The Stress of Her Regard E-Book

Tim Powers

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Lake Geneva, 1816 As Byron and Shelley row on the peaceful waters of Lake Geneva, a sudden squall threatens to capsize them. But this is no natural event - something has risen from the lake itself to attack them. Kent, 1816 Michael Crawford's wife is brutally murdered on their wedding night as he sleeps peacefully beside her - and a vengeful ghost claims Crawford as her own husband. Crawford's quest to escape his supernatural wife will force him to travel the Continent in the company of the most creative, most doomed poets of his age. Byron, Keats and Shelley all have a part to play in his fate, and the fate of Europe.

Leseprobe

TIM POWERS is a two-time winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and three-time Locus Award recipient. He lives in San Bernadino, California.

Also by Tim Powers

Tree Days to Never

Declare

On Stranger Tides

Hide Me Among the Graves

First published in the United States in 1989 by Ace Books.

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Tim Powers, 1989.

The moral right of Tim Powers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 406 0 E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 686 5

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Dean and Gerda Koontz

for thirty years of

cheerful, hospitable and tolerant friendship

And with thanks to

Gregory Santo Arena and Gloria Batsford and

Gregory Benford and Will Griffin and

Dana Holm Howard and Meri Howard and

K. W. Jeter and Jeff Levin and Monique Logan and

Kate Powers and Serena Powers and

Joe Stefko and Brian M. Thomsen and Tom Whitmore

And to Paul Mohney,

for that conversation, many years ago

over beers at the Tinder Box, about Percy Shelley

... yet thought must see

That eve of time when man no longer yearns,

Grown deaf before Life’s Sphinx, whose lips are barred;

When from the spaces of Eternity,

Silence, a rigorous Medusa, turns

On the lost world the stress of her regard

Clark Ashton Smith,Sphinx and Medusa

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE – 1816

BOOK ONE – A TOKEN OF INVITATION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

INTERLUDE – SUMMER, 1818

INTERLUDE – FEBRUARY 1821

BOOK TWO – 1822: SUMMER FLIES

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

EPILOGUE – WARNHAM, 1851

PROLOGUE

1816

—Bring with you also ... a new Sword cane ...

    (my last tumbled into this lake—)

—Lord Byron,

    to John Cam Hobhouse, 23 June 1816

UNTIL THE SQUALL struck, Lake Leman was so still that the two men talking in the bow of the open sailboat could safely set their wine glasses on the thwarts.

The boat’s wake stood like a ripple in glass on either side; it stretched to port far out across the lake, and on the starboard side slowly swept along the shore, and seemed in the late afternoon glare to extend right up the green foothills to move like a mirage across the craggy, snow-fretted face of the Dent d’Oche.

A servant was slumped on one of the seats reading a book, and the sailors had not had to correct their course for several minutes and appeared to be dozing, and when the two travellers’ conversation flagged, the breeze from shore brought the faint wind-chime melody of distant cowbells.

The man in the crook of the bow was staring ahead toward the east shore of the lake. Though he was only twenty-eight, his curly dark red hair was already shot with gray, and the pale skin around his eyes and mouth was scored with creases of ironic humor.

“That castle over there is Chillon,” he remarked to his younger companion, “where the Dukes of Savoy kept political prisoners in dungeons below the water level. Imagine climbing up to peer out of some barred window at all this.” He waved around at the remote white vastnesses of the Alps.

His friend pushed the fingers of one skinny hand through his thatch of fine blond hair and peered ahead. “It’s on a sort of peninsula, isn’t it? Mostly out in the lake? I imagine they’d be glad of all the surrounding water.”

Lord Byron stared at Percy Shelley, once again not sure what the young man meant. He had met him here in Switzerland less than a month ago and, though they had much in common, he didn’t feel that he knew him.

