Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 48

"It's about noon," said McKee, "and our footprints have been erased. Are you still with us, Sister?"
Christina had been leaning against a post-box, but now she took a deep breath and stepped away from it and took a fresh grip on the handle of her umbrella.
"I used to walk for miles," she said, "when I was a little girl." She tilted her head, as if listening. "And I don't feel his attention!"
Johanna held her hand out in the rain from under the gleaming umbrella. "I don't either, right now."
McKee nodded. "On to Dudley Street."
"I've heard of Dudley Street," Johanna said.
"It's good enough in the daytime," said McKee, starting forward, "though I'd have had us dress less grand."
Their way led them down a narrow side street where children and goats huddled in the shelter of eaves far overhead, and open doorways let out gruff voices and the smells of beer and dubious cooked meats, and then McKee guided them down a cross street to the left.
The houses on this street were all of blackened brick with haphazard ironwork over the windows, and a lone hansom cab moving down it was having to proceed slowly because of the multitude of shirtless boys kicking a ball around in the rain; they had marked out some intricate pattern on the street in white stones and seemed to be trying to kick the ball in a particular zigzag course across it.
Crawford noticed the recessed squares in the pavement only when he saw McKee crouch beside one, her blue silk dress trailing in the puddles, and wiggle a short pole that stood up from it.
After a moment a square of brown canvas was pulled aside from below, and Crawford saw that it had blocked a hole, and a squinting bearded face was now peering up out of it.
"We need translator shoes," McKee said, leaning forward to politely hold her umbrella over the hole. "The hide kind."
Crawford thought most shoes were made of hide, but the man seemed to comprehend a distinction.
"Farther up the street, under the shrouded cross," he said, jerking his head to the east, "for hiding shoes. And may God have mercy on you."
The bearded head withdrew down the hole, and the canvas cover was fumbled back into place and secured again from below.
Christina glanced up and down the unsavory street. "Perhaps this isn't a good idea after all," she said timidly.
"We're bringing your blood," said McKee, straightening up, "not God's. Come on."
But two of the boys who had been playing ball stepped in front of McKee now, and Crawford saw that they were older than the others - their cheeks were lined, and their chins were dark with whiskers.
"You two," said one of them, pointing at Christina and Johanna, "you got the smell of stony blood on you."
The other boy pulled what appeared to be a rough oval stone out of his pocket, and Crawford stepped in front of Johanna - but when the boy held it out on his palm, Crawford saw that it was some sort of oyster.
Rain was still thrashing down onto the puddled gravel of the street. The oyster opened, and a hollow voice clearly came out of it: "Some of your blood," it said.
The skin of Crawford's face seemed to tighten, and he found that he and his companions had all taken an involuntary step back.
"They've got a ghost in that oyster," said McKee. Crawford noticed that her knife was in her hand, and then he saw that Johanna had drawn her own blade from under the pink velveteen coat - but the two boys now pulled knives of their own from the backs of their waistbands.
"We heal fast when Mister Clammo gets fresh stony blood," said the boy with the oyster in his free hand.
Crawford braced himself to spring at the boys and try to block their blades with his gloved hands, but Christina Rossetti stepped forward - and pursed her lips and began to whistle.
Even in this tense crisis, the whistled melody jarred Crawford with its abrupt changes of key and its apparent distortions of some long-familiar tune...
No one moved as the shrill notes batted between the close black housefronts, and the only thought Crawford could hang on to was the bizarre idea that the very raindrops were halted in the air overhead.
And the oyster convulsed right out of its shell and fell with a tiny splash at the boy's feet. The rain came hammering down.
The boy crouched to pick up the limp white thing, while his companion stepped back uncertainly.
"Be damned," said the first boy. "It's dead!"
"Yes," agreed Christina with a cold smile. "And I know more stopping melodies. Shall I whistle another?"
The first boy let the white blob fall to the mud again, and then both of them were running away.
McKee and Johanna had tucked their knives away, and McKee was again leading the way forward.
