Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 22

The sitting room above him was unlit, but he could see faint changes in the dimness up there, as if figures were quickly but silently darting about.
"Who's there?" he whispered, not wanting to wake Lizzie if it was someone else. Could Swinburne have come back here?
A draft of chilly air swept down the stairs, and Gabriel's nostrils twitched at the scent of the sea. Christ, she had opened the French doors over the river!
Gabriel took the last steps two at a time, but the sitting room was empty when he stood panting in the dark doorway. Reflections and echoes from the river, he told himself, not intruders. He stepped to the French doors, but before pulling them closed, he looked out at the infinity of fog. A bell sounded out there somewhere, and then after a few seconds another; who would be out on the river tonight? He thought of going out onto the balcony and peering down at the dark shore below - but the sudden, irrational thought that he might see his dead father down there on the sand, blindly gaping upward, made him close the doors with enough force to rattle the glass panes.
He was sweating - because he was still wearing his overcoat. He wrestled it off and threw it, along with his scarf and gloves, onto the couch. And finally he walked across to the hall and the bedroom door.
The door was ajar, and Lizzie was asleep on the bed, lying on top of the blankets and still in the dress she'd worn at dinner. She was snoring deeply.
Gabriel sighed in qualified relief and decided to pour himself a brandy before going to bed.
Then he noticed the piece of paper on the front of her dress. Stepping closer, he saw that it was folded and pinned to the fabric.
Not letting himself think or breathe, he crossed to the bed and tore the note free and opened it.
He read: This is the only way out that will save us. Preserve my family by avoiding them, especially poor Harry.
The laudanum bottle was on the bedside table, empty now. She had always been protective of her family, especially her half-wit brother Harry.
"Lizzie!" He took hold of her bare shoulders and shook her, but her head just rolled limply. "Lizzie!" he shouted into her face.
She showed no response. He noticed that she was paler than usual, and with a trembling hand he took hold of her wrist. Her pulse, when he found it, was slow and weak.
Take the lot, he had told her when he had thrust the laudanum bottle into her hand. His chest was suddenly empty and cold.
He dropped her hand and for a long moment just stood shaking over her, his hands spread helplessly; then he cried, "I'm sorry, Guggums! Wait for me!" and hurried out of the room and down the stairs and out the street door, straight across the damp pavement of Chatham Place square to the fog-veiled lanes of Bridge Street and the house of a doctor.
CHRISTINA WAS ALREADY AWAKE when Maria came hurrying heavily up the stairs to rap at her door.
Christina had awakened at dawn, splashed her face in the water in the basin on the old birchwood washstand, and then padded barefoot across the rug - it had been the parlor rug in the house back on Charlotte Street, cut up for bedroom rugs now - and stared out through the frosted windowpanes at the bundled-up people who were already out and walking along the pavements this morning. Some were clearly peddlers, and some were probably clerks; but after a few minutes of steaming the glass with her breath, she had had to force down the suspicion that some of them were only pretending not to be scrutinizing this house, perhaps peering right up at her window from under their hat brims. She stood and looked for a while, anxiously watching for a particularly clumsy figure under a very wide hat brim.
But she had stepped back, and then heard Maria on the stairs, and she opened the door at Maria's first knock.
Maria had pulled a robe over her nightdress, and her hair had been hastily brushed. Smells of coffee and bacon from downstairs followed her into the room.
"Lizzie," Maria panted, "has died. I'm sorry to just - I only now heard."
Christina sat down on the bed. "Died? Died how?"
"Laudanum - poisoning. Gabriel is ready to go mad. He had half a dozen doctors there, since midnight - Lucy Brown was at the door just now - of course it was William who spoke to her - I gather Lizzie was pronounced dead only a few minutes ago."
Christina couldn't see in her sister's tear-streaked face any of the relief Christina herself felt - but if this death were a suicide, Lizzie might very well have escaped the gross, physical immortality that Christina's uncle would force on her, and been free to take instead the spiritual immortality offered by Christ. Suicide was a deadly sin, of course, but perhaps Lizzie had done it to save herself and her unborn child from a surer exclusion from Heaven.