Both of them were voluntarily in exile from England. Byron had recently fled bankruptcy and a failed marriage and, though it was less well known, the scandal of having fathered a child by his half sister; four years earlier, with the publication of the long, largely autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he had become the nation’s most celebrated poet—but the society that had lionized him then reviled him now, and English tourists took delight in pointing him out when they caught glimpses of him on the streets, and the women frequently threw theatrical faints.

Shelley was far less famous, though his offenses against propriety sometimes appalled even Byron. Only twenty-four, he had already been expelled from Oxford for having written a pamphlet advocating atheism, had been disowned owned by his wealthy father, and had deserted his wife and two children in order to run away with the daughter of the radical London philosopher William Godwin. Godwin had not been pleased to see his daughter putting into all-too-real action his abstract arguments in favor of free love.

Byron was doubting that Shelley would really be “glad of the surrounding water.” The stone walls had to be leaky, and God knew what kinds of damp rot a man would be subject to in such a place. Was it naïveté that made Shelley say such things, or was it some spiritual, unworldly quality, such as made saints devote their lives to sitting on pillars in deserts?

And were his condemnations of religion and marriage sincere, or were they a coward’s devices to have his own way and not acknowledge blame? He certainly didn’t give much of an impression of courage.

Four nights ago Shelley and the two girls he was travelling with had visited Byron, and rainy weather had kept the party indoors. Byron was renting the Villa Diodati, a columned, vineyard-surrounded house in which Milton had been a guest two centuries earlier; and though the place seemed spacious when warm weather let guests explore the terraced gardens or lean on the railing of the wide veranda overlooking the lake, on that night an Alpine thunderstorm and a flooded ground floor had made it seem no roomier than a fisherman’s cottage.

Byron had been especially uncomfortable because Shelley had brought along not only Mary Godwin, but also her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who by a malign coincidence had been Byron’s last mistress before he fled London, and now seemed to be pregnant by him.

What with the storm clamoring beyond the window glass and the candles fluttering in the erratic drafts, the conversation had turned to ghosts and the supernatural—luckily, for it developed that Claire was easily frightened by such topics, and Byron was able to keep her wide-eyed with alarm, and silent except for an occasional horrified gasp.

Shelley was at least as credulous as Claire, but he was delighted with the stories of vampires and phantoms; and after Byron’s personal physician, a vain young man named Polidori, had told a story about a woman who’d been seen walking around with a plain skull for a head, Shelley had leaned forward and in a low voice told the company the reasons he and his now abandoned wife had fled Scotland four years earlier.

The narration consisted more of hints and atmospheric details than of any actual story, but Shelley’s obvious conviction—his long-fingered hands trembling in the candlelight and his big eyes glittering through the disordered halo of his curly hair—made even the sensible Mary Godwin cast an occasional uneasy glance at the rain-streaked windows.

It seemed that at about the same time that the Shelleys had arrived in Scotland, a young farm maid named Mary Jones had been found hacked to death with what the authorities guessed must have been sheep shears. “The culprit,” Shelley whispered, “was supposed to have been a giant, and the locals called it ‘the King of the Mountains.’”

“‘It’?” wailed Claire.

Byron shot Shelley a look of gratitude, for he assumed that Shelley too was frightening Claire in order to keep her off the subject of her pregnancy; but the young man was at the moment entirely unaware of him. Byron realized that Shelley simply enjoyed scaring people.

Byron was still grateful.

“They captured a man,” Shelley went on, “one Thomas Edwards—and blamed the crime on him, and eventually hanged him ... but I knew he was only a scapegoat. We—”

Polidori sat back in his chair and, in his usual nervously pugnacious way, quavered, “How did you know?”

Shelley frowned and began talking more rapidly, as if the conversation had suddenly become too personal: “Why, I—I knew through my researches—I’d been very ill the year before, in London, with hallucinations, and terrible pains in my side ... uh, so I had lots of time for study. I was investigating electricity, the precession of the equinoxes ... and the Old Testament, Genesis ...” He shook his head impatiently, and Byron got the impression that, despite the apparent irrationality of the answer, the question had surprised some truth out of him. “At any rate,” Shelley continued, “on the twenty-sixth of February—that was a Friday—I knew to take a pair of loaded pistols to bed with me.”

