Hide Me Among the Graves (42 page)

Mentally he recited a verse of his own:
Though the many lights dwindle to one light, / There is help if the heavens has one.

Do I love that one light, he wondered, do I love
her
? I'm
awed,
by the ancient alien majesty of her kind, certainly; baffled by the nonhuman mathematics of her logic—but I certainly do love her gift: my gift is single, my verses…

He set down his glass, the brandy untasted, and shivered in the draft from the open window.

His first book,
Atalanta in Calydon,
had been published in 1865, three years after Lizzie's funeral—and the long verse play, a vivid retelling of the pagan Atalanta myth from Apollodorus and Homer, had won praise from the
Edinburgh Review
and the
Saturday Review.

His next collection of verse, though,
Poems and Ballads,
which had been published the following year, was savaged by the critics; and their denunciations of the vicious sensuality of the poems was so widespread and harsh that an obscenity indictment from the attorney general seemed likely, and the publisher withdrew the book only a month after its publication. But a bolder publisher picked it up before the year's end, and by then the book had found passionate admirers among the young men at Oxford and Cambridge, and a few critics hesitantly began to concede that Swinburne's poems, for all their pagan and even anti-Christian excesses, held a power not seen in English literature since Shelley and Byron and Keats.

Naturally, thought Swinburne now. I share the same species of Muse that those poets had. The attentions of the antediluvian stony tribe kill those we love and make us suffer in sunlight, but, in a side effect that they may not even be aware of, awaken language in us, make of it a living beast that can be harnessed and ridden.

Christina had it, for a while, though in recent years she writes religious stories instead of her old clear-eyed poems about death, and ghosts in the sea, and seductive goblins.

But she might have it again now—now that her uncle has apparently been freed from the disruptive mirrors that she put into Lizzie's coffin.

Swinburne recalled the conversation he had overheard at Tudor House six or seven hours ago, which had sent him hurrying to the Verbena Lodge so that his thoughts might not dwell too much on it and draw Miss B.'s attention: Christina's uncle's living and conscious identity was concentrated in a little statue stuck in her dead father's throat!—and the identity had been somehow scrambled and made impotent seven years ago, but was awake again now—though wounded.

Something to remember.

He looked up suddenly—he had clearly heard the street door downstairs, which he knew he had locked, open and then close.

TRELAWNY HAD WALKED NORTH
from Pelham Crescent to Upper Brook Street, skirting the shadowed expanse of Hyde Park where Shelley's first wife had been drowned in the Serpentine, and peering around from under the brim of his old hat at the dark houses that stood on either side like closely ranked tombstones, the dimly seen windows and balconies making hieroglyphic epitaphs. Here and there a light shone like a firefly in some room, and he wondered if lone, fevered poets labored in those rooms over unmerited verses. The costermongers would be assembling by the river now, with their carts of fish and vegetables agleam in the dockside lamplight, but none of them would have begun to venture north yet. There was no one abroad to see his quickly striding figure, and in any case the paper-wrapped parcel he carried looked like a plain shoe box.

Lights were on in an upstairs room in Swinburne's house, and the windows were open; but the young poet had been at his filthy Verbena Lodge until after midnight, and he had probably forgotten the lights and the window and was soddenly asleep by now.

Trelawny tapped nimbly up the steps to the front door, and on the lamplit stage of the threshold he flourished his lock pick as confidently as if it had been the key. A moment's one-handed twisting of it had the bolt retracted, and the old man opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind him. The hall was dark, but he could make out the shape of the carpeted stairs, and he took them silently, two at a time.

At the top of the stairs he paused to strip the paper from the box he had prepared, and he swung back the hinged lid, taking care to make no noise—but when he stepped into the brightly lit drawing room, he saw Swinburne standing, fully dressed, by the fireplace; and he had evidently heard Trelawny's entry, for he was even holding a sword.

The young poet raised it in a fair en garde. “Get out of this house at once,” he said in his shrill voice, “or I'll kill you.”

Trelawny grinned. “Or whip me, eh? Unless that's just for the girls at the Verbena Lodge.”

Swinburne looked disconcerted and lowered the blade an inch. His thatch of orange hair made his head look like an unhealthy overgrown flower on a frail stalk.

He peered more closely at Trelawny. “I know you.”

“Of course you do. We've been to church together, you and I.”

Swinburne frowned, started to say something, then just muttered, “You call the salons churches?”

“I mean the time we met in the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul's.”

“Oh!” He lowered the blade a few more inches. “But—what are you doing here? You advised me then to—quit England, sever my connection with…”

“Which I perceive you haven't done.”

Swinburne's left hand flew to his throat and pulled up his collar.

“No, lad, I've only observed the marks in your verse—and they're more plain there than any punctures in your scrawny neck.”

Swinburne colored. “Did she …
send
you here?” The young man seemed frightened.

“No. And are you jealous? Don't be—I don't write poetry; my relationship with her has never been”—he paused to touch his own throat—“consummated.”

Swinburne stepped away from the fireplace and sat down in a chair by the open window. The sword, still in his hand, had dragged a furrow in the nap of the carpet. “What do you want then? Go away.”

“I had hoped to take what I want while you slept; if you'd only been drunk enough, it might not even have wakened you.” Trelawny shrugged. “I want just a bit of your blood. A few drops, merely.”

Swinburne's scanty orange eyebrows were halfway up his high forehead. “No! Get out of here.”

