Hide Me Among the Graves (70 page)

“We'd be safe then,” Johanna agreed, “as long as we remembered not to come up for air.”

For a minute or so no one spoke, and Crawford stared out the window at the passing pillars and the high neoclassical pediment of the British Museum. Fourteen years ago McKee had told him about her father taking her there when she was eleven and about her fear that she might be in the room full of Egyptian mummies when the General Resurrection occurred.

“Christina won't be happy to see us,” said Johanna, bracing herself as the cab was steered into Torrington Place.

“I don't believe she's
ever
been
happy
to see us,” said McKee. “And small wonder.”

Christina's house had muslin sheets across the lower half of the front window to keep soot from blowing in, but above it Crawford saw the curtain twitch as he climbed down from the cab; he waved the bottle as a placating gesture before helping his wife and daughter down and paying the driver.

Christina herself opened the door when he knocked—she was wearing a plain black smock, and her dark and prematurely sagging face was stern.

Without a word she took the bottle from Crawford, held it up to the daylight, and then held it to her ear.

She sighed in evident relief. “Thank you. I'm sorry I can't invite you in, but we have plasterers due to repair the ceiling—”

“We contacted Maria,” interrupted McKee. “Her ghost, that is. She told us how to banish your uncle.”

Christina shivered as she hugged the bottle to her chest. “You—
forced
her?”

Johanna said, “Trelawny's fourteen-year-old granddaughter is somewhere out in the City with your uncle right now. It's a cold day, and it'll be a colder night.”

Christina sighed, and the steam of her breath whisked away on the chilly breeze. “Come in then, you punishments for my sins.”

She led them into the entry hall, where Crawford noticed Johanna's coat still hanging on a hook from last night; God only knew whose coat she had left at the Spotted Dog.

The parlor still smelled of garlic from the bottle Johanna had broken under the nose of the monstrous black-painted thing, and by the gray daylight filtering in through the lace curtains he could see the new cracks in the ceiling. Christina carefully set the bottle on the table, which had been righted.

Crawford said, “I'm sorry we left so abruptly last night—”

“Say calamitously,” said Christina, nodding.

“At least,” he went on, “the thing followed us out.”

“Yes, it did,” said Christina. “Mr. Trelawny shot it—it might be dead now.”

“Much luck,” murmured Johanna.

A housemaid appeared at an inner doorway, and Christina asked her to bring a pot of tea.

“What is the required sin?” she inquired with a brittle semblance of cheer after the housemaid had withdrawn. “The one Maria's method calls for.”

Crawford didn't look at his two companions. “You need to let one of us cut you,” he said, “so that you bleed, and then you must summon him, call for rescue—invite him back to you.”

He hoped that was enough—she would surely balk at the proposed murder of a stranger.

He could see a strong pulse in Christina's throat. “I—” she said. “This hardly seems—how would this aid in banishing him?”

Crawford cleared his throat. “Maria believes he will then appear, wholly, in his vulnerable human form. You're a blood relative of his, in, er, several senses, and you might be able to forcibly hold him in that form—by mental effort—for at least a few seconds.”

“So that you can kill him,” said Christina softly, “with wooden stakes and silver bullets.”

“And cremation,” added Johanna.

“I—don't think I can do it,” said Christina.

Maria's ghost had said,
She would not want to do that, because she has always wanted to do that.

“We need you to try,” Crawford said. “Trelawny's granddaughter needs you to try.”

“I—well, it would indeed be a sin. Even for a praiseworthy purpose, to call up a devil—invoke his love for me—”

McKee cocked her head. “Sister Christina,” she said, “do you mean it would be a betrayal of your uncle? Do you mean it would be wrong to
trick
him?”

Christina frowned and shook her head impatiently; and then she stopped.

“I,” she whispered, almost wonderingly, “think I do mean that! God help me—”

McKee leaned forward. “You trick a rat when you put bait in a trap.”

“You put it so elegantly.” Christina sighed. “That will be all, Jane, thank you,” she added to the housemaid who had brought in a tray and set it down on the table.

There were eight flat biscuits in a tray beside the teapot, and Crawford made himself ignore them. McKee and Johanna each grabbed two.

“When did you people last eat?” asked Christina in sudden concern.

“I had supper last night,” admitted Crawford.

“About twenty-four hours, for me,” said McKee, and Johanna nodded to indicate the same.

“Good heavens. I'll have Jane prepare sandwiches—”

“Sandwiches would be good,” said Crawford. “We can eat them on the way to the boat.”

“I don't understand,” said Christina. “Boat? You're … leaving the country?”

Johanna said, “It's a moored boat at the Queenhithe Stairs, by Southwark Bridge. I slept aboard it for a year or so, when I was a Mud Lark.”

“It's where Trelawny wants to trap Polidori,” said McKee. “And he wants to do it while it's daylight. It's cold out; you'll want to bundle up.”

Christina lifted the teapot and filled one of the cups. “I think,” she said as she picked it up in her shaking hand—and she took a careful sip before going on—“I must do as you say. I think I always knew the day would come when I must, for the sake of my soul, betray him.”

There were tears in her eyes as she set the cup back down. It rattled against the saucer.

THEY ALL CLIMBED INTO
a cab and took it to the river south of St. Paul's Cathedral, and in Upper Thames Street Johanna had the driver let them out at Bradburn Alley, by a row of tall brick warehouses just short of Queen Street.

“Better we approach along the river,” she said as she and her mother helped Christina Rossetti down from the cab. They had eaten several cheese sandwiches on the ride and now brushed crumbs from their coats.

