Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 6

Nearly four years ago. Crawford shook his head.
Children were dodging between the carts and carriages in the street, some of the ragged little figures seeming scarcely older than this alleged daughter would be if she had lived; they might have been playing some game this morning - they were singing some nursery rhyme that mingled in the chilly air with the clatter of hooves and the textured whir of metal wheel rims on frozen gravel.
Crawford looked back at McKee and spread his gloved hands. "I don't see what I can do. What anyone can do."
"You can get an invitation to a salon," said McKee, "is what you can do, and bring me as your guest."
Crawford lowered his arms. "A ... salon."
"Poets," she said absently, watching the street children. Their narrow faces and bare arms and legs were darkened as if with soot, Crawford noticed, and though they were scampering back and forth in the street, none of the faces he glimpsed held any expression. "Artists," McKee added.
"No, that's quite - I'm sorry, but that sort of thing isn't - "
Under the fur that covered her hands, the tiny bird squeaked four quick notes.
"Well, let's consider," McKee remarked quietly, perhaps talking to herself. "It's not a day for boating."
"No, it certainly is not," exclaimed Crawford in alarm. "Around the church, and back, is enough of a - a stroll this morning. Really, Miss McKee - "
"Call me Addie," she said, leaning forward on the pavement to look intently at the passing vehicles. "I think we can consider ourselves amply introduced."
Crawford winced.
She bit one of her gloves and pulled it off, then stuck two bare fingers into her mouth and whistled four piercing notes very like the bird's. Several men hurrying past looked back at her in surprise.
Crawford grimaced in embarrassment. "I really need to get back to my practice - "
"We're bound that way," she assured him, "just a bit roundabout. I think I may have attracted attention, forgive me."
"Well - whistling - !"
The high-perched driver of a shiny two-wheeled hansom cab reined his horse in toward them, but McKee shook her head and waved him past, then after a moment whistled again in the same way.
This time it was a shabby old hackney coach that wobbled toward them, its two horses contradicting Crawford's estimate a moment earlier of the evident health of London horses; the nostrils of the curbside mare were widely dilated and her flanks were twitching, and she was exhaling twice for every inhalation.
McKee stepped off the curb to nod and wave, and then she turned back toward Crawford.
He stared at the vehicle - the yellow paint on its bodywork was faded and chipped, and the door still carried the crest of whatever aristocratic family had long ago sold it.
"I am not - " he began.
But McKee had grabbed the arm of a man on the pavement, a nervous-looking young fellow with sparse muttonchop whiskers.
"Where are you walking to?" she asked him quickly.
"W-well," the fellow stammered, "the - the Royal Exchange, ma'am, on Threadneedle Street - "
"We're going that way, save some shoe leather and join us as a chaperone, no charge." And as the young man was nodding eagerly and taking off his hat, she tossed a half-crown coin up to the driver and called, "Threadneedle Street."
The hackney cab's door was open and the young clerk was already climbing inside. Crawford stepped back, but McKee caught his gloved hand with her bare one.
He started to yank his hand away, then paused when he saw the intensity in her eyes.
"I don't lie to people anymore," she whispered rapidly to him. "We're in danger if we stay here - those Mud Larks are beginning to bracket us. In their dim way, I think they've sensed what we are, and there's a man they report to. Get in, for the love of God."
Crawford opened his mouth, then closed it and obediently stepped up into the coach. The young clerk had thoughtlessly settled himself on the forward-facing seat, where good manners dictated that the lady should sit, and Crawford hesitated, momentarily unsure of where he should seat himself.
McKee poked him in the back.
Even as he made up his mind and sat down beside the clerk on the cracked leather upholstery, Crawford was regretting this whole enterprise. It occurred to him that this woman might well be insane.
Then McKee had got in and pulled the door closed and shaken it until it latched, sitting down across from him as the coach lurched forward. She didn't seem to mind the seating arrangement. The upholstery and the cloth paneling exhaled smells of old tobacco and stale cooking oil.
"Mud Larks?" asked Crawford in a neutral tone.
"Those children." McKee was leaning back in the seat and peering slantwise through the window. "The tide's low right now, they should all be out in the mud, harvesting." She shook her head. "A boat would have been better than this cab, but I had no warning - we'd have had to get past them to reach the water, and God knows where we would have found a boat for hire."
"Thieving little gypsies," put in the young man beside Crawford.
"But I don't think they can have picked us out," McKee went on, "especially now, in a coach with so much old emotional cross-stitching in it, and a random stranger's janglings." She pulled the little birdcage free with her ungloved hand and peered at the bright-eyed bird, who just blinked around the interior of the coach. "Evidently not."
"And is that a... Mud Lark?" ventured the young man.
McKee stared across at him. "This is a linnet. Who are you?"
"My name's Tilling, ma'am, Arnold - "
"Excellent. I'm Lady Wishfort and this is Mr. Petulant." Crawford recognized the names as characters from Congreve's play The Way of the World, but he was embarrassed that she had chosen the names of villains.
"Actually," he said hastily, "my name is" - he couldn't remember the first name of the play's hero - "is Mr. Mirabell." He added, "And this is Lady Millamant," giving McKee the name of the heroine.
But this wasn't a time for nonsense. He cleared his throat and looked across at McKee. "You said they might ... sense what we are? Er ... what are we?"
The windows were in shadow for a few seconds, and the knocking and rattling of the coach was louder, and Crawford realized that they were passing under the Temple Bar arch.
McKee seemed to relax. "Were you too drunk to remember that thing you saved us from, on Waterloo Bridge seven years ago? It was ... angry seems too pale a word, too human ... about our relations with members of its family. Well, jealous, in your case. Girard presumably loved you."