Trelawny rocked back and forth on his heels. “Allowing for difficulty,” he said, “I obtained detailed statements from two of the girls at your lodge. Many would find the accounts shocking and disgusting, but I think most would find them—well, shocking and disgusting, yes, but laughable too. And pitiable. There are houses that would publish these things. Your own publisher, Hotten, would probably do it—he'd extend you the courtesy of changing the names, but everyone would know who the subject is.”

After a few heartbeats, “You'd see to that, I suppose,” said Swinburne sourly.

Trelawny shrugged.

Swinburne shook his head as if to clear it. “Blood? What do you want my blood for?”

“To kill flies, to scare children, to keep Christians away from my door, what do you care? Just a couple of drops, no more than what you'd lose if you try to shave this morning.”

Swinburne made a fist of his free hand to hide its shaking.

“Blood,” he said, as if to remind himself of the subject at hand. “And you'll give me these
statements
you got from the girls? In exchange? And not get more?”

“That's it.”

Swinburne sat back, brooding.
“She
might not like it. My blood is hers.”

“You know I'm an ally of hers. She could hardly blame you.”

“If she blames a person for a thing, there's no help in him being justified.”

Trelawny exhaled. “Damn it, little man, if Shelley'd been as lily-livered as you are, he'd never have … just go and shave the lint off your chin and then look the other way while I steal the towel afterward!”

Swinburne shook his head. “Go home. This is insane.”

“Humor an old lunatic.”

“What do you want it
for
?”

“Ahhh…” Trelawny tried to think of something plausible. “Well, if you must know, rejuvenation.” He tried to look mildly shamefaced. “I've reason to believe that a few drops of your sort of blood, in brandy in an amethyst cup, might restore me to—”

“Semi-decrepitude.”

Cheeky bugger, thought Trelawny. “If you like.”

“You're as bad as the supplicants under London Bridge.”

Trelawny just stared at him from under his bushy white eyebrows. The mix of vampire-tainted blood with brandy in an amethyst cup was indeed a drink sought after by certain perverse folk, and Trelawny had heard of a sort of club called the Galatea under London Bridge, where such people gathered.

Swinburne shifted in his chair. “You'll leave immediately afterward?”

“I'll be away down the street before you've heard the door close.”

Swinburne stared at him, then shrugged and got to his feet, the sword still trailing from his right hand—and then his nervous gaze fell on the box Trelawny still carried.

“What's that?”

“A box. For cigars. If you have any, I'll put them in it.”

But Swinburne's eyes were suddenly wide. “That lid!—is a
mirror,
on the inside!” He stepped back hastily and raised the rapier again as the gaslight threw his shadow across the whips hung on the walls. “Get out! I know what mirrors can do to her sort—you'll not deprive me of my poetry! Get out, I say!”

Trelawny set the box on the mantel, then spread his hands placatingly and stepped forward, but Swinburne wasn't letting the old man get near him—Swinburne's sword snapped forward, and Trelawny yanked his right hand back just in time to avoid losing a finger.

The old man sighed and shuffled backward to the fireplace, and he reached up to pull the other rapier free of its hook. He suppressed a wince as his scorched palm closed firmly on the grip.

“I'm sorry you know it,” he said, exhaling.

Swinburne laughed in surprise. “You'd fight me? I'm not yet near forty, and you must be twice that—and you should know that I've studied fencing.”

“I must be a fool,” Trelawny agreed.
And I'm only seventy-seven,
he thought. He raised the sword, holding the grip as he would hold a hammer.

Swinburne relaxed again into the en garde position, and his disengage and thrust at Trelawny's wrist was contained and fast.

Trelawny parried it with a deliberately clumsy swat that rang the blades, and he retreated a step, his rear heel knocking on the hearth bricks; he didn't want the young man to experience any mortal alarm that might call up Miss B. prematurely.

“Hah!” exclaimed Swinburne. “You fence like a man trying to hang wallpaper!”

That was in fact the impression Trelawny wanted to give. Blisters on his palm were broken now, and the sword grip was wet.

“I'll cut you,” said Swinburne, and he licked his lips. “It'll hurt.”

If she senses his mood now, Trelawny thought sourly as he tightened his hand on the slick leather grip, she'll simply imagine he's gone back to the sport at the Verbena Lodge.

Swinburne lunged, driving his point toward Trelawny's shoulder, and at the last moment spun the point around the old man's bell-guard and jabbed for the elbow; but in the same instant Trelawny fell backward, folding his arm across his chest, and sat down heavily on the hearth, rapping his tailbone against the bricks and rattling the fire screen.

Swinburne paused over him and giggled breathlessly. “Now I
know
that all your exploits in your books were lies! Pirates, sea battles, Arab brides!”

He eyed Trelawny's raised knee and dropped his point toward it.

And Trelawny straightened his leg forcefully, kicking Swinburne's forward ankle out from under him; as the young man fell on him, Trelawny parried his blade aside and with his free hand punched the young poet very hard on the shelf of his descending jaw.

Swinburne tumbled into his arms, unconscious.

Very quickly, for Miss B. would have sensed that blow, Trelawny pushed Swinburne's limp form off him—the little poet hardly weighed more than a child—and stood up to snatch the box from the mantel.

The poet had rolled over on the carpet and was now face-down, and Trelawny crouched beside him and flipped him onto his back, and with a fingertip collected a smear of blood from Swinburne's lip—and he had no sooner smeared it around the grooves in the box's mirrored interior than his panting breath became a visible plume of steam.

The room was suddenly very cold, and books and papers flew in a whirlwind as a loud, fracturing buzz rattled the few pictures that weren't tumbling off the walls.

Trelawny spun toward the window and flinched as he held the open box up in front of himself.

Boadicea of the Iceni had arrived from out of the night.