Free The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

standing up but not really looking away from the little crystals. Their facets made bright needles of the lamplight, and seemed to increase the fever pressure behind his forehead. "Arthur Appleton . . . told me to look here for a place to stay. I'm a student at St. Elmo's." He shook his head sharply. "Thomas's, that is." He coughed.
    Henry Stephens gave him a good-naturedly skeptical smile, but just nodded. "If Arthur vouches for you, that's good enough for me. You can—what, are you off, John?"
    "I'm afraid so," said Keats, taking a coat from a rack by the door. "Got to see to Dr. Lucas's poor charges. Good to have met you, Michael," he added on the way out the door.
    When the door had closed, Stephens sank into a chair and picked up the wine glass Keats had left. "St. Elmo's, eh?"
    Though exhausted, Crawford smiled and changed the subject. "Dr. Lucas's charges?"
    Stephens bowed a fraction of an inch. "Young John is a dresser for the most incompetent surgeon at Guy's—Lucas's dressers always have plenty of festering bandages to change."
    Crawford waved at the odd crystals. "What are those?"
    Stephens may have realized that Crawford's casual manner was a pose, for he looked sharply at him before answering. "Those are bladder stones," he said carefully. "Dr. Lucas is given many such cases."
    "I've seen bladder stones," said Crawford. "That's not how they look. They look like . . . spiky limestone. These things look like quartz."
    Stephens shrugged. "These are what gets cut out of Lucas's patients. No doubt they're tired of it—any day now I expect the administrators to summon Lucas and tell him, 'Doctor, you're beginning to exhaust our patients!' " Stephens leaned back in his chair and chuckled quietly for several moments. Then he had a sip of wine and went on. "Keats isn't a brilliant student, you know. The boys assigned to Lucas never are. But nevertheless Keats is . . . perhaps more
observant
than the administrators guess."
    Crawford knew he was missing something. "Well . . . ," he said, trying to keep his eyes focussing, "why has he
saved
the things?"
    Stephens shook his head in humorous but apparently genuine disappointment. "Damn, for a moment I thought you might know, you were looking at them so intently!
I
don't know . . . but I remember one time he was playing with them, holding them up to the light and all, and he said, mostly to himself, 'I should throw these away—I know I can have my real career even without using them.' "
    Crawford had another sip of wine and yawned. "So what's his
real
career? Jewellery?"
    "Nasty sort of jewellery that'd be, wouldn't it? No." He looked at Crawford with raised eyebrows. "No, he wants to be a poet."
    Crawford was nearly asleep, and he knew that when he slept it would be for a good twelve hours, so he asked Stephens which room would be his, and when he was shown it he threw his portmanteau onto the floor. He fetched his drink, and stood for a moment in the hall and swirled the inch of wine in the bottom of the glass.
    "So," he asked Stephens, who had helped him carry blankets from the linen closet, "what's poetry got to do with bladder stones?"
    "Don't ask
me
," Stephens told him. "
I'm
not on intimate terms with the Muses."
     
    At first he thought the woman in his dream was Julia, for even in the dimness—were the two of them in a cave?—he could see the silver of antimony around her eyes, and Julia had whitened her eyebrows with antimony for the wedding. But when she stood up, naked, and walked across the floor tiles toward him, he saw that this was someone else.
    Moonlight climbed a white thigh as she padded past a window or cleft in the cave wall, and he smelled night-blooming jasmine and the sea; then she was in his arms and he was kissing her passionately, not caring that her smooth skin was as cool as the stone tiles under his bare feet, nor that there was suddenly in his nostrils an alien muskiness.
    Then they were rolling on the tiles, and it was not skin under his