And Christina was honest enough to concede, though only ever to herself, that she would be jealous if Lizzie were to become one of her monstrous uncle's vampiric brides.
"Was it," began Christina. She paused, then went on, "Was it, does it seem to have been - an accident?"
"'Stina! Of course it was an accident. Don't be ridiculous!" Maria sat down on the bed beside Christina. She took Christina's hand and said, "Probably it wasn't an accident. Oh, it might have been, you know!"
"I don't think it would damn her soul," said Christina, "under the circumstances?"
"True, she was saving her child, and herself - if - if she did it in time."
Christina took a deep breath and squeezed her sister's hand. "Listen, Moony, I know where the statue is. Papa's little black statue."
Maria frowned and shook her head. "What? You know where it is? How long have you - ?"
"I only learned last night."
"Oh, 'Stina, if only we had got it and destroyed it as soon as you knew! It might have saved Lizzie. But, but! - if she was too late, if she didn't die ... clean! - we can probably still save her from..."
"Premature resurrection."
"Yes, by destroying it! With Uncle John gone, I doubt she'd be sustained. Where is it?"
"It's - awkward. I spoke to Papa last night - his ghost, down by the river."
"Christina, you can't - that's not good. That's witchcraft."
"It's spiritualism, science! I didn't ... draw a pentagram, or light candles! He was just there in the shallow water, like - like some sick fish."
"And it was cold." Maria shook her head. "Poor Papa." Then she squinted at her sister. "How did you happen to be down by the river last night?"
"He told me to meet him there."
"Told you how?"
"I was - it doesn't matter. He said - "
"You used that pencil thing that Gabriel took from Lizzie, didn't you?"
"Somewhat. Slightly. I wasn't trying to talk to him, but he - "
"Consulting the dead! That's a sin, 'Stina! Who were you trying to talk to?" Then she nodded. "Uncle John."
"Not talk to, I simply hoped to get more of the 'Folio Q 'story. But Moony! Will you listen? The statue is apparently in Papa's throat. When his heart failed, he put it in his mouth, hoping Uncle John might save him, and in his travail he apparently inhaled it - and choked." Christina was horrified to realize that she was close to giggling, and she bit her tongue.
Maria's wide face was blank. "Evidently burial in sanctified ground doesn't stop him," she said slowly.
"No," agreed Christina.
"And our little ritual, at the Read estate seventeen years ago - " "It kept him away for a while. It let my body expel - " She caught herself and hurried on, "I didn't see him for ... months, afterward, and I had time to get stronger. I might have died, otherwise."
Maria hadn't been listening closely. "But what can we do?" she said. "We can't dig up Papa and - and cut his throat open!"
"He said you would know how to choke him, choke Uncle John."
"Choke him? Choke the statue? What would that mean?"
"Well, he didn't say. Ghosts are never lucid, Moony! They're shy - ashamed. And not very intelligent. But I think they are more honest, with their souls gone. They've lost all their..."
"Scruples."
"Yes. I don't think they remember why they ever kept secrets."
"In his last year," said Maria slowly, "Papa was writing a treatise on transmigration of souls. Mama burned it after he died, but he had me find and translate some Hebrew sources for him, in one of the manuscript collections in the British Museum. I could easily get permission to see those manuscripts again. There was a passage... I remember thinking at the time that it would have been helpful if I had read it before you and I did our... Grecian burial, seventeen years ago."
"It wouldn't ... compromise you? Us, I mean? Spiritually?"
"No, as I recall, it didn't involve summoning or confronting anything. I believe it involved mirrors - and, well, blood - but it was like a trap, or a fence; it would stop spirits, but you didn't have to be present."
"How would we arrange it?"
"I - I'd need to reread the old manuscript."
Christina stood up. "When is the funeral to be? Lizzie's, I mean."
Maria shook her head and tried to speak; she cuffed tears from her eyes and hiccuped, then managed to say, "God knows. Apparently Gabriel is not nearly ready to admit that she has actually died."
