Hide Me Among the Graves

“The skull,” said Crawford. “You were there — you didn’t see the interior of an enormous skull?”

“I only saw a dark tunnel and an underground river with a broken bridge over it. The skull means he’s worried. Was. With good reason, as it turned out.” She had cut several ragged pieces of ham free of the bone, and now wiped the knife on her sleeve and sat down in one of the two wooden chairs.

“I don’t,” she said quietly, “want him to get me again. You killed him then, and he stayed dead for seven years. Can you do it again?”

“It wasn’t me that did it then.” Crawford crouched to draw two mugs of beer from the cask by the coal scuttle, and he set them on the table and then sat down and began slicing the onion. The smells of ham and beer and onions made him realize that he was hungry, and he wondered where there might be clean plates. “But I know the woman who did it. We can tell her it needs doing again.”

“I hope she’s still alive.”

Crawford wrapped a strip of ham around a lump of cheese and some rings of onion and took a bite of it. It tasted wonderful.

“She is,” he said as he chewed. “She’s a poet, and she’s been publishing things steadily.” He wondered if Christina Rossetti would still remember him, and he was embarrassed to think that she might.

“A poet?” said his daughter. “I hope her poems haven’t suddenly got better.”

Crawford remembered Trelawny saying, that day in the cage in Regent’s Park, that writing good poetry was “one of their gifts.”

“She gets bad reviews,” he said hopefully.

On the black brick wall above the doorway to the stairs, a bell rang, loud in the narrow kitchen; both Crawford and the girl jumped.

He had installed an electric doorbell a few years ago. “I believe that means there’s someone at the front door,” he said.

“Stay down here! You locked the door?”

“Yes.”

Crawford had half stood up, and now he sank back into the chair and picked up his beer mug in a trembling hand.

The bell rang again.

He took a long swallow of the lukewarm beer and set the mug down — but a moment later he whispered a curse and stood up. He lifted his chair and carefully walked across the flagstones to the street-side wall, and he set the chair down slowly below one of the ceiling-abutting windows and stepped up onto it.

The window glass was black, and he could see nothing outside.

The bell rang a third time, and then faintly, through the glass in front of his face more than from down the kitchen stairway behind him, he heard the door knocker rapping.

He glanced back at Johanna; she had stood up and was pressing a finger to her lips.

The rapping sounded again, louder, and after thirty seconds he heard boots descending the housefront steps.

The boots clinked against the stone.

The breath stopped in his throat and he glanced over his shoulder at the stairway and calculated how long it would take him to rush up the stairs and down the hall to the front door — too long, perhaps.

So he hopped to the floor, dived to the table and snatched up his beer mug and flung it as hard as he could at the high narrow window.

Even as the broken glass was clattering across the bricks of the area outside and the steamy kitchen air was roiled by the sudden chilly draft, he was on the chair again and calling through the broken pane,

“Adelaide!”

The clinking footsteps halted, then rang down the iron stairs from street level to the bricks of the area, and a moment later Adelaide McKee’s remembered face was peering in at him, dimly lit by the lamp on the stove behind him. She must have been practically lying down on the pavement out there.

“John!” she said breathlessly. “Open the damned door and stop breaking your windows!”

She looked past him then, and her eyes widened in astonishment. She tried to speak, then just bit her lip and gave him an urgently questioning look.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s our daughter.”

Crawford looked over his shoulder at Johanna, who was standing by the stairs with her knife drawn.

“Johanna,” he said, “it’s your mother! She’s fully and only human — aren’t you, Adelaide? — run upstairs and open the door!”

He turned back to face McKee, and he thrust one hand through the broken window to clutch at her gloved fingers.

“You can’t open your door yourself?” she said, squeezing his hand. Tears glinted on her cheek in the lamplight.

“I—” It hadn’t occurred to him. “I don’t want to let you out of my sight.”

The cold night air clearly carried the snap of the door bolt retracting, and McKee glanced upward.

She released his hand and got to her feet, and now he could see only her boots, with the familiar metal pattens strapped to the soles. He heard her say, “I can’t stay long.”

FIFTEEN SECONDS LATER JOHANNA and McKee were seated at the table, and Crawford was dragging up the cask of beer to sit on.

By Crawford’s calculation, McKee was thirty-four now, but she looked as young as Johanna as she gazed wide-eyed at her daughter’s face by the now-flickering glare of the lamp.

“You—” McKee said to her, “we — we thought you were killed — I never should have—”

Johanna nodded. She seemed only interested, not upset. “He got killed, that day. It was a good day. But now he’s alive again.”

“You know?” McKee turned to Crawford. “That’s why I came here tonight, to tell you, warn you. The songbirds are in a state. Chichuwee says all the ghosts are jabbering about it and fleeing straight to the river and out to sea. Sister Christina’s trick has worn off, or broken, and he’ll know us, you and me.”

She looked back at Johanna. “And you. How long have you been living here? How did you know he’s back up?”

Johanna gave her an uncomfortable smile. “If I’m living here, it’s only been for about half an hour — Mr. Crawford’s name and address were in his watch.” She pulled the watch out of one of her shirt pockets and laid it on the table. “And I’ve known that he’s back for … about two hours. He came straight to me, but I got away from him, dove into a mountain of shoes and he couldn’t follow me among the million old footprints. He’s lost all his suppliers, and he can’t see very well.”

McKee turned a blank gaze from one of them to the other. Then to Johanna she said, “You’ve had the watch all this time? — seven years! — and you only came to your father tonight?”

“I couldn’t read, for a long time. And up to now everything’s been good enough.”

“What have you—” McKee waved a hand. “Where have you been living?”

Johanna puffed her cheeks and blew out a breath. “Lately in a room off Petticoat Lane, by the Old Clothes Exchange; I sometimes pick up porter work, baling up leather trousers and wigs for Ireland, and old rugs for Holland… I’ve been sharing a room with two women, and when I can’t make my share of the nine-pence week’s rent, I sometimes bring home some rug pieces for the floor, so when we drop something it doesn’t go straight through the cracks to the donkey stable below. But before that … a rooftop shed against a chimney, for a while, right after he went away; I was a beggar then, without even deciding to be … then on a boat by Southwark Bridge, working for the Mud Lark man… I lived with a coster family for a couple of years, I think, selling apples on the streets.”

“You live here now,” said Crawford firmly. After a second or two, he made himself look at McKee. “Our daughter is not dead.” His voice was steady. “Do you remember what I said — the last thing I said to you — in that village, Lower Clapton?”

McKee sat back in her chair, and after glancing around at the narrow kitchen, she looked squarely at him.

From her ragged handbag Crawford heard the mutter of a songbird.