Hide Me Among the Graves

precipice.

But it was easier to go on than to stop now. “The witnesses — one of them said that my eldest son, Girard, was helping some person or — helping some person, onto the ferry from a boat that had drawn up alongside, in the moments before … before the vessel was struck.”

“The witness didn’t know it was your eldest son,” she said gently. “You knew it, later. When Girard’s ghost appeared to you. And attacked you.”

The ferry deck had been shattered but not scorched, he recalled, and the only reason the other passengers guessed that it had been lightning was because of the deafening, echoing roar that had shaken the boat in the moment of impact.

Why did I go walking on the bridge tonight? he asked himself. I don’t usually go out onto any of the bridges in my midnight walks. Why did I neglect to bring any garlic? Was I drunkenly hoping that Girard would come again, and finish me off?

Was that Girard?

“Attacked me, yes,” he said, almost matter-of-factly. “And I broke the garlic jar and ran into the river. I hid from him.”

“Lucky thing for you that you did.”

“Girard was my son, and he came back to me — and I hid from him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it wasn’t really him, you know, anymore. Not mostly.”

“I’d like to believe you’re right.” He thought of asking about her husband, then realized that he didn’t need to.

“‘The many men so beautiful,’” she said quietly, “‘and they all dead did lie, / and a thousand thousand slimy things / lived on, and so did I.’”

He recognized it as a line from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The woman beside him shivered. “Thank you for rescuing me,” she whispered. “And taking me in like a hurt cat.”

“All the cats I take in,” he said, “are hurt cats.”

“I–I don’t even know your name.”

“John Crawford.”

“I’m Lisa Griffin.” She got lithely to her feet, but when he had stood up beside her, she swayed against him and he caught her elbow to keep her from falling. “I’m afraid the whisky has rather got on top of me,” she said with an awkward laugh. “Could you … escort me to this spare room?”

Mrs. Middleditch should escort her, he thought.

But he glanced at the curtained window and thought of the turbulent sky and all the lightless alleys out there in the cold rain, and he didn’t want to let go of this woman’s elbow.

“This way,” he said unsteadily, starting toward the stairs. He forced the thought of Veronica out of his mind.

NOW, SEVEN YEARS LATER, Crawford again picked up his teacup, and his hand didn’t shake.

“I—” he began hoarsely; then he cleared his throat and said, carefully, “I tried to find you, afterward.” He realized that he was stroking his beard as if miming deep thought and stopped.

The bird in the little cage on the table whistled several notes.

The woman nodded. “I believe you. But as I said, I gave you a false name that night. Griffin, wasn’t it? That was the street I was — living on. And I never had a husband.” She gulped some of the tea in her own cup, then abruptly set it down and whispered, “Of all the times I could ever have used a glass of whisky.”

It was only an hour or two after dawn, but Crawford said, “Would you like some? I might join you.”

“I gave it up.” She exhaled and stared squarely at him. “I was a prostitute, in those days. ‘Living upon the farm of my person,’ as the law has it. I’m not any longer.”

The little bird was darting glances from one of them to the other.

“Oh,” said Crawford blankly. “Good. That you — stopped.”

Over the years he had wondered about that, a woman walking alone on Waterloo Bridge after midnight, but it was still a shock to hear it confirmed.

“I enrolled myself in the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women, on Highgate Hill, and I spent two years there. Thanks to the sisters there, I was able to change my ways.”

“Oh.”

“And — before that”—she took a deep breath—“we had a daughter, you and I.”

CRAWFORD HELD UP HIS hand to stop her, then stood up and crossed to the mantel and poured several inches of whisky into a glass, from, he realized, the same decanter he had poured from seven years earlier. He drained half of it and then clicked the glass down on the mantel, and for several seconds he kept his hand on the glass and squinted at it. Finally he let go of it and turned toward her.

“How can you be — if you were—”

“I used what they call prophylactic measures when I was on the job,” she said flatly. “That night seven years ago was … spontaneous.”

Crawford wished he had not drunk the scotch, for he was dizzy and nauseated now, and his heart was pounding.

She glanced toward the inner door, behind which he could hear Mrs. Middleditch ascending the steps from the below-stairs kitchen.

“Let’s go for a walk,” McKee said, picking up her gloves from the table.

But Crawford sat down again. “The last time you and I were together, we got into trouble.”

She opened her mouth as if to say something, then apparently thought better of it.

“I mean outdoors,” he added, feeling his face heat up. “Overlapping candle flames, you said. We were more visible, to”—he waved vaguely—“things.”

“That was at night. They don’t generally travel abroad during the day.”

He shrugged and nodded. He recalled his parents telling him that. And Mrs. Middleditch was now audibly bustling around in the little dining room behind him.

He got to his feet again, reluctantly. “Very well. Let me get a hat and coat. And—” He stepped to the mantel and found the little bottle of ground garlic and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

She smiled. “In case we’re out past sunset?”

He ignored that and waved distractedly at the little cage on the table. “I can put the bird somewhere the cats can’t get to.”

“He can come along with us.”

CHAPTER TWO

She sleepeth: would ye wake her if you could?

Is her face sad that ye should pity her?

Did Death come to her like a messenger

From a far land where is not any good?

— Christina Rossetti, “O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?”

MCKEE LOOKED LEFT and right at the brick and wood houses along the narrow street as Crawford pulled the door closed behind them, and then she peered up at the variety of snow-capped roofs and gables and projecting upper floors.

Her fur-trimmed bonnet hid her face. “This is an old street,” she said, her breath wisping away on the breeze