Hide Me Among the Graves (48 page)

“You should take her to America,” said Trelawny. “My daughter Zella and her husband moved there ten years ago, at my insistence and expense, and so my grandchildren are safe. The vampire things generally can't cross that much salt water, unless you carry them along with you—as I did in '33, necessitating my near-fatal swim across the Niagara River to get free of it.” He was chewing on a knuckle and frowning at Johanna. “Even France might be far enough. The Channel is a lot of water.”

“We might do that,” said McKee, surprising Crawford. “But is there anything … quicker? Something we could do today, tomorrow?”

This time Trelawny was silent for so long that Crawford wondered if the man had forgotten the question.

“There's a certain crazy trick,” he said at last. “Have you ever heard of the translator men in St. Giles?”

McKee grimaced. “Devil worshippers, I've heard.”

“Not good Christians, certainly—not their clients, at any rate. But the trouble is that Miss Diamonds
is
a good Christian, and you'd need her cooperation—hell, you'd need
her presence
there. She
should
do it—she's got amends to make, like us all—but it'd be wrong to tie her up and take her there by force.” He paused and then nodded. “Yes, that would be wrong.”

“Devil worshippers?” ventured Crawford.

“They make shoes to hide you from God,” said Johanna solemnly.

“That's right, my dear,” said Trelawny. “And their clients pay a lot too, silly fools, to hide from somebody who's not even there in the first place. But … if there
were
someone there, their trick might work.” He squinted at Johanna. “And
you're
in a position where there
is
someone there to hide from.”

Crawford was frowning. “If you don't believe God exists,” he began—Trelawny glowered but didn't contradict him, so he went on—“then why do you have the Mud Larks baptized?”

Trelawny visibly restrained himself from throwing an angry glance at Johanna.

“Pascal's wager,” he snapped. “Dunking them and saying the words is no trouble or expense, and if there
should
be a God, the Larks are thus benefited. If not, I'm nothing out of pocket. If baptisms cost a penny a shot, I wouldn't bother.”

“I presume you've been baptized yourself, then,” Crawford went on.

Trelawny spat. “I won't unmake who I am. If I thought there were more than a negligible chance of such a being existing, I'd get a pair of translator shoes myself.”

“How do they work?” asked McKee. “These shoes.”

“They don't, Miss Rahab—they can't, as I just now said. But what they
aim
to do is deflect—refract, reflect!—the special mutual awareness between redeemer and redeemed. Hah! To make the shoes, they use consecrated wine from a Catholic Church—what they believe is the blood of their Redeemer. I don't believe people have a Redeemer … but Polidori surely has one, and with luck you can talk her into contributing some of her blood for a special pair of shoes—the blood she rubbed on him years ago to quicken him. With that blood fixed in your daughter's shoes, your daughter will seem to his special sight to be just a stray reflection of the actual living Miss Diamonds.”

Crawford tried to imagine talking Christina Rossetti into cooperating in this. “Wouldn't
your
blood work?” he asked. “You're the—what did you say?—the Rosetta stone between the species?”

“Impersonally, at a distance—like the tidal effects of the sun compared to those of the moon. Miss Diamonds is Polidori's immediate redeemer, by her personal blood.”

“You think, then,” said McKee dubiously, “that this has a chance of actually working?”

Trelawny pursed his scarred lips. “I'd be very surprised if it did. But I wouldn't be …
astonished
.” He turned and began striding away from the river, toward the close pillars and the pavement of George Street.

Crawford raised a hand, intending to call him back, then just let his hand fall.

“So much for our ambush idea,” he said.

McKee shrugged. “We could do what Trelawny's daughter did. Sail to America. Or France—Trelawny said that might do. The Magdalen Penitentiary might still front me money for passage, if I undertake to work it off as a domestic servant.”

“I could buy three tickets,” said Crawford, squinting thoughtfully. “To France, at least. And we'd want some money for food and lodging. I might need to convert some things to cash.”

“In the meantime,” said Johanna glumly, “there's the blood shoes.”

“One way or another,” said McKee, “we need to talk to Sister Christina again.” She started to walk away in the direction Trelawny had taken, but Crawford caught her arm.

“If passage to America should be possible—or to France, I can certainly afford that—for the three of us here, you'd do it?” Suddenly he despised his own circumlocution, and he said directly, “Would you come with me, and leave Tom?” His heart was beating rapidly.

“Yes,” said McKee in a level tone, “if that would save Johanna.”

Crawford nodded. “Are you married to this Tom fellow?”

McKee raised her chin. “Common law.”

“Will you marry me? Properly?”

For several seconds, McKee didn't speak. Crawford could peripherally see Johanna staring intently at them, but he didn't take his gaze from McKee's.

She looked away. “That would probably be necessary, for us to get travel documents with our child.”

Johanna exhaled audibly through her teeth.

“What I mean is,” persisted Crawford, “do you
want
to marry me?”

