The Stress of Her Regard (14 page)

"Uh . . . right."

"I'll give you a pair of stone soles before you go. And wear them, you hear me? You'll be good for centuries more, easily, just so
you
don't insulate yourself from
your
wife."

"But I'm
not
married, certainly not to one of these . . . things." His fever suddenly seemed much worse, and his breath was as hot as a desert wind in his head. "Am I? Could my wife have been one of them?"

"Sure—a fellow-husband can tell it just to glance at you, even without the evidence of your finger."

Crawford shook his head uncomprehendingly. "But she's dead . . . so I can hardly keep from
insulating
myself from her."

"I really doubt that she's dead."

Crawford chuckled dizzily. "You should have been there. Crushed like a press-full of grapes for wine, she was, and on our wedding night."

Des Loges's walnut-wrinkled face softened in what might have been pity. "Boy,
that
wasn't your wife." He shook his head, then climbed into the wagon. "I got your passport—now pull me home so that you can do your part of the bargain."

Crawford considered just walking away, hiring a carriage to take him at top speed to the Swiss border, and leaving this old man to walk, or hire some child to pull his wagon—but, almost in spite of himself, he remembered Appleton with the horse and money, and Keats with his luggage.

He bent over stiffly and picked up the harness.

The sun set before they were five miles south of Auray, but des Loges refused to consider spending the night in an inn, even when Crawford pointed out that there was no moon tonight to see by; and so Crawford plodded on, wondering feverishly if there would ever again be a time when he wasn't dragging this wagon around the Brittany hills.

The moon was indeed in its dark phase, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he discovered that he could nevertheless see it as a faint ring in the sky. The ground seemed to have a dim glow too, and several times when he heard noises in the surrounding fields he glimpsed patches of phosphorescence moving behind the wild shrubbery; and when an owl sailed past he was able to follow its silent flight for several long seconds before it swooped toward some small animal.

As the miles unrolled away behind, Crawford settled into a comfortable, metronomic pace, and when a pebble worked its way into his shoe through a gap at the side of the sole, he was reluctant to break his stride and take the shoe off—but after a few seconds he realized that the pebble wasn't at all uncomfortable. It might have been a fever-born delusion, but that foot, the whole leg, in fact, felt much less tired, springier; and so when he did pause it was to find another pebble and poke it into his other shoe. Behind him, des Loges laughed softly.

This time he wasn't startled by the valley of the standing stones, even though at night the figures looked much more like motionless men lined up across the miles of nighted plain for some unimaginable purpose. Luminous mists played over the stones in the starlight, and Crawford, dizzy and sick, thought the mists greeted him; he nodded back and waved his maimed hand.

It was past midnight when he pulled the wagon up beside the inverted half-boat that was des Loges's house. When they had got inside, the old man gave him a cup of brandy and showed him a corner he could sleep in.

At noon the next day Crawford was awakened by the old man calling to him from outside. He came stumbling out of the tiny house, blinking in the glaring sunlight, but it wasn't until he walked out to the rocks and looked down into the tide pool, and saw old des Loges sitting in the water next to the angular rock, that he remembered escaping from the ship and acquiring a passport. And now you've got to do him this favor, he thought as he squinted around and scratched under his unfresh shirt. I hope it's something you can do quickly, so as to be on the road again before the sun moves too much farther west. Nothing like the sleep-late life of a fugitive! He shook the pebbles out of the battered shoes, pulled them on and then climbed down the sandstone boulders to where des Loges sat.

The old man was dressed in the same dun cassock he'd been wearing the day before, and the clear sea water was rocking and swirling around his upper chest. The roughly hewn pyramidic stone was submerged, but Crawford could see that a segmented necklace of silver and wooden beads and some kind of onionlike bulbs was draped around the base of it—the buoyant wood and vegetable sections arched upward and waved in the currents, but the silver sections held the strange jewellery down on the sand.

Crawford glanced around again, uneasily, for all at once he knew that something bad was supposed to happen here, and he didn't know what direction it was likely to come from.

