Hide Me Among the Graves

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.

“It was … there,” she told William, pointing at the snowy ground to her right, “about twenty feet below the surface now, where I talked with the watermen. I wonder if their shed is still down there, buried!”

She remembered the old waterman, Hake, telling her, We’re well after being ghosts ourselves, and she shivered now in the cold.

“And I saw Papa … a bit farther on.”

She hobbled down the steps, leaning on William’s arm as he matched her pace. After walking several yards through the snow, she stopped and pointed down.

“About here.”

William obediently stared down at the frozen grass for a moment, then peered around at the leafless trees and lampposts standing up from the whiteness.

“I expect he’s at peace now,” he muttered.

“He was, from the moment of his death,” said Christina. “I’m sure he went directly to Heaven. But I trust his ghost has dissipated by now — certainly I don’t sense him at all here. One of the watermen told me it was remarkable that Papa’s had lasted eight years — and it’s been nearly a quarter of a century now.”

William steered her back toward the arch. “Thank you for showing it to me,” he said, “but we should find a cab and get you home. This winter doesn’t seem as if it ever means to make way for spring.”

Christina sighed and nodded. William had brought this outing on himself, by quizzing her this afternoon about what dangers their uncle might still pose to his growing family. Only two days ago his wife, Lucy, had given birth to their second child, a healthy boy they had named Gabriel Arthur Madox Rossetti.

The discussion had started with Maria’s ghost.

Their sister, Maria, had died three months earlier, of cancer, at the All Saint’s convent in Margaret Street, and the sisters had refused permission to Christina and her mother to view the body in the coffin, or even to enter the convent mortuary. Christina assumed it was because the sisters recognized the ineradicable Nephilim mark on her soul and therefore feared that she would try to capture Maria’s ghost — and in fact Christina had worried about Maria’s ghost, cut off from the Heaven-bound soul and perhaps swimming about disconsolately in the cold river. All fear one another, her father’s ghost had told her, fourteen years ago; river worms now… Ugly, crushed, blind … this waits for you all too, remember.

Christina had no doubt that it waited for herself and Gabriel and William, but she had been unable to bear the thought of even a half-sentient fragment of gentle Maria drifting fearfully in the cold river at night, part of what they had called the Sea-People Chorus…

And so she had been inexpressibly grateful when poor, silly, gallant old Charles Cayley had, on New Year’s Day, given her Maria’s captured ghost.

Cayley had said, with fastidious embarrassment, that he was distressed to see Christina so unhappy, and that he had learned from her that there was another London behind the one he had grown up in. And so he had consulted a series of “spiritualists” who had pointed him eventually to one of several magicians living in the sewers — and, through a hired intermediary, Cayley had had to deliver several cages full of songbirds to the magician in exchange for the peculiar sea creature that contained Maria’s ghost.

Cayley had given it to her preserved in a wine bottle filled with brandy. It was a kind of worm called a “sea mouse,” or more properly an example of Aphrodita aculeata.

It was a little oval thing no bigger than a baby’s shoe, furred with fine crystalline hairs that shifted from blue to green to red as one turned the bottle in the light.

Cayley had provided the magician with various items to draw the ghost to shore, where it could be netted — a copy of a book Maria had written, Letters to My Bible Class, and an old hairbrush of hers, and a sliver from the wooden floor of the old family house on Charlotte Street, which was now a City Registrar’s office — and Cayley had not been cheated. Though the creature itself was dead, swirling in the amber brandy, Christina could clearly feel her sister’s presence when she held the bottle.

Christina kept the bottle in her bedroom, and sometimes read Tennyson to it by candlelight when the night beyond the windows was especially cold and stormy.

This afternoon in Christina’s parlor, William had again obediently held up the bottle and peered into it, though he never sensed any presence of Maria in it. Then he had asked her whether a captive ghost—“I mean a contained and protected ghost,” he had added hastily, putting the bottle down — might be a protection for his new family against the lethal attentions of their uncle. Christina had for three years known about the piece of Shelley’s jawbone, which seemed so far to be effectively serving that purpose, and William had wondered aloud whether its evident power might derive from some fragment of Shelley’s ghost still adhering to it.

Christina had told him that ghosts weren’t supposed to last nearly that long, and she had described her nighttime river-side encounter in 1862 with their father’s ghost; and William had said, “I’d like to see that spot sometime.”

Intrigued by the idea herself, she had got up and fetched her overcoat and shawl and bonnet, and within minutes they had been in a cab bound for the Victoria Embankment.

And in the end she had been able to show him only expanses of frozen dirt where the river shore had once been. Feeling antique and irrelevant now, she let him lead her back to the cab rank by Gatti’s Restaurant on Villiers Street.

“I wish your friend Trelawny had more bits of Shelley to give away,” she said as a sedate old hackney coach bore them back up Tottenham Court Road toward the house Christina now shared with her mother and two aunts. The streetlamps were already lit and made passing halos on the coach’s window glass. “I believe that to some extent our terrible uncle is punishing Gabriel and I for our renunciation of him.”

Six years earlier, Christina had nearly died of some ailment that had swelled her throat and made her eyes protrude and permanently darkened her skin; it was tentatively diagnosed as Graves’ disease, and she had somewhat recovered since, though her hands shook almost too badly to write, and she still had little energy. The following year Gabriel had tried to kill himself with an overdose of laudanum, perhaps in mimic expiation of his guilt at Lizzie’s death; and though he had not died, he now believed that enemies were perpetually spying on him, and he had built partitions in his studio to keep them from peering in at him while he worked. And he took ever-increasing doses of chloral hydrate in brandy in a vain attempt to be able to sleep more than a couple of hours a night.

William was still as responsible and competent at forty-seven as he had ever been, and he was a devoted husband and father — but Christina sometimes sensed a wistful sadness in him, as if he too had chosen to make some never-referred-to but profound sacrifice for the sake of his family.

“I’ll ask Trelawny,” said William now with a gentle smile. “He always speaks highly of you. He calls you ‘Diamonds.’”

The coach had turned in to Torrington Place, and lights glowed in the windows of most of the houses in the row; Christina and her mother and aunts had moved here six months ago, but Christina still sometimes had trouble