Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 25

"Try it again when you're outside. She bit you, didn't she? Before she died?"
Swinburne rocked his head against the stone wall, feeling the mild sun on his face. "Yes."
For a few moments there was no skating whisper along the wall, and the only sounds were the windy echoes of random footsteps and coughs from the nave below.
At last the stranger's soft voice came again. "I had hoped your dilemma was simpler. It's her poisonous attention on you, in you, that reacted to sunlight ... but her attention right now is many times decimated and concentrated only on her wounded self. You have at least one more day, I think, before she'll be expanded enough to have regard for you again. You must leave England within twenty-four hours. She won't sense you on the other side of the Channel, the wide, cold salt water."
Swinburne was looking at his own right hand in the sunlight, savoring the simple warmth of it, and for a moment he let himself imagine starting over again, in France, say, with no history, free of -
"Would I still be able to write poetry?" he asked suddenly.
"Not like you've been writing recently, no. Not like Byron and Shelley and Keats, who shared the affliction you're now free to shed. But - like Tennyson or Ashbless, probably."
Swinburne relaxed and smiled, very relieved that this decision had turned out to be so easy; and he stepped back out of the sunlight, toward the doorway to the stairs. The old man on the other side of the round gallery looked fit enough, but if he chose to give chase it was unlikely that he'd be able to catch him.
Swinburne went down the curling stairway like a dancer spinning and tapping through a very fast allegro sequence.
I will never, he thought, go near the English Channel again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
You will not be cold there;
You will not wish to see your face in a mirror;
There will be no heaviness,
Since you will not be able to lift a finger.
There will be company, but they will not heed you;
Yours will be a journey of only two paces
Into view of the stars again; but you will not make it.
- Walter de la Mare, "De Profundis"
FOR SIX DAYS Lizzie's body had lain in an open coffin in the upstairs parlor at 14 Chatham Place, and though Gabriel had spent nearly every waking hour in the room with her, watching her face by candlelight because the curtains were drawn across the river-facing windows, he had been sleeping on a cot in William's room at the Albany Street house.
Now the downstairs front door at Chatham Place was open, and the black-draped laurel wreath that had hung there for six days was taken down so that the pallbearers wouldn't snag against it when it came time to carry the coffin out. The hearse had not arrived yet, but over the course of the last couple of hours a dozen black-clad friends and family members had solemnly stepped inside and climbed the stairs to the now-crowded sitting room. The flaring gas jets were supplemented with candles on the mantel and on two high, cleared bookshelves.
The coffin rested on a long table against the curtained windows. On a credenza against the door-side wall were several platters of sliced ham and pickles and a huge glass bowl of rum punch, and the crowd of guests was kept moving by people sidling up to the credenza to refill plates and cups. Many of the mourners took the little funeral cakes, disks of sponge cake wrapped in white paper and sealed in black wax with a skull imprint, but these they mostly pocketed as remembrances.
Christina, wearing one of the black bombazine dresses she'd worn for a year after her father's death, was sitting beside Maria on the sofa that faced the coffin and the curtained windows, and both of them were watching Gabriel warily. He was standing behind the coffin; Swinburne stood beside him, nervously fingering his gingery mustache, but Gabriel only stared down at Lizzie's smooth white face.
He had been incredulous a week ago when his sisters had told him where Christina believed the diabolical little statue was located, and then for several hours he had adamantly opposed the plan Maria had devised from new study in the Reading Room at the British Museum - but he had finally relented, and he had even helped his sisters cut out the mattress and lining of the coffin in order to attach to the wooden floor the hammock-like array of etched and stained downward-facing mirrors.
Christina was relieved now to see that the white cambric mattress and silk linings showed no signs of their tampering, at least with Lizzie's pale and oddly undeteriorated body now occupying the coffin. The veil Maria had constructed lay beside Lizzie's head, with a few locks of her red hair draped over it to keep any mourners from getting too close a look at it.
