Cutting the pistol ball out of Josephine’s scalp was easy and only superficially bloody, and within a few minutes Crawford had sutured up the incision and applied brandy-soaked bandages to it and to the entrance wound. And it was little trouble for her to sew his shirt tight to bind his cracked ribs.
Getting the ball out of his thigh would be more difficult, as he had to pull down his trousers and then lie on his stomach and give Josephine directions on what to do with the forceps.
The wound had started to close, and he almost lost consciousness when she began probing with the cold instrument.
“Sorry,” she said, after he had smothered a scream with his fist.
“'S all right,” he whispered quickly, wishing he didn’t have to save the last dribble of brandy for dressing the wound. He was suddenly bathed in cold sweat, and he wondered if he was about to be sick. “Talk to me as you do it, will you? Anything.”
She pushed the closed jaws of the forceps in a little deeper, and it was all he could do to keep from leaping up and yanking it out. The cold steel in his leg contrasted with the fresh, hot blood running down the sides of his thigh and puddling on the gritty pavement under him.
“Well, I told you why I was there, at Keats’s,” she said calmly. “Why were you there, and working for his vampire?”
“I wasn’t,” he gasped, “working for the goddamn vampire. Well, I guess I was, but I didn’t—Jesus, slow, do it slower!—I didn’t know it. I was working for the
Austrians. Hell, most of the work I did for him, this fellow von Aargau, and the Austrians—goddamn!—was protecting people from vampires.”
He felt the tip of the forceps touch the silver ball. “Stop,” he said hastily, “you’re there. Now—God help me—back out a little, open the forceps very slowly, and then try to grab the ball. I mean take hold of the ball. Firmly, squeeze it, you understand, but—don’t—do anything jolting.”
He saw her shadow nod. “The Austrians and the … stone people are allies, I think,” she said thoughtfully as she worked the metal in his leg and the blood puddle reached his knee, “but they’re different kinds of life, and can’t—I’ve got hold of the ball. What now?”
Crawford gripped the edges of the broken marble paving blocks under him. “Slowly,” he whispered. “Pull.”
She began pulling, so gently that at first he wasn’t aware of it. “They couldn’t possibly really understand each other’s goals,” she went on. “At best it can only be an alliance of convenience. I’ll bet the only people you protected from vampires were people important to the Austrians.”
“That’s true,” he said tightly. He could feel the tugging now. “Except for Keats—and that was apparently just an attempt to keep Keats’s vampire happy.” The tugging got stronger.
“A failed attempt,” said Josephine calmly as she slowly increased the pull, pressing down with her free hand on his bare, blood-sticky thigh. “She’s without a host now. He knew he had to die, and he did. He was even talking about suicide at one time.”
“Without a host,” Crawford echoed. “After twenty-five years.” Suddenly he remembered Severn’s story about Keats having been kept quarantined in Naples Harbor until his birthday, the 31st of October—and he was certain that the quarantine had been an Austrian courtesy to Keats’s vampire: to delay Keats’s arrival, and disillusionment, and possible death-wish, until the night when the vampire could scout Rome for a newborn infant to adopt, as she had adopted Keats himself a quarter of a century earlier. The Austrians had in effect donated an Italian child so that the vampire would not, no matter what Keats did, be left without a host.
She was provided with a field of hosts to choose from, Josephine, he thought bitterly. And he wondered if the infant the vampire had chosen was one of the ones that had been anonymously handed to him through the grating in the wall of the foundling’s hospital at Santo Spirito.
“Here it comes,” said Josephine, “don’t tense up.”
The forceps, gripping the pistol ball, was much wider now than when it had gone in, and Crawford could feel it tearing muscle as Josephine kept inexorably tugging upward. His eyes and jaws were clenched shut and he was breathing in great, whispered sobs, and the sweat was puddling under him and diluting the blood around his leg.
At last he felt it pop out and, though the blood began to well more quickly from the wound, he went limp in relief. Even when she doused the wound with the last of the brandy he didn’t twitch at the pain, and after she had tied a bandage around the thigh he was even able to pull his trousers up by himself.
He rolled over carefully, then sat up, feeling chilly and weak. “Thank you,” he told her hoarsely. “I’ve never worked with a steadier nurse.”
She turned away, toward the sun, and then awkwardly bent down to pick up the ball Crawford had cut out of her scalp. She rolled the two silver lumps in her palm, then drew her hand back as if to throw them out across the ruinscape.
“Don’t!” he said.
She lowered her arm and looked at him questioningly.
“They’re silver,” he said, “and we don’t have much travelling money.” He began struggling up onto his feet, using his walking stick like a barge-pole.
“Are we travelling together?” she asked, with no expression discernible on her face.
He paused, realized that his words had implied that … and that in fact it was what he would prefer. He straightened up, and then nodded cautiously. “If you’d like to. We can travel as brother and sister, and get work at some hospital somewhere. Uh … I do have to ask this; if the question makes no sense to you … just tell me so.” He took a deep breath. “Do you still think I killed Julia?”
She walked away from him, picking her way over fragments of fallen pillars, and she stopped beside a eucalyptus bush and picked one of its poisonous leaves and, as she absently tore it to pieces, stared out across the ruins to the ivy-masked arches that fretted the steep face of the Palatine Hill.
Crawford followed more slowly, bracing his stick in the cracks in the old pavement.
When he stood beside her he opened his mouth to speak, but she held up her hand. “You think I don’t know that I’m Josephine,” she said quickly, as though it was something that had to be said but that no one wanted to hear, “and that it’s Julia that’s—that’s d-dead.” She shook her head, a grin of unhappiness cramping her face, and tears spilled from her eye and made highlights on her lean cheek. “I do know it, I do; I just … can’t stand it. Julia was such a …so much better a person than I ever was. She was always terribly kind to me, in spite of all the trouble I was to her. I should be dead, and she should be the one that’s still alive.”
She looked away from him but held out her scarred, deformed left hand, and he took it. “I know you didn’t kill her. And I know what did.”
Hand in hand, but with not the slightest erotic interest, they made their halting way forward across the shattered floor of the Forum, toward the southeast, where the high, crumbled red shoulder of the Colosseum rose above the skyline of more modern churches.
“Have you ever had that done,” she asked him after a while, “what I did for Keats right there at the end? If not, I could do it for you anytime you liked. Anyone can, you know. What do the Catholics call it?”
Crawford tried to remember the details of the previous night. The mid-morning sun was drying his clothes, and he felt a lot better than he had a couple of hours ago, but exhaustion still clung to him like children on his back. “What,” he said finally, “letting him sign his book, with the water from the windowsill? I don’t think the Catholics—”