The Stress of Her Regard (21 page)

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 17 July 1816

For the next two days Byron's touring party moved uneventfully east through the Enhault and Simmenthal valleys, and on Sunday the twenty-second of September they crossed the Lake of Thoun to Neuhause and then resumed the horses and carriage for the fourteen-mile trip east through Interlaken and south to the village of Wengen, which lay at the foot of the range that included the Kleine Scheidegg, the Wengern, and beyond them, the more than cloud tall Jungfrau.

The sky was darkening and overcast by the time they found rooms at the house of the local curate, but Byron insisted on saddling a horse and going for a closer look at the mountains while there was still any light at all, and so Hobhouse, Crawford and a guide mounted up to accompany him.

From the cobblestoned road outside the vicarage they could see a waterfall bisecting the dark wall of the mountains, seeming to be more cloud than water in the distance; the slowly swaying column stood nearly a thousand feet from its mist-hidden base to its skyey source, and Byron shuddered and said it looked like the tail of the pale horse on which death is mounted in the Apocalypse. With that observation he galloped away up the road, leaving the other three to follow.

Rain swept over them after they'd gone only a few miles, but it wasn't until the thunder began frightening the horses that Byron would listen to Hobhouse's demands that they turn around.

Byron was in a wild mood, and because the man was his patient Crawford rode beside him. Byron was waving his cane over his head—which alarmed Crawford, for it was a new sword cane, and Byron had refused to let the guide carry it for fear that it might draw lightning—and he was shouting verses into the rain.

Twice Crawford recognized phrases he had heard in his dreams.

Hobhouse's cloak turned out to be anything but waterproof, and so they left him in a cottage and rode on toward the curate's house to get a man to bring him back an umbrella and a stauncher cloak.

A flare of lightning lit the valley at the same instant that thunder cannoned against the mountains, and Byron stood up in the stirrups to brandish his cane at the sky. He looked across at Crawford and laughed to see him cringing in his saddle.

"Tomorrow we'll climb to the peaks, never mind what the weather is," Byron yelled over the rain. After a moment he added, "Do you believe in God, Aickman?"

Crawford shrugged miserably; his own cloak was not much better than Hobhouse's. "I don't know," he called back. "Do you?"

Byron settled back onto the saddle. "I'm an agnostic with option to buy," he said. "But I can't see how . . . I mean, can there be supernatural phenomena without there being, too, a God?—In the
absence
of any God?"

Crawford bleakly reviewed the course of his own life, especially the last two months of it. "I'm afraid," he called finally, not at all happy with the answer he had come to, "that the more absences there are, the more things are possible. And so if there's an absence the size of
God
, then there probably isn't
anything
so appalling that we can count on not meeting it."

His statement seemed to sober Byron. "It's just as well you chose to disguise yourself as a veterinarian, Aickman," he called through the rain. "You'd have made an alarming philosopher." He spurred his horse and rode on, leading the way back to the curate's house.

The figure silhouetted against the yellow light from the open door proved to be the curate himself, and when the travellers had dismounted he curtly asked to see Byron and Crawford alone in his room.

"Some problem about the fee, I expect," muttered Byron as the two of them hung up their wet cloaks and followed the old man up the stairs; but Crawford had seen the look of distaste and sorrow on the lean, wrinkled face, and he wondered if they were all simply going to be thrown out, as he had been from the rooming house near Geneva eight days ago.

The old clergyman's room was right up under the steeply slanted roof, with a very low wall on one side and a high one on the other, and the windows that ran at ankle height along the low side were so small that Crawford guessed a lamp was necessary here even on the sunniest day. Rows of old leather book spines along shelves on the high wall seemed to blot up the light from the old man's lamp as he set it down on a low table and then lowered himself onto the narrow bed and waved toward two chairs at the other end of the room.

