Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 2

Christina and her brothers half listened to the familiar talk, and their mother sat at the cleared dining table in the next room with a stack of clothes, stitching up frayed sleeves and darning stockings.
The daylight on the bricks and windows across the street slowly faded from gold to gray, and then the curtains were pulled across and the chandelier was relit, and eventually the clatter of hooves and wheels on the pavement outside became just the fast snare-drum approach and diminishment of individual hansom cabs.
At one point Christina heard the old men talking about the Carbonari, and she looked up from her sketch of a rabbit.
Her father might have been watching her for several seconds, for immediately he beckoned to her; and when she had got up and walked across to his chair, he pulled a folded handkerchief from his robe pocket and handed it to her.
"Hold it for me," he said quietly, in English.
Christina knew that her mother couldn't see them from the other room - and she didn't need to unfold the handkerchief to know that it was wrapped around the little statue, for she could feel the cold of the stone through the linen.
She gave him a quizzical glance, for earlier he had said that he carried the thing around with him now - and he had told her not to touch it. His expression was impossible to read behind his thick lenses, though, so she nodded and tucked it into the pocket of her frock and went back to her sketching.
But her rabbit began to go wrong under her darting pencil - the hind legs and back seemed broken now, and the creature's face began to take on a human-like expression that somehow expressed both scorn and pleading - and when she heard her brother Gabriel gasp at the sight of it, she crumpled the paper.
"I think I'll go up to bed," she said. She curtsied toward the blinking old men but avoided looking at her father, and she hurried from the parlor to say good night to her mother and to light a candle to guide her up the stairs.
UNTIL FOUR MONTHS AGO Christina had shared the slant-ceilinged bedroom on the third floor with her older sister, Maria, but Maria had left home on her seventeenth birthday to work as a governess for the children of a family in the country. Maria was the one who always remembered to say her prayers, and Christina, now alone, often forgot.
Tonight she forgot. She lit a pair of candles that stood on a niche in the chimney bricks, washed her face in the basin and brushed her teeth, but as she climbed into the bed in the corner and blew out the candles and pulled the bed curtain across, her thoughts were of her father's little statue. It still sat rolled in the handkerchief in her frock, which hung now from a hook by the door.
The window overlooking Charlotte Street was outside the tent made by the bed curtain, so she sat up and pulled the heavy fabric aside - drafts or no drafts - and stared at the dimly glowing east-facing square in the wall. She was seeing it nearly end on, and couldn't hope to glimpse stars through the sooty glass, but she was vividly aware of the volume of space outside, all the tangled streets sloping down to the dark moving river, and the vast breathing sea out beyond all the bridges and docks - and then she was dreaming, for under the moon the river and the sea were alive with hundreds, thousands of pale figures waving jointless arms, dark spots intermittently appearing on their distant faces as eyes and mouths opened and closed.
The window rattled, and she was fully awake again. She and her siblings called that dream the Sea-People Chorus, and she hoped it wouldn't persist all night, as it sometimes did.
She preferred it to the visions of the creature she called Mouth Boy, though - an apparition who never appeared to the others, and whose head was flat because it was just an enormous mouth, with no eyes above or behind it. And even as she thought of him she thought she heard his characteristic harsh bellow's breath all the way up from the pavement below the window; it might have been an exhalation of his that had made the window rattle.
It was unpleasant to have such dreams when Maria wasn't in bed beside her! Often Christina and Maria would have had the same nightmare, and been able to hold each other in the darkness and reassure each other that the visions were imaginary.
This night seemed full of ghosts and monsters impatient to command her helpless attention - and her eyes darted to the faint outline of the door across the room, beside which hung her frock.
The window rattled again, and her resolve was instant. She bounded out of bed in her nightgown and groped her way to that corner and patted her hung frock till she felt the lump that was the handkerchief, and in a moment she had fumbled it out, shaken the little stone figure free, and hurried back to bed with the cold thing in her fist.