The old man was grinning up at him. "Married in the mountains, divorced by the sea!" he piped. "It's high tide now, but after you've liberated me, do please break that garlic necklace, will you? I'm not selfish, and I do like to pay my debts."

Though mystified, Crawford nodded. "Got you. Break the necklace." He dipped a toe into the water and winced at the chill. "You're . . . getting divorced?"

"That's the ceremony I want you to perform," des Loges told him. "It shouldn't be any problem. I'm a frail old man, and anyway I promise not to struggle."

"Do I have to get in the water?"

Des Loges rolled his eyes. "Of
course
you've got to get in the water! How are you going to drown me if you don't get in the water?"

Crawford grinned. "Drown you. Right. Listen, I—" Glancing at the necklace-bordered stone, he realized that it had a square base—and there had been a square dent in the ground where des Loges had said his wife always sat. "How does this divorce work?" he asked unsteadily.

Des Loges was watching the tide anxiously. "You drown me. It's just a token killing, really—suicide won't work, you see. Accident or murder only, and with the wife," he waved toward the stone, "incapacitated. And it has to be you—I knew it had to be you when I first heard you were on your way—because you're
married into the family
. They won't interfere with
you
; anybody else they could stop, or at least visit vengeance upon."

Crawford was reeling, and had to kneel down. "That rock, there, in the water by you. Are you trying to—is that your—"

"Brizeux has no family, no children!" des Loges shouted. "There's no one at stake but he and I, and we know what we're doing. For God's sake, the tide's going out—hurry! You promised!"

As if to give Crawford a head start, the old man bent over and shoved his face into the water; and with his four-fingered hand he beckoned furiously.

Crawford looked again at the sunken pyramid . . . and a voice in his head said,
No. Get away.

Crawford turned and ran, as fast as his stiff legs could propel him, east—toward Anjou, and Bourbonnais and, somewhere beyond, Switzerland.

I said "she must be swift and white
And subtly warm and half perverse
And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,
And like a snake's love lithe and fierce."
Men have guessed worse.

—A. C. Swinburne,
Felise

And always, night and day, he was in the mountains,
and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.

—
Mark
5:5

Like the fingers of a vast, invisible harpist, high-altitude winds were drawing plumes of snow from the top of distant Mont Blanc and casting them out across the whole southwest quarter of the sky; and in spite of the sunlight that raised steam from the slate roofs of the
riegelhausen
around him and made him carry his coat instead of wear it, Crawford shivered with something like sympathy as he watched the faraway mountain, and for a moment he could vividly imagine how these Geneva streets would look from the viewpoint of a person with a telescope on the summit.

Blue sky glittered in the puddles of rainwater between the cobblestones underfoot, and in the west a rainbow spanned the whole valley between Geneva and the Monts du Jura. Looking down from the too bright sky, Crawford saw a young woman approaching him hesitantly from across the street.

Though her fair hair and lace-trimmed red bonnet implied that she was a native, her pallid beauty seemed suited to some less sunny land, and her sick smile was jarring among these gaily painted housefronts—it seemed to Crawford to be somehow fearfully eager, like the smile of an unworldly person loitering around a foreign waterfront in the hope of selling stolen property or hiring a murderer.

"Larc-en-ciel,"
she said hoarsely, nodding over her shoulder at the rainbow but not looking at it. "The token of God's covenant to Noah, hmm? You look, pardon me, like a man who knows the way around it."

Crawford assumed she was a prostitute—the Hotel Angleterre was just ahead, after all, and no doubt many of the English tourists who could afford to stay there would appreciate a girl who didn't require the services of an interpreter—and he was chagrined, but not very surprised, to realize that he was not tempted to take her upstairs somewhere. He had just spent a full month in traversing France, and never during that time, even when he was working alongside very healthy young girls in the vineyards, had he felt any stirring of erotic interest. Perhaps the death of his wife was still too recent . . . or perhaps his intensely sexual dreams, the near nightmares that plagued him and left him drained and fevered in the mornings, were leaving him no energy for the pursuit of real women.

