Hide Me Among the Graves

the balcony.

He pitched the cigar out toward the river and shuffled back through the French doors into the relative dimness inside, and, before stepping to the bedroom to check on her, he looked at the framed watercolors hung around the blue-tile-fronted fireplace. They were all Lizzie’s — his own work was in the studio down the hall — and on this cold malodorous morning he saw her pictures as lifeless, the figures blank faced and awkwardly proportioned.

From across many years he remembered a disturbing pencil sketch of a rabbit, drawn by his sister when she’d have been about fourteen, and he absently touched the revolver he always carried in a holster on his right hip.

Flickers of reflected sunlight from the river played across the high blue-painted plaster ceiling, making Lizzie’s pictures look as drowned as his drawings of Miss Herbert and Annie Miller would soon be.

The room smelled of cigar, the Fleet Ditch, and garlic.

He crossed to the bedroom door and opened it quietly, but Lizzie was not in the big four-poster bed — she was sitting at the desk by the open river-facing window, hunched so closely over whatever she was doing that her wavy red hair lay tumbled across the desk and hid her face and hands.

“Guggums,” he began, using his pet name for her, but he stepped back when she gave a kind of whispered inhaled shriek and tore a paper she’d apparently been writing on.

Her face when she looked up was pale and thin, but her eyes on him were enormous.

“I’m sorry!” she said hoarsely; then she added, “Walter says your sisters are on their way over here.”

Clearly it wasn’t a visit from Christina and Maria that she was sorry about — though this was an inconsiderately early hour — and he was careful not to seem to be hurrying as he moved to the desk.

She had laid out a large page torn from a sketch pad, and it was covered with lines of penciled writing — passages of her own neat handwriting alternating with a wavering loopy script, the source of which, Gabriel soon realized, must be the pencil that stood upright in a little disk that sat on the paper. Gabriel reached out slowly — Lizzie didn’t stop him — and pushed the disk, and it slid smoothly across the paper, leaving a penciled line. Apparently the disk rolled on confined ball bearings.

“You promised Doctor Acland that you’d give this up. He says it makes you sicker.”

“S?eances,” said Lizzie weakly, throwing herself back in the chair. “This isn’t—”

“Oh, don’t, Gug — you know he didn’t mean the groups, the hand-holding! You know he meant — talking to dead people!”

She gripped the arms of the chair and got halfway to her feet, then collapsed back, panting.

Her eyes were closed, and her eyelids were wrinkled. “Who can I trust,” she whispered, “besides dead people?”

He opened and closed his mouth several times before he spoke. “I’ve done everything I — we’re practically on the river — and—”

“And the garlic and the mirrors,” she said, “and your gun. I know.”

Gabriel looked around the musty room in frustration, then snapped, “You’re too weak to go out to La Sablonniere tomorrow night. I’ll call on Swinburne and tell him it’s off. Mrs. Birrell can make us some soup.”

“I’ll be rested. I should go out sometimes.” Her fingers touched the torn paper, then quickly retreated. “Please.”

Gabriel exhaled and shook his head in reluctant acquiescence. “If you’re better by then. If! But no more of this — this necromancy.” He picked up the paper and the pencil disk. “Let poor Walter rest in peace. You owe him that.” He turned on his heel and left the room, ignoring her weak protests and kicking the door shut behind him.

He tucked the pencil disk into his pocket and squinted at the paper.

Walter was Walter Deverell, who had died eight years earlier. Deverell had been a close friend, a year older than Gabriel and a teacher at the Government School of Design, and it had been he who discovered Lizzie in a milliner’s shop near Leicester Square. Deverell had immediately hired her as a model, and Gabriel and his group of young painters — who called themselves, a bit self-consciously, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — had all soon hired her too, to model for various of their paintings.

Gabriel had long suspected that Lizzie would rather have married Deverell than himself, and when he thought about Deverell — which he tried not to do — he had to suppress a nasty satisfaction that the man had died when he did, at the age of twenty-six.

Since Deverell’s death Lizzie had two or three times contacted his ghost at s?eances, or claimed that she had. But — Gabriel hooked his reading glasses out of his breast pocket and sat down on the couch — Gabriel had never until now seen a transcript of any of those conversations.

At the top of the sheet of paper, Walter, are you there? was written three times in her clear hand. Below the last one was a meandering and unbroken pencil line; Gabriel managed to decipher it as,

there fair ne’er

Well, thought Gabriel sourly, that’s well said.

Lizzie’s handwriting followed it with, What shook me awake this morning?

Gabriel could only read the next line as,

parnassus has its flowers

Very poetical, Walter, he thought. The flowers on Mount Parnassus woke her up, of course.

Lizzie had followed it with, Where can we be safe?

And the pencil oracle had scrawled,

dark river you come soon

Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?

Below that Lizzie had written, Must I die soon?

— to which the meandering line replied,

or never

Lizzie countered, You know why I can’t.

— and Deverell’s faint handwriting followed with,

worse for both you if you stay

Gabriel started to get to his feet, then slumped back. It would do no good to try to reason with Lizzie right now.

“Damn you, Walter,” he whispered furiously, “you want her with you still?”

Lizzie’s next line was, I can’t.

And the last line on the sheet was Deverell’s:

ask his sisters are there in your soon

Gabriel tossed the paper away; it swooped back and forth and settled on the carpet.

According to spiritualist lore, a ghost could only be invited to reach up from the river and participate in this sort of written communication — they couldn’t be compelled; it had to be voluntary. Walter was apparently as poisonously eager to converse as she was.

If converse was the proper word. Morbid malignant gibberish. And Gabriel couldn’t see that the ghost had said that Maria and Christina were coming here.

He got to his feet and walked down the hall to his studio, stepping around stacks of books along the way. When he had married Lizzie almost two years ago — after so long an engagement that everyone, including her, had assumed he didn’t mean to go through with it — he had got the landlord to cut a door through to the next house in the row, connecting Gabriel’s old bachelor rooms on the first floor of Number 13 Chatham Place to the corresponding floor of Number 14. He had moved his bed — the bed he had been born in — to the newly acquired bedroom where Lizzie now sat, but he hadn’t shifted his studio.

Stepping now into the wide, high-ceilinged room, he let his eyes play over the canvases leaning in stacks and the sketches tacked to the walls.

He owed three paintings to the estate of a deceased patron — three paintings or the return of the 714 pounds the patron had advanced to him — but all he had been doing was portraits of Lizzie. It was Lizzie’s sad face in every picture, looking in every direction but straight at the viewer.