Not all of Byron’s servants were leaving, and he had left instructions that Crawford and Josephine were to be allowed to borrow a spare carriage and a couple of horses for the trip back to Livorno. By the time they had got themselves organized, though, the sun had begun baking the dusty road in earnest, and they decided to wait for the cool of dusk.
Crawford took a couple of Byron’s books out into the shaded courtyard and tried to read, but he kept getting distracted by the thought of the child he had seen out here the night before. He was sure the blood on the child’s mouth had been Ed Williams’s, and he wondered who Ed would get to consume him now.
Josephine spent most of the day lying down—Crawford assumed at first that she was napping, but at around noon he looked in on her and noticed that her eyes were open, staring patiently at the ceiling. He went back out to the courtyard and tried again to read.
West of Montenero the land sloped down for two or three miles to the coast of the Ligurean Sea, and when the sun had sunk enough to make a black silhouette of Elba, Napoleon’s island of exile, Crawford became aware of a rhythmic chanting from the road below the house.
He tucked one of Byron’s pistols into his belt before limping down the dirt road to investigate the sound, but found only a dozen villagers and a couple of priests standing around a wagon to which a weary-looking donkey was harnessed.
The priests were intoning prayers and sprinkling the dry road dust with holy water, and at first Crawford thought it was some local ritual that had nothing to do with him; then a very old man with a walking stick came hunching out of the sparse crowd and smiled at him … and Crawford wondered if a pistol would do any real good here anyway.
“They’re aware,” said des Loges in his barbaric French, “of the sort of place you people have lately come from.” He waved at the villagers and the priests. “Portovenere, I’m told. You’d be amazed to know how long it’s had that name,
and in how many languages. The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch had some things to say about the place, when he wasn’t moaning about his unattainable sweetheart Laura.”
He laughed and looked around at his bucolic companions, then squinted back at Crawford. “I think that at the right word these people would attack the house up there—note the knives several of them have, and the pitchfork that gentleman at the rear carries. The English lord who was here, Byron, is a member of the Carbonari, yes? These people approve of that—but Byron is gone now, and they can smell the—Siliconari—on you. They can smell it on me too, which isn’t helping.” He waved his stick back up the road. “Do you suppose you and I could talk?”
Crawford thought of Josephine, helpless back at the house. “All right,” he said, suddenly very tired. “Tell them I’m … tell them I’ve put a nail in a mazze, though, will you? We don’t need their … help.” Siliconari, he thought—probably a pun on silex, the French and Latin word for flint. Silex, silicis, silici.
Des Loges laughed and rattled off a quick phrase in Italian to the priests, who did seem to relax a little, though they didn’t stop sprinkling the holy water.
Des Loges stared at Crawford from time to time as the two of them limped ungracefully up the steep, dusty road to the dirt-paved yard. The shadows of the trees were lying to the east now, but the effect reminded Crawford of the stairway illusion he’d noticed that morning, and he wondered now whether he was headed uphill or down himself.
“You’re divorced!” exclaimed des Loges at last as they approached the front door. “But the Venice attempt was a failure, the one your friends made four years ago—you must have gone all the way up into the Alps, am I right?”
“Right,” answered Crawford. “With Byron, in 1816. And he’s backslid since, and I haven’t, so I don’t see why your priests admire him and fear me.”
“Actually they’re not that fond of Byron either, but he’s rich and powerful, and you’re not, and he is doing a lot for the Carbonari.”
Des Loges shook his head, and Crawford thought there was a glint of admiration in the ancient man’s eyes. “I never even seriously considered going to the Alps myself—the trip would have been a fearful ordeal for me, and I assumed it would be certainly fatal anyway; or, worse, that it would leave me crippled and unable to try anything else.” He shrugged. “So why not just get the right man to drown me at home.”
Crawford knocked on the door and self-consciously diverted the conversation from the subject of his failure to drown the old man six years ago. “It nearly was fatal. The trip to the Alps. There are some … astonishing creatures in those mountains.”
Des Loges nodded agreeably, accepting the conversational shift. “And you went in 1816? Old Werner was passing through in those years—his arrival in Venice was what wrecked the scheme your friends … and I … had there in 1818. His presence in Switzerland must have had the locals particularly upset—there must have been some Carbonari activity—and it would have had the old creatures particularly agitated, too, having the"—he used a word that Crawford could interpret only as animating focus—"pass so close. Did you see Werner, by any chance? He’d have been avoiding the highest passes, since he certainly wouldn’t be wanting a divorce, but you might have glimpsed his party.”
Crawford had begun to shake his head when des Loges added, “He’d have been travelling packed in ice, with an escort of Austrian soldiers.”
And it seemed to Crawford that he did remember something like that—a wagon stuck in the mud at dusk, and Byron whimsically climbing up onto its bed to help oversee the efforts to push the vehicle free.
“Maybe I did,” he said. “Who is this Werner?”
Des Loges didn’t answer, for one of Byron’s servants was finally pulling the door open. The servant stared with distaste at des Loges, but stood aside when Crawford told him that the old man was a guest of his—though this revelation earned Crawford himself a coldly reconsidering look.
“I’ll tell you about him,” des Loges said. “Where can we talk?”
The servant’s look of disdain had deepened visibly upon hearing des Loges’s calamitous French. “Uh, up in our room,” Crawford said. “Wait here while I tell my … wife, my current one, that we’re coming up.”
Josephine was sitting on the floor when Crawford returned to the bedroom with des Loges, and Crawford couldn’t tell whether she looked at the horribly old man with fascination or loathing, or both; he did see her hands working in her lap, and he knew she was once more mentally running through the halls of the multiplication tables.
Des Loges sat down in a chair by the window and put his feet up on the bed. “You asked about Werner,” he said. “Werner is the … high king of the Hapsburgs, you might say—the secret but absolute head of the Austrian empire. And he’s been that for a long time—he’s even older than I am, by a good four centuries. He was born in about the year A.D. 1000, in the old Hapsburg castle on the river Aar, in the Swiss canton of Aargau.”
Crawford was standing by the window, looking down the road toward where they’d left the priests and the villagers, but he looked around sharply at the name of the canton, and des Loges raised his eyebrows inquiringly.