Polidori opened his mouth to speak again, but Byron stopped him with a curt “Shut up.”

“Yes, Pollydolly,” said Mary, “do wait until the story’s over.”

Polidori sat back, pursing his lips.

“And,” said Shelley, “we weren’t in bed half an hour before I heard something downstairs. I went down to investigate, and saw a figure quitting the house through a window. It attacked me, and I managed to shoot it ... in the shoulder.”

Byron frowned at Shelley’s poor marksmanship.

“And the thing reeled back and stood over me and said, ‘You would shoot me? By God I will be revenged! I will murder your wife. I will rape your sister.’ And then it fled.”

A pen and inkwell and paper lay on a table near his chair, and Shelley snatched up the pen, dipped it, and quickly sketched a figure. “This is what my assailant looked like,” he said, holding the paper near the candle.

Byron’s first thought was that the man couldn’t draw any better than a child. The figure he’d drawn was a monstrosity, a barrel-chested, keg-legged thing with hands like tree branches and a head like an African mask.

Claire couldn’t look at it, and even Polidori was clearly upset. “It—it’s not any kind of human figure at all!” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know, Polidori,” said Byron, squinting at the thing. “I think it’s a prototypical man. God originally made Adam out of clay, didn’t He? This fellow looks as if he were made out of a Sussex hillside.”

“You presume!” said Shelley, a little wildly. “How can you be certain this isn’t made of Adam’s rib?”

Byron grinned. “What, Eve is it? If Milton ever glimpsed that with his sightless eyes, I hope it wasn’t during his visit here—or if it was, that she isn’t around tonight.”

For the first time during the evening Shelley himself looked nervous. “No,” he said quickly, glancing out the window. “No, I doubt ...” He let the sentence hang and sat back in his chair.

Belatedly afraid that all this Adam and Eve talk might lead the conversation into more domestic channels, Byron hastily stood up and crossed to a bookshelf and pulled down a small book. “Coleridge’s latest,” he said, returning to his chair. “There are three poems here, but I think ‘Christabel’ suits us best tonight.” He began to read the poem aloud, and by the time he had read to the point when the girl Christabel brings the strange woman Geraldine home from the woods, he had everyone’s attention. Then in the poem Geraldine sinks down, “belike through pain,” when they reach the door into the castle of Christabel’s widowed father, and Christabel has to lift her up and carry her over the threshold.

Shelley nodded. “There always has to be some token of invitation. They can’t enter without having been asked.”

“Did you ask the clay-woman into your house in Scotland?” asked Polidori.

“I didn’t have to,” replied Shelley with surprising bitterness. He turned away, toward the window. “My—someone else had invited it into my presence two decades previous.”

After a pause Byron resumed his reading, and recited Coleridge’s description of Geraldine exposing her withered breast as she disrobes for bed—

Behold! her bosom and half her side—

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

—And Shelley screamed and jackknifed up out of his chair and in three frantic strides was out of the room, knocking over a chair but managing to grab a lit candle as he blundered past the table.

Claire screamed too, and Polidori yelped and raised his hands like a cornered boxer, and Byron put down the book and glanced sharply at the window Shelley had been looking out of. Nothing was visible on the rain-lashed veranda.

“Go see if he’s well, Polidori,” Byron said.

The young doctor went into the next room for his bag, then followed Shelley. Byron refilled his wine glass and sat down, then looked at Mary with raised eyebrows.

She laughed nervously and then quoted Lady Macbeth: “‘My lord is often thus, and hath been from his youth.’”

Byron grinned, a little haggardly. “No doubt ‘the fit is momentary; upon a thought he will again be well.’”

