Hide Me Among the Graves

like tobacco smoke.

“These are mostly Tudor houses,” he said gruffly. The air was so cold that it hurt his teeth to talk. “The Great Fire missed this area. I moved here nine years ago. Which way?”

The bird in her ermine muff chirped several notes, and she said, “East, I think — through the Temple Gate. Where did you live before?”

“Clerkenwell. But I wanted to be closer to the river, after—”

“After Girard,” she said, nodding.

He was startled, and even almost pleased, that she remembered the name after all these years. “And the next street toward the river is Holywell, and the story is that there was a holy well there once. It’s said to be under an inn now — still, a nice thing to have nearby.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “I don’t know how holy it is anymore.”

Crawford blew away a cloud of his own. They were walking past the dark windows of the Angel pub, and the tall spire of St. Clement Danes stood on its island in the lanes of the Strand ahead.

McKee nodded. “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.”

Crawford frowned impatiently. “‘Had a daughter,’ you said. Not ‘have.’”

McKee wasn’t wearing the metal pattens now; her boot soles just scuffed on the old cobblestones under the swirls of snow.

“Her name,” she said, “was Johanna. She died. The woman who … housed and fed us, an old witch called Carpace who maintained a number of girls in a bawdy house in Southwark, she took Johanna away from me and then let her die, of neglect. Cold and starvation.”

They had emerged from the shadowy defile that was Wych Street into the crowded open square around St. Clement Danes, and the sky was a bright blue behind the smoke-stained spires and cupolas and chimney clusters of London’s skyline. Below that close horizon, pedestrians strode along in hats and overcoats, mostly clerks who lived out in suburbs like Hanwell or Dulwich and every morning walked to their jobs in shops and factories and inns of court, their boots now adding a tympanic rattle to London’s perpetual background rumble.

And already the broad lanes of the Strand were crowded with wheeled traffic. Crawford found himself squinting at the horses that pulled the tall omnibuses and cabs and barrel-laden carts, and he was cautiously pleased to see glossy coats, clear eyes, and firm steps.

I may well have treated some of these, he thought, for dysentery or mange or bronchitis. I can’t save people — especially the ones I’ve loved — but I can help animals. It’s God’s job, His neglected job, to save people.

But McKee’s words echoed in his head: cold and starvation.

If this woman hoped to wring money from him with her sordid tale, surely she would have claimed that the daughter was still alive.

“Was she,” he asked, “baptized?”

McKee was looking away, toward the columned gray front of the Provident Institution on the far side of the street, but he heard her say, “I try not to lie to people anymore.”

Ah, thought Crawford bleakly.

Then God had not claimed the child as His own — any more than He claimed all the blameless suffering animals.

“When?” he asked.

McKee looked back at him, her face pale in the ring of white fur. “In March of ’58. She was just two years old.”

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.