The Stress of Her Regard (62 page)

She's probably only now beginning to be able to think for herself, he thought. And she'll be hating it. Will she acknowledge the responsibilities that she can now clearly see, or will they be so appalling that she'll just want to return to the selfless haze?

"I thought," she said when the man had left, "that there'd be no difference if I killed myself. If the baby was his, suicide would just . . . speed up its birth."

"And your . . . rebirth."

She nodded. "I'd finally be able to
stop
being me, Josephine; I really
would
be just a walking . . . thing."

"But now," said Crawford carefully, "you know that our child would be too."

Josephine's eyes were wide now, and it occurred to Crawford that she looked trapped. "But we," she whispered, "we killed her, the woman that loved you. I can't . . .
know
that, I can't let myself know that."

Crawford took her shoulders.
"It wasn't Julia,"
he said. "It wasn't your sister. I know you know that, but you haven't . . . what, digested it. The thing we killed was a goddamn flying lizard, like that thing that tried to kill you—and our child—two nights ago. It was a
vampire
."

She lowered her head and nodded, and he saw a tear fall onto the knot at her wrists.

Too tired to worry anymore, he released her shoulders and began untying the knot.

When the stable owner came in again, Josephine and Crawford were standing together by the carriage, clinging to each other. The man smiled and muttered something about
amore
before going to the next stall.

They traded Byron's carriage for a less elegant but fresher-smelling one, loaded all their baggage into it, and then paid for a room at a hotel just so that they could bathe and get into clean clothes. Crawford even shaved—and, after agonizing about it for a minute, decided not to hide the razor.

Crawford was careful to wait in the hall while Josephine took her bath and got dressed; he was dimly and incredulously beginning to hope that the two of them might someday marry after all—if they weren't killed in Venice, and if she was carrying only one child—but he could imagine her withdrawing totally if he even
seemed
to be attempting familiarities right now.

When she stepped out of the room Crawford thought she must have left years in the bath water: her hair was clean and combed, and lustrous even in the dimness of the hall, and in one of Teresa's dresses that Byron had packed for her she actually looked slim rather than gaunt.

He offered her his arm; after only the slightest hesitation she took it, and together they walked to the stairs.

They walked down the sunlit Emilian Way to the Piazza Grande, and at an outdoor table under a statue of Correggio they ate hard-boiled egg slices in tomato sauce with grilled bread and olive oil, and drank most of a bottle of Lambrusco.

Beggars were huddled in the sun in front of the Renaissance arches of the Palazzo del Commune, and a barefoot old couple in ragged clothes had ventured out among the tables; the man was wringing a devastated hat in his hands and was talking to the well-dressed people at a table near Crawford. Thankful for his own clean clothes and good food and wine, Crawford pulled a bundle of
lire
from his pocket and waited for the couple to make their way to the table at which he and Josephine sat.

Then he noticed the Austrian soldiers. They must have come into the square several seconds earlier, for they were already spread out and walking purposefully across the square. Two of them seized the old couple and began marching them away, and, looking past them, Crawford saw that the soldiers had rounded up all the beggars and were herding them out of the square.

Suddenly ashamed of his apparent affluence, he crumpled the bills and let them fall to the pavement. In the breeze the wad of paper scooted away across the flagstones like a little boat.

"Parma's new Austrian masters don't seem to approve of beggars," he said to Josephine as he pushed his chair back and stood up. "Let's go—I hate seeming to be part of the crowd they're protecting from them."

Josephine too looked sickened by the spectacle, and stood up. "I think we've
done
Parma," she said in a sprightly imitation of the voice of an English tourist. "
Do
let's be moving on toward Venice."

Crawford was delighted to see even weak, ironic humor in her. "The Tintoretto
Last Supper
!" he exclaimed fatuously, trying to maintain her mood.

"The Veroccio
Colleoni
!" she chimed in; then, perhaps because she'd seen drawings of that grim mounted statue, her affected smile collapsed. "Back to the hotel?"

"Just for the carriage. Our old clothes they can keep."

