Hide Me Among the Graves

“That was an obstacle,” said Gabriel, nodding, “but I prevailed with the argument that it was the grave of my wife.”

“Was it,” said Christina slowly, “only your poems that you hoped to retrieve?”

She seemed to brace herself as she asked the question, as though it might provoke Gabriel, but Gabriel just gave his sister a haggard smile. “If my purpose had been to free our uncle from the mirrors and revive my strangled Muse—our strangled Muse! — I would have abandoned the plan tonight, when we learned that he is in fact somehow free of them now. I don’t want the — the consequences of his help anymore, but I would like to have the work I did in the days when I had his help.”

“Muse?” said William. “Help?”

Gabriel bobbed his head and waved toward Christina.

She pursed her lips and shifted on the sofa. “These things are vampires, and — and when they’ve established a connection with you, one of the results is often that you write … a better sort of poetry than you could do unaided.”

William shivered. A better sort of poetry than you could do unaided.

“Gabriel and I haven’t written first-rate poetry since Lizzie’s funeral,” Christina added.

“And they sustain the lives of their human … partners,” grumbled Gabriel. “I don’t think Christina would be an invalid now if we had not strangled him at Lizzie’s funeral — and I don’t think I would be losing my eyesight.”

William found that he was suddenly eager to believe this story, and he tried to revive his habitual skepticism. He turned to Gabriel. “What are the consequences that you don’t want?”

“These vampires,” said Gabriel, “love the humans whom they initiate into their family—”

“Initiate with their teeth,” said Christina quietly.

“—and,” Gabriel went on, “they are toweringly jealous of anyone whom each new family member has previously loved. They — kill any such, unless those have been initiated into the family themselves.”

“But … will your eyesight recover now — now that our uncle is … somehow awake again?”

“No,” said Christina and Gabriel together. Christina went on: “Our connections with him were evidently broken when we shut him down at the funeral, and so the people we love are still safe — as long as we continue to resist him.” She turned an anxious look on Gabriel. “How did Lizzie get into the house tonight? I gather you didn’t invite her.”

“No, Algy did. Her and this starved dead boy.” To William and Maria he said, “Lizzie was accompanied by what must have been the ghost of a boy, though he — seemed unusually solid, for a ghost. I don’t know who he was.”

William stood up, still trembling. “It will be one thing to legally exhume Lizzie,” he said, “and retrieve your poems. But it will be quite another to dig further, and break open our father’s coffin, and then actually cut open his throat! We should establish first whether or not that statue is still there. Our uncle’s recent activities may be the result of this statue’s having lately … dug its way out?”

“What sort of dowsing rod would you use?” asked Gabriel.

William smiled. “We should hold another s?eance here, with Diamonds and Clubs joining Hearts and Spades, for a full deck.”

“I will not participate in any such thing!” exclaimed Maria.

“You can watch,” said William, suppressing impatience, “and in proximity pray more effectively for our souls.”

Christina didn’t look any happier about the idea. “But who — what spirit would we ask to speak to?”

“Uncle John himself, I would think,” said William. “Or, failing that, Lizzie — she was lying right over him; it’s likely she would know.”

“It’s time we went in to dinner,” said Gabriel. “It’s to be in the green breakfast room tonight, and Algy is probably getting impatient.” More quietly he went on, “Let’s hold the s?eance soon — on a night when Algy isn’t here.”

IN THE SHADOWS OF the hall, Swinburne stepped back from the doorway and hurried to his room so that he could pretend to have been asleep when someone came to summon him.

CHAPTER TWO

We shall know what the darkness discovers,

If the grave-pit be shallow or deep;

And our fathers of old, and our lovers,

We shall know if they sleep not or sleep.

— Algernon Swinburne, “Dolores”

A THIRD OF A mile north of Tudor House stood Pelham Crescent, a semicircular row of splendid white houses designed thirty years earlier by Elias Basevi, who had also been the architect of Belgrave Square. Separated from one another by iron railings like rows of upright black spears, each house’s doorway was up three steps from the pavement and framed by square pillars that supported a first-floor balcony. The gentlemen who entered or alighted from glossy carriages at the curb wore tall silk hats or the newer round creations of William Bowler, and their starched linen collars and cuffs were bright spots against well-tailored black overcoats.

From Number 7 on this February evening, though, emerged a contrary figure in a brown sack coat with an open-collared shirt and no hat; his white beard was untrimmed and his glance up and down the street was arrogant. Edward Trelawny waved his cane, and a hansom cab obediently slanted in to a rocking halt in front of him.

“New Cut Market,” he called to the driver, flipping a half-crown coin toward the man’s perch behind and above the cab.

The driver turned the coin carefully in the dim radiance of a streetlamp, but it evidently appeared genuine, for he tucked it into a pocket and nodded.

Trelawny snorted and stepped up into the cab.

As the long reins snapped over the roof and the cab surged forward, Trelawny sat stiffly upright, scornful of the padded seat back, but inwardly he was uneasy, and he was cautiously reassured by the angular bulk of the pistol tucked behind his belt buckle.

He had not seen anything of the terrible Miss B. for seven years now, not since two days after that Rossetti woman’s funeral. At that funeral he had learned the identity of the woman previously known to him only as “Diamonds,” and he had called on her at noon the next day.

She had received him in the parlor of a modest house in Albany Street, with her fat sister sitting beside her on the sofa while he sat in a chair on the other side of a table on which rested an array of tea and biscuits, which he had ignored.

“MY CONDOLENCES, ON YOUR loss,” he had said formally.

“Thank you,” said Christina Rossetti.

“You mentioned, Diamonds,” he said, “that you know where that statue is buried.”

The sister — Maria — turned a startled look on Christina, but Christina stared evenly at Trelawny and said, “It doesn’t matter now. We have strangled it.”

“You did indeed,” he acknowledged with a respectful nod. “Last night I visited an acquaintance south of the river, a woman who was afflicted by your uncle—”

At that point Maria burst out, “How does this man know these things?”

“Mr. Trelawny is an ally,” said Christina, and she smiled. “At least as much of an ally as we can hope for. Do go on.”