Hide Me Among the Graves (9 page)

She was still unmarried at the age of thirty-one, living with her mother and two of her three siblings in a house in Albany Street just two streets from Regent's Park, and some of her friends thought this work was perilous to her own innocence and virtue; her brother Gabriel had written a poem in which a prostitute was described as:
a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul…

If she was feeling facetious, she would sometimes reply to their misgivings with a quote from Emma Shepherd's
An Outstretched Hand to the Fallen
—“the purer, the more ignorant of vice the lady is who seeks them, the greater the influence she has”—but to herself she could admit that there probably wasn't an inmate in the house as much in need of redemption as herself.

She had found a refuge in her volunteer residency work here, at least for one fortnight every two or three months, and Reverend Oliver, the warden, had shown her some tricks for “keeping the devils out,” as he put it—the iron-barred decorative openings in the garden wall, the mirrors in the entry hall, the garlic in all the window boxes.

Her sister, Maria, was doing work for the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, and possibly finding similar protections there. Christina hoped so—Maria would never discuss such things, and in fact had never referred to that evening seventeen years ago in a twilit field, when the two of them had given Greek funeral honors to their father's temporarily buried little black statue.

Christina had lately written a long poem about a girl who surrenders to supernatural temptation, to her ruin, and her sister who rescues her by exposing herself to the same perils. The poem was called “Goblin Market,” and the book whose proof pages were on the desk was titled
Goblin Market and Other Poems.

Christina had restored the little statue—rendered inert, she had believed then—to its usual perch on her father's shelf when she had returned from her visit to Maria in the country, and her father had never mentioned the thing again. He had died nine years later, and his last words before he hiccuped into his handkerchief and choked and expired had been
Ah Dio, ajuatami Tu!
Which meant, roughly,
God help me!
Their mother, though grieving, had gathered up all the copies in the house of his book,
Amor Platonica,
and burned them, along with the unpublished notes he'd made on the Kabalistic idea of the transmigration of souls. Nobody, not even Christina's skeptical brother William, had asked why.

Christina had dreamed of her father since his death: always in the dream he was sitting across a table from her in a small room lit by candles, talking earnestly; but she couldn't make out the words in his droning monologue. After a few minutes, she would lean forward and watch his lips intently and concentrate, and he would become visibly alarmed—apparently at the prospect of her comprehending his speech, which she realized he was unable to halt—and he would lean across the table and stick his fingers into her ears, so that she could no longer hear his voice, though she could see his lips still moving helplessly.

Always she lived with a conviction that at the age of fourteen she had brought a curse on her family by quickening that little statue with her blood.

Neither Christina nor Maria had married; their brother Gabriel was more stubborn and had married two years ago, at the age of thirty-two—his wife had borne him a dead daughter shortly afterward and was now, God help her, very ill herself. William had been engaged, in spite of Christina's oblique warnings—and Gabriel's too, she suspected—but he had canceled the engagement in bewilderment when the young lady insisted that it should be an entirely celibate marriage.

Amor Platonica
indeed, thought Christina now as at last she crouched to pick up the sheet of paper. The young lady had not perhaps been as unreasonable as William had thought.

The paper was a page from a story she recognized. She had written it out last year and had submitted it to Thackeray's
Cornhill
magazine, but after it was rejected, and she reread it, she had found herself sickened by William's comment that it was the best story she'd ever written—because, though it had been her hand that had held the pen, she was now convinced that she was not the one who had conceived and composed it.

She had burned it—but since late December she had found her hand writing it out again, in moments when her mind strayed from whatever she'd meant to write.

Its title was “Folio Q,” and she suspected the Q was meant to indicate the German word
quelle,
source. It was about a man who didn't dare look into mirrors, and instead imposed his own face onto the people he loved.

She suspected that the actual author was her uncle, John Polidori, who had killed himself in 1821, forty-one years ago. It was clear that he had not, after all, been laid to rest when she and Maria had temporarily buried the little statue.

She glanced at the handwritten page—then stepped to the window for better light, her heart beating more rapidly, for this newest page was a scene that had not been in the story as she had originally written it.

When she finished reading the page, she stepped to the desk and slapped around among the long galley proof sheets, for the handwritten page ended in midsentence—there was, though, no subsequent page.

But she needed to find out how the scene ended. Gabriel needed to know.

I could sit down and hold a pen over a blank sheet, she thought, and open my mind to
him,
deliberately this time, instead of inadvertently. He could write another page, or several.

All at once her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. Yes, she thought excitedly, I'll give him my hand, let him in just to that extent, just for a little while…

Then she clutched the crucifix on the rope around her waist, and for a moment she wished she were Catholic instead of Anglican, and that the rope was a rosary, so that she could pray to the Virgin for help—for she had sensed that her sinful eagerness was reciprocated from some direction, requited. She couldn't say an Our Father right now—ever since the age of fourteen she had instinctively feared the all-seeing God of the Old Testament—and even Christ would not shelter a soul who couldn't bear to entirely relinquish its one most precious sin … but the Virgin Mary might understand…

She shook off the thought—heretical Papist superstition!—and tore the handwritten page into strips and then into tiny fragments and tossed them into the cold fireplace.

She gathered the galley proofs into a stack, the corrected pages facedown on top of the uncorrected ones, then folded the stack and tucked it into the valise beside the desk. She would have to get another of the sisters to assume her duties today and find someone to take the last few days of her scheduled residence—but she needed to see Gabriel immediately.

She glanced at the closet where her street clothes were hung, then impatiently shook her head. There wasn't time. She hefted the valise, opened the door, and her heels echoed in the empty dormitory as she hurried past the rows of empty beds on her way out to the carriage lane by the stables.