Blood, she thought - and she bit her finger, chewing beside the nail and ignoring the pain, until she could feel slickness there with her thumb. She rubbed the wet ball of her thumb over the tiny face of the stone figure, feeling the points that were the crude nose and chin of it.
Her father claimed it had given him a prophetic vision of her mother.
She tucked it under her pillow and pulled the bed curtain closed again, and she lay down and snuggled herself under the blankets, hopeful that she had banished the old nightmares and would instead dream of the man she would one day marry.
AT FIRST THE FIGURE seemed to be Mouth Boy after all, for the thing's lips were grossly swollen, as if from an injury - in the dream it limped from darkness into the ring of light below a streetlamp - but when she focused more closely, she saw that the effect must have been a momentary exaggeration of the shadows, for its lips were simply wide and prominent below a pug nose and two enormous eyes. Its hair was an untidy tangle, and somehow it seemed to bear a caricature resemblance to her brother Gabriel.
This wasn't the Mouth Boy phantasm, which always looked more like a wide-snouted crocodile with no eyes at all.
This figure in the street waved both arms upward, and she saw that its coat sleeves hung over its hands, and from the steamy puffing of its breath it seemed to be speaking rhythmically, or singing, though she couldn't hear any sound.
It was standing at the steps of a house, and in a moment Christina recognized the house in the dream - it was her own house, her own front door at the top of the steps.
The flabby white cheeks glistened, as if this thing that resembled her brother were weeping at being locked outside.
"Wait," she said, and she realized that she had sat up in bed and was awake, and speaking out loud in the close darkness. "I'll let you in."
Her heart was pounding and her pulse thudded in her temples, and she wasn't able to take a deep breath, but she stepped out of bed straight toward the bedroom door, letting the curtain slide over her head till the hem of it fell off behind her like a discarded shawl, and she opened the door and stole down the stairs to the street door.
II.
So in these grounds, perhaps in the orchard, I lighted upon a dead mouse. The dead mouse moved my sympathy: I took him up, buried him comfortably in a mossy bed, and bore the spot in mind.
It may have been a day or two afterward that I returned, removed the moss coverlet, and looked ... a black insect emerged. I fled in horror, and for long years ensuing I never mentioned this ghastly adventure to anyone.
- Christina Rossetti, Time Flies: A Reading Diary
That September the summer twilight still extended past supper and the hour for the Read girls to go to bed, and so Maria and her visiting sister were permitted to take horses from the stable and ride as far as the family chapel and back.
The rosemary-scented breeze fluttered the girls' skirts as they rode slowly along the dirt path between the shadow-streaked grassy hills. Maria wore a long black riding habit loaned to her by Mrs. Read, and in spite of her stoutness she rode comfortably sidesaddle on a chestnut mare, but Christina, though she was riding more securely astride a man's saddle, was terrified whenever her gray gelding broke into a trot.
"He's a gentle old thing," Maria called to her. "You can simply relax and move with him."
"I feel like a tennis ball," said Christina breathlessly, "being bounced up and down on a racket. One time I'll - miss the racket when I come down, and I - don't see any way to fall off which doesn't - involve landing on my head." She smiled, but her face was misted with sweat and she felt as though her teeth might at any moment start chattering.
Maria reined in her own mount so that Christina's would subside to a steady walk.
"You'll be returning to London with a much rosier complexion than you left with," Maria observed. "Sun and fresh air have done it."
"Possibly." Christina knew that she had not regained any weight during this week in the country at the house of Maria's employers, and on the few occasions when she had ventured out into the sunlight she had been wearing a hat. Her forehead was always damp with perspiration. "I certainly like your cure better than iron filings steeped in beer."
"You don't swallow the iron filings, do you? Is that a cure for angina pectoris?"
"For anemia, actually. No, they decant the beer off them."
Maria was looking at her, but Christina couldn't make out the expression on her sister's round face against the glowing western sky. Perhaps she was disapproving of anyone giving quantities of beer to a fourteen-year-old girl, even as medicine.
