Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves Page 30

"It would only remind me of lost and impossible things. Everything you and I had in common is gone." She turned and began striding away in the direction opposite to the way she had directed him.

"Adelaide!" he called after her, but she didn't alter her pace.

When Polidori had vanished, Crawford had felt his mind popping by degrees back out to its former extent, like a half-crushed hat being poked back into shape; now one last dent seemed to spring back out, though it felt as if he'd been living with this one for years.

"Adelaide," he yelled desperately, "marry me!"

She hunched in her ragged and fouled clothes, as if someone had thrown a stone at her, but kept walking - and through one last dissolving thread of the compaction that Polidori's attack had imposed on their minds, he caught a final thought from her: So we can have more children?

Implicit in the thought were the names Johanna and Girard.

That froze him in place for a moment; then he was stumbling after her in his sopping trousers, ignoring the horrified cries of a crowd of children leaping out of his way.

McKee had rounded the corner of an old three-story whitewashed public house, and when he came skidding around it after her, she had disappeared.

A narrow lane or alley lay between the pub and a stable on the far side, and he hurried to it, but she was not visible between the old structures and there were no apparent doors or gates she could have gone through. A mongrel dog lying on the path lifted its head mistrustfully.

He walked back to the pub entrance, but as soon as he had pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped into the blessedly warm lamplit interior, several men in shiny corduroy jackets blocked his way.

"Smell too bad, you do," said one of them, extending an arm to keep Crawford back.

"Don't want us to bust you up, now, do you?" asked the other cheerfully. "Just shove off then, there's a good boy."

Crawford stepped back and stared at them while he caught his breath.

"I'm a friend of hers," he said at last. "You must have noticed that she was as ... soiled as I am."

"Soiled women! Not in here, mate. And it's up to her who her friends are."

Crawford looked from one of the two amiably implacable faces to the other. McKee had said she caught birds near here, knew this village - doubtless she was known at this pub and had hastily told these friends of hers to keep him out.

Other men were visible now behind these two.

Crawford opened his mouth and yelled, "Adelaide!" as loudly as he could - and a moment later he was lying on his side in the road, clutching his abdomen and trying to get breath into his stunned lungs, and gradually realizing that one of the men had punched him very hard in the stomach.

He rolled over and saw the man grimacing and rubbing his knuckles on his sleeve.

Two men behind him in the doorway were now holding empty beer bottles by the necks.

Crawford waved and shook his head and slowly got back up on his feet, able now to take short, wheezing gasps.

The men in the doorway watched impassively as he struggled to catch his breath.

"I'm - leaving," he finally managed to say. "Tell her - I love her."

Their expressions didn't change.

He turned away and began slowly plodding toward Kingsland Road, aching and limping and shivering in the cold.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

June 1862

Thank God who spared me what I feared!

Once more I gird myself to run.

Thy promise stands, Thou Faithful One.

Horror of darkness disappeared

At length: once more I see the sun...

- Christina Rossetti, "For a Mercy Received," January 1863

GREEN LEAVES THREW waving shadows on the glass of the window overlooking Albany Street, and through the open front door swept a warm breeze carrying the scent of robinia blossoms.

Through the hall doorway Christina heard William shout, "This desk won't fit through the door, nor fit back into the house. I think we're going to have to break it into pieces."

Christina laid down her pen and stood up, stretching.

"Leave it," she called. "Gabriel can rub grease on it when he comes, and we can all push on it."

William's irritable call came back, "It's not like a pig stuck in a fence, 'Stina, it's - oh - well, you wouldn't be joking about it if you - " He paused. "I think you'll have to go down the steps," he said, speaking out into the street, "and come up from the kitchen - or climb over this thing."

Christina heard a squeak and a hollow dragging sound, and then steps in the hall, and Maria appeared in the hall doorway in a black linen dress, not looking as if she had just moved heavy furniture, as apparently she had.

