Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves Page 55

"Mere de Dieu!" she exclaimed, halting. "What are you doing?"

"Get over here!" yelled Trelawny, tucking the pistol away.

Johanna hustled her father to the far edge of the roof where Trelawny was waiting impatiently, and then the four of them climbed over the low wall and dropped six feet into a narrow snow-filled gully between two projecting gables.

The footprints and handprints of the Larks were visible in the snow to the left, and had presumably extended up the shingle slope on that side before the shaking of the earthquake, but Trelawny led them through the knee-deep snow the other way, up and between a pair of cupolas and down into another snow-choked trough, this one thickly hazed with black smoke from a rank of chimneys at the downhill end.

Crawford was coughing before they had moved three paces, and when Trelawny stopped, Johanna yelled, "Get us out of this smoke!"

"In a minute," the old man called back hoarsely. "The smoke will repel the wasps, and they're how he sees."

From somewhere behind among the slopes and peaks and chimneys, Johanna heard again the nearly musical Where where where? Had Trelawny's pistol ball missed the man with the sticks?

"Christina Rossetti - " began Trelawny, then paused to cough himself before going on, "blinded him seven years ago."

Crawford managed to choke out, "Can we - get down this way?"

Johanna could hardly see her companions through the stinging billows of smoke.

"We can get farther away," said Trelawny. "I don't know about down. Follow me."

Beyond the next gable ridge, blessedly out of the worst of the smoke now, they found a row of windows overlooking Whitefriars Street extending away to their right, and the sills were a foot-wide stone ledge over the sheer drop. Trelawny began shuffling along it, facing the building and edging to his left, gripping the eaves that projected at shoulder height above the windows. Over the sighing of the wind, Johanna could faintly hear the rattle of wagons and carriages eight floors below.

Johanna quickly unstrapped the wobbly pattens from her boots and saw her mother doing the same. They wouldn't fit in the pocket of her coat, so she dropped them on the roof.

Then, her ears ringing with fright, she shuffled out onto the ledge after the old man, her gloved hands holding tightly to the eaves and her boots scuffing in the tracks Trelawny's had cleared in the snow. Her father was right behind her.

"Hang on," she said to him over her right shoulder, earnestly and unnecessarily. "Walk carefully."

"You too."

The wind was from the north, sweeping straight down Whitefriars Street, and it kept funneling between her torso and the window lintels and trying to push her outward. Every new grip on the eaves shingles was tight enough for her fingers to feel the grain of the wooden ridge through the leather of her gloves, and she scraped her boots slowly along the ledge, very aware of the glaze of ice.

"Who," she panted through clenched teeth, speaking mainly to distract herself from the abyss an inch behind her heels, "is he? The blind wasp man?"

Trelawny's snow-dusted hat twisted around, and for a moment she caught the gleam of one eye above the scar-twisted lips.

"You should know him," he said, looking forward again. "He's the dead boy who hoped to have his way with you."

"But - he's a blackamoor now!"

"It's paint."

Johanna looked back to her right and was relieved to see the silhouettes of her father and mother slowly shuffling single file along the ledge behind her.

"Why is he - here?" called Johanna.

"Speaking of hear," growled Trelawny, "he's not deaf."

Polidori used to call me Josephine sometimes, she thought. That was my grandmother's name, and she was supposed to be a particular favorite among his victims fifty years ago, though she got away from him in the end.

I'll bet Polidori - and his dead boy - would rather have me than Trelawny's granddaughter, if given a choice. All things considered! I'm in what Polidori would think of as his chosen family, and she's not. He might let the granddaughter go, if he had me.

"Is that why you called me here, in the dream?" she asked, speaking into the wind in a normal tone so that Trelawny might or might not hear.

But he had heard. "Would you have stayed in France, either way?"

She shuffled along after him, tense and careful, without answering.

No, she thought, even if I'm just back here to be a red flag to distract a devil bull from a young girl, I'll do it, I'll be that. I can't bear to think of another girl going through what I went through.

