Keats’s pulse was strong, which was uncharacteristic of consumption—but Crawford had known all along that this wasn’t consumption. Camphor, nitre, white henbane—he wouldn’t be prescribing any of those for this ailment.
Keats was subsiding, breathing deeply, but he seemed to be unconscious.
“Delirium, Doctor?” asked Severn, and when Crawford glanced up at him he noticed for the first time how exhausted Keats’s friend was.
“Just about any doctor would tell you so.” Crawford stood up. “How long have you been looking after him?”
“Since September—five months. We sailed from England together.”
Crawford led the way back into the other room. “How long have the two of you been here in Rome?”
“Since November. We landed in Naples on Keats’s birthday, Hallowe’en.”
“The trip from England took more than a month?”
“Yes.” Severn collapsed into a chair and rubbed his eyes. “The weather was bad when we left, and for two whole weeks we just sailed back and forth along the south coast of England, waiting for it to clear up; finally we were able to start out across the Channel, but the trip was horrible, and then when we got to Naples we were quarantined aboard the boat for ten days.”
“Why?”
“We were told that there had been a typhus epidemic in London.”
“Huh.” Crawford, who worked in Rome’s biggest hospital and was often called in on cases that required a speaker of English, had not heard of any such epidemic. “Hallowe’en’s his birthday,” he said thoughtfully, remembering now that Keats had told him that four years ago.
That would be why the medical treatment von Aargau had prescribed was the opposite of what he usually had Crawford do in these pseudo-consumption cases—usually the patients had to be insulated with garlic and holy water and closed windows, so that the source of their diminishment couldn’t get at them; but because of his birth date Keats was an adopted member of the nephelim family. He was different—re-exposure to the poison was the only thing that would keep him alive.
And, he thought, Keats must know this—so why is he intentionally keeping … her … out?
Just as he thought the word her, he noticed the title of a book lying on the table—Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems … by John Keats. He picked it up.
“John’s second book of poems,” Severn said.
The weight of the vial in his pocket reminded Crawford that he had to wait for the nurse, and no serious remedial measures could be taken for Keats until dark anyway, so he looked over at Severn. “I’d like to wait and talk to this nurse you mentioned. All right if I read some of this?”
Severn waved. “Surely. Can I make you some tea?”
Crawford took out his flask and unscrewed the cap, ignoring Severn’s scandalized stare. “Just a glass, thanks.”
Lamia was a narrative poem about a Corinthian youth who married a creature that was sometimes a woman and sometimes a sort of winged, jewelled serpent, and how he died after a friend banished her. Isabella told the story of a well-born girl whose brothers killed her plebeian lover, whose head she later dug up and planted in a pot of basil which she subsequently watered with her tears. Crawford wondered if the two poems weren’t really the same story—a female mating beneath her station, to the unintended ruin of the genuinely loved male.
At last footsteps approached up the hall, and Severn put down the magazine he’d been reading and got to his feet. “That will be Julia, the nurse,” he said.
Crawford stood up too, still holding Keats’s book—but he dropped it when
Severn opened the door and the nurse walked in.
For a moment he was sure it was Julia, his Julia, his second wife, who had died so horribly in a Hastings inn; then he noticed that the shape of the jaw was subtly wrong, and the forehead was too high, and he coughed to stifle an embarrassed laugh.
But when she glanced at him he saw that one of her eyes didn’t track properly, and wasn’t quite the same color as the other one, and the hairs actually stood up on the back of his neck when he realized who this was.
“Julia,” Severn was saying, “this is Dr. Aickman. The hospital across the river sent him—gratis!—to look in on John.”
Josephine nodded at Crawford with no evident recognition, and he was reminded of how much he had aged since she had last seen him. “Dr. Clark agreed to taking you on as a consultant?”
Crawford was trying to figure out if anything besides sheer, appalling coincidence could have led her here, and he missed her question and had to ask her to repeat it. When she did, he shook his head wearily and reached down to the table for his flask.
“No,” he said, lifting it to his mouth. “Excuse me,” he said a moment later as he lowered it and wiped his mouth with his free hand. “No, but I can show you credentials and testimonials that I guarantee outrank anything Clark can produce—and I can guarantee Mr. Keats’s recovery.”
Josephine didn’t look reassured. “And has Mr. Keats had anything to say about this?”
“John doesn’t want him,” put in Severn, apparently offended afresh by Crawford’s drinking. “Aickman wants John to sleep with the window open … oh, and he wants you to wash off the windowsill.”
It was clear from the way Severn said this that he expected the nurse to be offended at being asked to perform a menial chore, but Crawford saw the flash of real alarm in her eyes.
“Who sent you?” she asked quietly. “Not the Santo Spirito, they don’t object to garlic and holy water and closed windows!”
Severn stared at her blankly, but Crawford stepped closer to her and spoke directly into her face. “I never said the Santo Spirito sent me. All I say is that my methods will heal him.” He remembered that she suffered from some sort of nervous malady herself, and wished he could pry her jaws open and dump the contents of the vial down her throat right now.
At the same time he was blurrily aware that he wasn’t handling this as tactfully as he could; the reference to Shelley, and then the sudden intrusion of Josephine and a hundred memories from his supposedly dead past, had jolted him. He only carried the flask in order to be able to render himself unconscious during those times, generally late at night, when he was tempted to invite his nonhuman spouse back—and here he’d been sucking at it liberally in the middle of the day.
Von Aargau had made him memorize a procedure to use if some assignment should prove to be beyond him, and he was afraid he might very well have to use it, for the first time, today. Von Aargau had frowned when he’d described it, though, and very clearly, hoped that Crawford would never have to do it.
“Look,” Crawford said now, desperately, “give me one night. If he hasn’t shown an astonishing improvement by tomorrow morning, I’ll pay the entirety of Dr. Clark’s bill—and a salary for you, too,” he added, turning to Josephine, “covering the entire time you’ve been working here.”
Josephine’s expression didn’t change, but Severn smiled incredulously. “Really? Will you put that in writing? Great God, that would—”
“No,” interrupted Josephine sharply, “he can’t stay. John doesn’t want him. And I don’t need pay for this job—I’ve saved some money, and on my days off from here I have paying patients, and I’m not being charged rent at the St. Paul’s Home….”