Hide Me Among the Graves (51 page)

The glassy flesh shattered inward in a thousand pieces, and he picked among them, tossing them aside—and, deeper than he would have thought, he felt the rounded head of the little statue; he gripped it and pulled, and with a creaking and snapping and a shower of glassy throat fragments, the thing was free, and he was holding the little statue he had last seen on the high shelf in his father's bedroom, back in the old house on Charlotte Street.

And there was a faint pressure in his mind, a flavor of greeting and promise.

Suddenly he was moving with feverish haste—he shoved the statue into his pocket and wedged the broken piece of wood back over the hole in the coffin and his father's now crookedly uptilted face, and then he had gripped the grassy edge of the hole and pulled himself up and swung a leg up onto the surface, and a moment later he was lying on his back on the grass, panting so hard that he was blowing spit onto his goatee.

He rolled up onto his hands and knees. The gravediggers had taken their spades away with them, so with his hands he shoved piles of dirt down into the hole until he supposed any evidence of tampering must be concealed—he wasn't going to actually look, for he could imagine the broken piece of wood knocked aside now and his father's black face peering blindly up at him—and he got wearily to his feet.

All at once immensely tired and longing for his distant bed, he trudged to the lane and the steps down to the yard, where the gravediggers straightened up and knocked the coals out of their clay pipes and began trudging back up the steps with their shovels.

Now I've got to get to Howell's house, Gabriel thought as he hurried to the rented Victoria carriage he had left tied up on the far side of the chapel, and convince him that I've been there all along—and if he's there ahead of me, as is likely, I'll claim I had to take a ride in the fresh air.

But I've violated my wife's grave, and my father's, and probably broken my dead father's head right off. It will, he thought as he anticipated the self-loathing sure to come soon, take a powerful lot of fresh air to put some distance between me and the memory of this.

O
H! I COULD
never
have done that,” said Christina with a breathless laugh. “But luckily there's no need now.”

She leaned back in the forward seat of the hackney coach and smiled warmly at Crawford and Johanna and McKee, who were sitting on the opposite seat. Smells of cologne and damp wool filled the coach.

The traffic was not too badly congested on this rainy Friday morning, and the coach was rattling at a steady pace across the puddled intersection that was Oxford Circus, and Crawford, seated between Johanna and the right-side window, could see through the veils of rain down Regent Street past Jay's Mourning Warehouse to the round, pillared façade of the Argyll Rooms.

Oxford Circus still looked more or less the way John Nash had designed it in the '20s, and, what with Christina's unexpected good news, Crawford let himself indulge in a reassuring sense of continuity.

We don't have to go to France after all, he thought; I don't have to sell my practice. Adelaide and Johanna and I
will
still be here a year from now. Ten years from now. Not eating frogs in France somewhere, thank God. Perhaps one day we'll be going this way to attend Johanna's wedding, and these awnings and rooftop windows and ranks of chimney pots will mostly still be here.

“Gabriel woke William last night and told him that he had found it,” Christina went on, “and by now I'm sure he has destroyed it.”

McKee smiled at her with her eyes nearly closed. “I got the impression he sleeps late.”

“Well,” allowed Christina, “soon he will have destroyed it, if he didn't last night. He has all manner of hammers at his house, and he's only two steps from the river. In any case, we don't have to think about using my
blood
to make a pair of magical
shoes
!”

Crawford thought sourly that she might, now that it was apparently unnecessary, at least pretend that she would have gone to the trouble, if called on.
She
should
do it,
Trelawny had said two days ago;
she's got amends to make, like us all.

“I need to know that he's done it,” said Johanna quietly. “And how he destroyed it.”

Christina sobered. “Of course, child—I'll inform you all directly I know it's done. He intends to pound it to powder and sift it widely into the river; it's my uncle's physical body, so that should certainly … unmake him.”

She seemed distracted then, and Crawford had to repeat his next question: “What's become of the other one, the one Trelawny travels with?” The priest had said,
one up, the other down.

“I believe she's gone too, now,” said Christina. “My uncle appeared to me two nights ago, and he said that she was—how did he put it—‘shrunken and hardened and stopped in a box of mirrors.' The way
he
was, for seven years, apparently.” She shook her head. “Queen Boadicea of the Iceni, shrunk to a pebble and locked in a box! I think it must have been Trelawny who managed to do it at last—Maria and I told him long ago how we stifled our uncle.”

The coach had passed the Oxford Music Hall—Crawford noted that the time on the clock was ten minutes to ten—and now swerved in to stop in front of the pub at the corner of Bozier's Court.

Crawford levered open the coach door and stepped down to the pavement while opening an umbrella, and Johanna, in a new cambric dress and pink velveteen coat, hopped out right behind him; he reached a gloved hand up to help McKee down, and she too was wearing a new dress: blue silk with a hip-length cape. He remembered the enormous crinoline dress she had been wearing on the night they first met, and he was glad such things were apparently no longer in style—he would probably have had to hire a second coach.

Under a woolen overcoat he was wearing the formal frock coat he had bought seven years ago to replace the one he had lost in Highgate Cemetery. All three of them would have preferred to wear more ordinary clothing—McKee had said this church favored informality—but Christina Rossetti had insisted on buying the new clothes for McKee and Johanna.