Stout wooden bridges connected the buildings on either side of the alley, and men leaned out of doorways high up in the walls and guided boxes and canvas sacks being raised and lowered on long ropes by pulleys. Crawford led the three women down the alley, around walls of stacked crates and casks, and several times waved them into recessed doorways when heavy-laden carts with chain traces creaked past behind horses in heavy leather collars. Smells of oranges and tobacco and quinine spiced the turbulent air.

At the far end of the alley they were out in the sea-scented wind, viewing the broad face of the river from an elevation only a few feet above the water, and out on the rippled expanse white sails and black smokestacks contrasted with the gray sky. Crawford helped Christina over a low wooden fence, which McKee stepped over and Johanna vaulted, and then they followed a set of narrow-gauge coal-wagon tracks that paralleled the shore, toward the northernmost arch of Southwark Bridge twenty yards ahead.

A chorus of shouts broke out in the alley behind them, and Crawford wondered if a broken pulley had dropped a load.

He was about to glance back when, ahead of him, Johanna jumped and nearly pitched off the tracks into a rowboat below.

She caught her balance and threw him a scared look.

“One wasp doesn't mean—” she began.

Two wasps buzzed between them, and Crawford heard McKee curse behind him.

He looked back at her. “You and Johanna run ahead to the boat,” he said.

More shouting from the alley behind them was audible now over the wind in his face.

As McKee and Johanna sprinted away toward the shadows under the bridge, Crawford held Christina's elbow and tried to get her to move faster; finally he said, “Excuse me, it's an emergency,” and picked her up in his arms and began striding between the coal-wagon tracks after his wife and daughter. He had to shake Christina's lavender-scented black veil away from his hat brim twice before she noticed and tucked it behind her head.

“Wasps,” she said. “It's my nightmare son, isn't it?”

“So you said—last night,” agreed Crawford breathlessly. “Can you—look behind?”

She shifted in his arms. “I see men running out of that alley. Some of them are jumping into the river. No sign of … him, yet.”

Crawford's throat ached with panting, and his knees and hip jabbed him at every jolting step; he hoped he would have enough warning before falling to set Christina down first.

“I miscarried,” she said. “To me he was born dead. But then his … soul? … his insistent soul went on to become the child of Gabriel and Lizzie.”

“He—seems to have been—born dead—there too.”

“That's true, poor thing.”

The tracks curved sharply away inland to the left, and he stepped out from between them. He had reached the shadow of the bridge, and through stinging, watering eyes he saw Johanna and McKee on the deck of a low canal barge moored under the arching span.

“You—can walk, from here,” he gasped, lowering Christina to the stone pavement.

Together they hobbled to the wide plank that was laid from the embankment masonry to the boat's gunwale, and McKee helped pull Christina across; when Crawford had limped across too, he lifted the plank and shoved it sideways so that it splashed into the river.

Trelawny's head was visible in the low cabin hatch, and he clumped the rest of the way up onto the deck.

“What,” he said irritably, “something chasing you?” Then he squinted beyond them and swore. “Get below, quick,” he snapped.

Crawford stole a glance over his shoulder as he hurried Christina to the hatch.

For a moment he nearly jumped into the river along with the dockworkers. Bouncing down the coal-wagon tracks toward the bridge came rushing a figure that at first seemed to be just two very long cartwheeling gray arms, with rippling pennants of white cloth at the wrists; its black-clad torso bumped along behind, with one leg trailing and one twisted up around its neck, the toes of the bare foot holding a parasol over the rolling black head. It seemed to be singing as it flailed and bounced rapidly toward them.

“Get below!” roared Trelawny, and Crawford nodded and hustled Christina to the ladder. “Grab the swords! Do it!”

The cabin belowdecks was nearly as wide as the barge, lit by an open porthole in the starboard bulkhead. Slanted vents at the bow and stern ends of the ceiling were apparently to let fresh air in and stale air out. A stove against the port bulkhead was flanked fore and aft by rows of floor-to-ceiling bunks, and the bow end was blocked by a sleigh so big that Crawford thought two horses must once have been required to pull it.

And a short, stocky man with a drooping mustache stood halfway down the cluttered deck, staring at the newcomers in surprise.

“He's still got the sleigh!” whispered Johanna. “I used to sleep in it.”

Christina was just blinking around in evident alarm.

The stocky man looked past them at Trelawny, who had pulled the hatch closed and was now scuffling down the ladder.

The man called, angrily, “One, you said! Not … four! Not women!”

Crawford noticed the hilts of two slim rapiers standing in an elephant-foot umbrella stand by the ladder, and he snatched one of them up and held the hilt of the other out toward McKee. She took it with a quick nod.

“Shut up, Abbas,” said Trelawny tightly, striking a match to a lantern bolted to the wall by the ladder. “I'll—explain.”

Crawford reached up to take off his ludicrous beaver hat, but he saw Trelawny draw a pistol from under his coat—and he realized that this man Abbas was the person the old man intended to kill, to fulfill the conditions Maria's ghost had described.

Thumping and sliding sounded from the deck overhead, and then someone was pounding at the hatch and a girl's voice was screaming words Crawford couldn't catch.

“That's Rose!” whispered Johanna. “I know her voice!”

Trelawny took an uncertain step toward the ladder. “She
follows
that thing,” he said; then he shook his head and spat out an obscene monosyllable and turned toward the others, raising the pistol. “Abbas,” he said.

Crawford leaped at him, striking the pistol aside with his free left hand and aiming a punch at Trelawny's chest with the sword's basket hilt; but Trelawny tried to block the blow, and the hilt was deflected upward and rebounded at the old man's face.