The Stress of Her Regard Read online

  “Something about …” began Polidori; Shelley shot him a warning look, but perhaps the young doctor didn’t notice, for he went on. “… about a woman with—you said—eyes in her breasts.”

  Shelley’s squint of astonishment lasted only a moment, but Byron had noticed it; then Shelley had concealed it, and was nodding. “Right, that was it,” he agreed. “A hallucination, as I said.”

  Byron was intrigued, but regard for his obviously ill-at-ease friend made him decide not to pursue whatever it was that Shelley had really said and Polidori had misunderstood.

  He winked at Shelley and then changed the subject. “I really think we should each write a ghost story!” he said cheerfully. “Let’s see if we can’t do something with this mud-person who’s been following poor Shelley about.”

  Everyone eventually managed to laugh.

  A shadow passed over Chillon’s blunt towers and across the miles of lake between the grim edifice and the boat, and Byron shifted around in his seat by the bow to look north; a cloud had blotted half the sky since he had last scanned that side.

  “It looks as if we’d better put in at St. Gingoux,” he said, pointing. His servant closed his book and tucked it away in a pocket.

  Shelley stood up and leaned on the rail. “A storm, is it?”

  “Best to assume so. I’ll wake the damned sailors—what’s wrong?” he demanded, for Shelley had leaped back from the rail and was scrabbling through the pile of their baggage.

  “I need an eisener breche!” yelled Shelley—and a moment later he leaped to his feet with Byron’s sword cane in his fist. “Over your head, look out!”

  Half thinking that Shelley had gone absolutely mad at last, Byron sprang up onto the yard-wide section of rail around the bowsprit and calculated how long a jump it would take to land him near the mast-hung haversack, which in addition to wine bottles contained two loaded pistols; but the urgency in Shelley’s voice made him nevertheless risk a quick look overhead.

  The advancing cloud was knotted and lumpy, and one section of it looked very much like a naked woman rushing straight down out of the sky at the boat. Byron was about to laugh in relief and say something sarcastic to Shelley, but then he saw that the woman-form was not part of the distant cloud, or at least wasn’t anymore, but was a patch of vapor much smaller than he had at first thought—and much closer.

  Then he met her furious gaze, and he sprang for the pistols.

  The boat rocked as the cloud figure collided with it, and Shelley and the boatmen yelled; when Byron rolled up into a crouch with a pistol in his hand he saw Shelley swing the bared sword at the woman-shaped cloud, which hung now just above the rail, and though the blade stopped so abruptly that the top half of it snapped right off, the cloud seemed to recoil and lose some of its shape. There was blood on Shelley’s cheek and in his hair, and Byron aimed the pistol into the center of the cloud and pulled the trigger.

  The sharp explosion of the charge set his ears ringing, but he could hear Shelley shout, “Good—lead conducts electricity well enough—silver or gold’s better!”

  Shelley braced his tall, narrow frame against the rail, and with the broken sword aimed a real tree-felling stroke at the thing. The now turbulent cloud recoiled again, no longer resembling a woman at all. Shelley swung again, and the blade struck the wooden rail a glancing blow; Byron thought his friend had missed his target, but when a moment later Shelley hit the rail again, straight down this time, he realized that he had intended to chop free a wooden splinter.

  Shelley let go of the broken sword—it tumbled over the side—and with his thin hands pried up the splinter. “Give me your other pistol!”

  Byron dug it out of the fallen sack and tossed it to him. Shelley jammed the wooden splinter into the barrel and as Byron shouted at him to stop, aimed the weirdly bayonetted gun into the cloud and fired.

  The cloud burst apart, with an acid smell like fresh-broken stone. Shelley slumped back onto the seat. After a moment he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and began blotting his bleeding forehead.

  “You’re damned lucky,” was all Byron could think of to say. His heart was pounding, and he shoved his hands into his pockets so Shelley wouldn’t see them trembling. “Jam a gun barrel like that again and it’ll blow your hand off.”

