Byron let his snarl of effort curl up in a wolfish grin, and with his free right hand he drew his pistol again. “Silver and wood,” he gasped in Italian, “the ball in this is. You can die the way your idols do.”
The patrons backed away reluctantly, and a few moments later Byron and Crawford were scuffling out through the arched doorway. As Byron led him toward the wooden stairs, Crawford blinked over his shoulder.
“That’s not the Thames,” he said wonderingly, “and this bridge isn’t London Bridge.”
“Not much gets past you, Aickman, that’s certain,” Byron observed as he began dragging the two of them up the stairs.
Up on the pavement they paused to rest. Crawford squinted around at the torturingly bright street, and wondered where on earth he was. He peered down past his nose and was surprised to see that he had a beard, and that it was, though dirty, white.
“Not far now,” said Byron. “I’ve got Tita waiting in a rented carriage around this corner. If I’m not back to him in a few minutes, in fact, he’s been instructed to come after me.”
Crawford nodded, trying to hold on to his fragile alertness. “How did you find me?” he asked.
“I got my servants to ask around about an Englishman, with a Carbonari mark on his hand, who might well be trying to kill himself. They quickly learned that you were in one of these dens, and then they kidnapped one of the local nefandos—that’s what they call the neffies here, you know, it also means ‘unspeakable'—and they threatened to kill him if he wouldn’t give us the location of this place.”
Byron shook his head contemptuously. “The man broke down immediately, crying and babbling directions on how to get here. These nefandos are cowards. Even in their vice, they just want to skirt the unperilous outer edges, like a would-be rake who can’t work up the nerve to do more than just peek in through bedroom windows. If they had any real ambition they’d go north to Portovenere, where they might just actually find a vampire.”
Crawford nodded. “That’s true, I guess. They just want the dreams they get from their quartzes and bits of lightweight metal … and from the blood of the people who have been bitten. You can see through the blood.” He started forward, but again had to lean on Byron.
“And I wasn’t even infected anymore. They said my blood was still worth a connoisseur’s time, though—they said it was like a mild vinegar in which one could … still taste the grandeur of the fine wine it had once been.” He laughed weakly. “They’d love yours. If you should ever fall into penury …”
“A position always open to me, right. Thanks.”
For several moments they limped on in silence, while Crawford kept reminding himself of what was going on. “I’ll try to go up into the Alps again,” he wheezed finally, “for the sake of the child, but I’m afraid I’d die now long before reaching the peaks. I was … incalculably younger in 1816.”
“If my plan is sound we won’t have to go any farther than Venice,” Byron said. “I think I know a way to blind the Graiae.”
“Blind the … Graiae,” Crawford repeated, sadly abandoning his frail hope of being able to understand what was going on.
They shuffled around a corner, and Byron had taken off his hat and was waving it at the waiting carriage.
“You’ll stay at my place in Pisa tonight,” Byron said as the carriage got under way, “and then tomorrow we’ll take this carriage to Viareggio, where we’ll meet Trelawny, who’s sailing there aboard the Bolivar. He’s built some kind of damned oven or something to burn the bodies in. We’ll be bringing leaden boxes to hold the ashes.”
Crawford nodded. “I’m glad they’re going to be burned.”
“I am too,” Byron said. “The damned Health Office has been dragging its feet on letting us have the permits—I think someone high up in the Austrian government wants vampires hatching out of the sand—but we’ve got the permits now, and mean to use them before they can be cancelled. I just hope it’s not already too late.”
“Wait a moment,” said Crawford, “Pisa? I can’t go there—the guardia is looking for me.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, do you really imagine that you’re recognizable? You must weigh all of ninety pounds right now. Hell, look at this!”
Byron reached out and took hold of a handful of Crawford’s greasy white hair, and tugged. The clump of hair came away in his hand with almost no resistance. Byron tossed it out the open window and wiped his hand on a handkerchief and then threw the handkerchief out too. “You look like a sick, starved, hundred-year-old ape.”
Crawford smiled, though his vision was brightly blurred with tears. “I’ve always said that a man should have experienced something of life before embarking on fatherhood.”
Leigh Hunt’s children also noticed Crawford’s resemblance to an ape, and insisted that the lord’s menagerie was extensive enough already without bringing in “a mangy ourang-outang,” but Byron cursed them away and got Crawford upstairs and into a bath, then went to fetch Trelawny.
Crawford scrubbed himself with some rose-scented soap that might have belonged to Byron’s mistress Teresa—though he was sure she wouldn’t want it after this—and washed his hair with it too. When he lifted his head after dunking it in the water to rinse out the soap, most of his hair stayed in the tub, floating in curls like strands of boiled egg white; and when he got out of the tub and used one of Teresa’s hairbrushes, he realized that he had gone bald during this past month.
A full-length mirror hung on one wall, and he stared in horror at his naked body. His knees and elbows were now the widest parts of his limbs, and his ribs stood out like the fingers of a fist under tight cloth, and there were sores on his wrists from the daily chafing of the cross-ropes. And he didn’t think he would be fathering any more children.
For a few moments he wept, almost silently, for the man he had once been … and then bolstered himself with a sip of Teresa’s cologne, pulled a robe around his wasted body, and tried to tell himself that if he could somehow save Josephine and their child he would qualify for manhood in a truer sense than he ever had before.
It was a brave resolve, but he looked at his pale, trembling hands and wondered how much he would be able to do; and he considered the fragmented state of his mind and wondered how long he would even be able to remember the resolve.
Byron returned with John Trelawny to discuss the details of tomorrow’s pyre—Trelawny only gaped at Crawford twice, once when he first glimpsed him and once when he was told who Crawford was—but Crawford wasn’t able to concentrate on what was being said; Trelawny was so burly and tanned and dark-bearded and clear-eyed and healthy that Crawford felt battered and scorched by the man’s mere proximity.
Byron noticed his inattention, and led Crawford down a hall to a guest bedroom. “I’ll send up a servant with some bread and broth,” he said as Crawford carefully sat down on the bed. “I’m sure a doctor would insist that you stay in bed for a week, but this pyre tomorrow will be a sort of practice run for Shelley’s on the following day, so I want you along.”