The two of them rode out through the Porta della Piazza, the same southern gate where Shelley had been punched and the Italian dragoon stabbed a month ago, but though pistols bristled from the tooled leather holsters that fringed Byron’s hussar saddle, the soldiers of the Pisan guard looked down from the walls with nearly none of the alarmed suspicion that they had shown in previous weeks. They all knew that Byron was leaving the city soon. Also, there were only two armed riders today. Previous shooting parties had consisted of half a dozen or more.
“The Shelleys and their damned children,” snapped Byron when the walls were well behind them, and wild olive trees and thickets of saw-grass lined the road. “Have they reared one? Percy Florence is still alive and in his second year, but how much longer do you imagine he’ll survive? Their son William died three years ago, you know—a year after little Clara died in Venice—and way back in 1814 or so they had a child that died after two weeks. They hadn’t even named it yet! And I seem to recall that he had at least one child by his first wife—
no doubt any such are long dead. I don’t think Shelley is interested in the welfare of children—particularly if they’re his own.”
“That’s obviously nonsense,” Crawford said, driven by his knowledge of Shelley to risk contradicting Byron. “You know how he feels about his children … when he’s had them.”
Far from getting angry, though, Byron actually looked abashed. “Oh, you’re right, I know. But they do always die. And now they think Mary’s pregnant again! You’d think he’d give up sex—abandon the whole notion as a bad job.”
As I’ve done, thought Crawford.
They rode on without speaking, and the only sounds were the sea wind in the trees, and the sandy thudding of the horses’ hooves. Crawford pondered Byron’s remark about a silver bullet. Did Shelley imagine that Byron was the prey of a vampire? He had been, of course, before getting to the top of the Wengern.
Crawford looked across at his companion, noting the hollowed cheeks under the graying hair, and the brightness of Byron’s eyes. And the poetry he was writing these days was the best he’d ever done—Shelley had said recently that he could no longer compete with Byron, and that Byron was the only one worth competing with, now that Keats was dead.
Suddenly Crawford was sure that Byron had given in again—probably while he’d been staying in Venice, to judge by Shelley’s description of the woman he’d been living with there. Would it have been the same vampire that had been preying on him before? Probably. As he’d guessed in Switzerland six years ago—to Byron’s displeasure—they seemed to keep track of their previous lovers even when they’d been barred from them.
But Teresa Guiccioli was obviously not any sort of vampire—she frequently accompanied Byron and his friends on the afternoon rides, and even went to Mass at the cathedral. How was Byron keeping her safe from the jealous attentions of his supernatural lover?
He found himself thinking of the feel of his own vampire’s cold skin, and he hastily fumbled under his coat for his flask. He hadn’t had sex with anyone—anyone human—since his disastrous wedding night six years ago, and he had come to the bleak conclusion that making love to the thing that was Shelley’s twin had spoiled him for sex with his own species.
He still sometimes thought about the painful but releasing kiss Josephine had given him in front of Keats’s house a year ago in Rome, but the memory never quickened his pulse, and he and Josephine had never referred to it.
He and Byron had reached the field at the outskirts of the Castinelli farm where they always did their shooting, and Byron swung down off his horse and grinned up at Crawford. “Join you in that?”
“Certainly.” Crawford handed the flask down and then dismounted, and walked with Byron to the ravaged tree around which they habitually set up their targets. Byron took a second deep sip of the brandy, then handed the flask back, and as Crawford tethered the horses he crouched over some stakes they’d pounded into the ground last time. He was wedging half-crown pieces into the splintered heads of a couple of the stakes.
“Allegra’s dead,” he said over his shoulder.
“Oh.”
Crawford had never met the five-year-old daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont, and though he knew that Claire cared passionately for the child, he had no real idea of how Byron had felt about her—clearly he blamed himself at least to some extent, since he had made such a point earlier of impugning Shelley’s ability to take care of children.
“I’m sorry,” Crawford said, blushing at how inane it sounded.
“I had her in a, a convent, you know,” Byron went on, still facing away from him and adjusting the stakes. His tone was light and conversational. “I’ve got certain protections for myself and Teresa, but they’re not foolproof, and I thought … that in a consecrated place, far away from me and everyone else who’s known to these creatures … but it doesn’t seem to …” His shoulders were rigid, and Crawford wondered if he was weeping, but his voice when he spoke again was just as steady. “Our poor children.”
Crawford thought of his own agonized resisting of the urge to invite his lamia back—which in his case was, among other things, resistance to the offer of enormous longevity—and he thought too of the cost at which Keats had managed to save his own younger sister.
“Your,” Crawford began, wondering if Byron would challenge him to a duel for what he was about to say, “your poetry means that much to you?”
Byron stood up lithely and limped back toward the horses, still without having faced Crawford. In one flash of motion he drew two of the pistols and spun toward Crawford and the tree; and, in the next stretched instant of panic, Crawford had time to wonder if this was where he would die, and to notice that Byron’s hands were shaking wildly and that his eyes were shining with tears.
The two detonations were one ear-hammering blast, but Crawford caught the brief, shrill twang of at least one of the coins as it was punched away across the field.
One muscle at a time, Crawford relaxed, dimly aware through the ringing in his ears that Byron had reholstered the pistols and was walking back toward the tree; and beyond the glittering dots swimming in front of his eyes he watched him limp on past the tree, out into the grass; Byron’s head was down, and he was apparently looking for the coins, both of which were gone.
“It has,” Byron called back, after Crawford had crossed to the tree and was leaning against it. “Meant so much to me,” he added. He was kicking at the grass ten yards away and peering intently at the ground. “I … I suppose I really did know what Lord Grey was, what sort of thing he was, at least, when I opened my bedroom door to him in 1803. By the time I found out that I had doomed my mother and imperiled my sister, of course, it was too late. Still, I didn’t want to believe that he was responsible for my … life’s work, my writing, the thing that I … that made me me, do you know what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” Crawford managed to reply.
“I did suspect it—and so I’ve always taken inordinate delight in physical accomplishments—swimming and shooting and fencing and carnality. But none of those things are enough—not to justify all the deaths and hatreds and … betrayals, that have been my life.” He stooped and picked up a wad of silver, then held it up with a frail smile. “Not bad, eh? The coin’s wrapped right around the ball.” He began limping back toward the tree.