"WHAT THE NEW TESTAMENT calls 'unclean spirits,'" Maria had explained to Gabriel and Christina six nights ago, "the old Jewish mystics called dybbuks, though originally the word was more a verb than a noun. The identity of one of these spirits is not confined to its body but is a standing spherical pattern of radiation, like Faraday's description of electric fields."
Christina had needed to have that explained to her, though Gabriel had claimed to know all about it.
Maria had gone on, "It's a pattern that fills space, and matter is only a - like a cloud, to it. A mirror can cripple one of these spirits by reflecting part of its wave-form back on itself, so that the waves interfere with each other - they break the coherent patterns of its identity, causing arbitrary patches of awareness and oblivion, clear sight and blindness, presence and absence."
"But," Gabriel had objected, "if matter is just a cloud to them, why should a mirror be distinct?"
"It's distinct if their attention is called to fix on it," Maria had told him. "If one of these spirits incorporates a mirror into its particular attention, the reflection occurs. To be sure Uncle John fixes on the mirrors we use, they must be etched, and the incised grooves filled with blood that he recognizes and - and desires - and that he therefore will focus on."
Gabriel had been drinking brandy and pacing around the table in his studio, to which Lizzie's body had been carried. Delivery of the coffin had been promised for the next day.
"Where do we place this mirror - "
"Array of mirrors," said Maria, "for maximum diffraction."
" - This array of mirrors?"
"Gabriel, we must place it directly over the statue, which is the kernel of Uncle John's identity; and that's in Papa's throat, in his coffin. We must line the bottom of poor Lizzie's coffin with these mirrors, facing downward, and then she must be buried directly on top of Papa."
To Christina's surprise, Gabriel had not objected to this. He had nodded moodily and said, "It would be a real acknowledgment, finally, that she is - was - a member of our family."
Both Christina and Maria had stirred, but neither of them spoke; it was true that the rest of the Rossetti family had not ever warmed to Gabriel's melancholy bride.
Without discussing it, all three of them had known that the blood in the mirror grooves must be Christina's. And both sisters had insisted, over Gabriel's initial protests, that smaller etched and inward-facing mirrors must be sewn onto Lizzie's veil too, just in case poor Lizzie had after all not managed to escape the Nephilim's domination.
The blood on Lizzie's mirrors, they all finally agreed, must be Gabriel's.
THE SMELLS OF HAM and pickle and candle wax in the stuffy, crowded room were beginning to nauseate Christina, and she stood up, intending to go downstairs and stand in the street for a few minutes, when she saw Gabriel straighten from beside the coffin and frown at something behind her.
She turned to scan the crowd, and a moment later she gasped when she saw Adelaide and her veterinarian companion sidling over to the trays of food.
Christina stepped up beside Gabriel and whispered, "You and I both made them part of our family." He started around the coffin toward the uninvited newcomers, but Christina closed her hand around his black crepe armband. "And because of you and me, their daughter is menaced by what took Lizzie."
Gabriel exhaled and gave her a smoldering glance, then nodded.
Swinburne was leaning in dizzily behind Gabriel's shoulder.
"Who are they?" he asked. Christina exhaled through her nose to repel the fumes of rum on Swinburne's breath. "I must say," Swinburne went on, "women look fetching when they're in mourning."
"Oh, never mind, Algy," snapped Gabriel. "They're not important." He stared into the coffin again. "Nobody is, anymore."
Swinburne frowned thoughtfully and stepped back, though his eyes followed Christina.
She turned toward the door, consciously put on a smile that should appear at once sad, surprised, and welcoming; and when she felt she'd got it right, she began threading her way through the guests toward Adelaide and Mr. Crawford.
"WE'RE FRIENDS OF MISS Christina," said Crawford for the third time in two minutes. "No, we didn't know Mrs. Rossetti." He was sweating in his black frock coat.
McKee had read about Lizzie Rossetti's death and impending funeral and had insisted that the two of them attend; Crawford had reluctantly agreed when she promised that this would be their last visit to Highgate Cemetery.
