“Polidori is me, and I am him,” her companion said in a different voice.
“His sister,” Josephine said. “Your sister. She’s dead.”
“Yes,” said her companion calmly. “It’s rare that we die, but she is dead.”
“I killed her, helped kill her.”
“Yes.”
Tears glittered suddenly on Josephine’s right cheek. “I—I’m sorry I abandoned you in the Alps,” she said hoarsely. “And I’m sorry I refused you in that street in Rome, in front of Keats’s house. And I’m sorry I helped kill your … sister.” She walked on in silence for a while. “Sisters shouldn’t be killed,” she whispered.
“Nobody should be killed,” said her companion. “We offer eternal life to everyone.”
Josephine stopped, and faced him, though her eyes were closed. “Will you still have me?” she asked in a humble, hopeful monotone.
“Of course,” he said, placing his hand gently behind her neck and lowering his head to her throat.
Mary and Claire and Jane Williams were nearly hysterical with worry when the next day dragged on till noon without any sign of the Don Juan, and Crawford
agreed to go back to Livorno to ask whether or not Shelley had actually set out. Josephine was ill in bed, so, alone, already trying to figure out how he would break the news to the ladies on his return, he walked north along the beach to Lerici, where he hired a boat.
He arrived in Livorno in the evening and found Trelawny and Roberts still at the Globe, and their expressions of worried hope turned to despair even before they could ask him any questions, for Crawford’s face let them know that the Don Juan had not arrived at the Casa Magni after having disappeared into the storm two days earlier.
Byron was still in Pisa, and after a bleak, muted conversation in the lobby, Trelawny volunteered to ride north to tell him that it seemed sure that Shelley and Williams were drowned.
Trelawny left early the next day and was back in the late afternoon. Hunt and Byron, he said, had both been visibly upset by the news, and Byron sent a servant back with Trelawny to act as a courier, and had insisted that Trelawny take the Bolivar out and search for the Don Juan until Shelley’s fate was absolutely known; and the next day, as the courier took a fast boat north to deliver a tersely unhopeful letter to the Casa Magni, Trelawny and Roberts and Crawford sailed slowly in the same direction, closely skirting the coastline and scanning the shore for any sign of Shelley’s boat.
Crawford had gone with them, rather than with the courier, because the task of facing the women seemed vastly beyond him. During the past two days his feeling of disorientation had only grown worse—he was bewildered by, and unable to come up with ready answers to, even such innocuous remarks as “Good morning,” and it was actually a relief that Josephine had not spoken to him since the day of the lamia’s killing.
No sign of the Don Juan was found that day.
Back at the Globe that evening they learned that Mary and Claire and Jane Williams had returned with Byron’s servant that afternoon, and had gone on to Pisa to stay with Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi to await word. Josephine, it appeared, had elected to stay on at the Casa Magni with Shelley’s servants. Crawford was obscurely glad of it.
He and Trelawny and Roberts kept up the search for five more blurry days, only quitting when word reached them that two bodies, one of them tentatively identified as that of Edward Williams, had been found washed up on the beach near the mouth of the Serchio River, fifteen miles north of Livorno.
The health authorities buried the bodies before Byron and Hunt could get there to look at them, and presented Byron with a bill for the interments; Trelawny showed the bill to Crawford, angry about the charges for health measures, which included “certain metals and vegetable bulbs.” Crawford told him there were probably better things to be worrying about.
Another body was found the next day, five miles farther north. The port officials were fairly sure it was Shelley’s. Trelawny blustered and threatened and made liberal use of the fact that Byron was an English peer, and eventually got them to agree to postpone the burial until the body could be identified.
On Friday the Bolivar sailed north once more, and dropped anchor when they saw half a dozen Tuscan soldiers waving at them from the beach near Viareggio. Crawford, leaning on the Bolivar’s rail, wondered idly why so many soldiers were necessary to stand watch over one drowned body.
Roberts lowered the boat, and he and Crawford and Trelawny rowed ashore through the low surf.
As Crawford was splashing in through the shallows he noticed the sprawled form around which the soldiers were standing. Several canvas bags lay on a wooden pallet nearby, and there were four shovels stuck upright in the dirt like sailless masts. A crowd of ragged civilians, presumably fishermen, watched from a sandy rise a hundred yards away. Crawford looked down at the body.
The flesh of the face and hands had been nibbled away, right down to the bones, and the soldiers assured the Englishmen that fish had done it.
Trelawny and Roberts just nodded blankly, but Crawford looked up the beach to the crowd of unsavory spectators, and he remembered an old man who had dressed up as a clergyman to get into Guy’s Hospital and steal blood from a certain sort of corpse, and he wondered what the Italian word for neffy was, and he thought he knew why so many soldiers were here. He considered walking up to the silent figures, but was afraid he would lose all contact with the sane world if he saw … say, a fork … in the hand of one of them.
He turned away and spat in the sand, for the taste of Shelley’s blood was hovering in the back of his throat like a bad smell.
He returned his gaze to Shelley’s stripped skull. Some of the flaxen hair still adhered to it, and he remembered the way that hair used to blow in disarray around his face after Shelley had excitedly run his hands through it. He tried to derive some sense of sadness from seeing Shelley in this state of ruin, but he found that he couldn’t see the corpse at his feet as anything more than a corpse; he had said goodbye to the man eleven days earlier, when the blood he’d drunk had linked him to Shelley as he clung to the rail of the foundering boat.
Trelawny on the other hand was striding up and down the beach with his hands balled into fists, cursing to cover his very evident grief. Roberts looked more embarrassed than anything else.
Even without a face, the body was clearly Shelley’s. It still wore the nankeen trousers and the reefer jacket, from the pocket of which Trelawny had melodramatically pulled Leigh Hunt’s copy of Keats’s poems. Crawford noticed that it was folded open to the poem Lamia.
The officer in charge of the soldiers was yawning and shrugging, as if to indicate how routine and unremarkable the whole proceeding was, and when he spoke it was in English, as if to distance himself even further. “This body,” he said, “must be buried now, very now. You should burn him later, and the bodies down the coast also. It is the final law. And with this … wherewithal … placed muchly upon the bodies, first, when they are buried.” He waved at the canvas bags. “Health necessities, of the law.”
“More of their damned health necessities,” growled Trelawny. “Like the vegetables and metals they made Byron pay for.” He turned to Crawford. “What the hell’s he trying to say?”