  “Necessary risk—wood’s about the worst conductor.” Shelley pushed himself back up and stared anxiously at the sky. “Have the boatmen get us in, fast.”

  “What, you think we’re likely to see another?” Byron turned back to the ashen boatmen. “Get us in to shore—bougez nous dans le rivage plus près! Vite, very goddamn vite!”

  Facing Shelley again, he forced himself to speak levelly. “What was that thing? And what … did … it … goddamn … want?”

  Shelley had wiped the blood off, and now folded his handkerchief carefully and put it back in his pocket. He apparently had no scruples about being seen to tremble, but his eyes were steady as he met Byron’s glare. “It wanted the same thing the tourists in Geneva want, when they point me out to each other. A look at something perverse.” He waved to keep Byron silent. “As to what it was—you could call it a lamia. Where better to meet one than on Lake Leman?”

  Byron stepped back, dispelling the mood of challenge. “I never thought about the name of this lake. A leman, a mistress.” He laughed unsteadily. “You’ve got her in a temper.”

  Shelley relaxed too, and leaned on the rail. “It’s not the lake—the lake’s just named after her kind. Hell, the lake’s more an ally.”

  The man at the tiller had tacked them more squarely into the offshore breeze, and the castle of Chillon swung around to the portside. The wine glasses had fallen and shattered when the cloud-thing impacted with the boat, so Byron picked up the bottle, pulled the cork with his teeth, and took a deep gulp. He passed it to Shelley and then asked, “So if wood’s the worst conductor, why did it work? You said—”

  Shelley took a drink and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I think it has to be …an extreme, electrically. I think they’re like pond fish—equally vulnerable to either rapids or stagnation.” He grinned crookedly and had another pull at the wine. “Silver bullets and wooden stakes, right?”

  “Good Christ, what are we talking about here? It sounds like vampires and werewolves.”

  Shelley shrugged. “Not a … coincidence. Anyway, silver’s the best electrical conductor, and wood’s about the worst. Silver’s generally been too expensive for the kind of people who are credulous of the old stories, so they’ve traditionally had to make do with iron stakes. Eisener brechen, the stakes are called—it’s a very old term that means ‘iron gap,’ sort of, or ‘iron breach’ or ‘iron violation,’ though brechen can also refer to the refraction of light, or even to adultery. Evidently in some archaic context those things were all somewhat synonymous—odd thought, hm? In fact, it was an eisener breche that I was calling for at your house four nights ago. Polidori, the idiot, thought I had said ‘eyes in her breasts.'” Shelley laughed. “When I came to myself again, I had no choice but to go along with his foolish misunderstanding. Mary thought I had gone mad, but it was better than letting her know what I’d really said.”

  “Why were you calling for one that night? Was this creature we saw today outside my window that night?”

  “It, or one very like it.”

  Byron started to say something, but paused, staring back north across the water. A sheenless wave of agitation was sweeping toward them. “The sail, desserrez la voile!” he yelled at the sailors; then, “Hang on to something,” he added tensely to Shelley.

  The wind struck the boat like an avalanche, tearing the sail and heeling the boat over to starboard until the mast was almost horizontal, and water poured solidly in over the gunwales, splashing up explosively at the thwarts and the tiller. For several seconds it seemed that the boat would roll right over—while the shrill wind tore at their rail-clutching hands and lashed spray across their faces—but then, as reluctantly as a tree root
tears up out of the soil when the tree is forced over, the mast came back up, and the half-foundered boat swung ponderously around on the choppy water. One of the boatmen yanked the tiller back and forth, but it just knocked loosely in its bracket; the rudder was broken. The winds were still chorusing through the rent sail and the shrouds, and had raised a surf that was crashing on the rocks of the shore a hundred yards away.

  Byron took off his coat and began pulling at his boots. “Looks like we swim for it,” he yelled over the noise.

