Hide Me Among the Graves (61 page)

And in the moment before her recent singing was answered from another roof, she saw one—a rolling black shape nearly invisible in the snow-veiled distance to the northeast; it dipped and disappeared behind some paler building that blended into the uniform whiteness. I'll have to mention it to them, she thought, when they get here.

Only because she knew the song was she able to recognize the lyrics audible now from some nearby roof:

When the sky began to roar,

'Twas like a lion at the door…

She pulled down the scarf for another warming sip of the whisky and then screwed the cap back onto the flask and tucked it away.

She was twenty years old now, far removed from the deep perceptions and narrow lives of the Larks—even seven years ago she had had difficulties dealing with them. She wondered if she would even be able to convey the news of the black flier over Fleet Street.

She took a deep, whisky-fumy breath, and then sang,

When the door began to crack,

'Twas like a stick across my back;

When my back began to smart,

'Twas like a penknife in my heart;

When my heart began to bleed
—

She hesitated, for she could hear the muffled clatter of them scrambling across the far side of this roof, then sang the last line:

'Twas death and death and death indeed.

Crouching on the roof now and squinting back up its slope, with one arm braced against the chimney, she saw three shapeless hats, then a fourth and a fifth, poke up from the roof crest above her against the marble sky. The lean faces under the floppy hat brims were in shadow.

“I need to see the old man,” she called. “He sent for me.”

“Bugger that,” one of them growled. He or she was holding a long-bladed knife in one raggedly gloved fist.

“And I saw one of the black fliers just now,” she went on. “It went down over Fleet Street, very near here. Did any of you sorry lot see it? He'll want to know about it.”

The line of heads wobbled uncertainly, and another of them spoke up. “You got the Neffy smell on you.”

“So do you, each of you. I used to
be
one of you, damn it. He sent for me,
call
him.”

For several seconds the shadowed faces just peered down at her. Then regular clanking sounded from the far shoulder of the building; at least one person of adult weight was ascending the iron ladder from the adjoining rooftop. Could it be the old man already?

But she recognized the voice that called “Johanna!” and her eyes widened in dismay.

The Larks had ducked away out of sight on the far side of the roof, and Johanna scrambled up to the peak and glared down at where they were crouched in the lee of an advertising sign overlooking Whitefriars Street.

“Call the old man!” she said fiercely.

After a moment, one of the ragged Larks dug a clay egg out of a pocket and blew the remembered low, mournful note; it rolled away through the snowy air, seeming to shake the spinning snowflakes.

Johanna stared unhappily to her right, at a ridge between two nearby chimneys in the direction opposite the gang of Larks, and soon two bundled-up figures began to appear by labored degrees from behind it, and Johanna recognized her mother's overcoat, and then her father's cough. Her mother was forty-one now, and her father fifty-three, and Johanna blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down her cheeks and freezing on the scarf. They should both be sitting by the fire back in the rented house in Cherbourg, she thought furiously.

Her father was holding her mother's hand as she stepped carefully down a snow-covered slope of shingles, the pattens on her boots scraping up shavings of ice, and as he followed her McKee was facing the Mud Larks across the flat section of roof that was hidden from the streets below.

“Where is our daughter?” she demanded. “We heard her singing with you.”

“Up here,” called Johanna through clenched teeth. She pounded a gloved fist against the roof peak, loosening a little avalanche. “I told you not to come after me! I
begged
you to stay home, in my note! I'm—an adult now!”

“So are we,” gasped her father, waving his arms to keep his balance on the squeaking icy roof. “And then some.”

Johanna hiked herself up to sit astride the roof peak. “How did you …
find
me?” she called down to them.

“We followed the Larks,” said her father, looking around the rooftop clearing in evident bewilderment.

“Why
now
?” wailed McKee, squinting up at Johanna. “Cherbourg was safe!”

The Lark blew the little whistle again, and the flat note stretched out over the rooftops.

“Safe for the last what, month?” retorted Johanna. “Just as Rouen was, or Amiens, or St. Brieuc, or—how long do you think it would have been before he found me in Cherbourg too?”

“But,” McKee said, “with no preparation, in the winter—in the middle of the night!”

“And a dreadful day for a Channel crossing,” said her father; he paused to cough, and then he went on, “We caught the first boat out of Le Havre, but you weren't on it. You must have found one right at the docks in Cherbourg.” He coughed again. “What kind of springtime weather is this?”

Johanna sighed through her ice-crusted scarf, and was about to answer her mother, when a new voice intruded:

“I called her.”

A lean figure in a black Inverness cape and a slouch hat stepped out from behind the tallest chimney, on the far side of the low square area below Johanna.

And she caught a hint of echo in her own head, a leftover of the mental connection that had conveyed his message to her in a dream two nights ago.

Her mother now had her back to Johanna, staring up at the newcomer.

“Are you—a ghost?” asked McKee.

The question seemed to irritate Trelawny—he swept his hat off and flung his head back, his white hair blowing around his dark face in the snow, and said in a booming voice, “I wish to God I were! It's a bad world that brings an old man out onto the roofs on a day like this. Back down to the streets, now—we're fools to talk under the bare sky, let alone all clustered together.”

“I saw a flier two minutes ago,” said Johanna. She waved a hand north. “It went to earth a street or two away northeast, probably in the Strand around St. Bride's or Ludgate Circus.” In spite of everything, she smiled behind her scarf, pleased that she still remembered London geography after having been away for seven years.

