Hide Me Among the Graves (12 page)

“Was that a boat?” asked Maria breathlessly.

Gabriel shrugged. “What else?” He wondered if it had been the heavy-laden sloop he had noticed a couple of minutes earlier. “Nobody on board will have survived that.”

Down the hall they could hear Lizzie weeping now.

Gabriel turned toward the doorway and hesitated, his teeth bared in indecision. At last, “Help me with her,” he said to his sisters.

Maria nodded and hurried past him, her long black sleeves flapping.

Christina took Gabriel's arm as they strode behind her, and Christina whispered, “At the Lord Mayor's Show that time—”

“Hush. You'll upset them both.”

He should never have told Christina what Lizzie had said then—it had been a little more than nine years ago, in November of '52, shortly after he and Lizzie had become lovers. They had gone to see the Lord Mayor's parade in New Oxford Street, and a deformed dwarf beggar had been lurching alongside the parade, pacing the traditional giant wicker figures of Gog and Magog that were being ceremoniously carried down the street, and when the dwarf stumbled and fell near where Lizzie stood, she had run to the little figure and in pity taken it right into her arms—invited it into her bosom!—and even though its face was entirely wrapped in a scarf, the dwarf had somehow managed to
bite
Lizzie. When Gabriel had pushed the malignant thing away and pulled Lizzie to her feet and said, “Let's get that bite attended to, Lizzie,” she had shuddered and said to him hoarsely, “Call me Gogmagog.” A moment later she had claimed not to remember having said it—and when he asked her if she knew of the sinister “Goemagot” giant in Geoffrey of Monmouth's
Historia Regnum Britanniae,
who was called Goemagog in Milton's
History of Britain
and Gogmagog in Midlands devil legends, she had responded with genuine bafflement—but he had called her Gogmagog for the rest of that day, and the name had soon become the affectionate nickname Guggums.

And now, for the first time, it occurred to Gabriel that Lizzie might have acquired a
second
vampiric patron, on that day, in addition to his uncle. Her unspecific infirmities had started around then. Could
two
of the damnable things be
sharing her?
Uncle John
and
this Gogmagog thing?

Which of the two might it have been who, in his sisters' repellent speculation, had congress with Lizzie in Gabriel's form?

He shuddered and forcefully dismissed the thought and took Christina's arm to hurry her along.

When Gabriel and Christina arrived at the bedroom doorway, Lizzie and Maria were huddled in the far corner over the crib Gabriel had bought last year in anticipation of the baby who had been stillborn. Lizzie had never let him get rid of it. Maria had one arm around Lizzie and was murmuring.

Lizzie was sobbing and shaking her head. “Did you
shoot
at him, Gabriel?” she whined. “Look, you woke the baby!”

And for just a flickering split second, Gabriel thought he saw a tiny figure in the crib, a dark little thing with long fingers and enormous eyes; then, even before he could shake his head or blink, it was gone.

Maria didn't move, but she had gone quiet; and beside Gabriel, Christina had audibly caught her breath.

Gabriel swallowed, then managed to say, “The baby's quiet, now, G—darling. See? Take some more medicine, if you need to, and you should be back in bed.”

Lizzie's urgency seemed to have evaporated—she stared at the empty crib and then nodded and let Maria help her back to the bed. She sighed and lay back across it, and Gabriel stepped forward and pulled the sheet up to her shoulders, and she closed her eyes. Her eyelids looked like an old man's knuckles.

Gabriel jerked his head toward the hallway, and his sisters followed him back to the studio. Maria was visibly shaking.

The cloud of black smoke over the river had thinned and drifted west almost out of sight beyond the brick wall of the next house, and several rowboats and a steam launch were arrowing toward the arches of the bridge, no doubt heading for whatever floating debris the river had carried to the east side of it.

Gabriel crossed to a cabinet and reached down a bottle. He waved it at his sisters—Christina nodded energetically and Maria shook her head.

As he carried two filled glasses back to where the women had resumed their seats, he handed one to Christina and asked in a defeated tone, “Very well, who did she imagine I was shooting at?”

Christina gulped the brandy to avoid replying and Maria just stared out the window, but Gabriel knew what the answer was: their uncle. Or conceivably the Gogmagog thing. Lizzie might have mistaken the apparition for her husband the first time—or two—but had apparently not been fooled forever.

Jealous husband, he thought bitterly, shoots at immortal vampire rival.

And then he drained his glass in several eye-watering swallows and went back to refill it, for the thought had occurred to him that the apparition might have taken the form of Walter Deverell.

Christina finished her own glass and, staring out the window, seemed to brace herself. “Soon,” she said levelly, “there may be two phantom infants in that crib.”

For a moment Gabriel wasn't able to take a deep breath, and then he was panting. “Yes, probably!” he burst out. “But I
will
shoot him, if I get the chance. I've got silver bullets.”

“I wish you didn't carry that firearm about,” said Maria.

He drew his hand back as if to throw his refilled glass, then just set it down carefully beside the bottle. “William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. “He'll try to have children—he doesn't believe any of this.”

“Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.”

“And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped. “He
was
shot once, though, wasn't he? Our monstrous uncle, not God. In your story, Christina, your ‘Folio Q.'”