  Shelley, gripping the port rail, shook his head. “I’ve never learned how.” His face was pale, but he looked determined and oddly happy.

  “Christ! And you say the lake’s your ally? Never mind, get out of your coat—I’ll get us an oar to cling to, and if you don’t struggle, I think I can maneuver us around those rocks. Get—”

  Shelley had to speak loudly to be heard, but his voice was calm—"I have no intention of being saved. You’ll have enough to do to save yourself.” He looked over the far rail at the humped rocks withstanding the battering of the surf, then looked back at Byron and smiled nervously through his tangled blond hair. “I don’t fear drowning—and if you give me an oar to cling to I promise you I’ll let go of it.”

  Byron stared at him for a couple of seconds, then shrugged and waded aft, bracing himself on the rail, to where his servant and one of the sailors were frantically filling buckets from the pool sloshing around their thighs, and heaving the water over the side; the other boatman was pulling at the shrouds in an effort to get what was left of the sail usefully opposed to the wind. Byron grabbed two more of the emergency buckets and tossed one toward Shelley. “In that case bail as fast as you can, if you ever want to see Mary again.”

  For a moment Shelley just held onto the rail; then his shoulders slumped, and he nodded; and though he snatched the floating bucket and scrambled to help, Byron thought he looked rueful and a little ashamed, like a man who finds his own willpower to be frailer than he had supposed.

  For the next several minutes the four men worked furiously, sweating and gasping as they hauled up bucketful after bucketful of water and flung it back into the lake, and the man working the sail had, by swinging the boom way out to starboard, managed to get at least a faint surge of headway in spite of the loss of the rudder. And the wind was losing its fury.

  Byron risked pausing for a moment. “I—was wrong in my—estimation of your courage,” he panted. “I apologize.”

  “Quite all right,” Shelley gasped, stooping to refill his bucket. He dumped it over the gunwale and then collapsed on one of the benches. “I overestimated my grasp of science.” He coughed, rackingly enough to make Byron wonder if he was consumptive. “I recently eluded one of those creatures and left it behind in England—it’s practically impossible for them to cross water, and the English Channel is a nice quantity of that—but somehow it didn’t occur to me that I might run across more of them here … much less that they’d … know me.”

  He hefted his bucket. “Switzerland especially,” he went on, “I had thought, would be free of them—the higher altitude—but I think now that what drew me here to the Alps is the same … is the recognition … that this is … I don’t know. Now I don’t think I could have fled to a more perilous place.” He dragged his bucket through the water, now shin deep, and then got to his feet and hoisted the bucket up onto the rail. Before dumping it he nodded around at the Alpine peaks ringing the lake. “They do call, though, don’t they?”

  The laboring boat had rounded the point, and ahead they could see the beach of St. Gingoux, and people on the shore waving to them.

  Byron poured out one more bucketful of water and then tossed the bucket aside. The cloud had passed, and looking south to the Rhône Valley he could see sunlight glittering on the distant peaks of the Dents du Midi. “Yes,” he said softly. “They do call. In a certain voice, which a certain sort of person can hear … not to his benefit, I believe.” He shook his head wearily. “I wonder who else is answering that particular siren song.”

  Shelley smiled and, perhaps thinking of their recent emergency, quoted from the same play his wife and Byron had been quoting four days ago. “I suppose it’s many another who is ‘like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.'”

  Byron blinked at him, once again not sure what to make of what he said. “'Many another'?” he said irritably. “You mean many others, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Shelley, still smiling faintly as he watched the shoreline grow steadily closer. “But no, I think I mean each like two spent swimmers.”

  A rescue boat was being rowed out toward them across the sunny water, and already some of the sailors on it were whirling weighted rope-ends overhead in wide, whistling circles. The sailors on Byron’s boat scrambled to the bow and began clapping their hands to show their readiness to catch and moor the lines.