Christina herself was clad in a woolen coat and plain brown muslin dress, as resolutely unfashionable as ever. Crawford took her hand as she carefully lowered one foot and then the other onto the wet pavement.

Once inside the church, they shed their damp hats and boots and overcoats in the vestibule and shuffled forward down the center aisle toward where Father Cyprian stood below the altar in the gray light from the stained-glass window above and behind him.

The only other person in the church on this rainy morning was old Christabel, who nodded and smiled when Crawford glanced at her. He waved uncertainly.

“The certificate is made out and the parish marriage-record book is ready to be signed,” said the priest, “so there's no use delaying.” To Crawford he said, “Do you have a ring?”

“Yes.” In his waistcoat pocket he had brought along his mother's wedding ring; he hoped it would fit McKee.

“Let's—” began the priest, but he was interrupted by the squeak of the front door.

Crawford looked back and was somehow not very surprised to see the lean, white-bearded figure of Edward Trelawny in the doorway. The old man glanced around the dim interior and had begun to step back outside when he visibly recognized the people in the aisle.

He grinned and came in, pulling the door closed behind him, and when he had walked up to stand between Crawford and McKee he said, “Any of you know why a dead boy with a parasol should be anxious to get in here? I followed him up from Seven Dials.”

Johanna jumped, her eyes suddenly wide, and she exclaimed to Christina, “What if killing your uncle doesn't kill the dead boy?”

“Clearly Gabriel hasn't done it yet,” said Christina, though she was frowning.

“Ah!” said Trelawny. “This would be the phantasm who intends to marry you?”

Father Cyprian's eyebrows were halfway up to his hairline.

Johanna was very pale, and Crawford took a firm hold of her upper arm.

“Where is he now?” she asked.

“I showed him a pistol and he climbed away fast like a monkey up the side of this building. His arms stretch like gray rubber, don't they?”

Christina's lips were sucked in and her eyes were almost as wide as Johanna's, but she nodded jerkily. “Yes,” she whispered, “they do.”

“You all here for last rites?” asked Trelawny.

“A wedding,” said Christina in a reproving tone.

“I'm marrying Medicus,” said McKee.

“You could do worse, I suppose.” He looked around the nearly empty church. “Who's to give away the bride?”

“Nobody,” said McKee. “Ghosts.”

“I'd be happy to do it.”

Crawford and McKee both stared at the dark-faced, white-bearded old man with his permanently sneering scarred lips, and then they looked at each other.

“I suppose I have no substantial objection,” said Crawford.

“I'd be pleased, thank you,” said McKee.

“And,” said Father Cyprian, “if any
dead boy
should try to interfere in the ceremony, you can show him your pistol again.”

“I do that once,” said Trelawny cheerfully. “Next time I blow his grinning head off.”

“Don't miss,” said Johanna.

“Miss!” said Trelawny, almost spitting. “Girl, I—”

“Dearly beloved!” interrupted the priest loudly; and then he went on in a conversational tone, “we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and”—with a wave toward Christabel—“in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”

Crawford stood up straighter and smoothed his damp hair and beard.

ALGERNON SWINBURNE HAD SEARCHED
the whole of Tudor House, as well as he could—he had looked inside all the lacquered Japanese and Indian brass boxes that seemed to occupy every shelf, and peered behind all the stacked canvases, and stirred the salt and sugar jars with a knife. He had gone through every item in the drawers of the Elizabethan Spanish oak armoire in which Gabriel had once, as a joke, hidden a prized Nankin dish of Howell's. But the statue the Rossetti siblings had talked about was not to be found. He wondered fretfully how big it might be—not too big to clog an old man's throat, according to their story.

Gabriel must have it in his bedroom.

Swinburne glanced nervously toward the stairs. Gabriel suffered from insomnia, but in the mornings he did seem to be newly awake—blinking, distracted, grumpy. Perhaps he did all his actual sleeping in the few hours just before he got up, which was generally about noon.

I've got to risk it, Swinburne thought as he started up the stairs. If he awakens while I'm in his room, I'll think of some excuse for being there.

It had been a full week since horrible old Trelawny had knocked Swinburne unconscious after their hasty sword fight, and Swinburne had had no contact with Miss B. since then. He was sure the ghastly old man had succeeded in capturing her in his mirrored box—and so Swinburne needed a new patron. For these last seven days, no verses at all had sprung into his mind, and it was like being color-blind, or … or insomniac. And there were physical effects too—during these last several days, his forehead seemed always to be damp with sweat, and his vision seemed blurred, and his hands shook no matter how much brandy he drank.

At the top of the stairs he took off his shoes and tiptoed in his stocking feet to Gabriel's bedroom door, where he very slowly turned the knob; he lifted the door against the hinges as he swung it open.

The air was stuffy and stale. The windows that overlooked the back garden were heavily curtained, and the only light was a gray radiance through a closed window in the opposite wall. Swinburne could make out the vast mantelpiece, with its ivory-and-ebony crucifix, facing the mirror on a chest of drawers on the other side of the room and, between them on the broad figured carpet, the enormous old four-post bedstead.