"You must be a very good teacher," Christina said quickly, "to be a live-in governess for such a well-to-do family."
"They rejected another girl," said Maria, "because Mrs. Read felt she was too pretty to be in the house with Mr. Read. I'm employed because I'm not comely. I'd like to have the girls learn Greek and Latin, but I'm only to teach them from the Historical and Miscellaneous Questions - from it they learn things like, oh, when the Diet of Worms occurred, but not a bit of what it was."
"They must wonder what other diets were tried before it," said Christina, smiling. "The Diet of Dirt, the Diet of - "
"Anemia," Maria interrupted flatly, "angina pectoris, palpitations, shortness of breath." They were in the long shadow of a western hill now, and the northern breeze from the Chiltern Hills was cooler. "What is it?"
"Doctor Latham says that puberty is often - "
"Not what Doctor Latham says it is. What do you say it is?"
Christina opened her mouth, and then after a moment closed it again. "Oh, Maria," she whispered finally, "pray for me!"
"I do. And I hope you pray for yourself."
The dark spire of the Read family chapel was visible now ahead on their left, beyond the tall black cypresses and the iron fence of the family churchyard, and it occurred to Christina that it might not have been entirely the chapel's convenient distance from the house that had led Maria to choose it as their goal.
"I try to pray," she said. "I can't go to Confession anymore." She spread the fingers of one hand without releasing the rein. "What would I - say?"
Maria's voice was gentle. "Say it to me."
"I - Maria, I think - I'm ruined!"
Maria rocked back in her saddle, and her mare clopped to a halt. "Ach, 'Stina!" Maria whispered. "You think so? Are you - to be sent away?"
"I don't know. Can ghosts father children?"
Her horse had stopped too, and she could see the silhouette of Maria's head shaking slowly.
"It was a ghost?" asked Maria.
Christina nodded.
"I want to understand. You're saying it was the spirit of a dead man."
"Yes."
"If you've been feverish - "
"Maria, I didn't dream it! Well, I did at first - I saw it outside the house, but then I woke up and went downstairs and let it in - "
"Why on earth would you let it in?"
"It was in already, really - its body, in any case, petrified. Aren't ghosts supposed to sit by their graves? And it was sick, and weeping, and looked like Gabriel! And you and William too. It looked like family - I felt as if I were letting it back into its own house. And I - oh, I thought it would show me visions of my future spouse, guide me there, as it did for Papa."
Maria glanced at her. "Really? I never knew."
Christina just shook her head, biting her lip.
"Er ... did it? Show you a vision of that?"
"No. It only showed me itself."
For a few moments there was no sound but the wind that shook the grasses and tossed stray strands of Christina's fair hair across her face.
At last Maria said, "Was it ... substantial, your ghost?" She waved one hand. "Did it have weight, did the floorboards creak?"
"Weight? Not at first," said Christina bleakly. "Later, yes. Yes." She sighed. "As I diminished."
Maria was deep in thought and absently said, "I don't think anybody would say a ghost can ruin a girl." She looked up. "I thought Papa - "
"But I know." Christina's face was damp and chilly as she made herself speak. "Oh God. It wasn't - he, it, didn't force itself on me."
After a pause, Maria nudged her horse into a walk with her left heel, and Christina's moved forward to keep pace.
Maria said, "I thought Papa kept that damned thing on a special shelf in his room." She looked at Christina and shrugged. "Of course I know. What other ghost could it be?"
"Oh. Yes. Papa was keeping it in the pocket of his robe, lately. He thought it helped his vision. But then he gave it to me, three months ago."
"And where - " Maria's head whipped around to face Christina. "Jesus save us! You didn't bring it here, did you?"
"I'm sorry! I thought you'd know how to ... make it stop, free his soul from the statue, lay him to final rest! You've read so many - "
Maria's eyes darted over Christina's long coat and bunched-up skirt. "Do you have it with you now?"