“Yes.” She sniffed the rose and stared out at the dark sea.
“You shouldn’t be speaking to him,” Crawford began wearily. He hoped the coming day wouldn’t be so hot as to make sleeping impossible. “He … he’s not …”
“He told me about it, yes,” she said calmly. “His suicide, back in England. He thinks they’re the Muses, thinks these vampire things are. Maybe he’s right—though they weren’t that for him. Even after he summoned one and let himself be bitten, he still couldn’t write anything publishable … and so he killed himself.” She shook her head. “The poor boy—he was always so envious of Percy and Byron.”
“If you know that much about him,” Crawford said, forcing himself to be patient, “then you must know how dangerous such people are once they’ve been resurrected. That is not Polidori, not anymore—that’s a vampire inhabiting his body, like a hermit crab using some sea-snail’s shell. Are you listening to me, damn it? Hell, ask Percy about all this!”
“Percy …” she said dreamily. “Percy is stopping being Percy, have you noticed? The man I love is … what … receding, diminishing like a figure in a painting with deep perspective. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to communicate with him even by shouting in his ear.”
“Ask me then, I’m your doctor, right? Have you invited Polidori into your presence yet?”
“No—though he hinted that he’d like that.”
“I daresay. Don’t do it.” He stepped closer to her and put his hand on her chin to tilt her face up. “Percy Florence will die, if you do,” he said, staring hard into her eyes. Was she getting any of this? “Repeat that back to me, please,” he said in his best professional tone.
“Percy Florence will die, if I do,” she said weakly.
“Good.” He released her. “Now go to bed.”
She tottered back toward the house, and Crawford sat down in the sand; he was aware of someone watching him intently from up the slope, but the sky was lightening toward blue, and he knew that the thing that had been Polidori wouldn’t try to approach him.
He remembered Byron derisively quoting some of Polidori’s poetry, back in Switzerland in 1816. Crawford had laughed at the inept lines, as Byron had meant him to, but then the lord had frowned and said that it really wasn’t funny. “He’s terribly serious about all this, Aickman,” Byron had said reprovingly. “He’s a successful doctor, one of the youngest graduates of Edinburgh University, but his only ambition is to be a poet—like Shelley and I. He approached me for the personal physician job just because he thought that by associating with me and my friends he would be able to … learn the secret.” Byron had laughed grimly. “I only hope, for his sake, that he never does.”
Well, thought Crawford now, he did learn it, Byron. But, though he paid the Muses, they didn’t deliver—it was much like the deal Shelley thought he could make with his sister, my ex-wife.
The sun was up now, sparking green highlights on the wooded peaks of Portovenere across the Gulf, and the breeze almost seemed to have some coolness in it. Crawford got to his feet and began plodding back through the sand toward the Casa Magni, trying not to step into the indentations of Mary Shelley’s feet.
During the next five days Shelley spent more and more time out on the Don Juan, letting Roberts and the Vivian boy handle the rigging while he peered at various mountains through a sextant and filled page after page in his notebook—not with poetry anymore, but with obscure, scribbled mathematics. When they returned at dusk he would sometimes try to get Crawford to check his math, but it was largely Newtonian calculus, and entirely beyond Crawford’s skill; Shelley never asked Mary to check it, even though she was clever with numbers and he had clearly begun to doubt his own thought processes.
Crawford thought the man’s doubts were justified. No longer did Shelley dominate the dinner-table conversation with long arguments about the nature of man and the universe; he now seemed to find it difficult, in fact, even to follow Claire’s ramblings about her shopping expeditions to Lerici—and, though he did still read his mail, Crawford had several times seen him struggling to puzzle out the meaning of a letter, frowning and moving his lips and circling important words.
At last, seven days after Mary’s near strangulation, Shelley threw his notebook and a lot of his recent correspondence into the fire, and then asked Crawford and Josephine to accompany him on a walk down the shore.
The sun still shone in the morning half of the sky, but the sand underfoot was hot even through Crawford’s shoes, and he wondered how Shelley could stand plodding through it barefoot. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed yet that it hurt. Josephine was tense, but held Crawford’s hand and even managed a wan smile a couple of times.
“We leave tomorrow,” Shelley told them quietly. “You two will have to come back here in a week or so, but I want you with me in the meantime.”
Crawford frowned. “Why do we have to come back?”
“To do the part that has to be done here,” Shelley said peevishly, “and has to be done by you. So don’t pack everything, leave here any … scientific or medical apparatus you might possess.” He frowned, visibly trying to think. “Actually, Josephine needn’t come back here with you—she could stay with Byron and Trelawny and the rest of the crowd. They’re all going to be gathering back in Pisa.”
“I go where Michael goes,” said Josephine quietly.
Crawford squeezed her hand. “And neither of us is going to Pisa,” he said. “We barely escaped being arrested there two months ago. Why do you have to go there, anyway?”
“I—because of—oh, of course, to get poor Leigh Hunt set up with Byron. It was because of my urging that he’s sailed down here, with his whole damned family, and since I’ve got to be—stepping out of the picture, I want to see that he’s not left—left—”
“Helpless?” suggested Josephine.
“And broke?” added Crawford.
“In a foreign land, right,” said Shelley, nodding. “You can’t go to Pisa …? Well, we’re stopping off at Livorno on the way, to meet them all, so you could … wait for me there. I’ll be stopping back at Livorno again, before I …”
Crawford interrupted hastily. “This part that Josephine and I have to do,” he began, but Shelley waved at him to be silent.
When they had walked another hundred yards along the narrow, rocky shore, Shelley waded out into the shallows. “Let’s talk out here,” he said. “The, uh … the water, will help muffle our words. I don’t want the … vitro to … the sand, I mean, to hear what we say.”
Crawford and Josephine exchanged a worried look, but crouched to take off their shoes.
“What about glass?” Josephine called as she straightened up.
“Glass?” Shelley frowned. “Oh, like if you’re carrying any. Right, leave it there.”
Josephine reached up to her face and poked her glass eye out and put it in one of her shoes, then took Crawford’s hand again and walked with him out to where Shelley stood.
“Now pay attention,” Shelley told them. “I may not be able to express all this clearly … later. After now. Ever again.”