Hide Me Among the Graves (41 page)

FIFTEEN SECONDS LATER JOHANNA
and McKee were seated at the table, and Crawford was dragging up the cask of beer to sit on.

By Crawford's calculation, McKee was thirty-four now, but she looked as young as Johanna as she gazed wide-eyed at her daughter's face by the now-flickering glare of the lamp.

“You—” McKee said to her, “we—we thought you were killed—I never should have—”

Johanna nodded. She seemed only interested, not upset.
“He
got killed, that day. It was a good day. But now he's alive again.”

“You know?” McKee turned to Crawford. “That's why I came here tonight, to tell you, warn you. The songbirds are in a state. Chichuwee says all the ghosts are jabbering about it and fleeing straight to the river and out to sea. Sister Christina's trick has worn off, or broken, and he'll know us, you and me.”

She looked back at Johanna. “And you. How long have you been living here? How did you know he's back up?”

Johanna gave her an uncomfortable smile. “If I'm living here, it's only been for about half an hour—Mr. Crawford's name and address were in his watch.” She pulled the watch out of one of her shirt pockets and laid it on the table. “And I've known that
he's
back for … about two hours. He came straight to me, but I got away from him, dove into a mountain of shoes and he couldn't follow me among the million old footprints. He's lost all his suppliers, and he can't see very well.”

McKee turned a blank gaze from one of them to the other. Then to Johanna she said, “You've had the watch all this time?—seven years!—and you only came to your father
tonight
?”

“I couldn't read, for a long time. And up to now everything's been good enough.”

“What have you—” McKee waved a hand. “Where have you been
living
?”

Johanna puffed her cheeks and blew out a breath. “Lately in a room off Petticoat Lane, by the Old Clothes Exchange; I sometimes pick up porter work, baling up leather trousers and wigs for Ireland, and old rugs for Holland… I've been sharing a room with two women, and when I can't make my share of the nine-pence week's rent, I sometimes bring home some rug pieces for the floor, so when we drop something it doesn't go straight through the cracks to the donkey stable below. But before that … a rooftop shed against a chimney, for a while, right after
he
went away; I was a beggar then, without even deciding to be … then on a boat by Southwark Bridge, working for the Mud Lark man… I lived with a coster family for a couple of years, I think, selling apples on the streets.”

“You live here now,” said Crawford firmly. After a second or two, he made himself look at McKee. “Our daughter is not dead.” His voice was steady. “Do you remember what I said—the last thing I said to you—in that village, Lower Clapton?”

McKee sat back in her chair, and after glancing around at the narrow kitchen, she looked squarely at him.

From her ragged handbag Crawford heard the mutter of a songbird.

“I'm—where do I start?” she said in a flat voice. “After that day under Highgate Cemetery, I went back to Sudbury, since I'd no longer be bringing a devil's murderous attention with me. But it turned out my parents were dead by that time, and I thought Johanna was too. I came back to London.”

But not to me, thought Crawford. With a chilly, sinking feeling in his stomach he remembered her saying, a few minutes ago,
I can't stay long.

“What,” he began, but his voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat. “What does he do?”

McKee's stare was defiant. “He's a dealer in metal spoons.”

Johanna caught Crawford's eye and then glanced meaningfully at McKee's brown coat and faded blue dress, and he gathered that the garments didn't look top class in the girl's professional appraisal.

Crawford met McKee's gaze and nodded gently. “You said there was nothing for you to hope for, anymore, in London.”

“Nor anywhere else, I discovered.” She shrugged. “And I knew the ins and outs of London already.”

Crawford remembered her despair, at their last meeting, and he suspected that she had taken up with this spoons seller out of that despair, out of that self-disgust.

He sighed, emptying his lungs. “How long can you stay?”

“I don't—not long, he gets jealous, and I don't want him spending any money on—but Johanna!” She threw Crawford an uncharacteristically helpless look. “Can she live here?”

“We'll need garlic and mirrors aplenty,” said Johanna. “And soon.”

“Yes, of course she can stay here,” said Crawford.

McKee nodded. “Does that watch work?” she asked Johanna.

“No. And it's been in the river a few times.”

McKee glanced at Crawford and then away, and he remembered her saying,
I owe you a lot of time.
A debt to be written off, he thought.

“God knows what time it is,” she said, and got to her feet. She looked yearningly at Johanna and said, “I'll be back soon.”

“Tomorrow?” said Johanna with some eagerness. “Morning?”

McKee smiled. “Yes. I promise.”

“Bring some mirrors and garlic, and some of your old man's spoons, if they're silver. I'm not going to dare sleep a wink tonight, with just these.” She patted her shirt and pants pocket, indicating the knife and, presumably, some garlic.

McKee nodded, tight-lipped. “He sleeps late. I'll tell him he sold the spoons and spent the money on rum,” she said. She glanced again at the inert watch. “Unless he's already done that by now.”

“Never mind,” said Crawford hastily, “I've got crowns and shillings—plenty of silver.”

“I knew somebody did,” said McKee. She took a cloth-wrapped bundle from her handbag and set it on the table; from inside it Crawford heard a muffled cheeping. “Take that now. A goldfinch—if he really yipes, duck and get your garlic ready.” She started to say something more, but exhaled and turned away. Finally she said, “I'll see you tomorrow.”

