Hide Me Among the Graves

caught a final thought from her: So we can have more children?

Implicit in the thought were the names Johanna and Girard.

That froze him in place for a moment; then he was stumbling after her in his sopping trousers, ignoring the horrified cries of a crowd of children leaping out of his way.

McKee had rounded the corner of an old three-story whitewashed public house, and when he came skidding around it after her, she had disappeared.

A narrow lane or alley lay between the pub and a stable on the far side, and he hurried to it, but she was not visible between the old structures and there were no apparent doors or gates she could have gone through. A mongrel dog lying on the path lifted its head mistrustfully.

He walked back to the pub entrance, but as soon as he had pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped into the blessedly warm lamplit interior, several men in shiny corduroy jackets blocked his way.

“Smell too bad, you do,” said one of them, extending an arm to keep Crawford back.

“Don’t want us to bust you up, now, do you?” asked the other cheerfully. “Just shove off then, there’s a good boy.”

Crawford stepped back and stared at them while he caught his breath.

“I’m a friend of hers,” he said at last. “You must have noticed that she was as … soiled as I am.”

“Soiled women! Not in here, mate. And it’s up to her who her friends are.”

Crawford looked from one of the two amiably implacable faces to the other. McKee had said she caught birds near here, knew this village — doubtless she was known at this pub and had hastily told these friends of hers to keep him out.

Other men were visible now behind these two.

Crawford opened his mouth and yelled, “Adelaide!” as loudly as he could — and a moment later he was lying on his side in the road, clutching his abdomen and trying to get breath into his stunned lungs, and gradually realizing that one of the men had punched him very hard in the stomach.

He rolled over and saw the man grimacing and rubbing his knuckles on his sleeve.

Two men behind him in the doorway were now holding empty beer bottles by the necks.

Crawford waved and shook his head and slowly got back up on his feet, able now to take short, wheezing gasps.

The men in the doorway watched impassively as he struggled to catch his breath.

“I’m — leaving,” he finally managed to say. “Tell her — I love her.”

Their expressions didn’t change.

He turned away and began slowly plodding toward Kingsland Road, aching and limping and shivering in the cold.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Thank God who spared me what I feared!

Once more I gird myself to run.

Thy promise stands, Thou Faithful One.

Horror of darkness disappeared

At length: once more I see the sun…

— Christina Rossetti, “For a Mercy Received,” January 1863

June 1862

GREEN LEAVES THREW waving shadows on the glass of the window overlooking Albany Street, and through the open front door swept a warm breeze carrying the scent of robinia blossoms.

Through the hall doorway Christina heard William shout, “This desk won’t fit through the door, nor fit back into the house. I think we’re going to have to break it into pieces.”

Christina laid down her pen and stood up, stretching.

“Leave it,” she called. “Gabriel can rub grease on it when he comes, and we can all push on it.”

William’s irritable call came back, “It’s not like a pig stuck in a fence, ’Stina, it’s — oh — well, you wouldn’t be joking about it if you—” He paused. “I think you’ll have to go down the steps,” he said, speaking out into the street, “and come up from the kitchen — or climb over this thing.”

Christina heard a squeak and a hollow dragging sound, and then steps in the hall, and Maria appeared in the hall doorway in a black linen dress, not looking as if she had just moved heavy furniture, as apparently she had.

Seeing Christina’s raised eyebrows, Maria shrugged and said, “It only needed a lift and a twist.” She looked around the parlor, with its bookshelves and upholstered chairs and framed pictures leaning out from the walls. “The Cheyne Walk house is a good deal roomier than this.”

“It’s lovely,” Christina agreed, her face blank.

Maria stared at her for a moment, then both of them laughed.

“He’ll have Swinburne living there,” said Maria. “I can’t quite see Swinburne and Mama playing whist together on winter evenings.”

“And the household finances will be a shambles.”

Christina’s book, Goblin Market and Other Poems, had been published two months ago, but though it had got enthusiastic reviews in journals like the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review, and its three-thousand-copy first printing was reported to be selling well, she had no confidence that she would reap any substantial profit from it, and she was watchful of the family’s expenditures. Gabriel often bragged about making two thousand pounds a year with his paintings, but Christina and her sister and mother and aunt were all still living almost entirely on William’s income.

“He’ll be disappointed,” said Maria.

“Not really. He’ll have his noisy friends, and it would impede him to have women relatives about who rise before noon.”

Maria asked quietly, “How long do you think William will live there?”

“A month. Then he’ll be back here, at least half the time. He can’t be falling asleep at his office.”

“Still,” said Maria with a shiver, “I’m glad Gabriel has moved out of the Chatham Place house.”

“Well, yes.” Christina glanced at the waving green branches beyond the window to drive away memories of the winter — Lizzie’s death, poor Adelaide searching for her child, the waking vision of Mouth Boy in Regent’s Park, the alarming Trelawny.

The gambit Maria had come up with from her obscure studies had clearly worked — she and Gabriel had lost their sensitivity to sunlight, and Christina had even gone bathing in the ocean a few weeks ago! And she no longer dreamed of Polidori, in his own handsome form nor as the hideous Mouth Boy.

She had not written much poetry since the publication of Goblin Market—since Lizzie’s funeral, really — but at least she had not found herself writing any more of “Folio Q” either.

After seventeen harrowing years, John Polidori was no longer a part of her life, and she wanted no reminders of that darkly exciting passage. On the wall was still the portrait of Polidori — her mother’s brother, after all — but she never looked at that section of the wall.

But now she heard a familiar voice from out in the street: “William! Are you moving?”

“Stay,” said Christina to Maria.

“That poor man,” sighed Maria.

Christina stepped into the hall and walked to the street door. The desk was now out on the pavement, and William and John Crawford stood on either side of it.

“Hello, John!” called Christina, to save William the embarrassment of coming inside to ask if she was at