and a garlic-flavored stain deeply bitten into all the wood, and whitethorn and buckthorn around the windows, and of course it’s easy here to eat lots of garlic, and I have several guns around the house loaded with this sort of ammunition.” He tossed the cloth bag to Crawford and then resumed his seat, carrying the pistol pointed at the floor.
Crawford spilled some of the heavy balls into his palm. They were of silver, with a bit of wooden dowelling, sanded down flush, through the center.
“Twice I’ve shot at unnatural figures out in the courtyard,” Byron remarked. “No luck.”
Crawford kept his face expressionless, but remembered Byron’s excellent marksmanship, and decided that the contempt Byron had shown for his poetry when they’d last talked must have been largely a pose—it seemed that he was willing to restrict his vampiric muse, but not willing really to drive it away.
Crawford held up one of the silver-and-wood balls. “Would one of these kill … one of them?”
“Maybe. If the creature were very overextended, or very new, it might. Even a vigorous, mature one, though, would be—discouraged.”
“What does Teresa think of all this?” Crawford asked.
Byron shrugged. “These are traditional Carbonari protections. I bought that ammunition—I didn’t have to have it specially made.”
Crawford was getting angry, but it took him several seconds to realize why, and by then Josephine had already begun articulating his thoughts.
“What,” she asked slowly, “if Teresa should become pregnant? Would you stay with her, and a child of yours, under these circumstances, knowing what sort of perilous sea your … your admittedly carefully constructed boat is sailing on?”
Byron seemed startled, and not pleased, by these coherent sentences from her; but before he could answer, there came a catlike wail from the dark courtyard outside, rasping on nerves like a bow on violin strings. The wail continued for several seconds before diminishing away in a couple of syllables that sounded like “Papa.”
The pistol was shaking in Byron’s hand, but he got to his feet and walked to the glass doors.
“Papà, Papà, mi permetti entrare, fa freddo qui fuorí, ed è buio!” came the weirdly childlike voice. Crawford translated it mentally: Papa, Papa, let me inside, it’s cold out here, and dark!
Once before Crawford had seen the little girl who was now hovering in midair outside the glass, but she was plumper now. Her eyes were bright, and fresh red blood was smeared on the white skin around her mouth, and the palms of her hands were flattened against the glass. She was looking into Byron’s face, and all at once smiled hideously.
The skin was tight over Crawford’s cheekbones, and he forced himself to stay by Josephine and not run.
Byron had gone white and his hands were trembling, but he was nodding gently. “Si, tesora, ti piglio dal freddo.”
Without taking his eyes off of the child’s body he raised his voice and said, “Aickman—Josephine—go upstairs to your rooms. Please. This is between the two of us.”
Crawford opened his mouth to protest, but Josephine caught his arm. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”
They crossed the wide room to the dark hall, and before they rounded the corner Crawford looked back. Sobs were visibly shaking Byron, but the pistol was steady.
They heard the shot when they were on the stairs, and several minutes later, from the window in Crawford’s room, they saw the limping figure of Byron carrying the small body out across the moonlit grass. Crawford remembered having seen a church in that direction, and he wondered if Byron could be confident of finding a shovel.
“He said a new one might be killed with that ammunition,” said Josephine solemnly as she unbuttoned her blouse. “And she was certainly a new one.” She folded the blouse, shed her skirt and then crawled into bed. “Remember what Claire always used to say?” By moonlight Crawford could see Josephine’s haggard smile. “Well, she can’t say it anymore. At last he’s done something for Allegra.”
After several minutes of silence they became aware of a distant, inhuman singing that seemed to resonate up from the earth and down from the sky; the chorus was a tapestry of long-sustained notes, but, though it was majestically tragic, it evoked only awe and humility in Crawford, for it was clearly not composed for human emotions.
A gentle rocking woke Crawford at dawn. For a few sleepy moments he thought he was on shipboard, but when he noticed the flowers bobbing in the vase on the bedside table he remembered that he was in Byron’s house, and he realized that what he was feeling must be a mild earthquake. The rocking quickly subsided, and he went back to sleep.
CHAPTER 16
There were giants in the earth in those days …
—Genesis 6:4
Crawford and Josephine were awakened later in the morning by Shelley’s shrill voice down in the yard—when Crawford got up and pulled the curtains back and looked down, he saw that Shelley was directing the loading of the Hunts’ luggage onto the roof of his rented carriage, and seemed impatient to be on the road.
Byron could be seen pacing back and forth through the long, stark shadows of the olive trees that bordered the dusty yard, and the fact that he was awake at this hour, and not even bothering to watch as his servants strapped his own luggage onto the rack at the back of his Napoleonic carriage, led Crawford to believe that the man had not slept at all.
The stripes of darkness across the flat dirt made the yard resemble to Crawford a wide stairway, like the flight of steps he’d seen from Keats’s second-floor window in Rome two years ago, and he morbidly wondered which members of this party were heading uphill, and which were headed down. Byron seemed likely to be one of those people, Crawford recalled, who simply stayed in one place on the stairs, waiting for some tourist to pay them to pose for a portrait—and what sort of character was Byron calculated to suggest? Certainly none of the saints.
Crawford unlatched the window and pushed it open, and the already warm summer air that sighed into the room was scented with coffee and pastries somewhere nearby—apparently being ignored by all the busy people below.
Crawford and Josephine got dressed and went downstairs, and since they were staying in Livorno and not going on to Pisa, they had the leisure to eat a lot of the informal breakfast Byron’s servants had prepared.
At one point Shelley took Crawford aside and gave him a hundred pounds. Crawford took the money, but squinted at Shelley.
“Are you certain you want to give me all this?” he asked.
Shelley blinked, noticed the bank notes in Crawford’s hand, and then shook his head and reached for them. “No, I—I should give it to poor Hunt—or have it sent back to Mary, in La Spezia—I—”
Crawford kept two ten-pound notes and handed the rest back. “Thanks, Percy.”
Shelley stared at the money Crawford had given back to him, nodded and smiled uncertainly, then stuffed it into a pocket and wandered away.
By eight o’clock the last of the Hunts’ children had been rounded up and bundled aboard the rented carriage—Byron wouldn’t permit any of them in his own—and the adults climbed into one carriage or the other, and latched the doors, and then the vehicles got under way, flanked by servants on horseback.