They walked north along the beach. Crawford wanted to take her hand, but it seemed too trivial an action to be appropriate right now. The taste of Shelley’s blood was metallic acid in his head. He was out of touch with the world, and he was vaguely glad that he was dressed, for he didn’t think he would be able to put on clothes correctly—to remember what went on where, and which side out. He had to look down from time to time to make sure he was still walking.
The squat stone structure that was the Casa Magni appeared ahead, and shortly after they reached it he found himself drinking wine and chatting cheerfully with Mary and Jane.
He made an effort to listen to what he was saying, and was dimly reassured to hear himself telling the two women that their husbands had planned to leave Livorno in the afternoon, and would no doubt arrive sometime during the evening. “Percy sent you his love,” he remembered to tell Mary.
They slept chastely that night in the room that Shelley had let them have, and they were awakened at midnight by a remote inorganic singing, a distant chorus that seemed to be in the sky and the sea and the hill behind the house. Without speaking, they both got up and went into the dining room and opened the glass doors and walked out onto the terrace.
The singing was a little louder, heard from out here, and deeper. The tide had receded out so far that if Shelley and Williams really had been coming home tonight they would have had a hard time finding a mooring at all close to the house—and the exposed shells and black hummocks of sodden, weedy sand seemed to be resonating to the inhuman chorus.
The house was creaking as if in accompaniment; and when he had to take a step sideways to keep his balance Crawford realized that the house was shifting in an earthquake.
“It’s what we heard last week in Montenero,” Josephine whispered finally, “the night Byron killed Allegra. It’s the earth, mourning.”
When they returned inside, Josephine insisted on spending the rest of the night in the women’s servants’ room; wearily, Crawford acquiesced and went back to bed alone.
CHAPTER 18
No diver brings up love again
Dropped once, my beautiful Felise,
In such cold seas.
—A. C. Swinburne, Felise
How elate
I felt to know that it was nothing human …
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Aziola
Mary Shelley and Jane Williams were awake early the next morning, and as they drank their breakfast coffee they anxiously scanned the blue horizon of the Gulf; Claire got up later, and volunteered to watch from the terrace while the other two women tried to read and to conceal their uneasiness from the children—but it wasn’t until the sun began to sink over Portovenere in the late afternoon, with no boat having appeared, that the three of them began to be alarmed.
Josephine had resumed her job as governess of the children, and Crawford spent the day drinking on the terrace. Claire stood by the rail near him, but they hardly spoke.
That night he and Josephine again slept separately.
Josephine was awakened in the middle of the night by a voice whispering faintly from outside the house. She climbed out of her bunk and got dressed without waking the other servants, and went down the stairs to the ground floor, walked past the boat in which she had rescued Crawford three weeks earlier, and out onto the still warm moonlit sand.
A man was standing on the beach, and when she had stepped out of the arches he turned toward her and held out his hand.
For perhaps a minute neither of them moved; then she sighed deeply and reached out and took the proffered hand with her maimed left hand.
They walked south along the shore, moving up the slope when the waves came up and straying out onto the wet, flat sand when they receded.
After a few minutes she looked into her companion’s silvery eyes. “You’re my friend from the Alps,” she said, flexing her bent hand reminiscently in his. “Why do they think you’re this Polidori?”
“I am him too, more or less,” the man replied. “He came seeking my kind after leaving the poets, and I was … available and vital. Thanks to you, thanks to what you had given me. So I took him and, when he took his own life, the—what would be the right word?—the bits of attention … the seeds, say; the seeds I had planted in his blood quickened, and I emerged from his grave.”
Josephine frowned. “Doesn’t that mean there are two of you now? The one that bit him and the one that grew out of his dead body?”
“Identity is not as rigidly quantized with us as it is with you. We’re like the waves that agitate a body of water or a field of grass; you see us because of the material things we move, but we don’t consist of those material things. Even the seeds we plant in people’s blood aren’t physical things, but a sort of maintained attention, like the beam of a slotted lantern held on a moving object in the dark. My sister had to suffer, and labor, to be focussed down to a point where she could actually be killed, and even then she would probably not have died if she hadn’t been linked to Shelley by the fact of their twinhood.”
Josephine glanced at him warily, but his expression was still placid. “This person beside you,” he went on, touching his own chest, “can exist in any number of forms at once, just as he can be both Polidori and the stranger you called to your room that night in Switzerland.”
A wave came swirling up, faintly luminous in the moonlight, and they stepped up the slope to avoid it,
“It’s been a long time,” she said quietly.
“Time is nothing to my kind,” her companion told her. “It needn’t be anything to you either. Come with me and live forever.”
Some muted part of Josephine’s mind was profoundly frightened, and she frowned in the darkness. “Like Polidori?”
“Yes. Exactly like Polidori. Float to the surface of your mind only when you want to be awake.”
“Are you in there, Polidori?” Josephine asked, a little hysterically. “Say hello.”
“Good evening, Josephine,” said her companion in a different voice, one that still carried some pomposity. “It is my good fortune that we meet at last.”
“Did you find your life intolerable?”
“Yes.”
“Have you managed to jettison those … things, those memories, now?” Her face was relaxed, but her heart was pounding.
“Yes.”
“Do you hate my … do you hate Michael?”
“No. I did, before. I hated him and Byron and Shelley and all the people who had what I so wanted—the channel to the Muses. I gave everything I had, I gave me, but the Muses still withheld that, though they took me.”
“Are you sorry now that you gave in?” she asked, surprised at the urgency in her own voice. “Since they didn’t keep the bargain you thought you were making?”
“No,” he said. “Now I live forever. I don’t need to write poetry any longer—I live poetry now. The nights are mine, and the songs of the earth, and the old rhythms of the worlds and the atoms, that never change. I’ve faced the Medusa, and what looks like stony doom to men is actually birth. Men are born out of the hot wombs of humanity, but that’s only … like a chick in the egg developing feathers. The real, lasting birth is the next one, the birth out of the cold ground. Everything you wished you could leave behind is left behind.”
The moon was sinking low out over the water, highlighting with silver fire the tips of the waves that had closed over Shelley and his slain and petrified sister.