At about noon Crawford put on a pair of cut-off trousers Shelley had given him and went downstairs. The wind was shaking the trees on the slope behind the house, and the Don Juan, running with the wind, was a speck of white on the southern horizon. Crawford walked into the water and began swimming. Since the death of Mary’s fetus a week ago he had been taking a long swim every day.
The water was bracingly chilly, and revulsion at his situation made him swim out quite a distance before he relaxed and floated on his back, at last letting himself enjoy the sun on his face and chest.
Today was Sunday. They were to sail for Livorno tomorrow, and then he would have to decide what to do about Josephine. He couldn’t possibly go back to England with her—could he, in good conscience, book passage for both of them and then jump ship, leaving her to travel alone? No—whether she was his wife or the woman he loved, he was bound to take better care of her than that. And Josephine might one day come back. He couldn’t assume that she was gone forever.
Twice more he had felt the lamia’s nearness in the night—both times “Julia” had recoiled from him, thinking he was about to violate their agreement about not having sex until they left La Spezia—and he knew Shelley was still helplessly paying his part of the bargain. The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, he thought, mentally repeating a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets that Shelley had haltingly recited recently.
He didn’t know what to do about Williams—drag him into the Alps and up the Wengern? With Julia along?—and though he had garlicked the windows and threshold of the children’s room, and given Jane Williams ludicrous-sounding instructions not to let the children talk to strangers when they were outside, he bleakly wondered how long it would be until one of them, probably Percy Florence, began wasting away.
At last he let his legs sink and looked back toward the house, and a slight chill passed across his belly; he had drifted out while he’d been carelessly floating, and was now about twice as far from shore as he had thought. His heart was thumping hard in his chest as he began swimming back toward shore.
He couldn’t see that he was making any progress at all, and he cursed his four-fingered left hand and his stiff left leg.
After several minutes he was breathless from swimming against the tide, and he thought that in spite of his struggles he had drifted out farther. The sun was hot on his balding scalp, and glittered blindingly on the glassy waves.
He forced himself to breathe slowly and tread water. You swim in at a slant, he told himself, that’s what everybody says. This is not where you die, understand me?
He tried to see which way the tide had taken him, so as to be able to swim inward in the same direction, but now he couldn’t make out where the house was. The stretch of green-speckled brown that was the mainland seemed featureless, and farther away than ever. The harsh purple sky and the sun seemed to be squeezing it away.
He took several deep breaths and then kicked himself up as high out of the water as he could, and yelled, “Help!”—but the effort left him breathless, and the sound had not seemed to carry.
Tread water, he told himself; you can do that all day, can’t you? Hell, I remember a time in the Bay of Biscay when Boyd and I trod water for two hours straight, as an endurance contest, with friends swimming out to us to deliver fresh bottles of ale, and we only quit because it was clear that waiting for one of us to give up would require that the contest continue until well past dark. This current is much likelier to sweep you ashore somewhere than to take you right out of the Gulf into the open sea.
But even though he traded off between using his arms and using his legs, he could feel his muscles tightening like wires under his skin. Nearly a decade had passed since that contest, and he had clearly lost his youthful fitness somewhere along the line during the intervening years.
He forced himself to breathe evenly and slowly.
The loneliness was appalling. He was a tiny pocket of frightened agitation on the vast, indifferent face of the sea, as frail as a candle in a lost toy boat, and he thought that he wouldn’t even mind drowning if he could hear another person’s voice just once before going under forever.
He could call her.
The thought sent a shiver through his body. Could she get to him quickly enough? On such a sunny day? Somehow he was sure she could—she loved him, and she must have understood that he hadn’t really wanted to divorce her in the Alps. It might not even necessarily mean abandoning Josephine—once he was safely back ashore he could figure out some way to deal with that poor lunatic; certainly he’d be able to do more for her that way than by drowning out here.
He had been trying to favor his stiff left leg, but suddenly it knotted up tight with a muscle cramp that wrung a scream out of him. He flailed his arms to keep from sinking, but he knew that he had only perhaps a minute left.
And then to his own horror he realized that he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t call her. It meant that he was going to die out here, right now, but something—his love for Josephine, the love she had clearly felt for him on that too brief afternoon a week ago—made dying preferable to being possessed again by the lamia.
He tried to pray, but could only curse in angry panic.
The water closed over his head, and he looked up at the image of the sun wiggling on the surface. One more clear glimpse of it, he told himself desperately, just one more gasp of the sea air.
He made his hands claw out and down through the water, and his head poked out into the air—and he heard oar-locks knocking.
A moment later he heard Josephine’s voice screaming, “Michael!”
He discovered that he did still have a little strength left. He was sobbing with the pain of it, but he made his arms keep pushing the water out and down, and when an oar had spun through the air to splash near him, he managed to pull himself over to it and wrap his aching hands around the wide part of it.
A rope had been tied to the other end, and he nearly lost his grip when the line began to be pulled in; but at last his head collided with the planks of the boat, and he was being dragged in over the gunwale. He even managed to help a little.
His left leg was folded up tight, and hurt so badly that he really thought the bones might snap. He touched his thigh, and the knotted muscles were as hard as stone.
“Cramp,” he gasped, and a moment later she was massaging it with hands that had been made bloody by strenuous inexpert rowing. Her left hand, the one she had ruined on the Wengern, was itself visibly becoming clawed with cramp, but she worked strongly, with a nurse’s expertise, and after a minute the knot in his leg had been ground out.
For a long time he lay sprawled against one of the thwarts, just filling and emptying his lungs, his eyes shut. At last he sat up a little and looked around. The boat was one that Shelley had found too big to be convenient for rowing, and had stowed downstairs. There was no one in it but himself and Josephine.
He stared at her until he had regained his breath enough to be able to speak; then, “Who are you?” he asked bluntly.
At first he thought she wouldn’t answer; then she whispered, “Josephine.”
He lay back again. “Thank God.” He reached out and gently held her flayed, twisted hand. “How in hell did you even get this boat out of the house?”
“I don’t know. I had to.”
“I’m glad you noticed me out here. I’m glad you noticed me out here.” Julia, he thought, would never have done this.
Josephine sat back and pushed sweaty hair off her forehead. Her glass eye was staring crazily into the sky, but her good one was focused intently on him. “I … woke up from fright, I came back into my body, staring out the window at you and knowing you were in trouble. I had heard her noticing it—you understand?—and that was what gave me the strength to … push her aside, push J-Julia out. And then I was running down the stairs and wrestling this thing out through the arches and over the pavement and into the water.”