He turned to Crawford, and there were tears in his eyes. “What if Allegra, the real child, is still … in that head, somewhere, like a child lost in the catacombs of an overthrown castle? Christ, I remember playing with her, rolling billiard balls back and forth across the floor of Byron’s palace in Venice with her … years ago.”
“Why did you come here?” Crawford asked, thinking of the fragility of Josephine.
“Because I want to make a deal with her.” Shelley smiled shakily at him. “Her—not Allegra. You know who I mean. And, like the rest of her tribe, she’ll be more accessible in this place. I want to … buy her off.”
“With what?”
Shelley took the glass from Crawford’s hand and drained it. “With myself—or what makes me me, anyway; with the … greater part of my humanity.”
Crawford stared at him. “Will she take it?”
“Oh, she’ll take it, sure enough; I just hope she’ll remember to adhere to the bargain.”
Crawford shuddered, but didn’t try to talk him out of it.
That night Crawford was shaken awake by another of the servants, who told him he’d been shouting in his sleep; Crawford blurrily thanked the man, but was almost sorry he’d been awakened—for, though he couldn’t remember any of the dream, it was evident to him that it had been intensely erotic, and it was the first time in two years that he’d had any such feelings. At the same time he knew that even in the dream it had only been a tantalizing glimpse of something passing by, not anything for him.
He didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, and when at dawn he took a cup of coffee out onto the terrace he saw Shelley, pale and haggard, rowing the little boat out to the Don Juan; Shelley was facing him, and when he saw Crawford he nodded grimly.
The next day a three-masted frigate sailed into the Gulf and fired a four-gun salute to the moored Don Juan—it proved to be Byron’s new ship, the Bolivar, en route from Genoa to where her future owner awaited her in Livorno; aboard her were a Captain Daniel Roberts and a friend of Shelley’s and Byron’s from the days in Pisa, Edward John Trelawny.
Shelley was delighted to see Trelawny again, and even Mary revived somewhat from her semi-invalidhood, and for two days the Casa Magni was a cheerful place, with boat trips to Lerici for roses and carnations and spicy Ligurean food and strong coffee, and long, animated conversations around the dining table, and the sound of Jane Williams’s guitar echoing over the water.
Trelawny was a tall, bearded soldier-of-fortune who had known Edward Williams in Geneva; he had asked for an introduction to the Pisan circle mainly in order to meet Byron, whose adventurous poetry he admired, but as it happened he had become friends primarily with the Shelleys. He and Shelley were the same age, and though the one was big and dark and the other frail and fair, they were equally skilled at shooting and sailing, and now spent many hours together in pistol practice and in discussion of improvements Shelley wanted to make on the Don Juan.
The holiday atmosphere brought the children out, and Crawford saw Josephine frequently during the two festive days; and on Saturday night when a group took the Don Juan a mile north along the coast to Lerici for dinner, and there proved to be too many people for the longest table the restaurant had, he found himself sitting at a small separate table with her.
The waiter brought a steaming platter of trenette noodles covered with green pesto sauce redolent of basil and Ligurean olive oil and garlic, and Josephine said, “I hate this.”
She was forking a lot of the noodles onto her plate, so Crawford knew she didn’t mean the food. “We could leave,” he said quietly.
She looked up at him. “You know why we can’t.”
The smile he gave her was as affectionate as it was wry, for he knew she wasn’t referring to the danger of arrest. He nodded. “The children.”
“He’s got something in mind, in coming here,” she said. “Hasn’t he? Something he thinks will save them.”
Crawford took some of the pasta himself, and while he nibbled at it he quietly told her about the vague deal Shelley had hoped to make with his unhuman sister, and that he had apparently already made it.
“The one you’re married to,” said Josephine. “Are you … comfortable with the fact that she might be around?”
“Used to be married to,” he said. “I got a divorce in the Alps.” He went on hurriedly, “No, I’m not comfortable with the fact. She … killed Julia, after all. As a matter of fact I think she was around, night before last—I sort of … felt her, in my sleep, I think.”
Josephine reddened and looked away. “I know what you mean. Do you think Percy …?”
It was a new thought to Crawford, and he fought down the instant jealousy it roused in him. “I don’t know. That might have been part of the bargain, I suppose—he did … have her, once before, in 1811.” He despised himself for remembering the year. “Yes, I imagine that probably was part of it.”
She drank some wine and smiled unhappily at him, and he knew she had been aware of his momentary envy. “It’s all just so damned horrible, isn’t it?”
Crawford reflected her smile.
Edward Williams piloted them all back home, skating the Don Juan across the calm water under a full moon, but when they got back to the Casa Magni Crawford couldn’t sleep, and eventually got out of bed and went out to the
dining room to read.
The wind was strengthening, and the windows rattled with each gust in eerie counterpoint to the boom of the surf on the rocks, and Crawford kept being distracted by a remark Williams had made about the tides being capricious along this shore. Williams had seemed to find it amusing, but now, as the moon hovered over the massy shoulder of Portovenere, the thought made Crawford uneasy.
After a while Claire came silently out of Mary’s room and closed the door behind her. She smiled and nodded to him, but her face was drawn, and he wondered what dream had driven her out of bed. She seemed sober.
“I’ve got to get out of here, Michael,” she whispered, sitting down in a chair across the table from him. “Back to Florence. This is a bad place.”
He glanced out at the moon, and nodded. “Shelley should have done this alone,” he whispered back.
She stared at him. “Done what?”
He realized that she wasn’t aware of Shelley’s vague purpose in coming here, and he began to frame some answer having to do with the man’s poetry, but suddenly she was looking past him, toward the window, and her mouth was pinched shut and her eyes had gone as wide open as they could. Then she was up out of her chair and running toward the closed door to the terrace.
The violence of the movement startled Crawford half out of his own chair, and when he glanced at the French door he lunged out of the chair entirely and got to the door an instant before she did, and held her back.
There was a little girl out on the terrace, holding up white hands toward the light inside, and though she was silhouetted by the moon, Crawford could see her darkly shining eyes and white teeth as she mouthed inaudible words through the glass.
“What are you doing,” Claire panted, struggling to get out of Crawford’s arms, “that’s my daughter! That’s Allegra!”
“It’s not, Claire, I swear to you,” Crawford snarled, spinning her back across the floor to crack her hip against the table. “It’s a vampire. Your daughter died, remember?”