Hide Me Among the Graves (18 page)

After two more rapid spasmodic blows, he had a scant, bristly handful of what felt like tiny gears.

Something webby and wet brushed his face and he convulsively lashed out, flinging the bits of metal in a wide arc behind him.

The clinging membrane was snatched away, and he spun his wrecked watch on its chain and slung that toward the voices too. The air shook with a sound like dozens of castanets.

McKee yanked him back by the collar, and then the two of them were running.

“That's stopped
them
for now,” she panted, “and we're nearly out.”

Crawford forced himself to look only forward. I'm sorry, Veronica! he thought.

And now he could see a tall, dim, round-topped shape—it was a volume of dimly lit space on the far side of a dark archway, and in moments they had skidded around the left-hand side of the arch; a wide knobby surface slanted up in front of them, and when McKee let go of his hand to begin scrambling up the incline, he followed her and realized that he was climbing up, or rather across, the face of a toppled building. A rounded stone bar across his path was an attached column, and he followed McKee as she skirted a semicircular hole that was the top of an arched doorway.

The faint illumination was coming from above them, and when they had climbed around a wide balcony and were scrambling between the holes of windows, he recognized the white glow as moonlight.

“What—
is
this?” Crawford gasped.

“A first-century Roman building,” came McKee's reply, “wrecked when Boadicea destroyed London.”

Knocked right over sideways, thought Crawford with some awe as he continued climbing.

At last they came to the highest corner of the building—it was a rounded berm of masonry in front of them, probably the middle of a now-diagonal turret—and the moonlight was slanting in through a rectangular hole some twenty feet overhead.

“It's an easy climb now,” said McKee, pausing, “and we should leave separately. We'll come up in a yard off Portugal Street, only a few streets from your house.”

“Why didn't we come down this way?” panted Crawford. “It looks easier than that well.”

“For getting out, it is. Entering requires protocol, though—those ghost-moths would have been … different, if we had tried to avoid the well and the incantation.” There was enough moonlight for him to see her brush her dark hair back from her forehead. “Tomorrow we need to visit somebody.”

“I've got business, horses to see,” said Crawford, standing on the gritty curved surface of the ancient turret wall and staring longingly up at the patch of moonlight. “I'm afraid I won't be—”

“This woman can help us save Johanna,” McKee interrupted, “if anybody can. She knows about these things.”

“Another of your—your Hail Mary artists?”

“No—she's a poet, actually—though not the sort to have been at that salon tonight. And she's a sister at the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women … which happens to be right near Highgate Cemetery. Her name is Christina Rossetti.”

Crawford had never heard of her.

“After my surgery hours, then,” he said. “Noon, say.” He was still staring up at the moonlight. “Portugal Street? Near St. Clement's?”

“Near enough. Within the
origo lemurum
incantation.”

“What's that mean?” he asked. He was squinting at the slope ahead and bracing himself for the last bit of climbing. “You said it, earlier.”

“You've got to placate the old … gods or devils or whatever they are, who are confined down here. Protocol.
Origo lemurum
is Latin for something like ‘maker of ghosts,' I'm told. You remember it by ‘oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's.' The old rhyme gives invocations for other ways down too, near other churches.”

Churches, thought Crawford bitterly. No wonder I stay away from them.

McKee waved at the muddy slope that led up to the street. “You go first; I'll follow in a couple of minutes. And I'll be at your door at noon tomorrow.”

Crawford was already wondering when he might conveniently get his coat and hat back from the Spotted Dog, but he asked, “You'll be safe here? By yourself?”

He saw her exhausted smile. “Quite safe, thank you for asking.”

He hesitated, suddenly reluctant to leave her. “That watch was seven years old,” he remarked. “I bought it after ruining my last one when we dove into the river.”

She shrugged. “I owe you a lot of time.”

He smiled, then turned away and plodded to the embankment; it was in shadow, but it wasn't steep, and the timbers and masonry of buried and long-forgotten buildings made climbing easy enough. Within minutes he had clambered up out of a coal chute in a street he didn't recognize—men were smoking clay pipes on a set of steps nearby, but none of them appeared to see anything odd about Crawford's entrance into the scene—and after he had walked randomly through several sharply turning streets, he found himself at the broad lanes of the Strand, facing the spire of St. Clement Danes.

And this is where you started this morning, he thought bewilderedly, turning his weary steps toward home.

C
HRISTINA LOOKED AWAY
from her gentleman caller, who sat on the sofa a few yards away across the carpet, but her wandering gaze happened to fall on her mother's treasured portrait of Uncle John Polidori on the wall over the slant-front desk, and so she reluctantly looked back at Charles Cayley, who was leaning forward earnestly.

“They're so…” he began.

Seconds ticked by on the old clock on the mantel. Christina remembered her father winding that clock every Sunday, in their old house in Charlotte Street.

She sighed, catching a whiff of Cayley's liberally applied cologne. The tea was getting cold in the pot, and Cayley had eaten all the digestive biscuits. Perhaps his stomach was out of order.

