Hide Me Among the Graves

Street, cut up for bedroom rugs now — and stared out through the frosted windowpanes at the bundled-up people who were already out and walking along the pavements this morning. Some were clearly peddlers, and some were probably clerks; but after a few minutes of steaming the glass with her breath, she had had to force down the suspicion that some of them were only pretending not to be scrutinizing this house, perhaps peering right up at her window from under their hat brims. She stood and looked for a while, anxiously watching for a particularly clumsy figure under a very wide hat brim.

But she had stepped back, and then heard Maria on the stairs, and she opened the door at Maria’s first knock.

Maria had pulled a robe over her nightdress, and her hair had been hastily brushed. Smells of coffee and bacon from downstairs followed her into the room.

“Lizzie,” Maria panted, “has died. I’m sorry to just — I only now heard.”

Christina sat down on the bed. “Died? Died how?”

“Laudanum — poisoning. Gabriel is ready to go mad. He had half a dozen doctors there, since midnight — Lucy Brown was at the door just now — of course it was William who spoke to her — I gather Lizzie was pronounced dead only a few minutes ago.”

Christina couldn’t see in her sister’s tear-streaked face any of the relief Christina herself felt — but if this death were a suicide, Lizzie might very well have escaped the gross, physical immortality that Christina’s uncle would force on her, and been free to take instead the spiritual immortality offered by Christ. Suicide was a deadly sin, of course, but perhaps Lizzie had done it to save herself and her unborn child from a surer exclusion from Heaven.

And Christina was honest enough to concede, though only ever to herself, that she would be jealous if Lizzie were to become one of her monstrous uncle’s vampiric brides.

“Was it,” began Christina. She paused, then went on, “Was it, does it seem to have been — an accident?”

“’Stina! Of course it was an accident. Don’t be ridiculous!” Maria sat down on the bed beside Christina. She took Christina’s hand and said, “Probably it wasn’t an accident. Oh, it might have been, you know!”

“I don’t think it would damn her soul,” said Christina, “under the circumstances?”

“True, she was saving her child, and herself — if — if she did it in time.”

Christina took a deep breath and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Listen, Moony, I know where the statue is. Papa’s little black statue.”

Maria frowned and shook her head. “What? You know where it is? How long have you—?”

“I only learned last night.”

“Oh, ’Stina, if only we had got it and destroyed it as soon as you knew! It might have saved Lizzie. But, but! — if she was too late, if she didn’t die … clean! — we can probably still save her from…”

“Premature resurrection.”

“Yes, by destroying it! With Uncle John gone, I doubt she’d be sustained. Where is it?”

“It’s — awkward. I spoke to Papa last night — his ghost, down by the river.”

“Christina, you can’t — that’s not good. That’s witchcraft.”

“It’s spiritualism, science! I didn’t … draw a pentagram, or light candles! He was just there in the shallow water, like — like some sick fish.”

“And it was cold.” Maria shook her head. “Poor Papa.” Then she squinted at her sister. “How did you happen to be down by the river last night?”

“He told me to meet him there.”

“Told you how?”

“I was — it doesn’t matter. He said—”

“You used that pencil thing that Gabriel took from Lizzie, didn’t you?”

“Somewhat. Slightly. I wasn’t trying to talk to him, but he—”

“Consulting the dead! That’s a sin, ’Stina! Who were you trying to talk to?” Then she nodded. “Uncle John.”

“Not talk to, I simply hoped to get more of the ‘Folio Q ’story. But Moony! Will you listen? The statue is apparently in Papa’s throat. When his heart failed, he put it in his mouth, hoping Uncle John might save him, and in his travail he apparently inhaled it — and choked.” Christina was horrified to realize that she was close to giggling, and she bit her tongue.

Maria’s wide face was blank. “Evidently burial in sanctified ground doesn’t stop him,” she said slowly.

“No,” agreed Christina.

“And our little ritual, at the Read estate seventeen years ago—” “It kept him away for a while. It let my body expel—” She caught herself and hurried on, “I didn’t see him for … months, afterward, and I had time to get stronger. I might have died, otherwise.”

Maria hadn’t been listening closely. “But what can we do?” she said. “We can’t dig up Papa and — and cut his throat open!”

“He said you would know how to choke him, choke Uncle John.”

“Choke him? Choke the statue? What would that mean?”

“Well, he didn’t say. Ghosts are never lucid, Moony! They’re shy — ashamed. And not very intelligent. But I think they are more honest, with their souls gone. They’ve lost all their…”

“Scruples.”

“Yes. I don’t think they remember why they ever kept secrets.”

“In his last year,” said Maria slowly, “Papa was writing a treatise on transmigration of souls. Mama burned it after he died, but he had me find and translate some Hebrew sources for him, in one of the manuscript collections in the British Museum. I could easily get permission to see those manuscripts again. There was a passage… I remember thinking at the time that it would have been helpful if I had read it before you and I did our… Grecian burial, seventeen years ago.”

“It wouldn’t … compromise you? Us, I mean? Spiritually?”

“No, as I recall, it didn’t involve summoning or confronting anything. I believe it involved mirrors — and, well, blood — but it was like a trap, or a fence; it would stop spirits, but you didn’t have to be present.”

“How would we arrange it?”

“I–I’d need to reread the old manuscript.”

Christina stood up. “When is the funeral to be? Lizzie’s, I mean.”

Maria shook her head and tried to speak; she cuffed tears from her eyes and hiccuped, then managed to say, “God knows. Apparently Gabriel is not nearly ready to admit that she has actually died.”

Christina shivered. “I hope she has. Died for good, that is to say, with no … earthly return from it.”

“I do too,” whispered Maria. “I pray to God that she has.”

Christina crossed to the pegs on which her clothes were hung. “I must go to Gabriel. And I need to get a letter to a veterinarian in Wych Street — I’ve got to cancel an appointment I made for today.”

CHAPTER TEN

And watchers out at sea have caught

Glimpse of a pale gleam here or there

Come and gone as quick as thought,

Which might be hand or hair.

— Christina Rossetti, “Jessie Cameron”

SHEERNESS WAS AN old garrison town on the coast, at the mouths of the Thames and