"Where did you learn that?" she muttered over her shoulder.
Christina was stepping along at a more lively pace now. "From the girls at the Magdalen," she said breathlessly. "After your time, it may have been."
"Who ... wrote that terrible music?"
"Nobody seemed to know." Christina shrugged. "Some mute, inglorious Merlin."
"That must be the shrouded cross," said Johanna, her hand pointing ahead from under her umbrella.
Crawford looked in that direction and saw what at first appeared to be a wet cloth kite hanging from an old iron bracket high up on a brick wall, and a moment later he realized that it was a large crucifix draped in clinging linen.
In the street at the foot of the old lightless house was another of the canvas-blocked holes.
Johanna tilted back her umbrella and looked through narrowed eyes at Christina. "You and I should flip a coin," she said. "Both of us need to hide from him."
Christina raised her shoulders in a shiver, and McKee said, "No, a reflection of Sister Christina attached to her wouldn't accomplish anything."
"But it was a generous thought," said Christina.
McKee crouched and again wiggled a post beside this canvas cover, and this time, since they were farther away from the street-ball game - ominous in memory now, with its arcane patterns - Crawford heard a bell clang somewhere below the canvas.
Grimy fingers poked up from under the canvas, and a moment later it had been pulled aside to reveal a lean, bone-pale face and magnified eyes blinking behind two pairs of spectacles, one jammed in front of the other.
"You be wantin' to hide from God?"
"A god," said McKee. "We brought our own Eucharist."
The face bobbed. "There's still a corkage fee."
The man tucked the cover aside and scuffed back down a ladder, out of sight.
Crawford shrugged out of his frock coat and laid it in the mud beside the square hole, then knelt on it and felt around with his boots for the top rung of the ladder; when he found it, he grinned reassuringly at Johanna and began climbing down; and as the gray daylight above was cut off, replaced by flickering lamplight from below, he was uncomfortably reminded of the tunnels under Highgate Cemetery.
The cellar floor was spongy wood planks that made sucking sounds when he stepped away from the ladder to give McKee room, and a mismatched couple of kerosene lamps on a low table threw a yellow glare across shelves of boots and shoes, all very well worn. Hammocks were hung on the other side of the chamber, and Crawford saw several wide-eyed children in them gaping at him. A dozen crude straw dolls, perhaps the work of the children, were hung at various heights from the uneven ceiling and jiggled in the windless stale air.
After McKee, Christina climbed carefully down the ladder, her handbag swinging, gasping as each boot found a new rung and then not feeling for the next until her other boot had been firmly planted beside it. When at last she stood on the yielding wooden floor, she sighed deeply and wrinkled her nose at the ammonia-and-curry smell of the cellar.
Johanna came hopping down last, holding Crawford's muddy coat.
All their clothes were dripping, but Crawford didn't see that it would matter here.
"I'm known as Beetroot," the man said cheerfully. "I don't want to know who you people are."
"We need a pair of shoes for the girl," Crawford said. He was watching the hanging dolls and found that he was nearly whispering. "And the, the wine to prime them with is" - he went on, gesturing at Christina - "in her veins."
"Oh? Oh!" The man frowned and took off both pairs of spectacles and then put them on again, reversed, and he waved the spread fingers of both hands rapidly in front of his face and peered at Christina and Johanna through the shaking fans of them. Finally he lowered his hands and said to Christina, "Which one did you redeem?"
"Which ... one?" she asked weakly.
"There are only two sustaining originals, darling," Beetroot said.
Christina glanced at Crawford, who shrugged and nodded, and then she looked down at the soggy floor. Very quietly, she said, "The, uh, male one."
"Ah, the male one," said Beetroot, "the European one! Yes, I'll take a measure more of blood than ordinary, enough to make three pairs. No, four pairs, counting the pair for your girl." He rubbed his bony hands together. "I'll have my brats wear the others, to keep 'em from cooling off until I can sell them. People postpone hiding from God, or argue about my price for it, but I know three people who will pay quite a lot to hide from him." He grinned at Crawford. "The cost to you will be much less."
