“I think,” said Crawford, “he means that we have to bury the bodies now, but can dig them up later for cremation. And when we bury them we have to dump those bags onto the corpses.”
“What is that?” asked Trelawny, his black beard seeming to bristle with suspicion. “In the bags?”
Crawford crossed the sand to the bags, touched one, and then smelled his finger. “Quicklime,” he said before the officer could think of the English word. “It gets tremendously hot on exposure to water, any dampness.” The other two Englishmen looked ready to object, but Crawford looked again at the spectators and said, “I think it’s a good idea.”
They buried Shelley under the hot sun, and dumped a bag of the quicklime over him and then hastily shovelled sand down on top of the steaming effigy. The crowd of spectators broke up and drifted away, and Crawford and Trelawny and Roberts waded out to the boat and rowed back to the Bolivar.
They sailed back to Livorno as the sun went down over the Ligurean Sea beyond the starboard rail. By early evening they were back at the Globe Hotel, but Trelawny paused only long enough to empty a glass of wine before riding south to break the final news to Byron and the ladies.
Crawford sat up late, drinking alone on a balcony overlooking the harbor. The water was dark, but streaked here and there with yellow light from the portholes of a few boats with people staying aboard, and the waterfront was quiet on this Friday night; the only sounds were the faint wash of the surf and the wind fluting in the roof tiles behind and above him.
As had happened once before, in Byron’s coach outside the walls of Geneva, the wine seemed to clear his wits rather than dull them, even though the glass he was now drinking from was plain glass instead of amethyst.
Sometime during the long, morbidly hot day he had decided that tomorrow he would use the last of Shelley’s money to hire a boat back to the Casa Magni … and then ask Josephine to marry him. His life hadn’t been one he’d have chosen, but Josephine was the best and most important part of it, and—now that he had begun to recover from the shock of having killed the lamia—he knew he couldn’t bear to lose her.
Only by promising himself that he would marry her and make the rest of her life happy and contented could he bear to think of what her life had consisted of since she’d left England—the injuries, the cold and hunger, the loneliness, the recurrent madness … or to remember the innate gallantry and loyalty of her, the moral strength that had several times been much greater than his own…
In fact, it occurred to him as he poured a fresh glass of wine, her life in England seemed to have been a nightmare too. Clearly she had always been implicitly blamed for her mother’s death, both by her father and by her sister Julia, whom he had so carelessly married so long ago. He remembered Julia cheerfully telling him about Josephine’s pathetic attempts to be Julia, and about Julia’s callous public shattering of those pretenses.
The fact that Josephine could still love anyone, that she could still care so much about people—like himself and Keats and Mary Shelley and the children—that she would put her abused life in danger to do it, was evidence of a soul that should all along have been treasured, cherished.
The world had no place for her, and would certainly break her—probably soon—if he didn’t do what he could to protect her.
The medical profession was undoubtedly closed to them now, in Italy, at least, but surely there was a quiet life to be had, somewhere, for two tired and damaged people. Surely the world had no further malice toward them.
Cheered by the wine and by his new resolve, he went to bed early, for he wanted to be at Casa Magni by noon.
The boat he had hired had no smaller boat for passengers to debark in, and so after the captain lowered the anchor to wait for him, Crawford had to wade waist-deep through the low surf to the beach in front of the Casa Magni; one of Shelley’s woman-servants waved to him from the terrace, and was waiting for him in the dining room when he had crossed the sand-streaked paving stones of the ground-floor room and ascended the stairs.
The servant, whose name, he recalled, was Antonia, hurried across the carpeted floor to him. “There’s only me and Marcella and Josephine still here, sir,” she said quickly in Italian. “Is there word on Mister Shelley?”
“He’s dead, Antonia,” Crawford answered in the same language. “They found his body on the beach yesterday, twenty miles south of here. Williams is dead too.”
“Ah, God.” Antonia crossed herself. “Their poor children.”
Crawford just nodded. “They’ll get along,” he said in a neutral tone. “Where is Josephine?”
“She’s in the room that used to be Shelley’s.”
And was afterward hers and mine, for a while, Crawford thought as he crossed to the closed door. He tapped softly on it. “Josephine? It’s me—Michael. Let me in, there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about, and I have a boat waiting—for us.”
There was no reply, and he turned back toward Antonia with a questioning look.
“She has been ill, sir,” Antonia said. “The sun hurts her eyes….”
Crawford turned the knob and pulled the door open. The curtains were drawn against the sunlight, but he could see Josephine lying across the bed in her nightgown, her sweaty hair trailing across her face and throat as if she were a drowned body carried up here to await identification. The window was open, though the curtains scarcely shifted at all in the still, hot summer air.
Very slowly he walked to the bed, and he laid his hand on her forehead. The skin was hot, and his eyes had adjusted enough to the dimness for him to notice how pale she was.
He reached out and, hesitantly, pulled the damp strands of hair away from her throat. Two red puncture marks showed clearly on her white skin.
“No,” he remarked quietly, almost conversationally, though his heart was thudding rapidly behind his ribs. “No, this isn’t what’s happened. Not …” He sat down on the floor beside the bed, and he only knew he’d begun crying when Josephine’s drawn face blurred and dissolved into the pattern of the curtains, like an imagined face seen in the contours of crumpled bedclothes, that disappears when the viewer moves.
Not now, he thought, not now that I’m finally free of the lamia, now that Josephine and I are both too old and broken to climb the Alps again….
When he blinked away his tears he saw that her eyes were slightly open, squinting down at him where he sat. “Darling!” she whispered. “Come along, tonight. We can all share each other….” Her lips curled in a strained smile.
Then he was running down the stairs two at a time until his bad left leg buckled and he rolled down to the sandy pavement of the ground floor, twisting an ankle and cracking his head hard against the stones.
He remembered the despair-inducing field that had hung about the top of the Wengern like a subsonic vibration, and he wished he could bask once more in its oppressive influence, for he was afraid he lacked the necessary strength of character to shoot himself, or take poison, or jump from a height, without that kind of help.
Ah, but don’t worry, he told himself bleakly as he limped across the sand and into the surf and then began laboriously wading back out toward where the anchored boat waited for him; there must certainly be other ways—not as abrupt as guns or cyanide or high balconies, but in the long run every bit as effective, I’m sure. And I have just enough faith left in myself to be confident that I’ll find one.