Mary finished the quote. “‘If you much note him, you shall offend him and extend his passion.’”

Byron looked around the long room. “So where did he see ‘Banquo’s ghost’? I’m a fair noticer of spirits, but I didn’t see anything.”

“He—” Mary began, then halted. “But look, here he is.”

Shelley had walked back into the room, looking both scared and sheepish. His face and hair were wet, indicating that Polidori had splashed water on him, and he reeked of ether. “It was ... just a fancy that took momentary hold of me,” he said. “Like a waking nightmare. I’m sorry.”

“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 1

... 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.

After a few seconds he exhaled sharply, and grinned. “I guess that’s a stupid question, isn’t it? But truly, Boyd, if that had struck any closer, it’s a different sort of church ceremony you’d be bringing me to tomorrow.”

It was an effort to speak jocularly—his face was beaded with sudden sweat as if he’d stepped out into the rain, and the air was sharp with a smell like the essence of fright, and for a moment it had seemed to him that he was participating in the earth’s own shudder of shock. He turned and blinked behind him—his eyes had readjusted to the darkness enough for him to see that his companions hadn’t moved, though the two women looked scared.

“No chance,” Boyd called, sitting down and filling his glass. “I remember seeing Corbie’s Aunt clinging round your head in a storm off Vigo. The stuff likes you.”

“And who,” spoke up Appleton, his voice expressing only amusement, “is Corbie’s aunt?”

Crawford sat down himself and took a glass with fingers he willed not to tremble. “Not who,” he said. “What. It’s Italian, really, supposed to be Corposanto or Capra Saltante or something like that. St. Elmo’s Fire, the English call it—ghostly lights that cling to the masts and yardarms of ships. Some people,” he added, pouring wine into his glass and waving it toward Boyd before taking a deep gulp, “believe the phenomenon’s related to lightning.”

Boyd was on his feet again, pointing toward the south end of the yard. “And what are those buildings down there?”

Lucy wearily assured him that there weren’t any buildings at that end of the yard and told him to keep his voice down.

“I saw ’em,” Boyd insisted. “In that flash of lightning. Little low places with windows.”

“He means them old coaches,” said Louise. She shook her head at Boyd. “It’s just a couple of old berlines that belonged to Blunden’s father that haven’t been moved in thirty or forty years—the upholstery’s probably shot, not to mention the axles.”

“Axles—who needs ’em? Mike, whistle up Corbie’s Aunt again, will you? She’ll motivate the hulks.” Already Boyd was off the porch and striding jerkily across the muddy yard toward the old coaches.

“Oh hell,” sighed Appleton, pushing back his chair. “I suppose we have to catch him and put him to bed. You didn’t think to bring any laudanum, of course?”

“No—I’m supposed to be on holiday, remember? I didn’t even bring a lancet or forceps.” Crawford stood up, and was a little surprised to discover that he wasn’t annoyed at the prospect of having to go out into the rain. Even the idea of going for an imaginary ride in a ruined coach seemed to have a certain charm.

He had left his hat in the taproom, but the rain was pleasantly cool on his face and the back of his neck, and he strode cheerfully across the dark yard, trusting to luck to keep his boots out of any deep puddles. Behind him he could hear Appleton and the women following.

He saw Boyd stumble and flailingly recover his balance a few yards short of the vague rectangular blackness that was the coaches, and when Crawford got to that spot he saw why—the coaches sat on an irregular patch of ancient pavement that stood a few inches higher than the mud.

A yellow light waxed behind him, bright enough to reflect gold glints from the wet greenery and to let him see Boyd clambering up the side of one of the coaches—Appleton and the women were following, and Lucy still had the lantern. Crawford stopped to let them catch up.

“Gallop, my cloudy steeds!” yelled Boyd from inside one of the coaches. “And why don’t you sit a little closer, Auntie?”