She recalled that she and Cayley had been talking about his recent translation of the Psalms. He had published it at his own expense, and the Rossetti family had charitably subscribed for a dozen copies.

“… savage!” he finished at last.

“True,” she agreed. “God was raising the Jews by steps from barbarism to a state in which they could receive His son, and they
were
still genuine barbarians, in those early steps.”

“But to ask a blessing!—in the otherwise sublime 137th Psalm—on anyone who would knock the brains out of a Babylonian infant! I don't—”

He was off in a pause again. Sunlight outside made the lace curtains glow behind Cayley, and all Christina could clearly see of him was his balding head and his ears and the edges of his beard, but she knew he would be faintly, awkwardly, smiling.

Christina's mother was pottering about in the kitchen and would not interrupt what she saw as, what might in fact be, a courtship. But Maria would, mercifully, be home soon.

Christina poured out the last of the tea in the pot into Cayley's cup, and she was about to use the emptied pot as an excuse to join her mother for a few moments in the kitchen when three clanks on the front door knocker made both her and Cayley jump.

Lillibet the housekeeper would answer the door in a few moments, but Christina stood up to answer it herself, glad of the opportunity. “Excuse me a moment, Charles.”

She hurried to the hall, and paused to look in the mirror between two potted geraniums to make sure her hair was not pushed up in the back from slouching in her chair. Maria would not have knocked.

When Christina pulled open the front door, squinting in the sunlight and the winter breeze, she smiled at the respectably dressed man and woman who stood on the doorstep. They were probably students from Maria's Sunday Bible class, come to ask a question or return a book.

Then the woman pushed the bonnet back from her brown hair, and Christina recognized her.

“Adelaide!” she exclaimed wonderingly.

Cayley, always socially inept, had shuffled up behind her, his old-fashioned tailcoat flapping in the chilly draft.

“Adelaide
Procter?
” he asked brightly.

Cayley evidently supposed this was the devoutly Christian poetess who did volunteer work for homeless women and children in Bishopsgate.

“Hardly,” laughed Christina without thinking, distracted by the uncomfortable sunlight. Then, embarrassed, she smiled and said, “Won't you come in, Adelaide? And—?”

“This is John Crawford,” said Adelaide McKee, stepping into the hall and unbuttoning her coat. “You remember I had a daughter? John is the father.”

Christina suppressed a frown—at the Magdalen Penitentiary the reformed prostitutes were told that they must not reestablish contact with characters from their degraded pasts, and this was certainly a violation of that rule. And Christina recalled now that McKee had never agreed to leave London either.

But in the heat of embarrassment, Christina had already invited them in. And she could hardly ask poor Cayley to leave.

She introduced the company to one another, and Cayley was blushing behind his beard, and his nervous smile was broad. Clearly he had gathered that this couple was not married.

“Do join us in the parlor,” Christina went on bravely. “I was just about to have a fresh pot of tea brought in.”

For a moment she thought McKee had tittered at the remark, and she dreaded an uncomfortable conversation, then realized that McKee had a bird in her handbag.

That, at least, was a good sign. “Keeping the Hail Mary dealers busy?” Christina said.

“I am one now,” said McKee. “With, in fact,” she added, glancing toward her dubious companion, “a tall order at the moment.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Christina sincerely. “Honest work, lots of fresh air.” She led the company back into the parlor, and when all three of her guests were seated and blinking uneasily at one another, she leaned through the kitchen door.

“Visitors from the Magdalen,” she told her mother. “Could you ask Lillibet to bring us another pot?”

She sat down beside Cayley and gazed frankly at Adelaide's companion. Mr. Crawford didn't look depraved, sitting beside her with his bowler hat in his lap—his dark brown hair and beard were neatly trimmed, and he had the air of a professional man, or a scholar, caught in embarrassing circumstances.

“What do you do, Mr. Crawford?” she asked.

The man shifted uneasily. “I'm a veterinary surgeon, Miss Rossetti—a horse doctor. I have a surgery in Wych Street.”

Emboldened by this sally, Cayley turned his nervous smile on Adelaide and said, “Hail Mary dealers?” The presence of strangers made Christina aware again of how high pitched his voice was. “Are you a Roman Catholic, Miss McKee?”

Christina knew that Cayley didn't think much of Catholics. “It's slang for dealers in live songbirds,” she said, and blew a stray strand of hair out of her face.
“Ave,
from
avis,
in Latin—calls to mind
Ave Maria
—hence Hail Mary. The big markets for them are in Hare Street and Brick Lane.”

“And no, I'm not Catholic,” said McKee. “Their standards are too high.” She faced Christina. “I'm sorry to burst in on you this way, but our daughter—well, you remember I thought she was dead? We have it from a reliable source that she's alive after all. Possibly living around Highgate.”

“Oh, that's wonderful!” exclaimed Christina. “Can you find out exactly where she's living? Could your ‘reliable source' help?”

“Unhappily not.” She glanced toward Cayley, then back at Christina, and shrugged. “It was the old bawd Carpace, and she was a ghost when she told us as much as she did. And now she's—” McKee made a diving gesture.

“Ah.” Christina nodded. “In the river with the rest of them.”