She stared at him with such white-faced fury that he actually stepped back, but then she turned and ran into the room she was sharing with Mary, and closed the door; Mary slept in Shelley’s room that night, contrary to their habit.
Even in his bunk in the men’s servants’ room in the back of the house, Crawford could hear Claire sobbing wildly until dawn.
During the next several days Shelley went on a number of solitary hikes up and down the beach, climbing the weirdly bubbled and wavy volcanic rocks and frequently cutting himself on them, but at sunset he could generally be found leaning on the rail of the terrace that fronted the Casa Magni’s second story, staring out across the four miles of darkening water at the tall, craggy silhouette of the peninsula of Portovenere across the Gulf.
One evening Crawford followed him and Ed Williams out onto the terrace after dinner; Shelley and Williams were talking between themselves, and Crawford, shaded from the moonlight by the ragged canvas awning, leaned against the house wall and, as he sipped a glass of sciacchetra, a locally made sweet amber wine, he stared speculatively at his new employer.
Crawford had wondered why Shelley had been so determined to bring his whole entourage to this particular section of bleak coast; at times like this, when Shelley would desultorily maintain a conversation as he scanned the empty waters and the structureless shores, he seemed to be waiting for something—and at such times too he often rattled certain quartzy beach pebbles in his fist, like a man working up the nerve to roll dice on a horrifyingly large wager.
The only sounds on the warm breeze tonight were the measured crash of the surf on the rocks below the terrace, and the hoarse whisper of the wind in the trees behind and above the house, and the clicking of the rocks in Shelley’s fist—and so Crawford spilled most of his wine onto his hand and wrist when Shelley suddenly gave a choked yell and grabbed Williams’s arm.
“There!” Shelley said in a whispered scream, pointing out over the rail at the white foam streaking the dark waves below. “Do you see her?”
Williams, his voice shrill with fright, denied seeing anything; but when Crawford hurried to the rail and looked down he thought he saw a small human form hovering over the waves, beckoning with one white arm.
Shelley tore his gaze away from the sea and looked at Crawford; even in the evening dimness Crawford could see the whites of his eyes all around the irises.
“Don’t interfere, Aickman,” Shelley said. “She’s not for you this—” He paused then, for he had looked back out at the sea, and the look of alarmed anticipation was struck from his face, leaving only a look of sick, tired horror. “Oh, God,” he wailed softly. “It’s not her.”
Crawford looked out again at the dark, surging ocean. The pale figure was farther out, and now he thought he saw several—no, dozens—of impossibly hovering human forms far out over the face of the night’s sea, and he flinched back, coldly aware of how alone he and his companions were on this desolate northern coast, and of how very many miles outward the featureless water extended.
In the moment before it disappeared, seeming to rise into the ash sky and disappear against the stony shoulder of Portovenere, Crawford got a glimpse of the face of the child-figure Shelley had pointed out; the face was porcelain white, and seemed to be showing all its teeth in a broad smile.
Shelley collapsed on the rail, and if Williams hadn’t grabbed his shoulder he might have fallen over the rail onto the narrow pavement below; but after a moment Shelley straightened up and pushed his disordered blond hair back from his face.
“It was Allegra,” he said quietly. “Don’t, for God’s sake, tell Claire.”
Crawford stepped back into the shadows and chewed sweet wine from his trembling knuckles.
During the long summer days the heat seemed to flow through all of them like a drug. Even the children were stunned by it—the Shelleys’ two-year-old son, Percy Florence, spent most of his time drawing random squiggles in any shaded patches of sand he could find, and the Williamses’ two children, one of whom was barely a year old, spent much of each day crying—it seemed to Crawford that they cried with a sort of slow patience, as if a lot of it would have to be done and they didn’t want to wear themselves out early.
Claire just stumbled around in a daze, and Crawford didn’t think it was caused by her admittedly heavy drinking. All she could talk about was the way Byron had used Allegra as a way to make her unhappy; in fact, so frequently did she say “He never did anything for Allegra!” that Crawford and Josephine would often whisper the sentence to each other when Claire opened her mouth to speak, and more often than not had correctly anticipated what she’d been about to say.
Mary was unspecifically ill, much of the time, and had taken on the status of an invalid, and when she did leave her room it was generally to talk to Edward Williams and his wife Jane, who of all the group were bearing up best.
Ed Williams was a year younger than Percy Shelley, and though he had literary ambitions, and had even written a tragedy, he was a bluff outdoorsman, always tanned and cheerful and ready to help with the various maintenance jobs the boats and house required. His wife Jane, too, seemed unaffected by the domineering sun, and was always ready to cheer up the rest of the party with her guitar playing in the evenings, when at last a cooling breeze would sweep in off the water to break the sweaty choke-hold of the day.
Crawford liked both the Williamses, and was profoundly glad that they were here to share the impromptu exile.
At noon of the fourth day after the apparition of Allegra had beckoned to Shelley from the twilight surf, they saw a sail appear around the headland of Portovenere.
For once the day was gray and storm-threatening, and when the watchers on the terrace realized that the sail was that of Shelley’s new boat, the Don Juan, being delivered at last, Shelley smiled nervously and remarked to Crawford how appropriate it was that his craft should first be seen emerging from the port of Venus.
That’s right, thought Crawford, with a sudden chill that wasn’t the cold wind’s doing, Portovenere—that’s what it means.
The boat was an imposingly big craft when seen up close—two masts stood up from the polished deck, each sporting a gaff-rigged mainsail and topsails, and three jibsails extended like an upswept mane from the tapering neck of the long bowsprit—and, after she was moored and the delivery crew had come ashore, Shelley hired one of them, an eighteen-year-old English boy called Charles Vivian, to stay on as a part of her permanent crew.
On a sunny afternoon three days later they took the Don Juan out for her first real sail with Shelley as captain, and tacked their way effortlessly across the sparkling blue water of the Gulf to within a hundred yards of the cliffs of Portovenere. Jane Williams and Mary were aboard, seated in the stern near where Shelley worked the tiller, and Shelley had insisted that Crawford come along too, in case the outing should make the pregnant Mary ill.
At one point Shelley gave the tiller to Edward Williams and walked up to where Crawford sat leaning against the forward mast. “Six months more, then?” Shelley asked him.