"That's what Bony said. After the retreat out of Russia."

"He may go down in history as a great theoretician of the arts. Well, Mr Elton sir, under the ilexes let it be." Elton, though in civilian dress, sketched a salute and loped off across the piazza towards the Caffé Greco. John stood a while by Bernini's broken marble boat, listening to the water music. He tried to identify himself with the water, to be the water, to feel the small sick parcel of flesh that was himself liquefy joyfully, joyfully relish its own wetness and singing clarity. He sprang back with a start into nerve and bone to find a hand on his arm. James Clark, his doctor, with a smiling stranger. Clark said:

"Ye should be hame the noo, Master Keats. The nicht air -"

"Is nae halesome. Aye, I ken." The stranger looked puzzled with the very puzzlement of Lieutenant Elton. "I mean no mockery," John said. "Doctor Clark knows that his deliberate use of Scotch inspires confidence. Scotch engineers, Scotch doctors -"

"Scotch reviewers," said the stranger.

"Somehow I knew you understood English."

"This is Mr Keats," Clark said. "This is Signor Giovanni Gulielmi, man of letters and citizen of Rome."

"I know your work," said Gulielmi. "I know your Endymion well -"

"Ah, no, not that botched mawkery."

"Also your volume of this year. Would you call that too a botched mockery?"

"Mawkery," John corrected. "A neologism. The critics were always on to me for making up words. A real writer, they seemed to imply, would get all his words from Johnson's Dictionary. Sorry, I seem to start with a mockery and continue with a rebuke. You speak English excellent well, before God, with a right slight accent of the North. I would I had but a hundredth of that skill in the Tuscan."

"In, in," urged Clark, impelling John by the elbow. "Is Mr Severn already at home?"