  BOOK ONE

  A TOKEN OF INVITATION

  Of the sweets of Faeries, Peris, Goddesses,

  There is not such a treat among them all,

  Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,

  As a real woman, lineal indeed

  From Pyrrha’s pebbles …

  –John Keats,

  Lamia

  And Venus blessed the marriage she had made.

  –Ovid,

  Metamorphoses

  Book X, lines 94 and 95

  CHAPTER I

  … and the midnight sky

  Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley

  “Lucy,” the barmaid was saying in an emphatic whisper as she led the two men around the foot of the oak stairway, “which I’d think you could remember by now—and keep your damned voice down until we get outside.”

  The flickering lantern in her hand struck an upwardly diminishing stack of horizontal gleams from the stair edges rising away to their right, and Jack Boyd, who had just asked the barmaid her name for the fourth time that evening, apparently decided that taking her upstairs would be a good idea, now that he had at least momentarily got straight what to call her.

  “God, there’s no mistaking you’re one of the Navy men,” she hissed exasperatedly as she spun out of the big man’s drunken embrace and strode on across the hall to the dark doorway of the reserve dining room.

  The off-balance Boyd sat down heavily on the lowest stair while Michael Crawford, who’d been hanging back in order to be able to walk without any undignified reeling, frowned and sadly shook his head. The girl was a bigot, ascribing to all Navy men the faults of an admittedly conspicuous few.

  Appleton and the other barmaid were ahead of them, already in the dark dining room, and now Crawford heard a door being unbolted and pulled open, and the sudden cold draft in his face smelled of rain on trees and clay.

  Lucy looked back over her shoulder at the drunken pair, and she hefted the bottle she had in her left hand. “An extra hour or two of bar service is what you paid for,” she whispered, “and Louise’s got the glasses, so unless you two want to toddle off to bed, trot yourselves along here—and don’t make no noise, the landlord’s asleep only two doors down this hall.” She disappeared through the dining room doorway.

  Crawford leaned down unsteadily and shook Boyd’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “you’re disgracing me as well as yourself.”

  “'Disgracing'?” mumbled the big man as he wobbled to his feet. “On the contrary—I intend to marry …” He paused and frowned ponderously. “To marry that young lady. Her name was what?”

  Crawford propelled him into the dining room, toward the open door in the far wall and the night beyond it. Lucy was waiting for them impatiently in the far doorway, and by the wavering glow of her lamp Crawford noticed the lath and plaster panelling on the walls, and he remembered the ornate double chimney-stacks he’d glimpsed over the roof when the stagecoach had turned off the Horsham road this afternoon; evidently the inn’s Georgian front had been added onto an
old Tudor structure. He wouldn’t be surprised if the kitchen had a stone floor.

  “We’ll make it a double wedding tomorrow,” Boyd went on over his shoulder as he bumped against chairs in the dark. “You wouldn’t object to sharing the glory, would you? Of course this means I won’t be able to be your groomsman—but hell, I’m sure Appleton would be groomsman for both of us.”

  The pattering hiss of the rain was much louder when they were out on the roofed porch, and the chilly air sluiced some of the wine fumes from Crawford’s head. The porch, he saw, began at the door they’d come out of and extended south, away from the landlord’s room, almost all the way to the stables. Appleton and Louise had already sat down in two of the weather-beaten chairs that stood randomly along the deck, and Lucy was pouring wine into their glasses.

  Crawford stepped to the edge of the porch so that the curtain of rain tumbled past only inches in front of his nose. Out in the dark yard he could dimly make out patches of grass and the shaggy, waving blackness of trees beyond.

  He was about to turn back to the porch when the sky was split with a dazzling glare of white, and an instant later he was rocked back on his heels by a thunderclap that he was momentarily certain must have stripped half the shingles from the inn’s roof. Thinly over the crash he could hear a woman scream.

  “Damn me!” he gasped, taking an involuntary step backward as the tremendous echoes rolled away east across the Weald to frighten children in distant Kent. “Did you see that?” His ears were ringing and he was speaking too loudly.