Crawford realized that he was talking about Mary’s pregnancy. “Roughly,” he answered, shading his eyes with his hand as he squinted upward. “Be born in the late fall or early winter.”
Shelley stood easily on the deck, keeping his arms folded and only leaning to compensate for the rolling. “Mary doesn’t like it here,” he said suddenly. “She hates the loneliness, and the heat.” He had to speak loudly for Crawford to hear him, but the wind was on the starboard quarter and was flinging their voices away over the bow. “I think she knows I have to be here, though. To …” He shivered and looked past Crawford at the cliffs, shaking his head.
Crawford wished Byron had followed them all here, instead of moving farther south for the summer; despite the differences between the two poets, he was the best person to get Shelley to express himself clearly.
“To …?” echoed Crawford helpfully.
Shelley dropped his gaze to him again. “I may … it’s possible I may … suffer, here, this summer.”
Shelley had often complained to Crawford about bladder stones and hardening of the skin and fingernails; the symptoms seemed to be aggravated by exposure to sunlight, and Crawford started to advise him for the dozenth time to be careful always to wear a hat, but Shelley waved him to silence.
“No, not all that.” Shelley rubbed his eyes.
“I may not be quite the same man, come fall, as I am now and have been,” Shelley said. “You’re a doctor—if the sort of thing I’m describing does happen, I’d be grateful if you’d authoritatively tell Mary that it was—oh, you know, a brain fever induced by a mortified cut or something, that left me not as … as intelligent, not as insightful, as the man she married.” His tanned face was hollowed and pinched, making him look much older than his thirty years. “Don’t ever let her—suspect that I did it intentionally—for her, and for our surviving son, and for the child she carries.”
Without waiting for a reply he turned away and strode aft, and a few moments later Crawford got to his feet and leaned on the starboard rail, staring out to the open sea and away from Portovenere. Summer lightning made it seem that flickering white-hot wires were turning in the terribly blue sky just above the horizon, and the recent storms had driven in toward shore hundreds of gigantic Portuguese man-o'-wars that now hung below the surface of the water like big malignant pearls.
Shelley continued to take his long walks, mostly after dark now; and after Williams built a little rowboat out of wood and tarred canvas, Shelley began rowing it out to where the Don Juan was moored offshore, and spending his days aboard the big boat, feverishly writing page after page of poetry. The Triumph of Life was what he was calling his new, long work.
The summer seemed to Crawford to be flying past. Josephine bunked with the rest of the women servants, and had been recruited as a sort of assistant to Antonia, the Italian nanny who took care of the Williamses’ two children and young Percy Florence Shelley, and so he hardly saw her except at dinner; and she was subdued then, firing off none of the weird, conversation-stopping remarks that had so upset Mary and Claire when they all used to gather around Byron’s table in Pisa.
Mary tended to hide out in her room, and the Williamses stayed together, often out on the boat with Shelley, and so it was almost with a sense of relief that Crawford recognized the man he met on the beach on a twilight evening a month after that first outing aboard the Don Juan.
Crawford and Josephine had been busy all day attending to Mary, who had begun bleeding from the womb and for a swelteringly strenuous couple of hours had seemed on the verge of having a miscarriage; the fit had eventually passed, to Shelley’s intense relief, and Mary had fallen into a restless, sweaty doze. Josephine had returned to the children and Shelley had stalked back to his own room to resume the writing that so absorbed him, and Crawford had gone for a long walk south along the beach, only turning back when the sun had dipped behind the island off the tip of Portovenere.
As soon as he turned his steps back toward the north, Crawford had noticed the man standing on the sand a hundred yards ahead of him, and when Crawford had taken a couple of dozen steps in that direction he had recognized him.
It was Polidori, the arrogant young man who had been Byron’s poetry-writing personal physician before Byron had dismissed him, and given the job to Crawford, in 1816. The carefully tended little moustache and the curled hair and the self-consciously dignified stance were unmistakable.
Crawford waved and called out to him, and Polidori turned to stare in response.
Crawford started toward him along the sand—but at one point the shoreline led Crawford inland around a boulder, and when his course took him again out to where he could see some distance of beach, Polidori was gone, presumably up the wooded slope.
Still holds a grudge, thought Crawford. I wonder why he’s visiting Shelley.
As he trudged up to the Casa Magni, Crawford saw Shelley at his usual station for this time of night, leaning from the rail on the second floor and staring out over the sea. Shelley started violently when Crawford hailed him, but relaxed when he saw who it was. “Good evening, Aickman,” he called down quietly.
“Evening, Percy,” returned Crawford, pausing below the terrace. “Didn’t mean to startle you. What did Polidori want?”
Shelley’s momentarily regained composure was suddenly gone. His narrow fingers gripped the rail like the claws of a bird, and his whisper was shrill as he told Crawford, “Get up here—and say nothing to anyone.”
Crawford rolled his eyes impatiently, but obediently blundered through the empty ground floor to the stairs, climbed them to the dining room level and passed by Jane Williams and Mary and Josephine without speaking, though he picked up a glass and filled it from a decanter on the table, and then walked out to join Shelley on the terrace. The wind was from the sea, and he looked nervously out across the face of the water before looking at Shelley.
“So why are you afraid of Polidori?” he asked quietly, taking a sip of the wine.
Shelley stared at him. “Because he’s dead. He killed himself last year, in England.”
“Well, your information’s faulty. I saw him down the beach not half an hour ago.”
“I don’t doubt you did,” said Shelley unhappily. “This is an easy place for them to come to, the port of Venus.” He waved out at the ocean. “Remember Allegra?”
Crawford was suddenly very tired. “What,” he asked listlessly, “are you saying.”
“You know what I’m saying, damn you. If someone dies after being bitten by a vampire, and nobody … kills the body in the right way, he comes back, he digs his way out of his grave and comes back. Though it’s hardly him anymore. I stopped Clara … but the nuns at Bagnacavallo didn’t stop Allegra, and clearly nobody pounded a stake into Polidori’s corpse either.”
He shook his head, looking even wearier than Crawford felt. “Eggshells is all humans are to these things—the bite carries their … what, eggs, spores … and in the ground the spores replace the organic stuff of their dead host with their stonier substance, like the primeval fish and plants you can find petrified in rocks.” Crawford tried to interrupt, but Shelley went on. “I wish it were possible to be certain, absolutely certain, that no bit of the soul of the original host was still present in the remade body—but the revivified ones do seem to seek out people they knew when they were alive.”