Hide Me Among the Graves

Birmingham and Worcester Canal and—”

“You rowed up the Severn?” interrupted Gabriel.

“Byron once swam from Sestos to Abydos,” Trelawny said irritably, “and even in my forties I was in better condition than he ever was. The stories I could tell you about him!”

“Up the canal,” prompted McKee.

“Indeed. Well, I could have rowed on to Birmingham, easily, but I went ashore for the night in a little village called King’s Norton. Means ‘the king’s northern settlement’ originally. And I couldn’t sleep — I could feel someone calling me, in the old melody — so I went for a walk.”

“I know that melody,” said Christina softly.

Trelawny gave her a relenting, sympathetic look. “I’m afraid your poetry is probably very good, my dear. That’s one of their gifts. Byron was a member of the tribe too.”

To Crawford’s alarm, Christina seemed to conceal satisfaction at the remark. But, “You should have gone to a church,” she said.

“Stop it,” said Trelawny mildly. “King’s Norton lies on what they call Watling Street, the old Roman road that cuts right across Britain. I walked out of the village by moonlight, and out in the fields among the old oak trees I found stones, rounded now by weather but clearly cut by man many centuries ago, and then I was in a narrow defile, and — I met,” he said, nodding toward Crawford and McKee, “the woman you saw me with last night. Her husband had died, leaving his lands to her and her daughters, but the Romans annexed them, and flogged her and raped her daughters—”

“The Romans did?” asked Crawford.

“This was a ghost,” Gabriel told him shortly.

“Aye, a ghost,” said Trelawny, “to the extent that a figurehead is a ship. And so in revenge she led the Iceni and the Trinovantes against the Roman settlement at Colchester, and they damn well leveled the place. Then she led her barbarian army to London, and the Romans simply ran, so she leveled it too, with the help of an accommodating earthquake.”

“My God.” Christina was pale, and she nodded. “I know her name too.”

“She told you all this, there?” said Gabriel.

“She was boasting, boy,” said Trelawny softly. “Trying to appear substantial. Ghosts are ashamed of being dead.”

The cage they were in was west of the zoo wall, and Christina looked out across the grass to the south, toward where the creature had burrowed into the ground, and shook her head unhappily.

“She had sold her soul to get revenge,” Trelawny went on, “to a goddess she called Andraste, which was also called Magna Mater, and Goemagot or Gogmagog.”

Christina gripped Gabriel’s arm; she started to whisper something to him, then shut her mouth and just shook her head.

Trelawny raised an eyebrow. “We’re all in the soup, I perceive. Well, the emperor Nero was ready to abandon Britain altogether, but the Roman troops under Suetonius finally caught her on Watling Street, in the very defile I had wandered into. And her army was destroyed, and she drank poison.”

“So did Polidori,” said Gabriel.

“The last sacrament to the goddess,” said Trelawny, nodding. “But by that time she had of course been bitten by the stony goddess, and so she was not permitted to lie quiet in the earth. She — came home with me.”

“You invited her in,” said Christina.

“I couldn’t just—leave her out there! — somehow. By daylight she’s — well, you saw her: dwarfish, imbecilic, has to be covered against the sun. Can’t speak, has to wring notes out of that violin, with her hands in quilted mitts or hidden in long sleeves. When we arrived at my house, this was five years ago, I had to carry her up the hill, near bursting my heart with the effort of it. While she’s ‘alive’ she always weighs the same, regardless of her volume. I told my wife she was a long-lost daughter of mine, and she lived with us, even when we moved to a nearby estate, Cefn Ila. I took precautions, you understand, even though I had Shelley’s jawbone — garlic and mirrors and wood and silver — she was never free to consummate a link with me or any of my family. But—”

He exhaled a cloud of steam and cigar smoke. “My wife was no fool. To make sure of protecting our children, she left me, and I returned to London … with my inextricable companion, Miss B.”

“Boadicea, queen of the Iceni,” said Christina softly. “Was it about A.D. 60 that she … died?”

Crawford tried unsuccessfully to catch McKee’s eye. We saw some of Boadicea’s ancient havoc last night, he thought.

“You’re a scholar, Miss Diamonds. And she would dearly love to destroy London again.”

“I’m — embarrassed,” Christina said, “to have seen her like”—she waved out toward the park—“like that.”

Crawford looked out across the desolate park. One solitary walker wearing a very broad-brimmed hat was plodding west among the elm trees on this side of the frozen boating lake, the laboring silhouette merging and separating from the vertical lines of the black tree trunks.

“She’s far more dangerous now,” Trelawny told Christina, “than she was when she was entirely human.” He turned to McKee. “You had an ave with you last night. Did it catch Carpace’s ghost?”

“Y-yes,” said McKee, “and I went to Chichuwee, as you advised; and I got an answer—”

Trelawny interrupted urgently: “Do you still have the ave?”

“The ghost isn’t still in it,” she said. “I had got my answer, so—”

“You dumped her?” he asked incredulously. “Into the river?”

McKee bit her lip and nodded.

And broke a promise in order to do it, thought Crawford. For revenge.

“Didn’t you—” began Trelawny; he took a breath and went on, “She’ll never willingly answer questions, with a planchette and pencil! Didn’t it occur to you that she knows — knew! — important things about the Nephilim, things that might help save your — what was it, daughter?”

“She told me where to look for her…”

“And she said that the living Polidori statue is in Highgate Cemetery!” burst out Christina. “We can trust Trelawny!” she insisted to her brother, who had grimaced fiercely at her.

“Certainly,” agreed Gabriel through his teeth. “He’s only got a similar statue in his damned neck.”

“Not precisely similar,” said Trelawny. “But you can trust my ignorance. I don’t know who any of you are, nor where you live. Let’s maintain that lack of acquaintance; a good social policy in general, probably.” He tossed his cigar cleanly between two of the bars onto the snowy gravel lane. “Highgate Cemetery. She might be breakable through Polidori.” He fixed a glare on Christina. “How was he quickened?”

Christina turned away so that all any of them could see was the side of her bonnet. “I, God help me, I rubbed some of my blood on the statue — and then slept with it under my pillow.”

“She was only fourteen!” Gabriel burst out.

For a moment Trelawny just smiled gently at her. At last, “A prodigy!” he said. He took his violin case from the shelf and stepped to the cage gate and pulled it open. “I hope you all fare better than you seem likely to do,” he said when he was standing in sunlight out on the gravel. “Never speak to me again. Muster what wits you have, and exert them.”

“And pray to God for deliverance,” said Christina.

Trelawny gave her a withering smile with his scarred mouth. “I like you, Miss Diamonds, so I won’t call you a fool.” He bowed and turned away, and within moments his long stride had carried him out of the zoo lanes to the west, and soon he was a dwindling figure on the yellow grass, angling north toward the canal.

Crawford looked away from him, to the south, and saw that the person in the broad hat he had seen walking among the trees was, though still fifty yards away, now slowly trudging north, toward the broad lane of the outer circle. If he crossed that, he’d be in among the empty cassowary and zebra cages and could hardly fail to notice the cage on the end that was occupied by four humans.

We should get out of this, Crawford thought in embarrassment, onto the lane, like normal people.