But before he could reply to her ambiguous remark, there was a scuffling on the side of the street she'd come from.

"It's that damned atheist, let him lie," a gruff man's voice called, and then a girl cried, "A doctor, someone go for a doctor!"

Crawford automatically pushed the young woman aside and loped past her across the street.

"I'm a doctor, let me through," he said loudly, shoving his weathered but newly bought portmanteau between the people who were clustered in a rough semicircle against the wall of a tavern. They backed away to let him in, and at the focus of the crowd he found a frail-looking youth lying unconscious on the stones, his wispy blond hair clinging damply to his forehead.

"He started talking crazily, wildly," said a girl who was crouched beside him, "and then he simply fell over." Crawford realized that she was the one who had called for a doctor. She was English, and idly he noted that he would once have found her, too, attractive, though in contrast to the Swiss girl she was dark-haired and plump.

He got down on one knee and felt the young man's pulse. It was rapid and weak. "It looks like sunstroke," he snapped. "Got to get the temperature back down. Get me wet cloths—anything, a sail . . . curtains, a cloak—and something to fan him with."

A couple of people ran away, presumably to get the wet cloths, and Crawford pulled off the unconscious man's jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. A moment later he had peeled it off too, and he tossed both garments over his shoulder. "Soak up some rain water with these," he yelled, "and give them back to me."

Crawford stood up then and began flapping his own coat back and forth over the thin torso. It occurred to him that this young man resembled someone he'd met recently.

"Wasting your time, my good man," said one foppishly dressed Englishman cheerfully. "That's Shelley the atheist. Let him die and the world's a better place."

Crawford was about to say something about the Hippocratic Oath, but another man had just limped up from the direction of the hotel, and this new arrival swung around to give the tourist a frigid smile. "Shelley is a friend of mine," he said tightly. "If
you
have friends, perhaps you would be so kind as to have one of them arrange a time when you and I can meet somewhere at your convenience and . . .
reason
with each other?"

"Good God," muttered someone in the crowd, "it's
Byron
."

Crawford, still flapping his coat, glanced over at the newcomer. He did seem to resemble the author of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
as the drawings in the London papers had portrayed him—with a moody but classically handsome face under a wind-tossed mane of dark curls. Crawford had vaguely heard that the man had left England, but he hadn't known he had come to Switzerland. And who was this "atheist" Shelley?

The English tourist's face was dark and he was looking away, back toward the hotel. "I . . . apologize," he muttered, then turned and stalked off.

The blond young woman who'd talked to Crawford about the rainbow came hobbling over with a blanket and a bucket of water—and before she let Crawford dunk the blanket she shook into the water a handful of what seemed to be white sand. "Salt," she said impatiently, as if Crawford should have thought of it himself. "It makes the water a better conductor of electricity."

Byron seemed startled by the remark, and looked more closely at her.

"Great, thank you," Crawford said, too busy to bother with her odd remark. He balled up the blanket and plunged it into the water, and then draped the sodden fabric over Shelley's thin frame—noting, as he tucked it around him, a wide, corrugated scar on the young man's side, below the prominent ribs. One of the ribs, in fact, seemed to be missing.

The English girl who had called for a doctor smiled up at Crawford. "You must have been a ship's surgeon," she said, "to have instinctively called for a
sail
."

Both Byron and Crawford looked at her uncomfortably.

"Oh, hello, Claire," said Byron. "I didn't see you there."

"Yes," Crawford put in shortly. "I was in the Navy in my youth."

Just then another man came bustling up. "What's going on here?" he demanded. "I'm a physician, let me pass."

"The situation's well in hand, Pollydolly," said Byron. "It seems Shelley has had a sunstroke."

"According to whose diagnosis?" The man with the implausible name glared around at the crowd and then focussed on Crawford. Crawford noticed that he was young—in his twenties, probably, and trying to hide the fact behind his ostentatious moustache and blustery manner. "Yours, sir?"