Hide Me Among the Graves

and this reflex now brought that icy moment forcefully to mind.

Now the woman had glided closer, or else had got bigger. The chattering of the crowd seemed to slow and fall in pitch until it was isolated clicks in total silence.

The woman was taller now, with a stark red light on the vast marble planes of her face like sunset on the highest of the Alps, and the intelligence in her glittering eyes was alien and old, older than organic life. The mouth opened like a rift in clouds, and suddenly he was profoundly cold. The whole world seemed to tilt toward her.

When he had moved — when he had still been able to move — there had been the faintest tug against his cheek and forehead, as if he had blundered into a cobweb, and now his nostrils stung with the acid scent of freshly broken stone…

But it was immediately subsumed in a sulfury reek of garlic; and the rapid exclamations and questions all around crashed back in his ears, and the dimensions of the room and the people in it seemed to fall back to their normal proportions. Warm air tingled on his cheeks and forehead. Able to move again, Crawford glanced at McKee and saw that she had unstoppered a vial and spilled the mushy yellow contents into her hand and on the carpet.

Crawford’s hand darted to the little bottle in his waistcoat, but the robed woman, once again just a tall woman, had flinched back, and her place at the front of the crowd was taken by ordinary people with anxious faces, and he decided to save it.

But the tall, gray-bearded figure of Trelawny pushed through the press of people then and knelt beside Crawford and McKee to peer at Carpace’s limp body where it lay in dimness half under the tablecloth hem.

“You two glow,” he growled. His lips were distorted by old scars into a snarl. “Did you come here to do this? You must be mad to come here, even with garlic.”

“I needed to find out something from her,” said McKee. Her lips were firm, but tears glittered in her eyes.

“Did you learn it?”

McKee shook her head.

Trelawny glanced sharply at her purse, though in the babel of querulous questions and shrill advice any noise her linnet made would surely have been drowned out. “You know Chichuwee?” asked Trelawny. “The Hail Mary man?”

“Of him,” said McKee.

“See him.” Trelawny glanced over his shoulder — Crawford followed his look, but didn’t see the tall, robed woman in the jabbering crowd.

“Get out of here,” said Trelawny. “Separately.” Looking up, he said, loudly, “Apoplectic fit. Fetch a physician.”

The crowd broke up then, some people hurrying away and some rushing forward to elbow Crawford and McKee out of the way, though no one jostled Trelawny.

McKee grabbed Crawford’s lapel and pulled his head to hers. “Your house,” she whispered, and then she had released him and disappeared in the dim light among the dozens of agitated poets.

Crawford stood up, and a woman caught his wrist — he jumped in alarm, but it was his client, the woman who had got him the invitation.

“Mr. Crawford, can you do something? You’re a medical man!”

Crawford had the impression that Trelawny looked up at that remark, but he said to the woman, “I’m afraid she’s gone. I believe it was her heart.”

“Oh! How horrible!” She shook her head and stepped back, then went on distractedly, “Old Mr. Figgins is well, by the way.”

Crawford had no idea who she was talking about. “Good, good,” he said automatically, wondering where McKee might be, “tell him we must get together for dinner sometime soon. I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me.”

Before starting away he threw one more glance down at Trelawny. The old man met his eye and held up his hands, palms out, and then spread them and raised his eyebrows impatiently.

Baffled, Crawford held up his own hands in the same way.

Trelawny nodded with evident satisfaction and jerked his head toward the door before returning his attention to Carpace’s inert body.

CRAWFORD DIDN’T SEE MCKEE on the street, though admittedly she’d have had to be very close for him to see her in the yellow-stained fog, and he flagged down a hansom cab on Bloomsbury Street.

As the cab whirred south through the fog, Crawford huddled on the single seat, squinting into the damp and chilly headwind, and he tried to fit the events of the last fifteen minutes into his experience; they were as vivid and loud in his mind as if they were still happening, all overlapped and at once, and he wished his house was farther away so that he’d have time to relegate them — come to terms, see priorities and comparative magnitudes — before meeting Miss McKee again.

For the moment he simply shied away from thinking about the woman who had been with Trelawny, the woman who had seemed to stop his identity, crush it; to remember the encounter might be to reexperience it.

And the old woman Carpace had died there, and he had caused her death — he could simply have knocked both glasses off the table, couldn’t he? But that hadn’t even occurred to him at the time. Even so, he might have supposed it was opium or some similar drug that would only have made the drinker lose consciousness … but in fact, to the extent that he had thought of it at all, he knew he had assumed that one of the glasses had been primed with a lethal poison.

It was to save McKee … but he could have broken the glasses. Instead, he had switched them.

Sweat on his face and in his hair made the headwind even more sharply chilling, but he welcomed the immediacy of it.

Apoplectic fit, heart attack, those were plausible — no one had seen him switch the glasses. And even if someone had, what business did Carpace have putting poison in a wine glass? And mightn’t Crawford simply have a habit of idly moving objects around…?

Hidden away under layers of cloth, his heart was shaking inside his ribs.

The woman with Trelawny had been like the moon falling out of the sky onto him—

He took a deep breath and held it, and when he exhaled, he told himself that the evening’s scenes were falling away behind him with the steam of his breath.

The cab bounced across an intersection that he believed was High Holborn. He was just one anonymous Londoner among — what? a million? — in the foggy night.

He tried to imagine that his part in this entirely calamitous business was at an end. McKee had needed his help to get into that ill-starred salon — fair enough, and she had got it! — and now she could pursue her dubious quest alone.

He shifted uncomfortably on the damp leather seat at the memory of having found McKee attractive.

But her daughter — his daughter — was alive; according to that old dead bawd, at least.

I might have a living child, he told himself, cautiously tasting that thought.

Abruptly he remembered that Old Mr. Figgins was the name of his client’s dog, and his face burned now as he remembered saying that he and Figgins must get together for dinner. Did his client imagine that Crawford intended to have the dog sit at the table, or that Crawford proposed to crouch on the floor and share the dog’s dinner? Tomorrow he must send a note—

But the shallow evasive thought fell apart, leaving him with the weighty knowledge that he had a daughter, somewhere. She would be … six or seven years old now.

When the cab drew up in front of his house in the narrow lane that was Wych Street, Crawford had paid the cabbie and started up his steps before he noticed McKee leaning in the recessed doorway, out of the wind.

Thinking of overlapping auras, he quickly unlocked the door and led her into the parlor and turned up the gas jet. Cats, a few of them missing limbs, looked up incuriously from the couch.

“Shall I take your coat?” he asked neutrally, unbuttoning his own. His fingers were still trembling.

But McKee just laid her purse on the table by the couch and pulled the tiny cage out; she peered at the little bird for a moment, then set it down.