Austrian guards were checking everyone who was leaving the city through the high stone arch of the north gate, but the soldier who checked their carriage just leaned in the window and looked at Josephine, then peered up at Crawford with a disapproving air; he sniffed officiously and waved them on.

The carriage moved forward out of the shadow into the hot sunlight, and then the horses bounded forward, as if tired of the slow pace of city traffic. The road northward curled away ahead of them across the Po Valley, and for several hours Crawford drove happily between wide fields of yellow earth on which the vines and peach trees made geometrical figures in livid green.

A number of horses and carriages passed them, but he was not anxious to reach the nightmare end of this journey, and he wanted the horses to be fresh for the drive through Lombardy and Venetia tomorrow, so he maintained their leisurely pace.

In a couple of hours they had reached a village called Bresccllo that sat on the marshy banks of the Po. Crawford thought about stopping, but the air was full of some kind of lint that was making him sneeze, and he tilted his hat back and squinted along the western river bank to see where the bridge was.

* * *

Suddenly the carriage rocked violently on its springs, and a black-bearded young man was sitting beside him.

Crawford darted a hand toward the pistol under his coat, but the man caught his wrist with a browned hand. Crawford instinctively looked at the hand, thinking of breaking the grip—and then noticed the black mark between, the thumb and forefinger. It looked very much like the two-year-old stain on his own palm.

He looked up into a pair of fierce brown eyes. "Carbonari," the man said.

Crawford nodded, a little relieved.
"Si?"
he said.

The man spoke rapidly in what Crawford at first thought was French; then he recognized it as the patois of Piedmont, which lay westward up the valley, and he managed to translate it mentally. "You must go down the river," the man had said, "not across into Lombardy. Running water—it throws them off the scent."

"Uh . . . who," asked Crawford carefully, unconsciously trying to match the accent, "do you think we are?"

The man had taken the reins from Crawford and was goading the horses east down a narrower dirt track, away from the bridge.

"I think," he said, "that you are the couple who traded in a carriage reeking of garlic, in Parma this morning; the couple who got by the border guards at the Cisa Pass yesterday because of a sick woman, and a big bribe to men who are in some trouble now."

Suddenly Crawford remembered the guards in the Piazza that morning, who had been arresting everyone who looked as shabby as Crawford and Josephine had the day before; and he remembered the guard who had passed them through the Parma gate after having
sniffed
the carriage. Crawford was profoundly glad that he and Josephine had happened to abandon Byron's vehicle.

The new carriage was among wooden shacks now, and the lint in the air was worse. Crawford sneezed six times in succession.

"They're steeping the harvested flax crop," Crawford's guide said. "The air will be full of the stuff for days." He threw a quick glance sideways at Crawford. "You have no drink to offer a fellow soldier?"

"Sorry. Here." Crawford handed him the flask, and the man drank everything that was in it and handed it back. "Thanks. My name's della Torre."

"I'm—," Crawford began, but the man quickly held up his stained hand.

"I don't want to know," he said. "There was a description of the two of you, mentioning your Carbonari mark, in a message an Austrian courier was bringing from Lerici yesterday. Our people killed him in the mountains." He looked over his shoulder, back toward the bridge. "Clearly the courier they killed was not the only one they sent."

"Have the Austrians followed us here?" Crawford asked. "Perhaps we should abandon this carriage too. . . ."

"Yes, you should and you will, but not at this moment. They are not here yet—I passed them half an hour ago on the road from Parma, on a faster horse than any of the soldiers had, and I only got here a few minutes ago."

"Do you know . . . what it is they want us for?" Crawford asked. Shelley's heart? he wondered; the men I killed in Rome? Both?

"No," said della Torre, "and I don't want to know. I just assume you're on Carbonari business."

"I am that."

A series of decrepit wooden docks segmented the roadside on their left now, and della Torre slanted the carriage into a narrow alley between two warehouselike buildings on one of the docks. Crawford heard a squeal and splintering snap as some part of the carriage caught against the corner of one of the buildings and apparently broke off.

