“Percy!” Crawford called, lengthening his stride. “What’s the matter?”
Shelley blinked at him for a moment as if without recognition, then shook his head. “Can you and your sister come with us to La Spezia?” he asked harshly. “I have reason to believe that we’ll be needing …your sort of medical expertise.”
Crawford had never really managed to like Shelley. “I don’t see how we could, Percy, not right now. Mary or Claire is pregnant?”
“As a matter of fact we think Mary might be again—but that wasn’t exactly …” He gestured impatiently. “I can pay you both more than you’re making at the university hospital.”
Crawford knew this wasn’t true—Shelley was in debt to any number of people, even his English publisher. “I’m sorry. We really couldn’t leave Pisa. You know Josephine isn’t well. Her nervous condition …”
For a moment Shelley looked ready to argue—then he just shook his head and stalked past him; a moment later he was hurrying angrily down Byron’s private landing steps to his moored skiff, his boots tapping on the wet stone.
Crawford looked up at the balcony, but Byron had gone back inside. He let his gaze fall back to the street, and at last he noticed the old man—and a moment later he had quickly stepped forward into the recessed doorway of Byron’s house, and was rapping the knocker hard against the wood of the door, for he thought he had recognized him.
He thought it was … what had the name been? … des Loges, the crazy-talking old man who had got the Aickman passport for him in France—and then asked him to drown him in exchange for the favor—six long years ago and more than five hundred miles from here.
“Come on, Fletcher,” he whispered to the locked door. He told himself that des Loges couldn’t have recognized him—he no longer looked anything like the young, dark-haired Michael Crawford who had crawled up onto the beach at Carnac in late July of 1816.
And perhaps it hadn’t been des Loges at all. What would the man be doing here?
Could he be looking for Crawford?
The thought scared him, and he hammered the knocker again, harder.
At last Byron’s servant dragged the door open, an expression of grieved surprise on his seamed face.
“Sorry to have been so insistent, Fletcher,” Crawford said breathlessly, and a moment later the servant’s eyebrows climbed even higher, for Crawford had hurried inside and pulled the door closed himself. “There’s a … an old creditor of mine out there, and I don’t want him to see me.”
Fletcher shrugged and nodded, and it occurred to Crawford that, over the years, Byron had probably burst into a number of the houses he’d lived in with the same excuse for haste.
“Shall I announce you,” Fletcher inquired, “or were you just …?”
“No, he actually is expecting me. We were supposed to ride out to shoot in the maremma.”
“I’ll tell my lord you’re here,” said Fletcher, starting up the stairs, “though he might not be in the mood.”
Crawford lowered himself onto one of the sofas, and then stared unseeingly at the painted flowers on the high ceiling and wondered what had so upset Shelley and Byron. Had they had a fight?
It wasn’t impossible. Shelley was often visibly annoyed by Byron’s bawdy talk, and by the slight but ever-present condescension which the fact of being an English peer gave him, and, above all, by his refusal to speak to Claire or let her visit their daughter Allegra, whom he had left behind in a convent in
Bagnacavallo, on the opposite coast of Italy.
Shelley would be reluctant to break with Byron, for the lord was the most important contributor and subsidiser of the Liberal, the proposed magazine that was to publish Byron’s and Shelley’s newest poetical works and save Shelley’s friends the Hunt brothers from bankruptcy—Leigh Hunt and his wife and children were already supposed to be in transit to Pisa from England—but the right provocation at the right moment could have set off Shelley’s temper.
Even before he and Josephine had arrived in Pisa, over a year ago now, Crawford had known that Shelley was living in the city, and that Byron was expected—but he’d confidently dismissed a momentary suspicion that it was Shelley’s inhuman twin, rather than the university, that had made the place look good to him.
In fact he had at first planned to have nothing to do with the English poets … but then he had met Byron one evening a couple of months ago on the Lung’Arno.
Crawford had instantly recognized Byron, and after a moment of hesitation he walked up to him and introduced himself. Byron had been chilly at first, but after they had shaken hands he was suddenly full of cheer, recounting nostalgically exaggerated stories about Polidori and Hobhouse and some of the inns they’d stayed in during that tour of the Alps six years earlier. Before the two of them had parted that evening, Crawford had found himself accepting an invitation to dinner at the Palazzo Lanfranchi that Wednesday night.
Josephine hadn’t accompanied him that first time, and Shelley had been a little more surprised than pleased to see Crawford again, but gradually Crawford and Josephine had become a part of the group of English who were drawn to Shelley’s house on the south side of the river and Byron’s on the north.
Josephine seldom spoke, and sometimes upset the Shelleys by staring intently into vacant corners of a room like a spooked cat, but Byron claimed to like her occasional abrupt, random statements, and Jane Williams, who with her husband was staying with the Shelleys, was trying to teach her to play the guitar.
Byron never referred to having met Josephine on the Wengern, and Crawford believed he had managed to make himself forget most of that day.
Crawford had wondered what it had been about that handshake that had so warmed Byron to him, until one day a couple of weeks ago when he’d been drinking with Byron, and the lord had held up his own right hand, on the palm of which Crawford saw a black mark similar to the one that had been burned into Crawford’s hand when he had stuck the knife into the face of the wooden statue in Rome, accidentally summoning the Carbonari.
“Yours is darker,” Byron had observed. “They must have used a fresher knife in your initiation, when they had you stab the mazze. Did you know that any one knife is only good for so many stabs? After enough use in initiations all the carbon has been thrown off into flesh, and the knife isn’t steel anymore, just iron.”
Crawford had just nodded wisely, and he was careful never to contradict Byron’s impression that he had been initiated into the Carbonari … partly because he suspected that he had been, that night.
Byron was limping down the stairs now, and Crawford looked away from the ceiling.
“Good afternoon, Aickman,” Byron said. He was slim and tanned after having lost a lot of weight he’d apparently put on in Venice, but today he looked harassed and unsure of himself. “What did Shelley say to you out there?”
Crawford stood up. “Just that he wanted Josephine and me to go with them to La Spezia.”
Byron nodded ruefully, as though this confirmed something. “He won’t be coming along today—and I’m damned if I’ll go over there to fetch Ed Williams—so I guess it’s just you and me.” He gave Crawford a look that was almost a glare, then grinned. “You won’t be putting any silver bullets into me, will you?”
“Uh,” said Crawford, mystified, “no.”