"You're still a bastard," she said.

"Now and forevermore," Trelawny agreed. He had halted, his cape blowing around him more violently now. "We're at the corner," he said. "We can't go any farther."

At that, Johanna's resolutely sustained control deserted her. Can't go any farther? Her arms and legs tingled with sudden fright, and the ledge seemed narrower - the way back to the gable roof and the smoky chimneys seemed impossibly long and precarious, and her mother and father were blocking the way and might panic and refuse to move - !

And what if the earthquake wasn't quite finished?

Breathing rapidly, she gripped the slanting eaves in front of her with no intention of ever letting go.

"So," said Trelawny, "we'll take the stairs down." He swung one leg back, out over Whitefriars Street so far below, and then drove his knee forward into the top of the windowpane in front of him.

It shattered inward, the noise muffled and blown away by the wind.

Johanna realized that the first person to climb in would have no one to grab his hands and clothes while he crouched, but Trelawny let go of the eaves and squatted on the icy ledge with no evident qualms, and in the moment before he would have tipped over backward he reached out with his right hand, broke a wedge of glass out of the window frame, and then gripped the frame just as his weight came on it. Then his left hand gripped the opposite side and he hiked his legs forward into the dark room beyond. He disappeared inside, and she heard his boots knock on a wooden floor.

A moment later his squinting white-bearded face and one hand were back out in the wind.

"A little farther, child," he said.

"I'm right behind you," came her father's strained voice.

In her panicky state it seemed suicidal to release her iron grip, but Johanna exhaled and took a deep breath, and was able to let go of the eaves she was clinging to and reach out to take hold of the one over Trelawny; the move made ice water of her guts, but she gritted her teeth and followed it with a shuffle forward, and then Trelawny had a firm hold of her waist.

"Lift your feet," he said.

She did, and a moment later she was standing beside the old man in an unlighted slant-ceilinged room, hugging him and trembling.

"Still a bastard," she whispered. He patted the top of her hat and then turned to the window to help her father in.

When all four of them were safely in the room, peering nervously at the cobwebby banks of wooden filing cabinets that hid all the walls, her father finally took off his hat and glared at Trelawny.

"Did you mean to trade Johanna for your granddaughter?"

"Keep - your voice down," said Trelawny, panting. "We're trespassing here, wherever this is." He flexed his shaking fingers. "No, you fool, I don't want that thing to have any bride at all. You think I want London destroyed? But I'm eighty-four years old - I can't sprint across rooftops anymore, or swim the river, or - and your daughter knows his places."

McKee went to the short door and opened it; after peering into the hallway beyond, she shut the door and stepped back to the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. "Nobody about. But do let's be quiet." She turned to Trelawny, and the expression on her narrow face was one of concern. "You love your granddaughter."

"I wouldn't go that far," said the old man. He lowered himself carefully to the floor and stretched his legs out. "Ah! I've only seen her twice, and the second time was when her mother was ordering me out of her house. Still, she's a nice child." He sighed. "It's more that she's my granddaughter, you see."

"You ... care about her, then, as much as you care about anything."

Trelawny shrugged and nodded. "That sums it up."

"Let my husband cut that stone out of your throat."

Trelawny smiled at McKee. "No."

"You'll be saving two girls, Johanna here and your granddaughter, this girl Rose."

"There's other ways to stop Polidori," said Trelawny irritably, "without killing me."

"My husband is a skilled surgeon - "

Trelawny raised a hand to interrupt her. "And we need to find Rose in any case," he said. "We can't leave her clean but down a well somewhere." He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "We need to get hold of the damned Rossettis again."

Johanna sat down too. "I am helping in this," she told her parents as she brushed out her short brown hair with her gloved fingers. "I can't not."

Crawford sighed and joined them on the floor. "The Rossettis? Are they still alive? What can they do?"

