Byron started to turn away, then added, “Oh, and I’ll have the servant bring in a cup of brandy too—and feel free to ask for more whenever you like. It’s no office of mine to restrict anyone’s drinking, and I can’t have word going round that my hospitality is such that my guests are driven to drinking cologne.”
Crawford felt his face heating up, and he didn’t meet Byron’s eye; but after Byron had left the room he relaxed gratefully back across the bed to await the food. He heard his bath water being dumped out of a window, and he hoped the plants wouldn’t be poisoned.
He fell asleep, and dreamed that he was back up on the cross in the underground bar; someone had mistaken him for a wooden crucifix, and was getting ready to hammer an iron nail into his face, but Crawford’s only fear was that the man would notice too soon that Crawford was alive, and not do it.
CHAPTER 20
The only portions that were not consumed were some
fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what
surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In
snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was
severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I
should have been put into quarantine.
—Edward John Trelawny,
Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 1878
Lady Macbeth: Here’s the smell of the blood stilclass="underline" all
the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
Oh, oh, oh!
Doctor of Physic: What a sigh is there! The heart is
sorely charged.
Waiting-Gentlewoman: I would not have such a heart
in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.
—Shakespeare, Macbeth
The Serchio River at the end of summer was low and narrow between its banks, and the glittering waves that swept in from the Ligurean Sea and crashed along this uninhabited stretch of the Tuscany coast went foaming quite a distance up the river mouth, apparently unopposed by any current. The onshore breeze hissed faintly in the branches of the aromatic pine trees that furred the slopes of the hills.
The Bolivar was moored fifty yards out from shore, near a sloop that flew the Austrian flag, and Byron’s carriage stood on the dirt road above the beach.
On the sand slope a hut had been built of pine tree trunks woven with pine branches and roofed with reeds, and Crawford and Byron and Leigh Hunt were sitting in its shade, drinking cool wine while several uniformed men stood around the little structure. Crawford was sweating profusely, and he wondered which of the officers had had the unpleasant duty of living in the hut for the past month, guarding the graves of Williams and des Loges.
“Trelawny is upset,” Byron said. “He’d like to have done this at dawn—with a Viking ship for the pyre, I don’t doubt. He’s a pagan at heart.” Byron had been nervously irritable all morning.
Trelawny stood a few hundred yards away, his arms crossed, watching the men from the Health Office digging in the soft sand. His custom-made oven, a sort of high-sided, four-legged iron table, sat over a lavish pile of pine logs a few yards past him.
Trelawny had told Byron that he wanted the cremation to take place at ten o’clock—but Byron had slept late, and his carriage had not come rolling up to the road above the shore until noon.
Crawford took one more sip of wine, then shrugged. “It’s a pagan business,” he said. The ride had tired him, and he wished he could sleep. He tugged the brim of his straw hat down farther over his eyes.
Hunt looked at him in puzzlement and seemed about to ask a question, but Byron swore and stood up—the men had evidently found a body, for one of them had climbed up out of the sandy hole and picked up a boathook.
“Somebody is still here, at least,” Byron muttered, starting to limp forward.
Crawford and Hunt stood up and plodded after Byron through the thick, hot sand to the hole. Crawford made himself keep up with Hunt, but in order not to faint he had to clench his fists and stare at the ground and take deep breaths. The bandages around his ankles were wet—the blood-draining incisions the nefandos had given him had started bleeding again.
Oddly, there was no noticeable odor of putrefaction on the pine-scented sea breeze.
The health officer had dragged a blackened, limbless body out onto the sand. A woven chain of garlic still adhered to the body, and several purpled silver coins tumbled off onto the sand. The Health Office didn’t cheat, Crawford thought dizzily.
Byron was squinting, and his mouth was pinched. “Is that a human body?” he asked, his voice scratchy. “It’s more like the carcass of a sheep. This is … a satire.”
Trelawny reached down and gingerly pulled a black silk handkerchief free of the remains of the jacket; he laid it out on the sand near one of the silver coins and pointed at the letters E.E.W. stitched into the fabric.
Byron shook his head in disgusted wonder. “The excrement of worms holds together better than the potter’s clay of which we’re made.” He sighed. “Let me look at his teeth.”
Both Trelawny and Hunt turned puzzled glances on Byron.
“I, uh, can recognize anyone I’ve talked to by their teeth,” he said. Glancing at Crawford, he added, “The teeth reveal what the tongue and eyes might try to conceal.”
Trelawny muttered some quick Italian to the officer, who shrugged and, with the handle of the shovel, turned the head.
Crawford looked down at the shapeless, lipless face, and nodded. Williams’s canine teeth were perceptibly longer than they had been when he’d been alive. The garlic and silver slowed him down, Crawford thought, but the Health Office really should have thought of some plausible, hygienic-sounding reason to put a wooden stake through the chest.
The officer had leaned into the hole again, and this time hooked up a leg with a boot on the end of it. Trelawny stepped forward—he had brought one of Williams’s boots for comparison, and when he held it up to the one on the dead foot, they were obviously the same size.
“Oh, it’s him, sure enough,” said Byron. “Let’s get this onto your oven, shall wer?”
The officers were careful, but as they lifted the body, the neck gave way and the head fell off and thudded into the sand. One of the officers hurriedly stepped forward with a shovel, and, in a grotesque attempt at reverence that made Crawford think of someone coaxing some hesitant animal into a trap, gingerly worked the blade of the shovel under the head, and picked it up. The head grimaced eyelessly at the ocean, rocking slightly as the officer walked.
Byron was pale. “Don’t repeat this with me,” he said. “Let my carcass rot where it falls.”
Several of the officers had continued digging in the sand; they had found another body now, and wanted to know whether it should be carried to the oven too.
“No no,” said Byron, “it’s just that poor sailor boy, I doubt that he has any family to—”
Crawford took Byron’s arm, both to steady himself and to get the lord’s attention. “Add him to the pyre,” Crawford whispered. “I think you’ll recognize him by his teeth, too.”
“Oh.” Byron swore. “Si, metti anche lui nella fornache!” Hunt and Trelawny were staring at him, and he added, “Shelley thought well enough of—whatever his name was—to hire him, didn’t he? I’m taking over Shelley’s debts, and I choose to regard this as one of them.”