“I suppose if he’s got to go mad, this is the best place for it,” remarked Lucy nervously, holding up the steaming lantern and peering ahead through the downpour. “These old carriages are just junk, and Blunden’s not likely to hear his ravings out this far from the buildings.” She trembled and the light wavered. “I’m going back inside, though.”

Crawford didn’t want the party to end—it was the last one he’d ever have as a bachelor. “Wait just a minute,” he said, “I can get him out of there.” He started forward, then paused, squinting down at the pavement. It was hard to be sure, with the rain agitating the muddy water pooled on it, but it seemed to him that there were bas-relief carvings in the paving stones.

“What was this, originally?” he asked. “Did there used to be a building here?”

Appleton cursed impatiently.

“Back in the olden days there was,” said Louise, who was clinging to Appleton’s arm and absently spilling wine down the front of his shirt. “Romans or somebody built it. We’re always finding bits of statues and things when the rains fatten the creeks in the spring.”

Crawford remembered his speculations on the age of this establishment, and he realized that he’d misguessed by a thousand years or so.

Boyd yelled something indistinct and thrashed around noisily in the old coach.

Lucy shivered again. “It’s awful cold out here.”

“Oh, don’t go in just yet,” Crawford protested. He handed his wine glass to Appleton and then awkwardly struggled out of his coat. “Here,” he said, crossing to Lucy and draping it over her shoulders. “That’ll keep you warm. We’ll only be a minute or two out here, and I did pay you to keep serving us for a couple of hours past closing time.”

“Not for out in the damned rain you didn’t. But all right, a couple of minutes.”

Appleton glanced around suddenly, as if he’d heard something over the gravelly hiss of the rain. “I—I’m going in myself,” he said, and for the first time that evening his voice lacked its usual sarcastically confident edge.

“Who are you?” Boyd yelled, all at once sounding frightened. A furious banging began inside the coach, and in the lamplight it could be seen to rock jerkily on its ancient springs; but the racket seemed dwarfed by the night, and disappeared without any echo among the dark ranks of trees.

“Good night,” said Appleton. He turned and began leading Louise hurriedly back toward the inn buildings.

“Get away from me!” screamed Boyd.

“My God, wait up,” muttered Lucy, starting after Appleton and Louise. The rain was suddenly coming down more heavily than ever, rattling on the inn roof and the road out front and on lonely hilltops miles away in the night, and over the noise of it Crawford thought for a moment he heard a chorus of high, harsh voices singing in the sky.

Instantly he was sprinting back after the other three, and only after he caught up with Lucy did he realize that he’d been about to abandon Boyd. As always happened in moments of crisis, a couple of unwelcome pictures sprang into his mind—an overturned boat in choppy surf, and a pub across the street from a burning house—and he didn’t want to take the chance of adding the back yard of this inn to that torturing catalogue; and so when Lucy turned to him he quickly thought of some other reason than fright for having run after her.

“My ring,” he gasped. “The wedding ring I’ve—got to give to my bride tomorrow—it’s in the pocket of the coat. Excuse me.” He reached into the pocket, groped around for a moment, and then came up with it between his thumb and forefinger. “That’s all.”

By the light of the lamp she was carrying he could see her face tighten with offense at the implied insult, but he turned away and started resolutely back through the rain to where Boyd was screaming in the darkness.

“I’m coming, you great idiot,” he called, trying to influence the night with his confident tone.

He noticed that he was carrying the wedding ring in his hand, holding it as tightly as a sailor undergoing surgery bites a bullet. That wasn’t smart—if he dropped it out here in all this mud it wouldn’t be found for years.

Over the noise of the rain he could hear Boyd roaring.

Crawford’s tight breeches didn’t have any pockets, and he was afraid the undersized ring would fall off his own finger if he wound up having to struggle with Boyd; in desperation he looked around for a narrow upright tree branch or something to hang the ring on, and then he noticed the white statue standing by the back wall of the stable.

