“No,” she said, “when I smeared my wet hand across his forehead, so as to—”
“I thought that was accidental,” Crawford said, “just you catching your balance.”
She looked at him in exasperation. “No. It was what made his vampire leave. Damn it, what do they call it, not Confirmation—”
“Oh.” Crawford stopped walking for a moment. “Yes. Yes, I might want you to do that for me sometime—let me think about it.” He started walking again, and added, as an afterthought, “Baptism, they call it.”
BOOK TWO: 1822: SUMMER FLIES
And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow—
A living Image, which did far surpass
In beauty that bright shape of vital stone
Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion.
A sexless thing it was, and in its growth
It seemed to have developed no defect
Of either sex, yet all the grace of both …
And o’er its gentle countenance did play
The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies …
—Percy Bysshe Shelley,
The Witch of Atlas
…thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field …
—Job 5:23,
quoted without comment
in Shelley’s 1822 notebook
CHAPTER 12
Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;
Thou art fed with perpetual breath,
And alive after infinite changes,
And fresh from the kisses of death;
Of languors rekindled and rallied,
Of barren delights and unclean,
Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid
And poisonous queen.
—A. C. Swinburne, Dolores
Pisa, on the northwest coast of Italy near Livorno, was clearly a relic of what it had once been. The houses were classical Roman, but the paint was blistering off the shutters on the windows, and the clean architectural lines were blurred now with water stains and cracks, and some of the streets were simply abandoned, with vines and weeds claiming the fallen buildings.
The yellow Arno still flowed powerfully under the ancient bridges, but the buildup of the river-mouth delta had tripled the city’s distance from the sea in the centuries since Strabo had called Pisa one of the most valorous of the Etruscan cities. Charcoal-burners and cork-peelers labored in the maremma, the salt marsh that now surrounded the city, but the local commerce subsisted mainly on European tourists.
Most of the tourists came to see the cathedral and the famous Leaning Tower, but a few came with medical problems to the university—where an English-speaking doctor was a Godsend—or to try to catch glimpses of the two infamous poets, exiles from England, who had lately taken up residence in the city and were supposed to be intending to start some sort of magazine; such literary-minded tourists were advised to hurry, though, for the poets had evidently got themselves into some sort of trouble with the local government, and were expected to be moving on soon.
As Michael Crawford made his way eastward along the Lung’Arno, the crowded street that overhung the north side of the Arno, he was not paying any particular attention to the people around him. Two men were beating out mattresses over the bridge ahead, and a woman was singing as she leaned from a third-floor window and hung laundry on an alley-spanning clothesline, but Crawford, glancing at the ground from time to time to judge where to seat the tip of his walking stick, didn’t see the old man who was hobbling toward him.
The river was deep and fast-moving on this overcast April Thursday, and all the boats were moored along the river wall below the sun-bleached stone houses—even the adventurous Shelley’s skiff was tied up, though it was on this side of the river, across the rushing water from the Tre Palazzi where he lived. Clearly he was visiting Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, probably for the last time before moving north to the Bay of La Spezia.
And Byron had decided to spend the summer in Montenero, ten miles to the south. It looked to Crawford as though the English colony in Pisa was breaking up; Byron and Shelley had formed the hub around which the rest of them had revolved like spokes.
Crawford and Josephine would stay on, of course. They worked as a brother-and-sister doctor-and-nurse team with the medical faculty at the university, and he was confident that their value there would keep the official anti-English sentiment from affecting them.
Byron was the cause of it all, anyway, and he was leaving. His current paramour was a young lady named Teresa Guiccioli, whose brother and estranged husband were known to be active in the anti-Austrian Carbonari, and Byron had apparently been initiated into the secret society himself, and frequently bragged about having stored guns and ammunition for the informal army when he had been a guest in the Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna.
The Pisan government had not been pleased when Teresa and her brother, and then Byron himself, had moved to their city; and the hostilities had reached a near crisis a month ago, when Byron and Shelley and four other members of the local English circle had got into a scuffle with a rude Italian dragoon at the south gate. The dragoon had punched Shelley in the face with the guard of a saber, and in the ensuing mêlée one of Byron’s servants had stabbed the dragoon with a pitchfork; the man had eventually recovered from the wound, and the servant had been imprisoned, but now government spies routinely followed Byron and Teresa and her brothers.
Crawford certainly hoped that he and Josephine were under no suspicion.
He had continued to practice medicine as Michael Aickman after he and Josephine fled Rome. He’d been afraid von Aargau might have removed his faked credentials from the official records in Rome, but the university here had been impressed enough by his documentable experience and obvious competence to dispense with checking his papers too thoroughly, and he and Josephine had come here with the hope that at last they could settle down. Crawford thought they could live together as brother and sister for the rest of their lives—neither one of them was likely to marry.
He was forty-two now, and nearly always walked with a cane because of the stiffness that he’d never been able to work out of his left leg, and he spent a lot of his free time reading and gardening; and Josephine had been getting steadily saner during this unstressful last year. The wines and cooking of Tuscany had filled her figure out too, so that she looked a good deal like her dead sister now, and the Italian sun had tanned her skin and brought out a whole spectrum of copper and gold and bronze in her long hair. She and Crawford had become friendly with the Pisan English, and were frequently guests at Byron’s Wednesday-night dinners, but the two of them were really more Italian than English now.
Crawford had been looking down to his right at the surging water and, when he looked up to make sure not to pass the white marble façade of Byron’s house, he did see the old man, who was also walking with a cane—but Crawford was too busy with his own thoughts to give the man more than a passing glance.
Byron stepped out onto the second-floor balcony now, his graying hair blowing in the breeze, and Crawford started to wave up at him, but halted the motion when he saw the grim expression on the lord’s thinned face. A moment later Percy Shelley strode out of the Palazzo’s front door. He too looked upset.