Hide Me Among the Graves

The leaves on the curbside chestnut trees were still green, and between the boughs she saw shiny carriages and hansom cabs whirring along Upper Woburn Place. Their neighbors here were respectable stockbrokers and lawyers, but Christina missed the old house on Albany Street, where most of the family had lived for thirteen years.

She had written poetry there, for a time.

She shook her head impatiently and took a sip of the sherry. What was she thinking — she still wrote poetry!

— At a more labored pace, and without the psychic spark she had felt while writing verses before 1862.

Some of the poems that she had written since then had been published by Macmillan three years ago, in a volume titled The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems … and the Saturday Review had noted “a good many tame and rather slovenly verses” and “a dull, pointless cadence” in it. In the Athenaeum, a reviewer had said, “We do not see the conflict of the heart, but the sequel of that conflict,” and had lamented that the tone of the poems was that of a dirge.

Christina drained the glass of sweet wine and clanked it down on the rail so hard that the stem snapped off.

My life has a dull, pointless cadence, she thought furiously; I am in the sequel of that conflict, and a dirge is the appropriate tone!

She still regularly wrote prose pieces — mostly religious short stories now, for the Churchman’s Shilling Magazine—but she couldn’t pretend that they had the sprightly warmth of the work she had done before 1862.

Well, so be it. If her inspired poetry depended on the attentions of a devil, she was incalculably better off without it.

She turned back toward the drawing room, glancing at her hand to see if she had cut herself. There was no blood, but her thumb and forefinger were stained with ink. What had she been writing, while staring idly at the Japanese mountain?

A notebook lay open on the table beside her chair, and she laid down the broken pieces of the glass and picked it up.

And when she read the first lines that she had written on the open page, she knew what it was — more of “Folio Q.”

Her face was suddenly hot. She repressed a quick smile but reached out with her mind to see if the remembered psychic attention was again there — and she sensed only vacancy, a yawning silence.

If his personal attention had been turned on her once again, after these seven years of absence, she wouldn’t have needed the evidence of the renewed story in the notebook; she would immediately have felt it in her mind like tingling in a newly unconstricted limb.

Seven years ago she had speculated to Gabriel and Maria that her uncle — ghost or vampire or whatever he was — was not deliberately writing through Christina’s hand at those times when she had found herself writing “Folio Q,” that Uncle John might not even have been aware that she had been physically transcribing his story.

Eagerly she scanned the lines, but though they were in the familiar handwriting of her uncle’s spirit, they were disjointed and rambling:

… there need not be … wisdom or even memory … shall I not one day remember thy bower, one day when all days are one day to me? You have been mine before — how long ago I may not know: but just when at that swallow’s soar, your neck turned so, some veil did fall…

So he was somehow up again, now, awake again, but the fullness of the old connection had not been restored.

She reached out again with her mind, but she could not sense him.

Evidently the mirror confusion they had imposed on him seven years ago, though it had not lasted forever as she and Maria had hoped, had at least severed the link that had connected her with her uncle since that night when, at the age of fourteen, she had rubbed her blood on the tiny statue.

If that were so, she could still go out in the sunlight without being burned … but by the same token she would still suffer from her current distracted listlessness … and she would still not be able to write the sort of poetry she had written before Lizzie’s funeral.

But perhaps Uncle John was simply coming back slowly, to his old attentive extent! Christina would have to go out into the sunlight to see if it once again stung.

And she urgently needed to speak with Maria and Gabriel. Maria was off teaching, but Gabriel would probably be at his house in Chelsea.

Christina hastily scribbled a note to Maria, then hurried to her bedroom to change into street clothes.

THE BAY WINDOWS OF the first-floor drawing room at Tudor House on Cheyne Walk faced the river and the shoreline elms and, farther off, the webby silhouettes of ships moored at the timber docks on the far side of the darkening water, but Gabriel Rossetti was looking impatiently toward the doorway in the southern end of the long room, beyond the big dining table and next to the cabinet full of Dutch china and Oriental curiosities.

He had just lit the gas jets, and now he laid the matchbox on the mantel of the marble fireplace. The burnt wood smell lingered in his nostrils.

“Yes?” he called again. “Dunn, is that you? Algy?”

He heard the scuff and rattle repeated in the corridor — and then two figures moved into the room.

The first was a small, thin boy draped in one of the black velvet curtains from the drawing room and carrying a ludicrous parasol made of sticks and dirty rags — on his feet he wore two cigar boxes that knocked and scraped on the wooden floor. Gabriel’s instant surprised anger chilled to horror when he looked more closely at the intruder’s face — the boy’s skin was gray and stretched so tightly over the teeth and cheekbones that the open mouth seemed to be simply the result of it splitting, and the eyelids looked inadequate to cover his blank black eyes.

But the second figure froze the breath in his throat — it was a tall, red-haired woman in a visibly damp white dress, and after seven years Gabriel recognized her face more by the hundreds of pictures he had done of it than by actual recollection — the face was that of his dead wife, Lizzie.

She was breathing audibly, and the floor creaked under her bare feet.

“Lizzie!” he burst out. He had tried, on a number of occasions since her death, to contact her in seances, but the spirits who had answered his questions had never really seemed to be her. Suddenly and terribly he missed her, missed the cheerful innocence that had first drawn him to her.

“Stay,” he went on dizzily, trying to ignore the hideous child beside her. “Don’t leave me again—”

The two figures interrupted him, speaking in unison; the child’s voice was a harsh quacking and the woman’s a metallic whine: “Call me Gogmagog.”

Gabriel flinched and stepped back, and he could feel his heart thudding rapidly in his chest. Now he could see the alien and almost inorganic alertness in the woman’s eyes, and he noted the slackness of the face.

“You’re the one—” he whispered; “I shot you, in the park — you can’t have my wife—”

The two figures took a step forward, and the fabric of the woman’s dress tore rottenly at the knee.

“We have both loved her,” they said again in their grating voices, “my husband and I. She has two true parents, a rarity.” The woman’s head inclined toward her small companion, and they went on, “My husband is free again now, but wounded — you need to renew your lapsed vows to him.”

Gabriel’s pistol was in his bedroom, dusty and neglected; he crouched to pick up a black iron poker from beside the fireplace, and he straightened and held it up like a fencing foil. “Cold iron,” he said, his voice shrilled by fear. “Come near me, either of you, and I’ll — I’ll bash you.” He squinted at the boy. “Are you her — husband?”

The little gray figure’s mouth opened wider, further exposing the prominent white teeth, and when he spoke now, the woman didn’t join him. “No — I am promised to someone else,” he said in his flat monotone. He waved a sticklike arm at the woman beside him. “Her husband is your uncle, who today I finally roused from his long sleep, which cost him much.”

The mirrors, Gabriel thought, the mirrors we put into Lizzie’s coffin. This awful child must have somehow removed them.