"No," said Crawford, "this woman isn't a - a cask for you to draw from! I've got money, I'll pay for the standard - "
"You haven't got as much as these fellows will pay, I assure you." The man's eyes rolled behind the doubled lenses.
Crawford opened his mouth to argue, but Christina shook her head at him and gripped Johanna's shoulder. "I owe it," she said.
Crawford sighed. "How much do I pay?"
"Since you're providing me with surplus product," said Beetroot judiciously, "make it one ha'penny - just enough so that you've committed yourself."
Crawford dug in his pocket and gave the man a ha'penny coin. Committed myself, he thought - to what, in whose record?
The man turned away and opened an incongruously polished wooden box on the table by the lamps and lifted out a little silver bowl, a short wooden stick, and a tool like a screwdriver with a small perpendicular flange half an inch from the pointed tip.
A fleam and a bloodstick and a bleeding bowl, thought Crawford, much like what I've got back home in my surgery!
"I thought you ordinarily worked with consecrated wine?" he asked suspiciously.
"True, lad, but I needs must mix it every time with the blood of a man born in the river, underwater." He had laid the tools down now and begun to roll up his ragged sleeve, and he held his right arm out toward Crawford. The inside of his elbow was hatched with white scar tissue. "Such as myself. Collision on the river in '25 - my mother drowned, but they saved me." The man looked up at him and grinned. "Ordinarily I charge a good deal more than a ha'penny for this." He turned toward the hammocks and called, "Andrew! Come tap the fleam!"
Christina was staring wide-eyed at the blade of the fleam, and she wasn't reassured when a barefoot child came slapping up and picked up the instruments with grimy hands.
"Wait, I can do it," said Crawford hastily, "for you and the lady here. I've done phlebotomies on more horses than there are men in the moon."
"And I've had phlebotomies," said Christina faintly. Her eyes fixed on Crawford's. "Yes, I'd rather you did it."
Andrew immediately returned to his hammock, and Beetroot shrugged.
"Johanna," said Crawford, "can you hold the bowl?"
"Certainly," she said, picking it up. She seemed brightly interested in the whole procedure.
More to reassure Christina than from consideration of the man's health, Crawford lifted the glass chimney from one of the lamps and held the fleam blade in the flame until it was black; then he replaced the chimney and waved the blade in the air for a few moments to cool it off.
"Er... Adelaide," he said, "would you hold his elbow out?"
McKee gripped Beetroot's arm with both hands, presenting the inside of the elbow. The man was grinning, apparently at the unprecedented elaborateness of it all.
Crawford held the blade up, squinting at it. "You might not want to watch, Miss Christina."
"Squeamishness," she said, "is one thing I don't suffer from."
"Is there any liquor?" Crawford asked. "To clean the skin," he added when Beetroot gave him an impatient look.
"Oh. Bottle of gin under the table." The man laughed. "Clean the skin, is it!"
"Johanna, if you would. A splash on his elbow right over the vein, and then scrub it a bit with your handkerchief. And then hold the bowl under."
The girl did as he said, afterward absently tipping the bottle up for a mouthful before setting it on the table. The sharp juniper smell filled the cellar, and the straw figures hanging from the ceiling seemed to dance more vigorously in the still air.
Crawford tried to ignore the crude dolls. He laid the pointed tip of the fleam against the scarring over the man's median orbital vein, and then tapped the handle with the bloodstick - being careful to do it very lightly, for he was used to doing this on the neck of a horse, with a coat of coarse hair to get through.
Immediately a line of dark blood ran down and began puddling in the silver bowl Johanna held.
"Andrew!" called Beetroot. "Come watch as he does it to this woman. This is how you do it, not like you're driving a nail!" After several seconds, he unfastened a pin one-handed from his shirt and deftly poked it through the cut in his pale skin, and then folded his arm. "That's plenty."