Not too late, he thought desperately.
He grabbed her under the arms when he came up again, and with his free arm and his legs he began dragging them back toward shore. She was moving weakly, but he couldn’t tell if she was trying to help or to get free of him. He managed to keep her face above the water most of the time.
His vision was darkening and his bad leg was beginning to cramp when at last he felt sand under one bare foot, and he managed to conjure up one last
explosion of effort that left them both sprawled naked on the hot sand.
Though bleakly sure that any more work would burst his heart, he rolled her over onto her stomach, spread his hands on her ribs just under the shoulder blades, and bore down, feeling the sand abrading her skin under his palms. Water gushed from her mouth and nose.
He did it again, forcing more water out, and then again; at last, with the colored sparkling of unconsciousness filling his sight, he rolled her onto her back and pressed his mouth onto hers and blew his own breath into her lungs—waited a moment while it rushed back out—and then put his mouth to hers once more.
The exhalation he gave her took his consciousness with it.
He couldn’t have been insensible for more than a few seconds, for the water she’d spewed out was still a patch of bubbles on the sand when he raised his head from her breast and stared anxiously into her face.
Her eyes were open, and for one long moment met and held his. Then she rolled out from under him and spent a good minute coughing up more water. She was facing away from him, and seemed to be almost clothed in clinging sand.
At last she got unsteadily to her feet. Crawford watched her, then hastily got up himself when he saw that she was walking back toward the water.
“I’m only rinsing off the sand,” she snapped when she heard his footsteps splashing behind her in the shallows.
He stayed close to her; and, when he saw that she really didn’t intend to swim out again, he decided that getting rid of the caking sand was a good idea, and he got down and let the waves wash over him, too.
Then they were walking back up the sand slope, and she took his hand. They kept walking, through the dry, floury sand, to the sudden coolness of the leaf-carpeted shadows under the trees, and when he released her hand it was just so that he could put his arms around her. She lifted her face to his and held him tightly.
He kissed her, deeply and with all the passion he had thought lost forever; and she was responding feverishly. In a moment they were lying in the leaves, and with each thrust into her it seemed to Crawford that he was pushing further away all the awarenesses of failure and death and guilt.
Later Crawford walked naked back up the beach to the Casa Magni, almost grateful now for the solitude of the area, and he managed to get upstairs to his bunk without being seen by anyone but Claire Clairmont, who had clearly started drinking early today, and simply blinked at him as he strode past her. Once dressed, he went into the women’s servants’ room and bundled up some clothes for Josephine.
When he returned to the clearing in which they had made love, he found her sitting up and staring out at the sea. She took the clothes with a grateful smile, and when she had dressed she hugged him for several seconds without speaking.
He was relieved, for during the walk back from the Casa Magni he had tried to imagine what he would find when he got to where he had left her—he had pictured finding her gone, and her body washing up some days later; or catching a glimpse of her, mad-eyed and with her fingers chewed bloody, scampering away through the trees like a wild beast; or hunched up as he’d seen a few over-stressed sailors get, with her knees to her face and her arms around her legs and nobody at all at home behind her eyes. He had hardly dared to hope that she’d be not only alive and sane but cheerful too.
Then she leaned back and looked up at him happily. “Found you at last, darling!” she said. “What on earth have you been doing in this desolate place, with all these horrible people?”
“Well,” he said, suddenly cautious, “we’re working for Shelley, you and I are.”
“Nonsense. You’ve got your practice in London, and I certainly don’t work! Do finish up whatever dreary little affairs you have here, and quickly—my mother must be wild with worry by this time, even though I’ve been sending her letters.”
He was far too tired to argue now. “I guess you’re right,” he sighed, holding her close again so that she wouldn’t see the weariness and disappointment in his face, “Julia.”
Trelawny left aboard the Bolivar two days later, though Captain Roberts stayed on at the Casa Magni so as to be able to help Shelley sail the Don Juan down to Livorno—for Leigh Hunt and his family were finally due to arrive there in two weeks; at last Hunt and Shelley and Byron would be able to start their magazine, though Shelley seemed to have lost some of his enthusiasm for the project.
Shelley was, in fact, devoting all his attention to refitting the Don Juan, presumably to make it a more imposing vessel, better able to stand comparison with Byron’s ostentatious Bolivar. He and Roberts and Williams were adding a false stern and bow to make the vessel look longer, and had dramatically increased the amount of canvas she could spread.
They also re-ballasted her; Crawford pointed out that the vessel rode a little higher now than it had before the refitting, but Shelley assured him that they knew what they were doing.
On the evening of Trelawny’s departure, Crawford was standing with Shelley and Claire on the terrace and watching the Bolivar’s sails recede to the south against a cloudless bronze sunset, when Josephine stepped out onto the terrace from the dining room and gave Crawford an unfriendly look.
“Can I speak to you in our room, Michael?”
Crawford turned to bare his teeth out at the sea and squint his eyes shut, then let his face relax as he turned around. “Of course, Julia,” he said, following her back inside.
Shelley had given up his room when Josephine told him that she and Crawford were married, and Crawford now missed his old bunk in the servants’ quarters.
She shut the door when he had followed her into the room. “I told you this morning,” she said, “that I wanted a definite answer from you about when we’re leaving this ghastly place.”
“Right.” He sighed, and sat down in a chair by the window. “Shelley’s sailing south to Livorno a week from yesterday, to meet Byron and this Leigh Hunt fellow. Shelley said you and I can ride along.”
“Why how frightfully generous of him!—considering that you’ve been working here for nearly two months without a penny of pay. You still haven’t explained to me why you failed to demand passage on the Bollix or whatever its foolish name was.”
“Yes, I did. Mary Shelley—and Claire, lately—are patients of mine, and I don’t want to leave them while their conditions are in doubt.” He tried to look sincere as he said this—the truth was that he had been delaying leaving the Casa Magni because he thought she was more likely to recover her real Josephine personality here, where she’d lost it, than in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Livorno, or back at home in the now alien nation of England.