“After my surgery hours, then,” he said. “Noon, say.” He was still staring up at the moonlight. “Portugal Street? Near St. Clement’s?”
“Near enough. Within the
“What’s that mean?” he asked. He was squinting at the slope ahead and bracing himself for the last bit of climbing. “You said it, earlier.”
“You’ve got to placate the old … gods or devils or whatever they are, who are confined down here. Protocol.
Churches, thought Crawford bitterly. No wonder I stay away from them.
McKee waved at the muddy slope that led up to the street. “You go first; I’ll follow in a couple of minutes. And I’ll be at your door at noon tomorrow.”
Crawford was already wondering when he might conveniently get his coat and hat back from the Spotted Dog, but he asked, “You’ll be safe here? By yourself?”
He saw her exhausted smile. “Quite safe, thank you for asking.”
He hesitated, suddenly reluctant to leave her. “That watch was seven years old,” he remarked. “I bought it after ruining my last one when we dove into the river.”
She shrugged. “I owe you a lot of time.”
He smiled, then turned away and plodded to the embankment; it was in shadow, but it wasn’t steep, and the timbers and masonry of buried and long-forgotten buildings made climbing easy enough. Within minutes he had clambered up out of a coal chute in a street he didn’t recognize — men were smoking clay pipes on a set of steps nearby, but none of them appeared to see anything odd about Crawford’s entrance into the scene — and after he had walked randomly through several sharply turning streets, he found himself at the broad lanes of the Strand, facing the spire of St. Clement Danes.
And this is where you started this morning, he thought bewilderedly, turning his weary steps toward home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I will keep my soul in a place out of sight,
Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.
CHRISTINA LOOKED AWAY from her gentleman caller, who sat on the sofa a few yards away across the carpet, but her wandering gaze happened to fall on her mother’s treasured portrait of Uncle John Polidori on the wall over the slant-front desk, and so she reluctantly looked back at Charles Cayley, who was leaning forward earnestly.
“They’re so…” he began.
Seconds ticked by on the old clock on the mantel. Christina remembered her father winding that clock every Sunday, in their old house in Charlotte Street.
She sighed, catching a whiff of Cayley’s liberally applied cologne. The tea was getting cold in the pot, and Cayley had eaten all the digestive biscuits. Perhaps his stomach was out of order.
She recalled that she and Cayley had been talking about his recent translation of the Psalms. He had published it at his own expense, and the Rossetti family had charitably subscribed for a dozen copies.
“… savage!” he finished at last.
“True,” she agreed. “God was raising the Jews by steps from barbarism to a state in which they could receive His son, and they
“But to ask a blessing! — in the otherwise sublime 137th Psalm — on anyone who would knock the brains out of a Babylonian infant! I don’t—”
He was off in a pause again. Sunlight outside made the lace curtains glow behind Cayley, and all Christina could clearly see of him was his balding head and his ears and the edges of his beard, but she knew he would be faintly, awkwardly, smiling.
Christina’s mother was pottering about in the kitchen and would not interrupt what she saw as, what might in fact be, a courtship. But Maria would, mercifully, be home soon.
Christina poured out the last of the tea in the pot into Cayley’s cup, and she was about to use the emptied pot as an excuse to join her mother for a few moments in the kitchen when three clanks on the front door knocker made both her and Cayley jump.
Lillibet the housekeeper would answer the door in a few moments, but Christina stood up to answer it herself, glad of the opportunity. “Excuse me a moment, Charles.”
She hurried to the hall, and paused to look in the mirror between two potted geraniums to make sure her hair was not pushed up in the back from slouching in her chair. Maria would not have knocked.
When Christina pulled open the front door, squinting in the sunlight and the winter breeze, she smiled at the respectably dressed man and woman who stood on the doorstep. They were probably students from Maria’s Sunday Bible class, come to ask a question or return a book.
Then the woman pushed the bonnet back from her brown hair, and Christina recognized her.
“Adelaide!” she exclaimed wonderingly.
Cayley, always socially inept, had shuffled up behind her, his old-fashioned tailcoat flapping in the chilly draft.
“Adelaide
Cayley evidently supposed this was the devoutly Christian poetess who did volunteer work for homeless women and children in Bishopsgate.
“Hardly,” laughed Christina without thinking, distracted by the uncomfortable sunlight. Then, embarrassed, she smiled and said, “Won’t you come in, Adelaide? And—?”
“This is John Crawford,” said Adelaide McKee, stepping into the hall and unbuttoning her coat. “You remember I had a daughter? John is the father.”
Christina suppressed a frown — at the Magdalen Penitentiary the reformed prostitutes were told that they must not reestablish contact with characters from their degraded pasts, and this was certainly a violation of that rule. And Christina recalled now that McKee had never agreed to leave London either.
But in the heat of embarrassment, Christina had already invited them in. And she could hardly ask poor Cayley to leave.
She introduced the company to one another, and Cayley was blushing behind his beard, and his nervous smile was broad. Clearly he had gathered that this couple was not married.
“Do join us in the parlor,” Christina went on bravely. “I was just about to have a fresh pot of tea brought in.”
For a moment she thought McKee had tittered at the remark, and she dreaded an uncomfortable conversation, then realized that McKee had a bird in her handbag.
That, at least, was a good sign. “Keeping the Hail Mary dealers busy?” Christina said.
“I am one now,” said McKee. “With, in fact,” she added, glancing toward her dubious companion, “a tall order at the moment.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Christina sincerely. “Honest work, lots of fresh air.” She led the company back into the parlor, and when all three of her guests were seated and blinking uneasily at one another, she leaned through the kitchen door.
“Visitors from the Magdalen,” she told her mother. “Could you ask Lillibet to bring us another pot?”
She sat down beside Cayley and gazed frankly at Adelaide’s companion. Mr. Crawford didn’t look depraved, sitting beside her with his bowler hat in his lap — his dark brown hair and beard were neatly trimmed, and he had