Delia Torre ignored it. "There will be a boat here," he said, and hopped down to the resounding boards.

Several big, scarred-looking men emerged from a dark doorway in the building they'd collided with, and della Torre began arguing with them so immediately that Crawford thought they must be old enemies resuming some long-standing conflict.

Alarmed both by the pursuing Austrians and by his new ally, he climbed down and opened the carriage door. Josephine was asleep, and he reluctantly shook her shoulder.

She opened her eyes, but there was no particular alertness in them.

"We're abandoning the carriage," he said to her clearly, "and proceeding by boat. You might want to step out."

"Boat?" she asked doubtfully.

"Boat," he said. "What's wrong? Do you
want
him to be able to follow you?"

She closed her eyes. "You know I don't," she said. She climbed out of the carriage and stood by him, swaying. He put his arm around her. "But," she whispered, "you know my blood does."

Delia Torre walked around the carriage; he was slapping his forehead. "The men of Emilia are corrupt," he said when he had paused before Crawford and lowered his hand. "These men want a thousand
lire
for the use of one of their boats. It is their best boat, understand, and in it I and one of them can take you to Porto Tolle, on the Adriatic, in two days at the most."

Crawford's stomach felt hollow. He only had about fifteen hundred
lire
. Still, he couldn't see that he had any choice but to deal with these people, and there didn't seem to be time to try to talk the price down.

"We'll take it," he said, despising the way his voice sounded like a very old man's.

Delia Torre nodded bleakly, then shrugged. "For nothing, though, they will take responsibility for the carriage and horses that the Austrians are looking so hard for."

I daresay they will, thought Crawford bitterly. But, "Very well," he said. And how much of this are you skimming off? he wondered.

"I," della Torre went on stoically, "will help you take your baggage onto the boat."

"You're
too
kind," said Josephine in English as they started across the dock.

The boat was about thirty feet long, with apple-shaped bows and a leeboard like a wooden wing on each side; the mast was hinged and lying back across the stern, and Crawford could see that it would carry a gaff-rigged mainsail and a jib. He admitted to himself that it did look serviceable.

Within minutes the mast had been raised and locked in place, and as soon as the baggage and the four passengers were aboard, the lines were cast off and the sails were raised and the land-side leeboard was swivelled down into the water, and the boat began angling out away from the dock.

Josephine had gone straight to one of the narrow bunks below the deck, but Crawford refilled his flask and sat with it by the starboard rail, and he watched the village recede away behind them.

Today was Monday. They had left Lerici on Saturday night, and already he had spent more than half of the two thousand
lire
Byron had given them . . . and lost Byron's carriage and horses.

But the brandy made him optimistic. With luck, he thought, we've also lost our pursuers, both human and inhuman.

All afternoon the boat beat on down the Po, between green fields dotted with white cattle, and at sunset Josephine came tottering up onto the deck.

Della Torre stared at her for a moment, then walked across the deck to where Crawford sat. "She's bitten," he said.

Crawford nodded drunkenly. "We're going to get her unbitten."

"Why do you go toward the sea, then? The Alps, I'm told, are where one goes to shed the vampires."

"We're going to do it in Venice."

"Venice?"
Delia Torre shook his head. "Venice is their stronghold! That's where their king is supposed to be living."

Josephine walked up and without a word took Crawford's flask and drank deeply from it. "God," she said in English, "I'm—" She shook her head, staring at the distant riverbank.

"I know," said Crawford. "I've felt it too. Fight it—for the child's sake if not your own."

She shivered, but nodded and took another sip.

"Talk Italian," said della Torre. For the first time, Crawford heard real uneasiness in the man's voice.

The sky was darkening ahead, and clouds curled solidly in the sky.

At dusk the man from the docks—whose name, Crawford gathered, was Sputo, the Italian for spit—started to tack in toward the lights of a city, but della Torre told him to keep going, to sail all night. The man shrugged and obeyed, only remarking that if they were to go on they'd have to kindle up running lights. Della Torre walked around the boat with a firepot, carefully lighting the lamps that swung on chains out over the water.