McKee looked at him almost angrily. “Do
you
want to marry me?”

“Yes,” said Crawford. “As I have for seven years.” He was still holding her elbow.

She rolled her eyes.
“Yes,
if you've got to have it said straight out. I still think you saw that in my head, then, in that tunnel.”

Johanna clapped her hands. “Oh, well done, you two.”

Crawford couldn't take a deep breath, and just nodded. He took Johanna's hand in one of his, and McKee's in the other, and started walking back up the pier toward the pillars and the Strand beyond. McKee was looking only straight ahead, but she was holding his hand tightly.

“Where does Johanna sleep?” she asked finally. “At your house.”

“It's been Mrs. Middleditch's old room, on the second floor,” said Crawford. “You didn't meet her, though, did you? But last night we both wound up in the basement, and I think I'm going to set up two beds down there, for now.”

“Could you set up a third bed? Over on Johanna's side of the stove?”

“Easiest thing in the world,” said Crawford.

I
T WASN'T ONE
of Gabriel's raucous dinners, with jokes and impromptu limericks flying back and forth under the two dozen candles in the Flemish brass chandelier—it was just family and Charles Cayley, whom William had invited mainly to discuss the handling of some ambiguous verbs in translating Dante—but Christina had excused herself after the soup and retired to one of the downstairs sitting rooms to lie down on the sofa under the big, ornately framed mirror.

She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece—ten o'clock, and though Maria would be getting tired, the men would probably go on talking until after midnight.

Of course it would not have occurred to poor William, lost in his merely voyeuristic concerns with literature, that Christina might find it awkward to sit down at dinner with Cayley, whose proposal of marriage she had refused three years ago.

He had been so earnest, that day in the parlor at the Albany Street house, and so disconcerted when she had gently told him that she couldn't marry him!

She had been thirty-five years old then, and Cayley was surely the last suitor she would ever have—and she had always been very fond of him, and he virtually worshipped her. He had even managed to overlook what she knew he thought of as an element of coarseness in her, excusing it as an inevitable result of her charitable work among the prostitutes.

And her diabolical uncle had been, as far as she then knew, laid to permanent rest four years earlier—so there was no reason to fear having children … and she would have loved to have children.

Ultimately she had simply not considered it fair to Cayley, to marry him when she—

When she—

Go ahead, she thought now as she looked up at the mirror in Gabriel's sitting room, admit it.

When she loved another.

But she was a good enough Christian to suppress and starve that love, and to pray that the object of it might somehow one day be saved from Hell.

She had convinced herself that she was glad, when they had laid Lizzie's poisoning coffin over him; and she had convinced herself that she was horrified, five days ago, when it became clear that he had evaded the mirrors and risen from that grave.

She closed her eyes now, and tears spilled down her cheeks. Assume an attitude long enough, she told herself, and it will become your real one. But if only I had been permitted by circumstances to have a child! Even a niece or nephew—but her siblings were not likely now to have children either.

But, she thought, a child of my own—!

A soft thump on the Sarabend carpet made her open her eyes, and then she simply stared, disoriented.

This wasn't another vision, for she was still in Gabriel's sitting room—but a little boy was standing only a few feet away from her now, wrapped in one of Gabriel's purple Utrecht velvet curtains.

Then she blinked and looked at him more closely—and sat up, alarmed and guilty, for he had clearly been long neglected—he appeared in fact to be near death from starvation: his wide bright eyes sat deep in the round sockets of his skull, and his mouth and nostrils looked like torn spots in a thin sheet of overstretched leather. In fact, if it hadn't been for the lively attention in his eyes, she would have believed he was dead.

Her face and hands stung with a sensation that wasn't tingling only because it was steady, and she was vaguely aware that her heart was pounding rapidly.

But—this must be the boy Gabriel described, she thought. His undead son, born from Lizzie's dead body in the grave.

She didn't even move, except to tilt her head back, when he sprang nimbly onto the back of the couch and, reaching up with his long gray tree-branch arms, draped the curtain over the corners of the big mirror; his arms seemed to stretch out even thinner, like taffy. Now he was wearing only a breechcloth made from one of Gabriel's towels; his knees were the widest parts of his bone-thin gray legs, and his ribs stood out like ridges in eroded wood. The still air was rank with a smell of clay and loam.

Christina pushed back her suddenly damp hair with both trembling hands and tried to think. Gabriel had described the boy as dead, but perhaps he wasn't, quite.

Then she noticed a flapping cut in the gray skin below his left ribs.

“Let me—” she burst out instinctively, “let me get you to a doctor!”

He looked as if he would have blinked at her, if his eyes were able to close, and she pointed a trembling finger at his side.

“I don't bleed,” he said. His voice was a harsh quacking.

Perhaps the wound wasn't as bad as it looked; certainly there was no sign of blood. “Then let me—at least—get you some—” she stammered, “something to eat.”