Seeing Christina's raised eyebrows, Maria shrugged and said, "It only needed a lift and a twist." She looked around the parlor, with its bookshelves and upholstered chairs and framed pictures leaning out from the walls. "The Cheyne Walk house is a good deal roomier than this."

"It's lovely," Christina agreed, her face blank.

Maria stared at her for a moment, then both of them laughed.

"He'll have Swinburne living there," said Maria. "I can't quite see Swinburne and Mama playing whist together on winter evenings."

"And the household finances will be a shambles."

Christina's book, Goblin Market and Other Poems, had been published two months ago, but though it had got enthusiastic reviews in journals like the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review, and its three-thousand-copy first printing was reported to be selling well, she had no confidence that she would reap any substantial profit from it, and she was watchful of the family's expenditures. Gabriel often bragged about making two thousand pounds a year with his paintings, but Christina and her sister and mother and aunt were all still living almost entirely on William's income.

"He'll be disappointed," said Maria.

"Not really. He'll have his noisy friends, and it would impede him to have women relatives about who rise before noon."

Maria asked quietly, "How long do you think William will live there?"

"A month. Then he'll be back here, at least half the time. He can't be falling asleep at his office."

"Still," said Maria with a shiver, "I'm glad Gabriel has moved out of the Chatham Place house."

"Well, yes." Christina glanced at the waving green branches beyond the window to drive away memories of the winter - Lizzie's death, poor Adelaide searching for her child, the waking vision of Mouth Boy in Regent's Park, the alarming Trelawny.

The gambit Maria had come up with from her obscure studies had clearly worked - she and Gabriel had lost their sensitivity to sunlight, and Christina had even gone bathing in the ocean a few weeks ago! And she no longer dreamed of Polidori, in his own handsome form nor as the hideous Mouth Boy.

She had not written much poetry since the publication of Goblin Market - since Lizzie's funeral, really - but at least she had not found herself writing any more of "Folio Q" either.

After seventeen harrowing years, John Polidori was no longer a part of her life, and she wanted no reminders of that darkly exciting passage. On the wall was still the portrait of Polidori - her mother's brother, after all - but she never looked at that section of the wall.

But now she heard a familiar voice from out in the street: "William! Are you moving?"

"Stay," said Christina to Maria.

"That poor man," sighed Maria.

Christina stepped into the hall and walked to the street door. The desk was now out on the pavement, and William and John Crawford stood on either side of it.

"Hello, John!" called Christina, to save William the embarrassment of coming inside to ask if she was at home. "Do come in."

John Crawford climbed the steps and followed Christina into the parlor, holding his hat. His hair and beard, Christina noted, showed streaks of gray that hadn't been there five months ago, and his face seemed leaner.

"You remember my sister, Maria," said Christina. "Can I get you some tea?"

"Miss Maria," said Crawford, nodding. From his salutation he apparently thought Maria was younger than Christina. "No, thank you, I was just passing by your street - "

As so often, thought Christina.

" - and I thought I'd stop and ask if you might have heard anything of Miss McKee."

"Not a word, I'm afraid. But as I've said, I'll certainly - "

"I'm sorry, I know you've promised to let me know at once. It's just that I worry..."

On his first visit after Lizzie's funeral, Crawford had told Christina that the girl Johanna had died, and he had mentioned it again at least twice; Christina was weary of pity, and hoped he would not bring it up again.

"We really will let you know," said Maria from the couch. Though unlikely to have any romantic attachments herself, or because of that, she had enormous sympathy for star-crossed lovers.

"But," added Christina with an apologetic smile, "you must trust me to apprise you of any word of her as soon as I learn anything. These visits, so far out of your way - "

"Yes, you're right," said Crawford. He smiled at her, deepening the lines in his cheeks. "We were allies for a while, weren't we?"

