Still remembering the way Keats had chosen to die, Crawford said, “But why did you ask him in again? After you had managed to cut free of him in the Alps?”
“I had stopped writing!” Byron shook his head and pitched the coin away. “It … it turned out that I couldn’t stand that. I wrote Manfred, yes, but that was mostly from memory, stuff I’d composed mentally before we climbed the Wengern; and then in Venice I started the fourth Canto of Childe Harold, but it was just plodding … until I met Margarita Cogni—and then I made myself believe that she wasn’t Lord Grey again in a differently sexed body, and that the sudden improvement in my writing would have happened anyway.” He started back toward the horses. “I find I’m not really in the mood for shooting—how about you?”
“To hell with shooting,” Crawford agreed bewilderedly.
“And now Allegra’s dead,” Byron said as he untethered his horse and swung up into the saddle. His eyes narrowed. “But before the … thing can get my sister and my other daughter, I’m going to ditch it again, and then go someplace where I can accomplish something, make my name mean something—in some more valuable arena than poetry.”
Crawford climbed back up onto his horse. “Like?”
“Like … what, freedom—fighting for it—for people that haven’t got it.” Byron frowned self-consciously. “It seems like the best way to atone.”
Crawford thought of the bas-relief coat-of-arms on the door of Byron’s carriage, and of the many-roomed palace he shared with his monkeys and dogs and birds. “Sounds awfully democratic,” he said mildly.
Byron gave him a sharp look. “That’s sarcasm, isn’t it? Apparently you don’t know that my first speech in the House of Lords was in support of the frame-breakers, the English laborers who were being jailed, and even killed, for breaking the machines that were taking away their employment. And you know how involved I’ve been with the Carbonari, trying to help them throw off the Austrian yoke. It’s been …” He shrugged and shook his head. “It hasn’t been enough. Lately I’ve been thinking about Greece.”
Greece, Crawford recalled, was struggling to free itself from Turkey; but it was such a distant conflict, and so overshadowed with echoes of Homer and classical mythology, that he dismissed the notion as mere Byronic romanticism.
“So you’re planning to return to the Alps?” Crawford asked.
“Perhaps that. Or Venice. There’s no terrible hurry … in the meantime I can continue to resist the thing’s attentions, as I’ve been doing. The Carbonari have been resisting them for centuries, and Teresa’s family is deeply schooled in Carbonari lore. You noticed, I trust, that Teresa is … that she remains untouched by this particular ailment.”
Byron seemed angry, so Crawford didn’t question him further—though he was now very curious to know whether Byron’s affection for Teresa had sprung up before or after his discovery of her family’s vampire-repelling skills.
They had ridden for several minutes back toward the centuries-forsaken walls of the city when Byron noticed a figure ahead of them, silhouetted against the gray sky on a rise in the track through the marsh. Crawford squinted in the direction Byron indicated, and saw that the figure was running wildly—toward them—and then he went cold with recognition.
“It’s Josephine,” he said tightly, spurring his horse forward.
She began waving when she saw the horses, and her arm didn’t stop met-ronoming back and forth until Crawford had ridden up to her, reined in and dismounted, and grabbed her arm and forced it back down to her side. She was panting so desperately that he made her sit down, and her eyes were wide open, the glass one staring crazily up into the gray sky.
Byron dismounted too, and held the reins of both horses, staring at Josephine with lively interest. Crawford hoped she would turn out to have had some purpose in running out here; he never permitted anyone to make fun of her odd behavior, but it was discouraging how many times she gave people the opportunity.
After a minute Josephine had regained her breath. “Soldiers from the garrison,” she said, “at our house. I hid when they broke in, and then I climbed out the kitchen window when they were all in the main room.”
Byron swore. “You two weren’t even anywhere near the damned gate when Tita stabbed that dragoon! And they just broke in? I’m going to deal with this, they can’t start harassing all my acquaintances—”
“I … I don’t think it was about the dragoon,” she said, staring hard at Crawford with her one eye.
“Well?” Crawford demanded impatiently after a pause. “What do you think it was about? You can talk in front of Byron,” he added, seeing her hesitate.
“They were talking about three men who were killed in Rome last year.”
Crawford’s belly suddenly felt very empty, and he instinctively looked past her at the city walls. “… Oh.”
Byron’s eyebrows were raised. “You killed three men in Rome?”
Crawford exhaled. “Apparently.” He looked back, along the road that led to the Castinelli family’s farmhouse, and he wondered how much the old farmer might charge to let him and Josephine sleep on his kitchen floor tonight.
“Byron, could you please have a message delivered to Shelley when you get back? Tell him that the Aickmans will take him up on his offer of employment after all—but that he’ll have to bring clothes and supplies for us, and pick us up on the road outside the city.”
CHAPTER 13
The realm I look upon and die
Another man will own;
He shall attain the heaven that I
Perish and have not known.
—A. E. Housman,
When Israel Out of Egypt Came
The entire Shelley household—which, after a hasty stop at the Castinelli farmhouse, included Crawford and Josephine—left Pisa the next day; and four days later Crawford and Shelley and Edward Williams spent an hour carrying boxes through the shallow surf of the Gulf of La Spezia’s eastern shore, setting the boxes down on the sand-swept portico of the old stone boat-house that Shelley had rented, and then wading back to the anchored boat for more.
Away from each side of the house stretched a seawall that divided the narrow strip of beach from the trees masking the steep slope behind the house, and the nearest neighbors were a dozen fishermen and their families in the little cluster of huts called San Terenzo, two hundred yards to the north. There was a road somewhere up the hill, but the only practical access to the shoreside dwellings was by sea, and Shelley was anxious for the delivery of the twenty-four-foot boat that he’d had built at Livorno, and aboard which he hoped to spend most of the hot summer days.
The house was called the Casa Magni, which Crawford thought was an awfully splendid name for so desolate and inhospitable a place. Five tall arches opened on the ground floor, but except for a narrow pavement the house fronted right on the water and, behind the arches, the flagstones of the vast, house-spanning chamber were always rippled and gritty with sand from the high tides.
The ground-floor chamber was used only for storage of boating equipment, and everyone had to sleep and dine in the rooms upstairs—Crawford remembered hearing descriptions of Byron’s palace in Venice, and he wondered why both poets seemed to like dwellings that were just about literally on the water.
On the evening after their arrival Claire returned unexpectedly soon from a walk along the narrow beach and, climbing the stairs to where everyone else was sitting around the table in the long central dining room, she heard Shelley saying something about Byron and the convent at Bagnacavallo; when she got to the top of the stairs she crossed the room and asked Shelley if her daughter was dead, and Shelley stood up and answered, quietly, “Yes.”