Hide Me Among the Graves (60 page)

Christina had intended to throw the spoonful of garlic at Polidori, but it was ludicrously inadequate against this, the antediluvian thing that had for a mere billion human heartbeats worn her uncle's animate ghost.

She scooped up the crushed garlic and rubbed it over her face and throat, then sucked the spoon clean.

The night recoiled from her.

Into her head sprang a projected image of the water colliding with the face of the dead boy, and the boy shaking it off with impunity and staring back at her.

But that desperately advanced image blinked away. In actual fact, the skeletal gray figure was now convulsing in the sand; at one point its skull-like face was turned up toward the moon, and Christina saw black stains mottling the cheeks and covering the eyes.

She shivered and almost lost consciousness then as a wave of wordless rage scorched across the field of her thoughts and perceptions.

A black ripple like a blowing curtain to her left caught the fragments of her attention, and when she had somewhat mustered her thoughts again, she was able to recognize a sort of caricature of her uncle, its arms waving helplessly in the turbulent wind.

“Tell speak at the boy it no effect!” squawked the fluttering, nearly faceless figure. “Say him water only!”

“It
is
just water,” screamed Christina. “It's baptism! I've saved his soul!”

The sketchy Polidori caricature wailed, “No soul!” and blew into scattering shreds—

And Christina slammed her hands against the kitchen table and slapped her feet against the tinglingly warm flagstones.

She was panting in the humid air of Gabriel's kitchen, clutching the edges of the table now as if to force it to stay, and her eyes darted around to gratefully take in the stove and the window and the hallway arch. The spoon and the cup were nowhere to be seen.

For nearly a minute she simply concentrated on breathing in and out, though the smell and taste of garlic was overpowering.

But that's right of course, she thought at last—a dead child has no soul in it to save. Still, the baptism clearly had some effect on his ghost. And it was all I could do.

She could still feel Polidori's rage in her head, muted down to the usual pressure of his attention, and it carried now a flavor of wrathful promise—dead children, disease, despair.

MCKEE HAD ROUSED FATHER
Cyprian from his room by pounding on the rectory door, and eventually he had opened an upstairs window; and after she and Johanna had conveyed something of the urgency of their situation, he had come downstairs with a candle and unlocked the church and led them inside. There was only one window, high on the wall above the altar, and the moonlight through the stained glass shone with various brightnesses of gray. The pews below were in darkness except for the priest's bobbing candle and the candle in a red glass chimney burning beside the altar. The two banks of tiny votive candles that had been lit during the day had long since burned out.

McKee and Johanna sat down in the front pew, and the priest stood between it and the communion rail.

“Annulled?” he said finally. “Why? I don't think you've been married twelve hours yet.”

“Because,” said McKee in a tightly controlled voice, “my husband has—unmerciful God!—had the misfortune to fall prey—to the devils we mentioned yesterday.” She inhaled and went on speaking. “My daughter—our daughter, and I, have to hide from him now, and I'm afraid the sacramental bond of marriage might be a thread he and his new master could follow.”

Wind sighed against the stained-glass window, and the doors through which they'd entered, facing Bozier's Court, rattled on their hinges, making both McKee and Johanna jump.

The priest glanced toward the rear of the church and then looked again at McKee.

“The marriage has not been consummated?” he asked, and McKee turned her face away from the candle's dim amber glow.

“No,” she said. “We've—been busy.”

“An annulment would take time.”

“We don't
have
time,” said McKee, her voice cracking. “We've wasted more than an hour selling things in the New Cut Market, and we need to be on a boat bound
somewhere
tomorrow morning.”

“I'm sorry, Adelaide—I could destroy the record and you could destroy the certificate, but—”

“That would only erase it in legal terms,” said McKee, nodding hopelessly.

“An annulment,” said Father Cyprian, “even a simple and uncontested one on the basis of non-consummation, would still have to come through the bishop.” He spread his hands. “But it may be that the—the
spiritual
bond between you and him has not yet been forged.”

“It's forged,” said Johanna. “I'm the forgery.” She sniffed. “The marriage
was
consummated—in advance, thirteen or fourteen years ago.”

“That may be true,” McKee whispered; and in the same moment, from the darkness at the back of the church, came Crawford's voice: “That's true.”

McKee uttered a short scream and whirled around in the pew, her hand darting under her coat; Johanna scrambled to stand on the pew, facing backward; and the priest raised his voice:

“You have no power here.”