It was a life-sized sculpture of a nude woman with the left hand raised in a beckoning gesture, and as Boyd roared again Crawford splashed across the mud to the statue, slipped the ring onto the ring finger of the upraised stone hand, and then ran on to the derelict coaches.

It was easy to see which one the crazed Navy lieutenant was in—the carriage was shaking to pieces as if it had a magically sympathetic twin that was rolling down a mountain ravine somewhere. Hurrying around to the side of it, Crawford managed to get hold of the door handle and wrench the door open.

Two hands shot out of the darkness and grabbed the collar of his shirt, and he yelled in alarm as Boyd pulled him inside; the big man threw him onto one of the mildew-reeking seats and lunged past him toward the doorway, and though a web of rotted upholstery had got tangled around Boyd’s feet and now sent him sprawling, the big man had managed to get at least the top half of his body outside.

For a moment Crawford seemed to hear the distant singing again, and when something brushed gently against his cheek he let out a roar as wild as any of Boyd’s and jackknifed up onto his feet; but before he could vault over the other man, he braced himself against the wall—and then he relaxed a little, for he could feel that all the loose threads of the upholstery were bristlingly erect like the fur on the back of an angry dog, and he realized that the same phenomenon must have been what made the shreds of the seat upholstery stand up and brush his face a moment ago.

Very well, he told himself firmly, I admit it’s strange, but it’s nothing to lose your wits over. Just some electrical effect caused by the storm and the odd physical properties of decaying leather and horsehair. Right now your job is to get poor Boyd back to the inn.

Boyd had by this time freed himself and crawled out onto the puddled pavement, and as Crawford climbed down from the coach he was getting shakily to his feet. He squinted around suspiciously at the trees and the ruined carriages.

Crawford took his arm, but the bigger man shook it off and plodded away through the rain toward the inn.

Crawford caught up with him and then matched his plodding stride. “Big beetles under your shirt, were there?” he asked casually after a few paces. “Would have sworn rats were scrambling up your pant legs? I’ll bet you wet your pants, in fact, though as rain-soaked as you are nobody’ll notice. Delirium tremens, we doctors call this show. It’s how you know when to back off on the drink.”

Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been as blunt as this, even with someone he knew as well as he knew Jack Boyd, but tonight it almost seemed to be the most tactful approach—after all, no one could be blamed for suffering a case of the galloping horrors if the cause was simply a profound excess of alcohol.

Actually he was afraid Boyd had not been quite that drunk.

The party was clearly over. Lucy and Louise were complaining about having to go to bed with wet hair, and Appleton was evasively irritable and, as if to confirm the soured mood, the landlord muttered angrily in his room and caused either his knees or the floorboards to creak threateningly. The women abandoned the lantern and fled to their rooms, and Appleton shook his head disgustedly and stalked upstairs to go to bed himself. Crawford and Boyd appropriated the lantern and tiptoed to the closed door of the taproom and tried the lock.

It wouldn’t yield.

“Probably just as well,” sighed Crawford.

Boyd shook his head heavily, then turned and started toward the stairs; half-way there he paused and without looking back said, “Uh ... thanks for getting me ... out of that, Mike.”

Crawford waved, and then realized that Boyd couldn’t see the gesture. “No trouble,” he called softly instead. “I’ll probably need something similar myself sooner or later.”

Boyd stumped away, and Crawford heard his ponderous footsteps recede up the stairs and down some hall overhead. Crawford tried the taproom door again, with no more luck than before, briefly considered finding out where the barmaids’ rooms were, and then shrugged, picked up the lamp and went upstairs himself. His room wasn’t large, but the sheets were clean and dry and there were enough blankets on the bed.

As he got undressed, he thought again of the overturned boat and the house across the street from the pub. Twenty years had passed since that rowboat foundered in the Plymouth Sound surf, and the house had burned down nearly six years ago, but it seemed to him that they were still the definition of him, the axioms from which he was derived.

