to what we’re attempting instantly if we let them see you bringing a corpse up to the pillars.”
Shelley had started to hand the body across, but halted. “But we’ve got to bring her, the whole point of this—”
Byron gently took the body from him and laid it down on one of the leather seats in his own gondola. Shelley noticed that Allegra, Byron’s daughter by Claire, was crouching wide-eyed in a seat up by the bow.
“We’re going to bring her,” Byron assured him. “We simply can’t let them see that she’s dead.”
Shelley climbed across into Byron’s gondola and then tried to pay the gondolier who had picked him up from in front of the inn, but the man clearly hadn’t known until now that he’d been ferrying a corpse, and he poled his craft away without accepting any money.
“A good sign,” said Shelley a little hysterically as he sat down beside his dead daughter. “She can’t be dead if the ferryman won’t take two coins.”
Byron laughed grimly and then ordered the imperturbable Tita to go on—and to watch for any canal-side spectaculos di marionettes. He gingerly lifted a cloth bundle from his pocket and unwrapped it; it contained a tiny iron fire-pot, and he blew on the air-slits. Shelley saw a glint of red light from within.
Shelley was willing now to let Byron handle things, and he didn’t even ask for a reason when Tita maneuvered the gondola to a stop beside a pavement near the Academia di Belle Arti where a puppet show was going on by early lamplight.
Byron wrapped the fire-pot in the cloth and replaced it in his pocket; then he climbed out and limped over to the stage and managed to interrupt the show long enough to talk to one of the puppeteers behind the stage. The audience didn’t seem to mind, and several people cried, delightedly, “Il matto signore ing-lese!”—the mad English lord! Shelley saw money change hands, and then Byron was limping back with one of the big Sicilian marionettes in his arms. It was of a knight in golden armor, and strings and iron rods dangled from it.
When Byron had got back into the gondola and ordered Tita to resume their journey, he began untying the sections of armor from the marionette and tossing them to Shelley. “Dress Clara in these,” he said curtly. Shelley did as he was told, and when Byron handed him the visored golden helmet he tried to fit it over Clara’s head.
After several minutes of wrenching, “It doesn’t fit,” he said desperately.
The canal was in shadow now, and darkening by the moment—the water was already streaked and stippled with the reflections of colored lights from the many-windowed palaces they were passing.
“It’s got to,” Byron told him harshly. He was staring ahead at the night-silhouetted domes of Santa Maria della Salute. “And quick—we’ve only got another minute or so.”
Shelley forced the helmet on, hoping Allegra wasn’t watching.
The gondola pulled in to the fondamenta in front of the torchlit Piazza, and as Shelley stood up and stepped across from the rocking boat onto the stairs he saw that there were indeed Austrian soldiers on the pavement—ranks of them—and he saw too that charcoal and straw and bundles of wood and canvas bags had been piled around the bases of the two columns. A man was splashing some liquid onto the piles. Shelley smelled fine brandy on the breeze.
He turned to Byron, who now stood beside him with Allegra. “Intense heat wakes them up?”
“Right,” Byron answered, starting forward, “with the proper fuel, and just so it isn’t done in sunlight. The Austrians are ready; the eye must be in Venice now. I wish I’d thought to bring Carlo.”
Tita stayed by the gondola, and the odd foursome—Byron, Allegra and Shelley carrying the ghastly marionette—strode out across the square.
Several of the Austrian soldiers stepped forward as if to stop them, but began laughing when they saw what Shelley carried, and they called to him in German.
“They want to see the puppet dance,” whispered Byron tensely. “I think you’d better do it. It’ll be a distraction—I’ll try to ignite the fires—now, while the eye isn’t here yet—while they’re watching you.”
Shelley stared at him in horror—and noticed a very old man standing behind Byron, leaning on a cane. There was a moment’s glint of light beneath the old man’s plain brown robe, and Shelley realized that he was carrying a concealed lamp. Did he, too, intend to light the fires prematurely, while the Graiae were still blind?
The old man met his gaze, and nodded, as if answering his thought—and suddenly Shelley remembered having seen him here a month ago; he had called something that had seemed then to be Percy, but Shelley was now surer than ever that the name called had actually been Perseus.
“Do if,” snarled Byron. “Remember, if this works, it won’t have been disrespect to a corpse.” He shoved Allegra toward him, which added to Shelley’s distress—what would she make of this?
With tears in his eyes, Shelley took hold of the two iron rods in one hand and the strings in the other, then let the body slide out of his arms so that it dangled above the warped pavement—and, as Byron sidled away in the shadows, Shelley began yanking at the strings and rods, making the body dance grotesquely. Torchlight glinted red on the helmet, which was lolling loosely at the level of his belt.
His teeth were clenched and he wasn’t permitting himself to think, except to hope that the impossibly hard thudding of his heart might kill him instantly; and though over the rushing of blood in his ears he was vaguely aware that the soldiers had begun muttering, it wasn’t until he sneaked an upward glance through his eyebrows that he realized that they were dissatisfied with the show—that they’d seen better, that they had higher standards when it came to this sort of thing.
Somehow that made the whole situation even a little bit worse. It occurred to him that he now knew something that perhaps no one else in the world did—that there was no curse more horrible than, May your daughter die and be made into a puppet which finds disfavor before an audience of Austrian soldiers.