"In a campaign that succeeded," agreed Christina. "A campaign that is over," she added, perhaps a bit more forcefully than she meant to. "My uncle - the devil that wore my uncle - is dispersed in the grave."

"And we part ways," he agreed, stepping toward the hall. "'One watching for the mere bright day's delight, one longing for the night.'"

It was a couplet from Goblin Market. He nodded and walked out of the house, and Maria got up to watch him out the window.

"The poor man!" exclaimed Maria again.

"His troubles now are his own," said Christina. "The troubles we shared with him are ended." She walked over to stand by Maria and watched Crawford's black-clad figure striding away north toward Albert Road.

"Ended," she repeated firmly.

BOOK II

Good Enough in the Daytime

October 1869

CHAPTER ONE

Love that is dead and buried, yesterday

Out of his grave rose up before my face,

No recognition in his look, no trace

Of memory in his eyes dust-dimmed and grey.

- Christina Rossetti, "Love Lies Bleeding"

THE COPPERY LEAVES of the elms within the walls of Highgate Cemetery hung motionless in the still autumn air, but the yellow grass in the shadow of one north-facing gravestone was shifting. The grass blades, which had been flattened by rain earlier in the day, now stood up like a porcupine's quills, and quivered.

Several minutes later a white point poked up from a hole in the middle of the patch of upright grass blades and rose to a height of a foot before expanding out in a makeshift parasol of muddy white silk. The shaft of the parasol was a long splinter of oak, polished on one side, and the bottom end of it was gripped by a tiny gray hand.

With a series of peristaltic ripplings, a wrinkled gray newt-like figure ejected itself up and out onto the wet grass, and it huddled under the canopy of dirty silk as its snake-like lower half separated into two legs.

In the long fingers of its free hand it carried a tiny fragment of broken mirror.

Its ribs flexed in and out for several minutes under its gray skin while its tiny black eyes swiveled around, scanning the clearing under the elms. Then it got its legs under itself and stood up; and the parasol wobbled over it as it took high steps to a rose bush a few yards away.

In a hollow under the rose bush, hidden from the view of any person more than three feet tall, was a substantial pile of tiny mirror pieces, and the gray creature laid this last one down and then hunched away to the roots of the nearest tree, and its spidery fingers began scrabbling in the damp dirt for beetles; when it found one, it stuffed the wiggling thing into its mouth and began chewing eagerly and immediately commenced digging for another.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI WAS STARING absently at one of the ukiyo-e prints that William had hung on the grasscloth-lined walls of the drawing room. The wood-block print, rendered in several colors by incomprehensibly patient Japanese artisans, was a view of a mountain that seemed to be floating in the white sky, and Christina was frowning, for there was something ominous in the idea of a mountain freed from the surface of the earth.

She looked away from it finally and laid down her pen in order to refill her glass from the sherry decanter. Her new physician, Doctor Jenner, had advised her to sleep late, eat plenty of carrageen seaweed jelly, and drink what seemed to Christina to be extravagant amounts of sherry.

Her ailment or ailments were obscure, their only symptoms being a constant cough and listlessness. Certainly this malaise was preferable to the anemia and angina pectoris and nightmares from which she had suffered prior to Lizzie's funeral seven years ago. Sometimes Christina suspected that her present lack of energy and alertness, and Gabriel's failing eyesight and insomnia, were consequences of being deprived of some supernatural sustenance their uncle had been providing ... before they choked him with the mirrors at the funeral.

She sighed and got slowly to her feet, taking the glass with her to the French doors; they opened onto the first-floor balcony, and she blinked through the panes at the Ionic columns of St. Pancras Church across Upper Woburn Place, and at the red-and-gold trees in Euston Square off to the left. Evening had fallen, and only the topmost spires and chimney pots were still touched with a rosy glow.

Her brother Gabriel had found a house to rent in Cheyne Walk down in Chelsea, but two years ago the rest of the family had moved from Albany Street a few streets west of here to this house on Euston Square.