Crawford winced. In spite of himself, he was remembering things his parents had told him. "My mother and father," he said hesitantly, "were kin by marriage, or said they were, to..." He laughed uneasily. "Well, they said it was to a species of vampire, actually. I don't think - "
"That would have been before about 1820?"
He nodded, feeling nauseated again with the smell and motion of the carriage. He was peripherally aware of Arnold Tilling's stare.
"That's likely why the creature found your family," said McKee. "The vampires were gone for about thirty years, and then about fifteen years ago somebody must have invited one back and blooded it." She gave him an appraising look. "You probably resemble your parents in some way these things sense and remember, like the smell of your soul or something."
What she was saying fit in with things he recalled his parents saying, and in spite of her outlandish statements, Crawford heard the quiet assurance of sincerity in her voice, and he gave a sigh that seemed to deflate him. He was looking away from her at the bird as he asked her, "And they hate us?"
Arnold Tilling apparently took him to be addressing the bird, for he raised his eyebrows and stared with some evident anxiety at the little cage.
McKee said, "They hate us because the ones they adopt loved us - if only in a brief, token way sometimes! They see the ones they adopt as having been part of our families, and these things don't want them to be part of any family but their own. So they kill as many members of the plain human family as they can reach. You and I added to their burdens, with Johanna." She laughed bleakly. "It would powerfully inconvenience them, Mr. Mirabell, if you and I were to marry and have lots more children."
Crawford could feel his face stiffen, and he kept his eyes on the caged bird.
"Not," added McKee after a pause, "of course, that you'd ever consider marrying a onetime prostitute." Crawford heard her shift on the seat, and then she went on brightly, "Have your wife and the other son come back, ever, since their deaths? Have you seen them again? It would be at night."
"No," whispered Crawford.
"Well, they did die on the river, after all, so their ghosts are probably safe in the common crowd that infests the water. Mr. Tilling, you remember how bad the river smelled four years ago? The Great Stink?"
Crawford, still staring at the bird, felt the young man beside him nod jerkily.
"A saturation of ghosts, that was. More the result of cholera than the cause of it! They seem to decay in an organic way, you see, and if the concentration of them is high enough - "
Arnold Tilling lunged half out of his seat and yanked on the cord that rang the bell beside the driver. "I've only just," he babbled, "only just remembered!" He was already gripping the inner door handle as the coach rocked and slowed. "I need to - business at..." - he crouched to peer out the grimy window - "at the Old Bailey this morning. It's been lovely spending time with - "
Then he had got the door open and was already leaning out over the pavement. Cold river-scented air whisked through the coach.
A front wheel grated against the curb, and Tilling evidently decided that the vehicle had slowed enough for jumping.
When he was gone - perhaps falling, from the clattering sound of it - McKee gripped the door lintel and leaned out, squinting up toward the driver. "Carry on!" she called, and the coach wobbled and lurched forward again.
"Did he," Crawford asked when she had pulled the door closed and sat down again, "break his leg?"
"Why, do you treat humans too?"
"Never. God looks after them, or claims to."
"Ultimately, I suppose. Are you and God - at odds?"
"Yes."
They stared at each other for several seconds, and then Crawford said, "Have you seen your daughter - "
"Our daughter."
"Our daughter, since her death?"
McKee opened her mouth - then closed it and shook her head, scowling. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have got - it was unreasonable of me to get angry. I'm glad your wife and younger son are apparently resting in peace. No, I haven't seen Johanna, since. Most people just die, and stay dead."
Crawford nodded several times and looked out the window at the Romanesque spire of St. Bride's. He had to remind himself that all this distressing business really might be true. He had seen what he'd seen, done what he'd done.
"Why have you caught their attentions?" he asked. "I suppose I can see now why the - the thing on the bridge recognized me, but why did it recognize you?"
"Oh, why do you suppose?" He was surprised to see a glint of tears in her eyes a moment before she angrily cuffed them away.
"Girls in that trade," she went on, "may sometimes unknowingly have congress with adopted human members of that terrible family. Even a ... brief connection of that sort looks like trespass to those creatures, suffices to rouse their jealousy." Crawford glanced at her, but she was avoiding his eyes. "A month or so before you and I ... met," she said, "there was a young man, at an accommodation house in Mayfair. Afterward, he seemed ill at ease, more than the ordinary, and he urged me to enroll at the Magdalen Penitentiary in Highgate; he said the priests and sisters there could help me undo bad connections I'd made. I thought he was just another guilty Christian trying to salve his conscience after the fact, after the act ... until I walked outside again."
She shivered. "Right away, as soon as I was out under the night sky again, there was ... webs in the air, and a smell like rainy streets, or broken stone, very strong. Old Carpace had made sure all the girls knew what to do when that happened, and she always made us wear some metal on our shoe soles at night - sometimes pattens, otherwise anything wired on - holed coins, spoons, eyeglasses."
"Really. And what were you - " Crawford began, but the caged bird began chirping rapidly, and McKee pulled a tiny cloth bag from a pocket in her coat, dug a pinch of what appeared to be white sand from it and sprinkled it through the cage bars onto the bird's tail.
"Salt?" said Crawford. "But you've already caught it."
"Don't want anyone else to," she said. "He senses a ghost - it happens from time to time - and the salt keeps the bird's spirit too heavy to catch it." She managed to smile at him, though squinting. "This ave is for me."
Crawford blinked. "I'm sure. So what were you supposed to do? - when the webs and smells happened?"
"Oh - run, get away from the spot they're focusing on, cross the river if possible and hope the metal on your shoes makes a kaleidoscope of your identity and location. Dive into the river if you have to." She sighed. "I got away, but it - they, it - knows my spirit silhouette now. It was another three years before I finally took that fellow's advice and checked in at Magdalen."