“I have no p-power anywhere,” said Crawford hoarsely, shambling forward. “Adelaide, Johanna—I've escaped him, the way Trelawny did in America, by drowning myself. Throw—” He was interrupted by a fit of harsh coughing, and his hands slapped one of the middle pew backs. “Throw garlic at me. Or roll your j-jar down here and I'll eat it.” He gave a shaky laugh. “Wait till dawn and I'll—dance naked in direct sunlight.”

Johanna took the candle from the priest and began walking down the aisle toward Crawford.

McKee shouted, “Johanna, don't!” She drew her knife and ran after her, but Johanna began running too, and the candle went out; and when McKee caught up with her daughter, the girl was already in Crawford's arms.

“Don't stab him!” yelled Johanna. “He's right! I'd know!”

“Get away from him,” said McKee through clenched teeth.

“No! I say he's clean, and I was a Lark!”

“Was.”
Holding her knife half extended for a stab, McKee reached out tensely with her free hand to pull Johanna out of the way; and she touched Crawford's sleeve. Then she let her fingers tap across his waistcoat.

“You're soaked,” she said. “And shivering.”

“I j-jumped into the river,” he said. “Again. This time I went all the way to the bottom, and—and I very nearly died, but—ghosts found me and revived me.”

“Ghosts did?” said McKee. “What ghosts?”

Crawford exhaled, and McKee got the impression that it was so that his voice wouldn't crack when he spoke. “Old friends,” he said. “I—I look forward to seeing them again, when my time comes.”

McKee didn't move for several seconds, then swore and tucked her knife back into its sheath.

“Father,” she said, turning back toward the dimly visible altar, “never mind the annulment, but could we buy some dry clothes from you?”

THE DOVER-TO-DUNKIRK STEAMSHIP WAS
a 180-foot side-wheeler, and though its funnel was puffing black smoke into the blue morning sky and the pistons drummed under the deck, two sails on its foremast appeared to be doing most of the work. Beyond the white sails, the remote blue sky met the sea in every direction.

Crawford and McKee and Johanna were huddled with a dozen other passengers just aft of the big starboard wheel cowling. Crawford's cough had not abated, and he hugged himself inside the overcoat he had bought at a train stop in Maidstone.

“Sorry,” he gasped after the latest coughing fit. “Thames water doesn't seem to be good for one's lungs.”

“The cats,” said Johanna, holding on to her hat in the breeze from behind, “probably gave you an extra life or two.”

McKee just shook her head, staring out at the green waves of the English Channel. Crawford knew she was worried about his health, and the money that they were spending much more rapidly than planned, and the prospect of beginning life anew in a country whose inhabitants spoke a language she didn't know.

They were still an hour out of Dunkirk, and they had been told that the tide would be low there, and that the ship would not dock but land passengers in rowboats.

Crawford said to McKee, “What shall we have for
le petit déjeuner,
Madame Crawford?”

McKee had learned that much from him on the train. “Frogs,” she said.

“Great bread and cheese,” countered Crawford.

“And wine,” put in Johanna.

“Will we ever come back?” burst out McKee. “Will we ever … see London again?”

Crawford leaned against the tall cowling, feeling the vibration of the big paddle wheel turning inside it.

“I think we had better hope not,” he said.

S
NOW WHIRLED DOWN
out of the gray sky, and the young woman who was crouched behind the big letters of the
ENO'S FRUIT SALT
sign high over Tudor Street pressed her back against the warm chimney bricks and began the song once again, singing loudly against the wind:

There was a man of double deed

Sowed his garden full of seed.

When the seed began to grow,

'Twas like a garden full of snow…

It occurred to her that she was in her own garden of snow up here, with rounded white drifts at various levels all around her, and icicles fringing roof edges and the projecting rims of cold chimneys.

The metal pattens on her boots were braced against the shingled roof of a tiny gable that poked out of the main slanting roof, and she wondered if anyone within might hear her; but the window would certainly be closed in this weather, and the little garret room probably wasn't heated—the chimney at her back wasn't radiating warmth from any hearth within a dozen vertical yards. She felt as if she were on the lowest-hanging skirt of some slow-moving airship, hidden by the snow and the fog from the earthbound city so far below.

She shivered and fished a flask from under her outermost coat and unscrewed the cap with trembling gloved fingers, then pulled the scarf down from her face and took a sip. The whisky was warm, and she exhaled a plume of aromatic steam before pulling the scarf back up.

She still couldn't hear a reply to her singing, and she hoped this unseasonably late winter weather had not diverted them from their usual early-March routine: go to the rooftops to watch for churning black clouds rushing over the skyline. She recalled seeing several of the things during her years as a Lark—sometimes the weirdly distinct little clouds were elongated perpendicular to the direction of travel, and waving at the ends like wings.