Christina rocked her head back and stared at the high plaster ceiling. “The story took place in Italy, and it concerned a man who didn't dare look in a mirror. He was threatened by a rival in love, but he let down his guard, and his rival shot him, in the mouth, and yes, it was with a silver bullet; he never really recovered. He died not long afterward, in Venice.” She lowered her head and looked at her siblings. “Papa told me once that he got the little petrified statue in Venice, before he came to England—he said it showed him visions of Mama. And he implied … that the acquiring of it put his soul in peril.”

Maria muttered something doleful in Italian.

Christina went on, “I seem to be—our uncle seems to be—writing a sequel now, in which he's alive again, in London.”

“We need to read this sequel,” said Gabriel. “I wish you hadn't burned ‘Folio Q.'”

Christina gave him a stricken look. “I'm sorry, I—I've destroyed the new page too! I didn't think—”

For several long seconds none of them spoke.

At last Gabriel said, gently, “You remember it, though.”

“Yes—yes.”

“And if you write more—if
he
does, that is—you can save it.” When Christina nodded, he fished Lizzie's automatic-writing pencil disk out of his pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it deftly. “Use this,” he said, “if it will help. I don't want it in the house.”

Maria frowned, but Christina nodded and gingerly put the thing into the side pocket of her habit.

“And,” Gabriel went on, though it actually made his forehead sweat to say it, “he claims that my wife is with child by … by a vampire wearing my appearance, is that right? Does he actually … mention Lizzie by name?”

Christina sighed and nodded. “Lizzie Siddal.”

“Damn him, her name is
Rossetti
now, Elizabeth
Rossetti
.” Gabriel jammed his fists in his coat pockets and paced to the far wall and back, staring around at all the portraits of his wife.

“If she is with child,” he asked finally, “as the ghosts and devils claim—who is the father?”

“You are,” said Christina. She too was pointedly looking at the pictures, not at him. “There's no other human, no other male, really, in the picture. He took your—when you invited him in, in whatever form he was wearing—along with your blood—” She was blushing, and Maria had turned to face the wall. “‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,'” Christina finished quickly, quoting Shakespeare's sonnet about the effects of lust.

“Er, yes.” Gabriel was blushing himself. “Quite so. Well! In that case we need to catch him and kill him, don't we? Shoot him with a silver bullet again.” He patted the bulk of the revolver under his waistcoat.

“Catch him?” cried Maria. “You'll damn your soul simply doing that! And silver bullets will only injure him—you need to find the statue too and destroy that. At
least
.”

Gabriel flinched at
damn your soul,
for he had not entirely shed the Catholic beliefs of his youth; but he nodded grimly and went on, “If we—if I—can catch him, injure him, bind him somehow—he's weak in daylight, according to what I recall of your story, Christina!—we can make him tell us where the statue is.”

He looked squarely at Maria. “How do we catch him, Moony?” he asked, using the nickname she had been given in childhood because of her round face.

“Why do you imagine I would know?”

“You seem to know the cost of it. And you read all of Papa's manuscripts, burned now, even the ones in Greek and Hebrew—all his occult interpretations of Dante and Pythagoras and the Jewish mystics.”

“It's ridiculous to think that—”

“Do you know a way, Moony?”

Maria got to her feet and smoothed out the apron of her black habit. “Consider it, Gabriel,” she said earnestly as she moved to step past him. “If Papa knew anything about—”

He stepped in front of her. “But do you know a way?”

Her round face looked up at him from under her folded-back veil. “Gabriel,” she said, “I am a lay member of the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, soon to be undertaking my novitiate. I love you, and through you I love Lizzie and any children you have. But if I know a way to catch
him,
it would be a mortal sin, for all of us, to use it, and therefore I would not reveal it. You
know
me.” After staring into his eyes for another couple of seconds, she said, “I'll just go look in on Lizzie,” and again stepped around him.

This time he didn't block her.

As Maria clumped away down the hall, Gabriel said to Christina, “A clear yes.”

“And a clear no.” She shivered, but Gabriel couldn't tell what emotion it sprang from. “I believe I could
summon
him,” she said. “I don't know about restraining him.”

Gabriel nodded. I imagine I could summon him too, he thought—but in my case it would be the form of a woman who answered the summons.

As before, it would be the image of Lizzie. I wonder if I
could
shoot a creature wearing that image.

B
Y NOON THE
unseasonal east wind had died. With sunset came clouds from the west that hid the rising full moon, and the streetlamps of London were lit early because of a heavy fog that was as much coal smoke as dampness.

Cabs and coaches moved slowly down the streets from one patch of lamplight to the next, the creak and clatter of their passage seeming to echo back more clearly from the housefronts in the opaque night air than they did by daylight.

A slow-moving clarence cab made a wide right turn from Charing Cross Road into New Oxford Street, its two lanterns lighting the driver's hat and turned-up coat collar and the horse's flexing back and not much else. A hansom cab would have been faster, but McKee had said that if they were to travel together at night, they must have a vehicle with four walls as well as a roof, and hansom cabs didn't have a partition in front. Crawford had been happy with the choice, for it let him sit across from her with his silk hat beside him—and he was facing the rear, this time, as good manners dictated.