The piano music had stopped the instant he had knocked, and now furniture creaked and thumped on the other side of the door for several seconds. Finally the door was unbolted and, when it was pulled open by a harassed-looking young man, Crawford guessed from the present haphazard placement of several of the chairs that they had been braced against the door moments earlier.
Crawford was puzzled until he noticed the piano—certainly rented—that stood in the far corner of the room. Italian law required that every piece of furniture in a room occupied by a consumptive be burned after the invalid had died, and so these people couldn’t risk having the landlady burst in unannounced and catch the sick man in this expensively furnished room.
“Si?” the young man quavered, speaking with a thick English accent. “Cosa vuole?”
“English is fine with me,” said Crawford, stepping around him into the room. “I’m Michael Aickman, a doctor. I’ve been sent to look at a young man named John Keats—I gather he’s to be found through here,” he said, crossing to the inner door.
The young man had looked relieved at not having to speak Italian, but now he looked worried again. “Can’t Dr. Clark come? Did he send you? The nurse has just gone for the mail, and she’s got to go home shortly after she gets back, but—”
“No, I’m not from Dr. Clark. I work at Santo Spirito, across the river, but I’m on an independent assignment now. Excuse me, but I was told that Mr. Keats is very ill, and I’d like to begin immediately—could you tell him I’m here?”
“But we … we can’t afford another doctor! Even now Clark is giving us a break on his fee, and the nurse is working for nothing. You—”
“My bill is prepaid—by an anonymous good Samaritan who watches over people like destitute poets who get ill. So if you would announce me?”
“Well …” The young man stepped in front of Aickman and rapped on the door. “John? There’s a doctor here, he says somebody’s paid him to take care of you … maybe it was Shelley, or Brown back in England.”
Aickman frowned slightly at the first name, and suddenly needed a drink. “I’ll wait out in the hall while you talk,” he said quickly, turning away and fumbling under his coat.
In the hall he twisted the cap off his flask and then tilted it up to his mouth; after several deep swallows of the brandy, he replaced the cap and tucked the flask back into his pocket. Usually he covered the smell on his breath by chewing cloves of garlic, but he’d been told that this Keats person wasn’t to be exposed to the stuff, so he’d left it behind. Oh well, he thought—maybe this young man won’t sniff a gift physician in the mouth.
The thought struck him as funny, and he was still chuckling to himself when he re-entered the apartment.
The young man at the door sniffed the air and stared at him. He turned quickly to the closed door, and Aickman heard him whisper, “My God, John, your instincts are good—he’s drunk!”
Crawford was about to get stern with this ungrateful pauper when there was a laugh from beyond the closed door, and then a frail voice called, “Drunk? Oh, very well then, Severn, let him in.”
Severn rolled his eyes but pulled the door open, and Crawford strode past him into the next room as imperiously as he could. Severn followed him.
It was a narrow room, with a bed against one wall and a window in the other. The young man in the bed was emaciated and hollow-eyed, but looked as if he had once been sturdily built—and when he looked up, Crawford recognized him.
This was the same youth who had helped him evade Josephine in London four years earlier, and who had been the first to tell him about the nephelim. What had been the name of that evil pub Keats had taken him to, under London Bridge? The Galatea, that was it.
Keats seemed to recognize him, too, and for a moment he looked frightened; and the smile he put on now seemed forced. “Doctor …?”
“Aickman,” said Crawford.
“Not … let me see … Frankish?”
What a memory the boy had! “No.”
The air in the room was thick with the yeasty, bakery smell of a starving human body—conventional medical wisdom held that consumptives should eat virtually nothing. Crawford crossed to the window, unlatched it and pushed the frames open.
“Fresh air’s important in the treatment of the sort of Phthisis you suffer from,” Crawford said. “It’s fortunate that your bed’s close to a window.”
Below him he could see the tourist painters, and the broad steps sloping up the hill, and the clusters of shivering saints huddled against the balustrades. The spire in front of the church of Trinità dei Monti cast a long winter shadow, as if it were the gnomon of a sundial meant to indicate seasons rather than hours. Beyond the church was simply wooded green hills, for this was the northern edge of the city.
“Another thing that is—” he began, then paused. He had been leaning on the windowsill, and now there was grease on his hand. Even without bringing his hand to his nose he could smell garlic. “What’s this?” he asked quietly.
Keats looked wary, but Severn laughed. “We have our dinners sent up here from the trattoria downstairs,” Severn explained, “and it costs us a pound a day, but the food was just terrible at first! So finally one evening John here just took the plates from the porter and, smiling the whole time, dumped them all out the window, and handed the empty plates back! Since then they’ve brought us excellent food—and the landlady didn’t even charge us for the dinners that wound up in the square.” He peered at Crawford’s hand. “Uh, I guess he accidentally got a little on the windowsill while he was at it.”
“Accidentally,” Crawford repeated thoughtfully, smiling at Keats. “Well, we can’t expect you to get well with putrefying food lying about—I’ll have this nurse of yours wash that off as soon as she gets back. Now it’s important that you—”
“I don’t want you,” Keats said steadily. “I’m fine with Clark, I don’t need—”
Crawford promised himself another drink very soon. “I’ve dealt with a dozen cases like yours, Mr. Keats, and every one of my patients has recovered. Can Clark claim a similar record? Is Clark even confident that this is consumption? Aren’t there some symptoms that … puzzle him?”
“That is true, John,” put in Severn, “Clark did speculate that it might be something to do with your stomach, or your heart….”
“My brother is dead, Frankish,” said Keats loudly, his wasted face made even gaunter now with anxiety and helplessness. “Tom died in England two years ago, of consumption—” Keats paused to cough harshly, but after a few seconds forced himself to stop. “And,” he went on, his voice hoarse, “he wasn’t even eighteen yet … and two years before that—just after I met you, in fact—he started getting letters in verse from something signing itself Amena Bellafina,’ and I’m sure your Italian is good enough for you to translate that into something like ‘pleasant succession of sweethearts'—though bella can also mean ‘final game'—”
Keats’s voice had been getting more and more strained, and now he gave way to the cough that had been building up inside him; he fell back onto the bed and rocked there as the terrible coughing tore through his chest and brought bright blood to his lips.
Crawford knelt beside him and took his thin wrist. Any conventional doctor would be sharpening his lancet now, and calling for a cloth and bowl and bolsters and a sponge soaked in vinegar, but at some point since leaving England Crawford had lost his faith in phlebotomy—somehow bleeding a patient seemed too much like rape now, and he doubted that he’d ever do another bleeding in his life.