IN THE WEST END
, northwest of Waterloo Bridge and the open market at Covent Garden, seven narrow streets met from all directions in a confusion of carriages and wagons and omnibuses below the wedge-shaped buildings that framed an irregular open space. Earl Street stretched east and west, and its balconies and awnings and the hats of the pedestrians on the pavement were lit with the morning sun, while only the chimney pots and roofs of the other streets stood free of the chilly shadows that made the old women around the bakery shops below pull their shawls more tightly around their shoulders. A smoky beam of sunlight crossed the crowded square, occasionally reaching through gaps in the traffic to touch the stone circle where there had once stood a pillar with six sundials on it. The junction had long been known as Seven Dials, for the streets and buildings themselves were said to make a seventh sundial for those who could read it.

Through the crowds of cartwheeling children and adolescent thieves in corduroy trousers and black caps, a peculiar couple shuffled to a corner on the west side. Though the man's hair and beard were gray as ashes, his shoulders were broad under his flannel coat, and his step was springy—but when his dwarfish companion hesitated at a wide curbside puddle, he crouched and braced himself and lifted it with both hands, then shuffled carefully through the puddle to put the burden down on the pavement with a
whoosh
of exhaled steam.

The little person was draped in a voluminous Chesterfield overcoat and a baggy slouch hat, with a scarf wrapped around its neck and face, and though now it hopped out of the way of a couple of sprinting boys, its eyes weren't visible. Long shirtsleeves covered its hands, but in its right hand, half hidden behind the curtain of a lapel, it gripped a violin with a bow clipped to the neck.

Now with its sleeve-shrouded left hand the little figure plucked the bow free, and raised the violin and tucked the chin rest into its scarf and skated the bow over the strings—the hidden fingers of its right hand slid up and down the neck, and the instrument produced a hoarse seesawing note.

The gray-haired man nodded impatiently. “What does it look like?” he snapped. His lip was curled into a perpetual sneer by a scar that ran down his jaw.

He was squinting around at the people hurrying past or slouched against the buildings, and at last he saw the person he was looking for—an old man in a floppy hat and a formal but tattered black coat on the far side of Monmouth Street, his gloved hands holding a broom as if it were a drum major's baton.

“This way,” said the gray-haired man, starting forward.

The violin emitted a downward-sliding note, but the little person holding it scuttled along after him.

At the corner the old man with the broom had stepped out onto the crushed gravel of the street, waving his broom to halt the horses of an approaching beer wagon, and then he proceeded to sweep the slushy top layer of gravel aside so that three businessmen in bowler hats could cross the street without getting their shoes too muddy. On the far side they paused to give him money, and then, visibly surprised, paused for a little longer while the old man reached into a pocket and gave them change.

He dodged and splashed his way back to the corner where the mismatched couple waited, and he didn't look at the short figure but grinned at the gray-bearded man.

“Stepping out, Mr. Trelawny?” he said.

Trelawny nodded and handed him a gold sovereign. “I want it all back,” he said.

The crossing sweeper nodded judiciously as if this was an uncommon but not unheard-of transaction, and from his pocket produced two ten-shilling pieces. “There you go, a pound for a pound. I'll just switch brooms.”

He hobbled to a nearby druggist's shop with red and purple glass jars in the window; a boy crouched in the recessed entryway beside another broom, and the old man took it and left the one he'd been using.

“A new broom sweeps clean,” said Trelawny dutifully when the old fellow had returned.

“But the old broom knows all the coroners,” returned the old crossing sweeper with a cackle.

Trelawny's scarred lip kinked in a tired smile at the exchange.

Trelawny glanced left and right at the coaches rattling past on the street, then suddenly darted out in the wake of a fast-moving hansom cab. The old crossing sweeper followed him nimbly, sweeping Trelawny's boot prints out of the wet road surface.

On the pavement behind them, the dwarf in the slouch hat and overcoat swiveled its covered head in all directions and sawed shrill notes on the violin.

On the far side of the street, Trelawny looked back and couldn't even see his diminutive onetime companion.

“Well done,” he said to the old man. “You … don't get into trouble over this?”

The crossing sweeper laughed. “I may be a prodigal son, but I'm still a son. And how should I refuse crossing to,” he added, pointing at his own throat and then at Trelawny's, “the bridge himself?”

Trelawny pursed his lips irritably at the reminder, but he nodded and hurried away up Queen Street, the narrowest of the streets that met at the Seven Dials.

He remembered this area of the City as it had been in the late 1830s, before the track for New Oxford Street had been leveled through the tangled courts and densely packed houses of the St. Giles rookery. He smiled and softly hummed an old song as he hurried along the crowded pavement, thinking of streets and houses that were just memories now—Carrier Street, with Mother Dowling's undiscriminating lodging house… Buckeridge Street, where lords and vagabonds mingled in Joe Banks's Hare and Hounds public house… Jones Court off Bainbridge Street, where Trelawny had once drunkenly surprised a roomful of his enemies by riding a donkey into their midst…

Trelawny's eyes were relaxed in a wide-focus stare, and his hands swung loosely at his sides, the fingers slightly spread. He stepped into an alley on his right, and though there was scarcely six feet of pavement between the windows and doors of the buildings on either side, dozens of figures moved in the shadows. Many were young children huddled around adults who might be their parents and who appeared to be offering broken trinkets for sale on tables set up against the black brick walls, but most of the inhabitants of the alley seemed to be idlers, men who were of working age but who had no evident occupation.