"I . . . did not know who you were," said the old clergyman, speaking English with a heavy German accent, "when you came here. I would not have let you stay." Byron had just sat down, and now pushed his chair back to stand up again, but the old man raised his hand. "You may stay now, I will not turn you out. But I have heard from the people about you—you,
besonders
," he added, looking at Crawford.

"Means 'especially,' " put in Byron helpfully. "What did they tell you about us? That old incest story again? Those girls
weren't
sisters, you know—Mary Godwin had entirely different parents than the Clairmont girl, even if they do both have the same stepfather. And in any case, is it really worth the effort of your disapproval? These are things that every day occur."

"This is nothing to do with . . . plain carnal congresses," the old curate said. "Worse stories are about. The people tell me that you have dealings with . . . unheavenly spirits, the things which walk the valley of the shade of death."

"A nice phrase," said Byron, grinning. "I like it. So we've sinned against your . . .
ordinances
? Prove it and punish us, if you can."

The old man shook his head wearily. "The mountains, the high places, are not the path to redemption now, not anymore. That was long ago—and dangerous even then. Salvation, redemption, are now to be found through the sacraments." He turned to Crawford, and his lined old face was rigid, as if with the effort of concealing his loathing. "Even such as
you
might be able, through them, to escape damnation."

Byron laughed uneasily. "Don't be so hard on the lad, Father, he's not nearly as bad as all that. My God, you're eyeing him as if you think he'll steal the gold chalices off your altar."

"Or turn the wine in them to vinegar," said Crawford, his voice quiet with anger, "just with a look. Is this Christian charity as it's practiced in Bern?" He stood up, rapping his head against the low ceiling. "The Church has become a more . . .
exclusive club
since the founder's day, it's clear. No doubt the Devil is more hospitable."

"Wait," said the curate, "sit. I want to see you in Paradise, but I also want to see all my parishioners there. If you go to the mountains now, in the state you're in, things will be roused that will do none of my people any good." He nodded to Crawford. "Another like you is already in the Alps, but I can do nothing about him, and in any case he's keeping to the low passes and travelling only at night. . . ."

He had slowly lifted the stopper from a decanter of brandy on a shelf by the bed, and he turned toward a row of glasses beside it. "Will you stay down here, away from the mountains? I can promise you redemption, if you truly want it—and I can promise you death, if you persist in your course. You have not ever had better counsel than what I am saying."

Crawford sat down, a little mollified, but he shook his head. "No. I'm going up there."

Byron nodded agreement. "I don't get dissuaded from my courses by this kind of counsel."

The curate closed his eyes for a moment, then shrugged and poured the brandy into three of the glasses. He stood up to hand one to each of his guests, and then hobbled back to the bed and sat down.

Behind him a human shadow appeared on the wooden panelling of the wall, though there was no form casting it. The dim silhouette shook its head slowly, and then faded.

Crawford's heart was thumping, and he looked at Byron; Byron's eyes were wide—clearly he'd seen it too. Both of them put their glasses down on the floor.

"None for me, thanks," said Crawford, standing up.

"Me either," said Byron, who had already got to the door and opened it.

The old man was quietly sobbing on his bed as they drew the door closed behind them, and Crawford wondered if he was repenting having tried to poison his guests, or sorry that the attempt had failed.

On the way back to where Hobhouse waited they passed a big, six-wheeled wagon that had got bogged down in the sudden mud. Byron, still in his wild, contentious mood, insisted that they get out and push, even though the wagon seemed to have at least a dozen torch-carrying attendants who were already laboring at it, and so he and Crawford and the servant got off their horses and dug their heels into the mud and helped shove at the thing.

The attendants didn't seem grateful for the help, especially when Byron got up into the bed of the wagon to direct the work, but they put up with it until the wagon was rolling again, then made Byron get down and whipped up the horses and resumed their southward progress.

"Coals to Newcastle," laughed Byron as he got back onto his horse.

"How's that?" asked Crawford wearily, wishing his boots weren't now full of cold mud.

"The big box they've got in the back of that is full of ice—it leaked on my hands when I leaned against it—and they're heading into the Alps."