Christina shivered. "I hope she has. Died for good, that is to say, with no ... earthly return from it."
"I do too," whispered Maria. "I pray to God that she has."
Christina crossed to the pegs on which her clothes were hung. "I must go to Gabriel. And I need to get a letter to a veterinarian in Wych Street - I've got to cancel an appointment I made for today."
CHAPTER TEN
And watchers out at sea have caught
Glimpse of a pale gleam here or there
Come and gone as quick as thought,
Which might be hand or hair.
- Christina Rossetti, "Jessie Cameron"
SHEERNESS WAS AN old garrison town on the coast, at the mouths of the Thames and the river Medway. It was forty-six miles east of London on the London, Chatham and Dover Railway line, and Swinburne had spent two hours and nine shillings to get there in a drafty second-class railway carriage that he had shared with half a dozen women, apparently the wives of laborers in the dockyard. Swinburne had reflected that any one of the women looked capable of throwing him bodily off the train, and he had left his copy of Baudelaire's scandalous Les Fleurs du mal in his overcoat pocket and had instead contented himself with reading Dickens's David Copperfield. He had even pulled his ridiculous sou'wester hat down at the sides to somewhat conceal his possibly affronting hedge of coppery hair.
He was out in this Godforsaken corner of England because Lizzie had died two days earlier, apparently by her own hand.
A five-minute walk from the Sheerness station had taken him to a railed lane overlooking the shore, and since the sun had only a few minutes ago gone down over the Gravesend hills behind him, and the sky was still pale, he had stood there for a few minutes with the cold sea wind flapping the long back brim of his rubberized hat. A couple of distant figures trudged along the darkening expanse of sand below him, carrying a pole that might have been a mast or some fishing apparatus, and a man on horseback a hundred yards farther away was trotting north along the band of darker damp sand by the gray fringe of surf. Off to his right, near the empty steamboat pier, Swinburne saw a long open shed with what looked like a row of a dozen gypsy wagons in it - and then he recognized these as bathing machines stowed away for the winter. Come June they would be wheeled out, and ladies in street clothes would climb in and pull the doors closed, and then the vehicles would be drawn by horses down the slope and a few yards out into the shallows, where the ladies, having changed into bathing suits, could open the seaside doors and step down to splash about in the water, unobserved from the shore. In spite of the purpose of his quest tonight, Swinburne had forlornly wished that one hardy lady or two might have braved the cold sea this evening; and that, if any had done it, he had brought a telescope.
He had sighed and walked on to the brightly gas-lit Grand Hotel, where he had moodily drunk three brandies before strolling southeast down Broadway, away from the lights of the town. The slow crash of surf against the seawall a mile out to his right was the only punctuation to the steady wind, and the coming night looked likely to be far darker out here than any ever were in London.
Soon the lantern on the pier Chichuwee had told him to watch for stood out clearly ahead of him, and Swinburne trudged up to within a few yards of the foot of the short pier and stood there for a full minute, nerving himself to take the last few steps of this long day's journey. Someone must have lit the lantern and hung it on its pole at the end of the pier, but Swinburne couldn't see anyone.
He took a deep breath now and squeezed Baudelaire in his pocket for luck, then tramped down the booming planks of the pier, threading his way delicately around buckets and lengths of rusty chain.
Several moored boats rocked gently on the black water in the lantern light, but only one seemed occupied. If it were the one Chichuwee had directed him to, it was a fishing boat, and Swinburne couldn't imagine this vessel being anything much else. The grimy, battered vessel was no pleasure craft, certainly.
The boat was about twenty-five feet long. The short mast was bare, and the sail on its tethered boom was furled, but smoke was fluttering up out of a short tin pipe on the deck forward of two wide rectangular holes; stepping closer and peering over the gunwale, Swinburne saw that the rearward hole was partly filled with what appeared to be wet gravel. Perhaps it was some unattractive sort of shellfish. The chilly onshore wind was metallic and sulfurous, with a taint of coal smoke from the little chimney.