Then she was gone, tapping rapidly up the stairs. A few moments later Crawford and Johanna heard the front door close, and, through the broken window, McKee's metallic footsteps receding.

Johanna was swinging her feet under her chair. “The last thing you said to her, before, was asking her to marry you?”

Crawford stared at her and managed to smile. “Yes.”

“That's a man's coat she's got on, much mended, and the boots don't match.” She rolled some cheese and onion in a piece of ham as Crawford had done and bit off half of it.

Crawford got up, found another mug, and filled it with beer. As he sat down, he said, “I can show you to your room after we're done with this … supper. I've got probably half a dozen mirrors around the house, and you can have them.”

She nodded, chewing. “And,” she said finally, “after he bites you, he'll know about the mirrors and not look at them. No, we neither of us should sleep tonight, especially with a window broken. Fetch the mirrors down here and we can make a wall of 'em. And bring your shillings! We've got knives, and—” she added as she dug a jar out of her trouser pocket, “here's garlic.”

“Stay down here all night?”

“Why not? It's partly underground.” She grinned. “We can tell stories till dawn. What happened to your cats? I saw another one in the hall, and it only had three legs.”

He stared at her for several seconds, then shrugged. “I'm a—an animal doctor,” he said. “When I find hurt cats, I bring them home and take care of them.” He took a sip of beer and then began cutting up more ham and onion. “I've got a blind one too, and she knows every corner of the rooms and furniture; she can run from one end of the house to the other and not bump into anything.”

Johanna nodded. “She should have married you. My mother should have.”

“Not the cat,” Crawford agreed. The thought of his poor cats had reminded him of something. “Uh … have you been—by any chance—baptized?—since we saw you last?”

Johanna had taken another bite of the rolled ham, and she nodded as she chewed. “The Mud Lark man has all the Larks baptized before they can scout for him.”

Crawford wondered who this Mud Lark man might be, and what sort of scouting he had his young charges do; but there was all night in which to ask.

“Good, good.” He got to his feet. “I'll fetch the mirrors and silver—don't eat all this before I get back.”

I
N HIS DRAWING
room in Upper Brook Street, Algernon Swinburne stood staring out through the open windows at the still-dark houses in the stale night. He had come home hours ago, but he was still dressed in the flannel trousers, white shirt, and woolen sweater that he had worn on his latest visit to the Verbena Lodge in Circus Road, when the evening had been fresh and full of anticipation.

Ordinarily he would have indulged himself now in the opportunity for mild pain by sitting and leaning back in a chair, but this evening's drunken excesses at Verbena Lodge had left him slightly—only slightly, and certainly only temporarily—disgusted with the formal pretenses he engaged in there. None of the whippings and spankings that went on ever caused any actual injury, or even any real hurt.

He turned his back on the window. By the light of two gas jets on the far wall, for the fire had gone out while he'd been gone and he hadn't the energy to fetch more coal, he surveyed the room's ornate furnishings—the rosewood chairs, the imported Herter Brothers sofa, the gold-stamped book spines vertical and horizontal on the shelves—finally noting, hung on the walls above the bookshelves, the token whips and birch rods; and even, for the bravura of it, a pair of crossed rapiers over the mantelpiece.

Sad evidences, those were, of his gallingly restrained inclinations, which were unlikely to be really indulged while he still lived.

He sighed. The only satisfactory thing about it all, he thought—as he faced the window again and peered out at the dark patch that was Grosvenor Square and listened to the whir of a distant cab out in the night—is that my vigilant Miss B. cannot mistake the activities at the Verbena Lodge for anything having to do with love.

Girls in staged schoolrooms being struck with birch rods on their behinds by women pretending to be strict governesses—other girls taking money to spank patrons like Swinburne who took the roles of boys needing punishment—none of it would engage Miss B.'s inhuman attention, rouse in her that response which was comparable to homicidal jealousy in humans, and the spankings Swinburne received were far too mild for her to perceive them as attacks on him. The girls at the lodge were safe. Swinburne certainly didn't love any of them, nor did they love him.

He hadn't loved any woman since Lizzie, and she—her ghost, at any rate—had refused his offer to let her inhabit his living body. Since her refusal he had surrendered himself to the strenuous and enervating affection of Miss B., and, on the side, the largely symbolic Sadean activities at the Verbena Lodge.

He didn't dare love anybody, nor even seem to. He had loved his sister Edith, and she had died only a year after he had committed himself to Miss B., and immediately afterward he had persuaded his parents to take an extended Continental tour; since then he had avoided them, and so they were still alive. And when Gabriel Rossetti had arranged for Swinburne to take a mistress in the conventional way, the woman died less than a year later, in spite of precautions Swinburne had thought would be adequate; he hadn't loved her—she had complained that “spanking was no help” in making love—but even his unsatisfactory behavior with her had effectively mimicked it, to the woman's fatal misfortune.

Miss B. will have no rivals, Swinburne thought now as he stepped to the sideboard and poured one last inch of brandy into a snifter—though he knew that it was a mistake to attribute human motivations to her kind. She was more like a sun that ignited a reciprocally fueled solar fire in him, while simply incinerating any lesser planets that presumed to orbit him.
Then felt I like some watcher of the tombs,
he thought, paraphrasing Keats,
when a new planet swims into my ken.