Hide Me Among the Graves

“If she is with child,” he asked finally, “as the ghosts and devils claim — who is the father?”

“You are,” said Christina. She too was pointedly looking at the pictures, not at him. “There’s no other human, no other male, really, in the picture. He took your — when you invited him in, in whatever form he was wearing — along with your blood—” She was blushing, and Maria had turned to face the wall. “‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’” Christina finished quickly, quoting Shakespeare’s sonnet about the effects of lust.

“Er, yes.” Gabriel was blushing himself. “Quite so. Well! In that case we need to catch him and kill him, don’t we? Shoot him with a silver bullet again.” He patted the bulk of the revolver under his waistcoat.

“Catch him?” cried Maria. “You’ll damn your soul simply doing that! And silver bullets will only injure him — you need to find the statue too and destroy that. At least.”

Gabriel flinched at damn your soul, for he had not entirely shed the Catholic beliefs of his youth; but he nodded grimly and went on, “If we — if I — can catch him, injure him, bind him somehow — he’s weak in daylight, according to what I recall of your story, Christina! — we can make him tell us where the statue is.”

He looked squarely at Maria. “How do we catch him, Moony?” he asked, using the nickname she had been given in childhood because of her round face.

“Why do you imagine I would know?”

“You seem to know the cost of it. And you read all of Papa’s manuscripts, burned now, even the ones in Greek and Hebrew — all his occult interpretations of Dante and Pythagoras and the Jewish mystics.”

“It’s ridiculous to think that—”

“Do you know a way, Moony?”

Maria got to her feet and smoothed out the apron of her black habit. “Consider it, Gabriel,” she said earnestly as she moved to step past him. “If Papa knew anything about—”

He stepped in front of her. “But do you know a way?”

Her round face looked up at him from under her folded-back veil. “Gabriel,” she said, “I am a lay member of the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, soon to be undertaking my novitiate. I love you, and through you I love Lizzie and any children you have. But if I know a way to catch him, it would be a mortal sin, for all of us, to use it, and therefore I would not reveal it. You know me.” After staring into his eyes for another couple of seconds, she said, “I’ll just go look in on Lizzie,” and again stepped around him.

This time he didn’t block her.

As Maria clumped away down the hall, Gabriel said to Christina, “A clear yes.”

“And a clear no.” She shivered, but Gabriel couldn’t tell what emotion it sprang from. “I believe I could summon him,” she said. “I don’t know about restraining him.”

Gabriel nodded. I imagine I could summon him too, he thought — but in my case it would be the form of a woman who answered the summons.

As before, it would be the image of Lizzie. I wonder if I could shoot a creature wearing that image.

CHAPTER FIVE

She loved the games men played with death,

Where death must win…

— Algernon Swinburne, “Faustine”

BY NOON THE unseasonal east wind had died. With sunset came clouds from the west that hid the rising full moon, and the streetlamps of London were lit early because of a heavy fog that was as much coal smoke as dampness.

Cabs and coaches moved slowly down the streets from one patch of lamplight to the next, the creak and clatter of their passage seeming to echo back more clearly from the housefronts in the opaque night air than they did by daylight.

A slow-moving clarence cab made a wide right turn from Charing Cross Road into New Oxford Street, its two lanterns lighting the driver’s hat and turned-up coat collar and the horse’s flexing back and not much else. A hansom cab would have been faster, but McKee had said that if they were to travel together at night, they must have a vehicle with four walls as well as a roof, and hansom cabs didn’t have a partition in front. Crawford had been happy with the choice, for it let him sit across from her with his silk hat beside him — and he was facing the rear, this time, as good manners dictated.

“I believe the British Museum is ahead of us,” McKee remarked now, peering out at the vague shapes of the buildings looming past on either side. Windows of houses were luminous yellow smears in the angular black silhouettes.

The cab’s windows rattled and the wheels made a loud grinding sound on the crushed stone of the street surface, and Crawford had to lean forward in the dimness of the interior to hear her.

“I don’t know where we are,” he said, trying to remember precisely why he had agreed to this. “Talk louder.”

“My father took me to the British Museum when I was eleven,” she said. He cupped a hand to his ear, and she added, “Oh, for God’s sake, sit over here beside me so I won’t have to shout.”

It seemed, on the whole, ridiculous not to. He nodded and stood up in a crouch and sat down on the forward-facing seat, of which McKee’s crinoline dress occupied more than half. He smelled lavender with the faintest undertone of garlic.

“The, uh, British Museum,” he said.

“Yes. I mainly remember being scared by the Egyptian mummies — I was afraid we might happen to be in there in the moment when the General Resurrection took place, and they’d start to come to life all around us.”

Crawford realized that he was smiling in spite of himself. “Well — on the whole, that would be a festive moment, wouldn’t it? The Second Coming, Jesus arriving to judge the living and the dead? You couldn’t have been much of a sinner at the age of eleven.”

“As opposed to later, you mean. Shall I tell you how I came to be ruined, eight years after that?”

Crawford’s smile had disappeared. “Certainly not, Miss McKee. I think we’re almost at our destination. Do you suppose there’ll be a dinner?”

He had obtained with no trouble from his dog-owning client a note of invitation to the salon, but the note, written on the back of her calling card, simply said, Please welcome into your company John Crawford, a poet, and his guest. No reference to dinner. He had taken McKee’s advice and copied out twenty lines from a middle canto of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, just in case.

She shrugged. “This isn’t my pasture any more than it’s yours. It sounded like more talking than eating — which ought to mean beer, at least. I grew up in the country, in Sudbury. You know it?”

“Certainly.”

“In ’54, when I was nineteen, I was visiting cousins in London; one night we got separated in the crowd in Mayfair. I was dazzled by all the bright gas jets and music and the fine-dressed ladies and gentlemen … as I thought at the time. The elegant scene. And I got lost, and found myself in a dark street with the crowds all somehow gone, and an old woman in an open doorway spoke to me. I told her I’d lost my way and asked her how to get back to Langham Street, where my aunt and cousins lived, though I didn’t know if it was in Soho or Fitzrovia or St. Pancras or what — I’ve heard it’s in Fitzrovia—”

“Yes,” said Crawford.

“—but she swore she knew it and would have her groom escort me back, but first I must come in and have a cup of coffee to take the chill off. I did. The coffee was drugged. When I woke up after noon the next day, I learned that at least one man had visited me. I was kept prisoner for a week and then wholesaled with two other girls to Carpace across the river.” In the dimness he saw her raise one hand and let it fall. “There’s no going back.”

“I’m sorry,” Crawford said stiffly, squinting through the front window into the light-stained fog ahead of the