Trelawny lowered his hands and stared at the dim ceiling. "Five years ago! - I gave William Rossetti a protection. He had put together a book of Shelley's poems, and I knew Shelley, and I helped William with the book and got to know him. I admire him, he's a friend. And he was thinking about asking a woman to marry him, and he had ... no conception of the peril he'd be putting her into, much less any children they might have. His brother and sisters knew, and I suppose they tried to tell him, but he was skeptical. Scientific. So I gave him my piece of Shelley's jawbone, scorched from the funeral pyre. It deflects the attention of ... those things."

Johanna blinked at him. "You never offered me that."

"I thought you were off to America. If you'd all just go to America and stay there, I wouldn't have all these problems."

"You wouldn't have problems!" said Crawford, and he began coughing again.

"So William has the Shelley jawbone?" said McKee quickly.

"That's right. He gave it back to me at first, after showing it around to his friends as if it were a - a morbid relic or souvenir - he told me he really had no use for it. It was unsanitary. But three years ago he finally did get married, and his wife started having nightmares, when she could sleep at all, and their first child miscarried, and her brother whom they were both fond of flopped down dead at the age of nineteen - and William came back to me then, and begged me to give it back to him! I did, and now his wife's recovered and he's got a baby daughter who seems healthy."

"'London destroyed,'" echoed Crawford belatedly. "How would the dead boy destroy London, just by getting a bride?"

"The dead boy is a child, or product, at any rate, of Miss B.," said Trelawny. "You remember her, I'm sure! She had largely assumed that poor woman Rossetti married, Dizzy or some such name; you remember her funeral. And if Polidori can raise up from the dead a girl who's a member of his family - and he's choosy about that! - the two can, if we stretch the term, marry."

McKee started to interrupt, but Trelawny frowned and went on, "The thing that is Miss B. is British, as British as the Cotswold Hills; in a sense she is the Cotswold Hills! And the thing that is Polidori is European, specifically Alpine. The offspring of their families, of their continents, would exert an actual physical tug across the Channel." He nodded at Crawford. "Earthquake."

"To destroy London?" said Crawford. "There are never earthquakes in London." He paused. "Well, until today."

"A minor local one," agreed Trelawny, "just from your daughter and the dead boy being in proximity. And Rossetti's house shook, if you recall, when they were briefly in proximity in his bedroom seven years ago! And she, Miss B., destroyed London with an earthquake eighteen hundred years ago, when her resurrected British daughter gave birth to a child, so to speak, by a resurrected Roman soldier. She'd very much like to do it again."

"Did the ... child live?" asked McKee.

"The child was the earthquake," said Trelawny. "It lived less than a minute."

Johanna could see that her parents didn't believe this story, but she remembered a vision she'd had seven years ago, in which astronomically vast wheels had pulled a city apart, rupturing underground rivers and toppling towers.

"I don't have those hide shoes anymore," she said. "Let's get this jawbone before sundown."

CHAPTER TWO

Venus-cum-Iris Mouse

From shifting tides set safe apart,

In no mere bottle, in my heart

Keep house.

- Christina Rossetti, "My Mouse"

IN THE DIMMING daylight to the west, Christina Rossetti could see the Charing Cross Hotel and railway station, and she remembered the Hungerford Market that had stood where the hotel and railway station were now.

Her dress, shawl, and bonnet were black.

"Oh, I've outlived my London," she said, turning to William, who was holding her elbow. "With Maria gone, I feel like a ghost myself. This modern London is for people like your new son, not for me."

They were here so that she could show him the spot where she had talked with their father's ghost fourteen years earlier, and the two of them were standing below the central arch of the York water gate - but the stairs that had once led her down to the watermen's shed on the river shore now ended, after only two steps, at a wide gravel pavement, beyond which stretched a broad landscape of snow-covered lawns and paths. The new Victoria Embankment had pushed the river shore a hundred yards out from this spot, and from here she couldn't see the water at all.