Long ago he had started carrying a flask so that he could banish these memories long enough to get to sleep, and he uncorked it now.

Thunder woke him up hours later, and he lifted his head from the pillow and reflected sleepily on how nice it was to be drunk in bed when the lanes and trees and hills outside were so cold and wet ... and then he remembered the wedding ring he had left in the yard.

His belly went cold and he half sat up, but after a moment he relaxed. You can get it in the morning, he told himself—wake up early and retrieve it before anyone else is up and about. And who’s likely to be rooting around out behind the stables, anyway? Sleep’s what you need right now. You’re getting married later today—you’ve got to get your rest.

He lay back down and pulled the blankets up under his chin, but he had no sooner closed his eyes than he thought, stable-boys. Stableboys will probably be working out there, and I’ll bet they’re on the job early. But maybe they won’t notice the ring on the statue’s finger ... a gold ring, that is, with a good-sized diamond set in it. Very well, then surely they’ll report the find, knowing that they’ll be rewarded ... after all, if they tried to sell it they’d get only a fraction of its real value ... which was two months’ worth of my income.

Damn it.

Crawford crawled out of bed and found the lamp and his tinder box, and after several minutes of furious striking he managed to get the lamp lit. He looked unhappily at his sodden clothes, still lying in the corner where he’d thrown them several hours ago. Aside from one change of clothes, the only other things he had brought along to wear were the formal green frock coat and embroidered waistcoat and white breeches in which he was to get married.

He pulled the wet shirt and breeches on, cringing and gasping at the cold unwieldiness of them. He decided to forego the shoes, and just tottered barefoot to the door, trying to walk so steadily that his shirt would not touch him any more than it had to.

He almost abandoned the whole undertaking when he unbolted the outer door of the spare dining room and a rainy gust plastered his shirt against his chest, but he knew that worry wouldn’t let him get any rest if he went back to bed without fetching the ring, so he whispered a curse and stepped out.

It was a lot colder now, and darker. The chairs were still on the porch, but he had to grope to know where they were. The south end of the yard, where the stables and the old carriages were, was darker than the sky.

The mud was grittily slimy between his toes as he stepped off the porch and plodded out across the yard, and he hoped nobody had dropped a wine glass out here. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, for in addition to worrying about cutting his feet he was remembering Boyd’s eerie ravings of a few hours ago, and he was acutely aware of being the only wakeful human being within a dozen miles.

The statue was hard to find. He found the stable, and plodded the length of it, dragging his hand along the planks of the wall, with no luck; he was about to panic, thinking that the statue had been carried away, when he rounded the corner and dimly saw the inn buildings away off to his left, which meant that he had somehow been checking the south wall instead of the west one; he reversed course and carefully followed two more walls, conscientiously making the right-angle turn between them, but this time he found himself dragging his numbing fingers along the wall of the inn itself, which wasn’t even connected to the stable; he shook his head, amazed that he could still be this drunk. Finally he just began stomping out a zigzag pattern across the nighted yard with his arms spread wide.

And he found it that way.

His fingers brushed the cold, rain-slick stone as he was groping back toward the stable wall, and he almost sobbed with relief. He slid his hand up the extended stone wrist to the stone hand—the ring was still there. He tried to push it up off of the statue’s finger, but it was stuck somehow.

An instant later he saw why, for a flash of lightning abruptly lit the yard: and the stone hand was now closed in a fist, imprisoning the ring like the end link of a chain. There were no cracks, no signs of any fracture—the statue’s hand seemed not ever to have been in any other position. Rain was streaming down the white stone face, and its blank white eyes seemed to be staring at Crawford.

The nearly instantaneous crash of thunder seemed to punch the ground spinning out from under him, and when his feet hit the mud again he was running, racing the tumbling echoes back toward the inn, and it seemed to him that he got inside and slammed the door against the night just as the thunder crashed over the inn like a wave over a rock.