“Fliers!” cried Trelawny. “So close! And such as you are on the roofs! Down, now. If we're not—”

“He called you?” interrupted McKee, though she was walking back toward the roof slope she had just descended, and the ladder on the far side. “How?”

“He can reach me in dreams,” said Johanna, swinging a boot over the roof peak and sliding down to the surface her parents stood on, “just like the other can.” She stepped across the icy tarred surface and stood worriedly beside her father. The bitter chill couldn't be good for his lungs.

Trelawny had skated down from his perch to join them, and now he raised his gloved hands. “Reach her from the opposite spiritual direction,” he clarified. “These, you recall, are the hands that baptized her.” He turned to the mute Larks on the other side of the flat roof and said, “Good. Resume your patrol.”

“You
called
our daughter back to London?” said her father, who hadn't moved.

Trelawny's face was shadowed as he pulled his old hat back over his head. “I tried Chichuwee, day before yesterday,” he said gruffly, “but he could provide no help.”

“Help in what? Never mind, it doesn't matter—our daughter is leaving with us on the next boat back to France.”

“You and Mother take it,” said Johanna. She squeezed his hand through two layers of glove leather. “This is for me to do. You two will just get killed if you stay—wait for me in”—belated caution kept her from again saying the name of the city—“in the place we've been living.”

“What's
for you to do?” burst out McKee.

“He,”
said Johanna, not wanting to pronounce the name
Polidori
out here either, “has got himself another girl. She's fourteen, just a year older than I was when that dead boy came after me, wanting to—to have a child, some sort of child, by me. She's to be his bride, since I fled.”

“My granddaughter, that is,” said Trelawny. “Rose, Rose Olguin. I will—
not
have her digging her way up out of a grave and”—he added with a shudder—“and having
congress
with that dead thing.”

“You said your children were in America,” protested Johanna's mother.

“Argentina,” said Trelawny impatiently, “one of them. Others stayed here and died. Of course. But the daughter in Argentina moved back to London two years ago, in spite of my warnings, and now her fourteen-year-old daughter—”

Johanna noticed that the Larks had disappeared over a low wall to the left; and a moment later the roof moved sideways under her boots. She hopped to keep her balance, but her father sat down and her mother crouched and braced one hand against the roof surface. Patches of snow slid down all the roof slopes, and she heard a low rumble roll across the City.

And then something buzzed past her ear, and when she jerked back, she saw a wasp swinging away through the moving veils of snow.

A wasp, she thought, in the middle of a snowstorm? Only after that did she think: An earthquake? In
London?

“Follow me!” yelled Trelawny, moving now away from the way McKee and Crawford had come, toward the roof-edge wall beyond which the Larks had disappeared.

The roof was still swaying, and Johanna helped her father to his feet, waving away another wasp, and before hurrying after Trelawny she glanced back the other way.

A figure stood now beside the chimney where her mother and father had first appeared; its face under a tall silk hat was shiny black, and at the end of each of its long arms it waved a thin bamboo stick as if conducting an enormous orchestra.

“Where where where?” it called, in such a melodious voice that Johanna thought it had begun to sing.

A loud, hard pop shook the air, and the figure bowed and thrashed its sticks wildly but didn't lose its balance; looking the other way, Johanna saw Trelawny lowering a smoking pistol.

“Mere de Dieu!”
she exclaimed, halting. “What are you doing?”

“Get over here!” yelled Trelawny, tucking the pistol away.

Johanna hustled her father to the far edge of the roof where Trelawny was waiting impatiently, and then the four of them climbed over the low wall and dropped six feet into a narrow snow-filled gully between two projecting gables.

The footprints and handprints of the Larks were visible in the snow to the left, and had presumably extended up the shingle slope on that side before the shaking of the earthquake, but Trelawny led them through the knee-deep snow the other way, up and between a pair of cupolas and down into another snow-choked trough, this one thickly hazed with black smoke from a rank of chimneys at the downhill end.

Crawford was coughing before they had moved three paces, and when Trelawny stopped, Johanna yelled, “Get us out of this smoke!”

“In a minute,” the old man called back hoarsely. “The smoke will repel the wasps, and they're how he sees.”

From somewhere behind among the slopes and peaks and chimneys, Johanna heard again the nearly musical
Where where where?
Had Trelawny's pistol ball missed the man with the sticks?

“Christina Rossetti—” began Trelawny, then paused to cough himself before going on, “blinded him seven years ago.”

Crawford managed to choke out, “Can we—get down this way?”

Johanna could hardly see her companions through the stinging billows of smoke.

“We can get farther away,” said Trelawny. “I don't know about down. Follow me.”

Beyond the next gable ridge, blessedly out of the worst of the smoke now, they found a row of windows overlooking Whitefriars Street extending away to their right, and the sills were a foot-wide stone ledge over the sheer drop. Trelawny began shuffling along it, facing the building and edging to his left, gripping the eaves that projected at shoulder height above the windows. Over the sighing of the wind, Johanna could faintly hear the rattle of wagons and carriages eight floors below.

Johanna quickly unstrapped the wobbly pattens from her boots and saw her mother doing the same. They wouldn't fit in the pocket of her coat, so she dropped them on the roof.

Then, her ears ringing with fright, she shuffled out onto the ledge after the old man, her gloved hands holding tightly to the eaves and her boots scuffing in the tracks Trelawny's had cleared in the snow. Her father was right behind her.

“Hang on,” she said to him over her right shoulder, earnestly and unnecessarily. “Walk carefully.”