Something was splashing heavily in the water fifty yards away, out in front of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and spray glittered dimly in the starlight—Tita was audibly and uncharacteristically praying as he wrenched at the oar—and then for a moment something big had risen partway out of the water, something made of stone but alive, and its blunt head, bearded with seaweed and crusted with barnacles, seemed to be turned toward the glaringly lit Piazza with terrible attention in the moment before it crashed back into the water and disappeared.
The oppressive sense of being cosmically stared at lifted from Shelley’s chest.
“The third pillar,” Byron said hoarsely. “The one they dropped into the canal in the twelfth century. We’ve awakened it too.” He looked almost fearfully at Shelley. “I think even it wants a look at you.”
Shelley was glad he had blocked Allegra’s view of it—she had already seen far too much tonight—and he tried to broaden his narrow shoulders to keep her from seeing anything more; but the water seemed to be settling down, and the thing didn’t rise again.
Soon the church of San Vitale blocked the rearward view, and he let himself lean back. He looked anxiously at Allegra. She was apparently calm, but he wasn’t reassured.
He didn’t stay long at the Palazzo Mocenigo.
He did remember to take the armor off Clara’s abused body—and to borrow a couple of tools from the shaken Byron, who didn’t ask why or even look at him as he handed them over—before flagging a gondola in which to return to the inn where Mary and Claire waited.
Shelley walked back down the hill in the morning sunlight to where Mary and
Claire stood. The tiny coffin had already been lowered into the grave, and the priest was shaking holy water down into the hole. Too little too late, Shelley thought.
Goodbye, Clara. I hope you don’t resent the last thing I did for you—the unspeakable going-away present I gave you just before dawn, after we’d got back to the inn and everyone but you and me had gone to sleep.
Did I really delay so long in Este, he asked himself, and let this happen to my child, just because my writing was going so well? Am I guilty of the same self-imposed blindness as Byron, who is clearly ignoring the connection between his concubine Margarita Cogni and his recent poetry?
Maybe, he thought now, maybe if I had jumped out of the gondola on the trip from Fusina to Venice, when Clara was at least still alive—drowned myself then, even as late as that—my dreadful sister would have died too, and Clara wouldn’t have had to die. But no, by then she’d already been bitten.
He looked again at his abraded left hand.
The coffin had been shut last night, when he had stolen down to the spare room where the landlord had told them to put it, but Shelley had lifted the lid and taken Clara’s cooled little wrist in his hand. There had been no pulse, but he had felt a patient vitality there, and he knew what sort of “resurrection of the dead” would await her if he didn’t take the ancient precaution.
It hadn’t taken him long, even trembling as he was and blinded with tears.
When he had finished, he had closed the coffin again, and despite being an atheist he prayed, to whatever benevolent power there might be, that no one would open it—or at least no one unburdened by an awareness of the truths behind superstitions.
He threw Byron’s iron-headed hammer into the canal; the wooden stake, which had so ravaged his hands and had so much more horribly ravaged little Clara’s body, he left imbedded in her chest.
INTERLUDE: FEBRUARY 1821
…This consumption is a disease particularly fond of
people who write such good verses as you have
done … I do not think that young and amiable poets
are at all bound to gratify its taste; they have entered
into no bond with the Muses to that effect….
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, to John Keats, 27 July 1820
I fear much there is something operating on his mind—
at least so it appears to me—he either feels that he is now
living at the expence of some one else or something of that kind.
—Dr. James Clark,
Keats’s physician in Rome, 27 November 1820
Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him
how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my
sister—who walks about my imagination like a ghost—
she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even
in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.
—John Keats, to Charles Brown, 30 November 1820
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
—John Keats, epitaph for himself
Even on this chilly day there were a dozen artists, mostly English tourists, who had setup easels in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the wide marble stairs that terraced the Pincian Hill below the twin bell towers of the Trinità dei Monti church. As Michael Crawford strode across the Piazza toward the tile-roofed rooming house that was Number 26, his boots scattered piles of the little yellow husks that littered the pavements wherever the lower classes of Rome gathered, and he looked with sour amusement at the loungers eating plates of the boiled beans that had shed the husks.
These weren’t precisely beggars—they stood here in hopes of being asked to model for paintings. In order to solicit such employment they liked to assume, as if by accident, poses they thought they were particularly suited for: here, leaning against the stairway coping, a hollow-cheeked, bearded young man rolled his eyes heavenward and mumbled under his breath, clearly hoping to be asked to pose as some suffering saint or perhaps even Christ; while over by the Bernini fountain a woman in a blue shawl clutched an infant to her breast and made beatifically magnanimous gestures with her free arm; the weather was evidently too chilly for any appearance by the sun-basking representatives of the dolce far niente, the “sweet to do nothing” life, but saints and madonnas and even entire Holy Families stood in shivering clusters along the shallow gray slopes of the steps.
For a moment Crawford was whimsically tempted to drop his bag and stand idly here himself, just to be able to see, when an artist finally did ask him to pose, what sort of character the artist might think he represented. A Hippocrates? A Medici poisoner?
But he quickened his pace, for even in Rome winter could be deadly to victims of consumption, and the man he was going to see was supposedly very far gone with that disease; and the man’s nurse, for whom Crawford had been given some medicine that was now in a vial in his coat pocket, was apparently suffering from a nervous disorder that made her a danger to both herself and her patient.
Though Crawford’s step was still light and he was only forty years old, his hair was almost completely gray. He had been working as a doctor again for two years now, largely on retainer for a man named Werner von Aargau, and the retainer work had, during the last twenty-six months, taken him all over Europe. He was glad to be back in Rome again.
He had met von Aargau in Venice, in the winter of 1818. Crawford, nearly destitute in those days, had been doing some late-night drinking by lamplight in a canal-side café when he’d been startled to his feet by the nearby screech and clang of swordplay, and when he had flung down his drink and rushed along the canal bank a dozen yards, he had come upon a young man sprawled on the ancient pavement beside a dropped sword, his shirt soaked with blood.