She stirred, and blinked at him.
“What’s the year, and where are we?” he demanded.
She closed her eyes, then after a moment whispered, “Twenty-two, Gulf of La Spezia.”
“Good. Remember it. Now get the bandage out of the teapot and wring it out and hand it to me—it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit hot, I want to try diaphoretics anyway, until the ice gets here.” Easily said, he thought, but how are we to induce real sweating without burnt hawthorn or calx of antimony or elder flowers or camphor? More than ever he regretted the loss of his medical kit in Pisa.
He saw Josephine’s questioning look when he turned to her to take the bandage. “Well, wrap her up in blankets, at least, when I’m done here,” he said, “and then have her drink as much of that tea as she can.” He turned back toward the bed.
The whole front of Julia’s head was crushed, but there was a shifting of the bloody flesh where the eye sockets might have been, and he guessed she was trying to open her eyes. A hole opened beneath them, and managed to pronounce the words, “Why, Michael…?”
He closed his own eyes again. “Percy,” he said unsteadily, “go to the kitchen and get me garlic, anything with garlic in it. We’re getting that kind of resistance here.”
“Why, Michael …?” said Josephine behind him in an eerily accurate echo.
When he opened his eyes he saw Mary again—he gave her what he tried to make a reassuring smile, then glanced past her, out the window. The sky was still lost behind the fog, and he prayed that the sun would disperse the stuff soon.
The visual hallucinations stopped when Shelley followed his instructions about rubbing the window frame with the garlic bread he’d found, though Crawford—and, visibly, Josephine—continued to hear Julia’s voice outside, repeatedly asking him, “Why?”
Crawford’s measures slowed the bleeding, and when the ice was brought upstairs at nine-thirty he had Trelawny fill a metal hip-bath with salted water and chunks of the ice; then he had Shelley help him lift Mary out of the bed and lower her into the tub.
She shuddered violently at the chill, but it very shortly stopped the bleeding.
The fog was breaking up, and distantly across the Gulf the ridge of Portovenere glowed green and gold in the morning sun. Crawford stripped the bed, wrapped the tiny fetus of Shelley’s dead child in the ruined sheets, and walked out into the dining room. Shelley followed him.
“There’s a shovel downstairs,” Shelley said bleakly, “in the corner by the spare oars.”
Shelley dug the grave, in the slope behind the house; it didn’t have to be very deep, but tears were running down his cheeks and it took him nearly half an hour. At last Crawford laid the bloody bundle in the hole.
He straightened, and Shelley began shovelling dirt into the hole, and Crawford mentally said goodbye to the child that had been in his care. He had lost babies before, but—perhaps not rationally—this loss filled him with more guilt than had any of the others.
“She didn’t honor your deal, did she?” he asked Shelley in a brittle tone.
Shelley threw the last shovelful of dirt onto the low mound. “No,” he said hollowly. “She did take what I offered—I won’t ever write any more poetry, she gnawed out that part of my mind—but I guess she … didn’t remember, not for very long, anyway, what her part of the bargain was supposed to be.”
“This is what—the third child you’ve lost to her? The fourth, that’s right. And this time Mary nearly went too. You’ve got one child left, Percy Florence, upstairs. How long do you think it’ll be before she kills him?” Crawford had sometimes taken the two-year-old boy out rowing in the little boat when his father was off in the Don Juan, and he didn’t like to think of coming out here again some morning to bury Percy Florence.
Shelley blinked around at the walnut trees standing up from the slope, then out at the sea. “I don’t know. Not long, I suppose. I wish she could be stopped, but this was my best—”
“It was not,” interrupted Crawford harshly. “In Switzerland, when you talked to me in that boat on the lake, you told me that it’d be a bad idea for me to pitch you into the water, remember? You said that if you were to drown it would probably kill her, because of how closely you’re linked, being twins and all. Well, if you want to save Mary and your remaining son, why don’t you do that? Drown yourself? Why didn’t you do it years ago, before she killed your children?”
He had expected Shelley to get angry, but instead he seemed to consider seriously what Crawford had said. “I don’t know,” he mumbled again, then plodded slowly away toward the house, leaving Crawford to carry the shovel.
After stowing the shovel, Crawford took off his bloody shirt—he hadn’t had time yet this morning to put on shoes—and walked out across the pavement onto the sunlit sand and waded into the clear blue water. When the waves were lapping around his waist he kicked himself forward and began swimming, and he rolled in the waves and scrubbed at himself until he was sure all the blood was off him. It didn’t make him feel much cleaner.
He lay flat in the water and floated, listening to the pulse of his own blood. His bloodstream was currently a closed loop, not open to anyone, and for a while he thought about Shelley’s submission to his lamia, and then he made himself stop thinking about it.
He was pretty far out by now—fifty yards, he guessed. Treading water awkwardly in his long trousers, he turned and looked back at the old stone edifice all of them were living in. The awning over the terrace was ragged and faded, and the walls and arches were streaked with rust stains, and at this moment he couldn’t see why anyone would come here except to die and leave their bones to bleach on the white sand.
A robed figure stepped out from the darkness between the arches and began picking its way over the sun-bright rocks, and he recognized it as Josephine. Apparently she wanted a thorough bath too.
At the surf line she threw off her robe, and he was surprised and alarmed to be able to see, even at this distance, that she was naked. Shelley and Claire, and even the Williamses sometimes, liked to go swimming nude, but Josephine had certainly never done it before. Crawford hadn’t even known she could swim.
She swam out at a southward slant, and he decided she hadn’t noticed him bobbing far out on the glittering face of the water; he paddled along after her, more slowly because of the drag of his trousers.
They were a good hundred yards south of the Casa Magni when her head disappeared beneath the surface, and suddenly Crawford guessed what her purpose was. In an instant he had shucked off his trousers and was swimming as powerfully as he could toward where she had disappeared.
A cluster of popping bubbles told him he had found her—apparently she was emptying her lungs as she sank—and he jackknifed in a surface dive and struggled down against the buoyancy of the salt water. He could see her white body below him, and he kicked himself farther down. The sudden rush of water hurt his eyes, and he was weirdly reminded of swimming through the thickened air on top of the Wengern.
He grabbed a handful of her hair, and then began thrashing back up toward the rippling silver sheet overhead that was the surface; she clawed at his hand and forearm, and he could feel his lungs heaving with the effort to breathe in water, but he knew that if he let her succeed in drowning he would almost certainly decide to follow her, so he kept tugging and kicking.
At last his head broke the water, and he was whoopingly gasping air, and then, in a move that pushed him back under, he hoisted her up so that her head was out of the water. Her naked back was pressed against his chest, and he could feel her lungs working.