They had made visits to the cemetery on four of the last six days - McKee had gone alone on the days when Crawford's practice took precedence - and twice they had even climbed the wall, separately, to search the grounds by night; and they had not caught one glimpse of anyone who might have been their daughter, Johanna.
Crawford now looked at McKee, who had her arm linked through his to prevent them being separated in the press of mourners, and he reflected that she looked a good deal more tired and discouraged than she had when she had come to his surgery at dawn eight days ago, even though at that time she had believed Johanna was dead.
He supposed he looked tired too - he'd been staying up late to do accounts that ordinarily would be done in the afternoons. It would be good for both of them when this last cemetery excursion was done, and the two of them would be able to go their separate ways - though probably McKee would spend the rest of her life monitoring the marble-studded lawns at Highgate Cemetery.
Just this funeral to get through, he thought - and then he realized that many of the starkly gas-lit faces he could see around him also seemed to reflect an imperfectly concealed relief. Apparently Gabriel's friends believed the marriage had been in some ways an ill-advised one.
Through a gap in the milling mourners he caught a momentary glimpse of Lizzie Rossetti's still profile in the coffin, and though she looked nothing like Adelaide McKee, she brought his thoughts back to McKee; one day McKee too would be dead. Though it was obviously true, the thought troubled him with something like a premonition of guilt. Crawford and McKee had not talked very much during the past week's expeditions, but they had quickly established an unconsidered partnership, seldom having to discuss who paid for cabs or coffee or spoke first to a cemetery guard or policeman, always understanding from a nod or frown or gesture what was proposed to be done next.
His thought about Gabriel was echoing in his head - an ill-advised marriage.
And across the room he now saw the piping-voiced little bald gentleman they had met at Christina Rossetti's house last Monday - Crawley or something, his name was.
McKee had noticed him too. "Christina's suitor, Cayley," she whispered, "who disapproves of her work with the lower orders."
Crawford nodded, remembering. Cayley seemed to be registering disapproval today too, blinking across at one of the guests whose coppery red hair could admittedly use cutting, or at least brushing.
From the stairs beyond the doorway at his back Crawford heard someone say, "The hearse is here." The phrase was repeated in muted tones through the crowded room, and people began bolting the remaining punch in their cups and crouching to set plates down against the walls.
"Pigs," whispered McKee, and Crawford shook her arm reprovingly.
"Well, they are," she whispered.
"Artists," he said quietly. "Poets." He picked up one of the paper-wrapped funeral cakes from the tray by the door, blinked at the skull imprint in the black sealing wax, and tucked the thing into his pocket.
An old man moved aside from in front of them, and Crawford found himself looking straight into Christina Rossetti's wide brown eyes. Her face looked both paler and younger by the gaslight, framed by her pulled-back brown hair and the high black neckline of her dress.
"Adelaide!" she said softly. "Mr. Crawford! It was good of both of you to come. I'm terribly sorry I wasn't able to - Gabriel and I weren't able to go with you, last week." She looked at McKee. "And I'm very sorry to perceive that you haven't found good news." She glanced back toward Maria and Gabriel, and then whispered, "But we hope to end, today, the peril that we discussed at the zoo."
"End it?" said McKee. "How?"
The little Cayley fellow had sidled closer and appeared to be trying to hear.
"I - " said Christina, "I'll tell you after it has been implemented. The arrow is in flight, there's nothing to be done but wait - for an hour or two."
The people around them were shuffling toward the door, rocking from side to side the way people always did at solemn events, and Christina took McKee's elbow in her left hand and Crawford's in her right and led them forward.
"You came by cab?" she said. "I'm to be in the coach ahead of the hearse, but I'll get you places in one of the mourning coaches."
MARIA WAS STANDING BESIDE Gabriel now.
"It's time to close the coffin," she told him softly, and she leaned in and pushed Lizzie's hair aside to lift the veil, which was heavy with the little inward-facing mirrors she had sewn onto the inner side of the lace. She carefully draped it over Lizzie's calm face, making sure that it was even and wouldn't be dislodged, and turned away with tears in her eyes.