Hide Me Among the Graves (72 page)

“I'll turn 'em out,” whispered Trelawny. “It was always yours.”

Crawford got to his feet, wincing at the pains in his knees and hip. He dug some coins out of his pocket and handed them to Johanna. “Alcohol,” he said. “Carbolic acid. There's a stove here? Good. Water. A sewing kit. Thread. Bandages.” He glanced down at his scowling, sweating patient; the handkerchief Trelawny was pressing to his throat was already completely blotted and gleaming with blood, and the red puddle on the deck seemed wider. “I'd advise a Bible too, and a priest,” Crawford added uneasily.

Christina nodded. “A Catholic priest, I think, when it's something important.” Then she bit her lip and looked down. “I'll even—say a rosary.”

“Don't talk more foolishness—than you need to, Diamonds,” whispered Trelawny. “This is just the … last stage of the assault I survived fifty years ago. I'll go on surviving it.”

“No priest?” said Christina. Her eyes were anxious.

“No priest,” echoed Trelawny in a hoarsening whisper. “I married my Zela and loved her without a priest's consent, and when I
do
die, it will be without one.”

Christina gave him a wan smile and then looked at the scattered dust on the deck by Abbas's corpse. She sighed, and said, perhaps to herself, “I only loved one man, and it was my misfortune that he died nine years before I was born.”

Crawford stared at her and opened his mouth, then shut it and turned to Johanna. “You'd better hurry up getting those supplies.”

Johanna nodded and started toward the ladder. “He won't die of this,” she called back over her shoulder. “He'd scorn to.”

“She was always the best of the Larks,” whispered Trelawny.

T
HE OLD FIELDSTONE
All Saints Church at Birchington-on-Sea, east of the Thames Estuary in northeast Kent, was separated from the North Sea only by a gently descending mile of sand and sparse weeds, but the churchyard was bright with flowering irises and lilacs, and Christina Rossetti had brought woodspurge and forget-me-nots. The angular gray stone steeple was the only interruption of the bright blue sky.

Gabriel had died five days earlier, on the evening of Easter Sunday, at the age of fifty-three. The cause of death had been kidney failure, or a stroke, or the ravages of breaking a chloral hydrate addiction by switching to whisky and morphia. A local doctor had pronounced that Gabriel had simply not wanted to live any longer.

Birchington was a long train ride from Victoria Station in London, but Gabriel had been staying out here in therapeutic retreat, and he had been adamant that he was not to be buried at Highgate Cemetery with Lizzie and his father. No one had argued with him.

The coffin had been carried from the church down to the grave on the shoulders of William Rossetti and five men Crawford didn't recognize, and the priest was now praying over it. The walls of the grave were straightly cut down into the chalk.

Swinburne was absent—at forty-five he had reputedly become something of a penitent hermit, living out in Putney and forswearing drink. Of course his poetry was technically competent but uninspired these days, but he seemed grateful for his deliverance from it; it was said that he even remembered Trelawny fondly.

Trelawny had died only last August, at the age of eighty-eight, having lived actively for four years after Crawford cut the stone ball from his neck.

Christina, at least, had apparently noticed the four figures hanging back by the church porch, and she hobbled up the path to where they stood.

“Adelaide!” she said, squinting in the sunlight but not cringing from it. She touched an old scar on her hand. “And Mr. Crawford. Your beard is white now! And—Johanna… Foyle, is it, now?” When Johanna nodded, Christina turned to the fourth person in the group, a diffident and clean-shaven man of about thirty. “And Mr. Foyle himself?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, bowing.

“I'm sorry I was too ill to attend the wedding … two years ago already?”

Crawford nodded. “At the church in Bozier's Court.”

“I remember it well.”

“Trelawny was there,” said Johanna. “Muttering heresies.”

“And his granddaughter? Rose? Was she at the ceremony?”

“No,” said McKee. “I gather she stayed on at the Magdalen house, working there now.”

“Ah. I haven't been back there in years.” Christina shook her head, and her gray hair blew around her face as she turned to look back down the shallow slope to the churchyard. Absently she blew aside a stray lock.

“No mirrors in Gabriel's coffin,” she said, “and William has three children now, the youngest a two-year-old girl. All well, and I don't know if he even remembers now where the bit of Shelley's jawbone is.”

Christina glanced at Mr. Foyle and seemed reassured when he nodded, clearly acquainted with the whole story.

“I've—been to Confession,” she said, “at a Catholic Church, though it was hard. I truly think you three would benefit from doing the same.” She sighed and looked at Crawford. “But if it weren't for your actions, I believe we would all be very different people now, and incalculably worse, living in a London like Dante's
Inferno.”

“Or dead under an inverted London,” said Johanna.

“That too, that too,” Christina said distractedly, staring again down the slope at the mourners and the coffin. “I should rejoin the others.” She blinked, then focused again on Crawford. “I'm glad you have your spouse and child,” she said, and Crawford could hear the effort it took for her not to emphasize some of the words. “And I … truly do forgive you for the … sometimes stressful changes you brought us.”

Johanna's brown hair was longer now, pinned back against the wind. She cocked her head and smiled at Christina. “We forgive you too,” she said, “for the same.”

Christina blinked. “Oh, yes. That's—yes, thank you. And may the—the Father forgive us all.”

She shivered in the sunlight and then began hobbling back down the path to her brother's burial.

With thanks to Father Chrysostom Baer, O. Praem; John Berlyne; Jim Blaylock; Russell Galen; M. L. Konett; Barry Levin; Andreas Misera; Father Jerome Molokie, O. Praem; Chris Powers; Serena Powers; and Joe Stefko.

TIM POWERS
is the author of numerous novels, including
Last Call, Declare, Three Days to Never,
and
On Stranger Tides,
the inspiration for the blockbuster film
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
, starring Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz. Powers lives in San Bernardino, California.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Three Days to Never

Declare

Earthquake Weather

Expiration Date

Last Call

The Stress of Her Regard

On Stranger Tides

Dinner at the Deviant's Palace

The Anubis Gates

The Drawing of the Dark

An Epitaph in Rust

The Skies Discrowned

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover photograph © by Valentino Sani

 

A signed limited edition will be privately printed by Charnel House. www.charnelhouse.com

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HIDE ME AMONG THE GRAVES.
Copyright © 2012 by Tim Powers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-123154-4

EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN 9780062101280

12   13   14   15   16   
OV/RRD
   10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pvt. Ltd.

25 Ryde Road (P.O. Box 321)

Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada

2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

http://www.harpercollins.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand

http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollins.com