At seven o'clock the next morning they set out toward the mountains again, fortified with coffee and brandy—their own—against the eternal chill that made fragile cloud-plumes of human speech and then snatched them away into the cobalt sky. Crawford and the guide were on mules, while Byron and Hobhouse rode horses.

The waterfall was now glowing in sunlight; Byron called attention to the rainbow that hovered around it like a halo, but Hobhouse sniffed and said he wasn't impressed with a rainbow that had only two distinct colors in it.

"At least they're regal colors, Hobby," said Byron, and only Crawford heard the tremor in his voice. "Purple and gold, after all."

The mountains themselves were too big—too high and distant and vastly jagged—for Crawford to comprehend; looking at them was like looking through a telescope at the alien features of the moon. It was only the unnaturally clear air of this high country that let these sights be visible in such awful totality—back down there behind the travellers, in the zones where mankind flourished, hazes and mists and smokes mercifully limited the extents of human sight. As the hooves clopped along the uphill stone path toward the feet of the sky-spanning peaks, Crawford kept catching himself thinking of the mountains as ancient, living entities, and he was nervously reminded of the story of Semele, the human mother of Dionysus, who was struck dead by the sight of Zeus in his undisguised, inhuman glory.

The sun blazed on the expanses of snow and ice, and by midmorning they had all donned blue-tinted goggles to protect themselves from snow-blindness.

The oily scent of the pines was diminishing as the travellers got higher, like the taste of juniper in a glass of gin that's being refilled with icy vodka, and Crawford thought that all smells, and even the ability of the air to carry them, would soon be among the things he and the others had left behind. The pines they were passing now were all withered and stripped of bark, and Byron stared at them sombrely and said that they reminded him of himself and his family.

Crawford thought the remark was a little too affected and theatrical, a little too
Byronic
, to be genuine, and he wondered if Byron himself could always distinguish between his own emotions and his poses.

The road grew steeper, and at one point they had to angle across the path of a recent avalanche; no trees still stood in the wide, swept-looking track of it and, blinking up the slope at the inaccessible steepnesses from which it had come, Crawford was surprised to see a broad silvery vein glittering in a freshly exposed stone face. He asked the guide about it, and the man answered, uncomfortably, that it was the
argent de l'argile
, or silver from clay, and that in a day or two it would have withdrawn back into the body of the mountain.

After a thoughtful pause, Crawford asked if it was a particularly lightweight metal, but the guide just turned away and began pointing out peaks ahead of them.

Soon they were moving in single file along narrow switchback ledges up the face of the Wengern, and Crawford discovered that his mule behaved as though it were carrying its usual width-tripling bales of cargo—the beast plodded along the very precipice edges of the paths to avoid snagging its nonexistent baggage against the mountain wall. No amount of yanking or swearing could make the beast move in closer to the wall and, after an hour or so of the almost tightrope-walking pace, Crawford had got used to it, and only turned pale when his mount would knock loose a section of the edge with its hoof and have to scramble to right itself.

Josephine was on foot, but her new friend had given her a splinter of stone to press deeply into the flesh of her palm, and for hours she had been able to jog along after Byron's party without fatigue; and on the ledgy paths up the mountain she was able to keep pace with her quarry effortlessly. Her transfixed palm had stopped bleeding hours ago, and her hand only hurt when she accidentally touched the rock wall with it.

"I can't accompany you," her friend had told her at dawn when he had had to leave. "But take this piece of me"—he had handed her the little stone claw then—"and keep it, me, enclosed in your flesh, and I will be with you in spirit, and guide you."

And he certainly had. Several times she had encountered a choice of ways, but each time the stone spike pulled her decisively, if painfully, one way or the other—it had always kept her on Crawford's trail, even when her eyes were watering so badly in the glare of the sunlit snow, in spite of her goggles, that she couldn't see where she was going; and her only concern now was not to follow so closely that someone in Byron's party might look back along some straight traverse and see this solitary female figure following after them.