One of the candlesticks wobbled and then clanked over, and then Shelley’s door opened, and Crawford could hear people stirring in the rear rooms.
Claire ran back toward the glassed door, and Crawford caught her, holding her too tightly in his fear.
Josephine, wrapped in a robe, padded up, stared expressionlessly for a moment at the swaying thing on the terrace, and then stood between it and Claire.
Claire’s eyes blazed at Shelley, who was blinking around sleepily. “Allegra’s on the terrace,” she told him clearly. “Tell these two to let me go to her.”
Shelley was suddenly wide awake. “It wasn’t her, Claire,” he said quietly, keeping his eyes away from the windows. “Ed,” he added to Williams, who had appeared from his own room, “pull the drapes across, will you? And Josephine, get Claire a glass of something to let her sleep.”
Williams walked slowly across the room to the windows, and Crawford, still holding the struggling Claire, glanced at him impatiently.
Williams was staring at the child outside as he dragged the drapes across, and though there was no change in Williams’s expression, Crawford thought there had been some kind of communication through the glass in the instant before the drapes cut out the last of the moonlight. He tried to catch Williams’s eye as the man walked back across the room, but Williams was staring at the floor.
Claire sagged in Crawford’s arms, and he led her to a chair and lowered her into it as Josephine hurried back to the women’s servants’ room.
Shelley’s alertness had faded, and he was blinking around as if he couldn’t remember what had just happened—more than ever Crawford was sure he must have consummated his bargain with the lamia, and he gripped the back of Claire’s chair very hard. He didn’t want to go back to the lamia himself—he swore to himself that he didn’t—but he remembered with torturing vividness how hungrily she used to come into his arms, and he remembered his hands on her, and hers on him.
Josephine had returned with a bottle of laudanum, and Claire dazedly drank the dose Josephine measured out, and then let herself be led back to her bed.
Without a word Williams returned to his own room and closed the door.
“You didn’t expect this?” Crawford asked.
“Not Allegra, no,” Shelley said softly, shaking his head. “I couldn’t believe it when we saw her the other night—I was told that the body was shipped back to England. God knows what child’s body was sent there. I—”
“What do you recommend we do about it?”
“… All go back to bed?” Shelley ventured.
Not trusting himself to speak, Crawford nodded stiffly and returned to his room.
He still couldn’t sleep. He lay staring up at the ceiling, wondering if he should go take some laudanum himself to drive away the memories of cold breasts and a hot tongue, and glaringly alive but inorganic eyes, and the total loss of self to which he had so gratefully surrendered during that most peaceful week of his life in Switzerland six years ago.
Shelley was having her—perhaps even now, at this moment—and her thoughts were all of Shelley and not of him.
He sipped brandy from his ever-present flask instead, and at dawn managed to fall into an uneasy doze.
At eight he was again shaken awake, this time by Shelley, who was pale beneath his tan and clearly on the verge of weeping. “Mary’s had a miscarriage,” he said tightly, “and is hemorrhaging badly. Hurry—I think she may bleed to death.”
Crawford rolled out of bed and pushed back his hair. “Right,” he said, trying to gather his wits. “Get me brandy and clean linen, and send someone to Lerici for ice. And get Josephine—I’ll need her.”
CHAPTER 14
… The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
… He had seen the figure of himself which met him as
he walked on the terrace & said to him—“How long do
you mean to be content?”
—Mary Shelley,
15 August 1822
The sheets had been peeled back from Mary’s bed, and blood seemed to be everywhere; it not only soaked the bedclothes and the mattress, but was spattered on the walls and smeared across her face—evidently she had reacted violently when she’d become aware of what was happening to her. By the gray, fog-filtered light from the windows, the blood seemed to be the only color in the room, and it was only after the first stunned moment that he even noticed Mary’s naked form lying among it.
The low ceiling of the long-ago hotel room in Hastings seemed to press down on the top of his head, and for several seconds he just stared in mindless horror at what seemed to be Julia’s exploded corpse.
“Aickman!” Shelley said loudly.
Crawford dragged himself out of the memory. “Right,” he said tightly.
He crossed to the bed and knelt, quickly pressing the heel of his hand against Mary’s lower belly.
“Someone’s going for ice?” he asked sharply.
“Ed Williams and Trelawny are, in the Don Juan,” Shelley told him.
“Good. Get me a bowl of brandy.”
Josephine hurried in a moment later, and when Crawford glanced back at her he could see that the spectacle had a traumatic effect on her, too—but she took several deep breaths, and then in a flat voice asked him what needed to be done.
“Come over here.” When she had crossed to the bed and leaned over, he spoke to her quietly. “It’s too late for the fetus. Now we’ve got to stop the bleeding. Get me a pot of very damned strong tea, and then roll a cylindrical bandage for packing her, and soak it in the tea—the tannin should help. And be ready to bandage her tightly around the hips, with a pad over the uterus here, where my hand is.”
He felt that someone else had entered the room and was standing behind him, but he was talking calmly to Mary now, reminding her that he was a doctor, and telling her to relax.
He saw some of the tension go out of the tendons in her neck and legs, and when Shelley returned with the bowl of brandy Crawford rinsed his free hand in it and then gently put a finger into Mary’s vagina to try to ascertain the source of the bleeding. As he’d feared, it was inaccessibly far up.
He felt strong disapproval radiate from the person behind him, but ignored it.
He heard Josephine return, and smelled the tea she had brought.
And suddenly it was Julia’s destroyed body that he was probing with such grotesque intimacy, and the room was again the one in which he’d spent his wedding night in Hastings. He drew back with a smothered yell and looked around wildly; Josephine and Shelley were the only other people in the room—God knew whom he had imagined to be standing behind him—and Josephine was trembling so hard that tea was shaking out of the pot she held as she stared in horror at the fearful bed.
It’s a hallucination, Crawford told himself desperately. This is like what happened in Keats’s apartment in Rome.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was Mary in the bed, and Shelley was looking at him anxiously. Crawford turned to Josephine—her face had relaxed again, but she was just staring blankly out the window, into the fog. Clearly she had shared the hallucination. “Josephine,” he said, to no response. “Goddammit, Josephine!”