When Crawford awoke, several hours later, it was with the certainty that horrible things had happened and that strenuous activity would soon be required of him to prevent things from getting even worse; his head was throbbing too solidly for him to remember what the catastrophe was, or even where he was, but perhaps, as he told himself blurrily, that was something to be grateful for. More sleep was what he wanted most in the world, but when he opened his eyes he saw a smear of nearly dried mud on the sheet ... and when he threw back the covers he saw that his feet and ankles were caked with it.

With a gasp of real alarm he bounded out of bed. What on earth had he been doing last night? Sleepwalking? And where was Caroline? Had she thrown him out? Perhaps this place was some kind of madhouse.

Then he saw the portmanteau under the window, and he remembered that he was in a village called Warnham, in Sussex, on his way to Bexhill-on-Sea to get married again. Caroline had died in that fire nearly six years ago. Oddly, this was the first time since her death that he had even momentarily forgotten that she was gone.

So how had his feet got so dirty? Had he walked to this inn? Surely not bare-foot. No, he thought, I remember now, I took the stagecoach here to meet Appleton and Boyd—Boyd is to be my groomsman, and Appleton is letting me pretend to Julia’s father that his elegant landau carriage is mine.

Crawford let himself relax a little, and he tried to conjure some cheer in himself, to see his recent fright and present sickness as just the consequences of old friends out carousing.

If I was in the company of those two last night, he thought with a nervous and self-consciously rueful smile, God knows there are any number of ways I might have got so dirty; I suppose mayhem is assured—I only hope we didn’t commit any murders or rapes. As a matter of fact I do seem to recall seeing a nude woman ... no, that was only a statue ...

And then he remembered it all, and his fragile cheer was gone.

His face went cold and he sat down. Surely that must have been a dream, that closed stone fist; or maybe the statue’s hand never had been open, maybe that was what he had imagined, and he had really just drunkenly pushed the ring at the hand and then not noticed it fall when he had let go of it. And then there must have been something else, a bit of wire or something, around the stone finger when he saw it later.

With the blue sky glowing now in the swirls of the window’s bull’s-eye panes, it was not too difficult to believe that it had all been a dream or a drunken mistake. It had to be, after all.

In the meantime he had lost the ring.

Feeling very old and frail, he unstrapped the portmanteau and pulled on his spare set of travelling clothes. Now he wanted hot coffee—brandy and water would be more restoring, but he had to go find the ring with as clear a head as possible.

Appleton and Boyd weren’t up yet, which Crawford was glad of, and after choking down a cup of hot tea—the only drink available in the kitchen—he spent an hour walking around the inn’s muddy back yard; he was tense but hopeful when he started, but by the time the sun had climbed high enough to silhouette the branches of the oaks across the road he was in a fury of despair. The landlord came out after a while, and though he expressed sympathy, and even offered to sell Crawford a ring to replace the one he’d lost, he was unable to remember ever having seen any statue of a nude woman in the area.

Finally at about ten Crawford’s two companions came tottering down for breakfast. Crawford sat with them, but nobody had much to say, and he ordered only brandy.

CHAPTER 2

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sideways would she lean, and sing

A faerys song.

John Keats,

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

THE STORM CLOUDS had scattered away northward, and Appleton folded down the accordion-like calash roof of his carriage so that as they drove they could bake the drink-poisons out of their systems in the summer sun; but most of the roads between Warnham and the sea proved to be very narrow, walled on either side with stones heaped up centuries ago by farmers clearing the moors, and to Crawford it several times felt as if they were driving through some sunken antediluvian corridor.

Ancient oaks spread branches across the sky overhead, seeming to strive to provide the corridors missing roof, and though Appletons hired driver cursed when the carriage was slowed for a while by a tightly packed flock of two dozen sheep being languidly goaded along by a collie and a white-bearded old man, Crawford was glad of their companythe landscape had been getting too close-pressing and inanimate.