Hide Me Among the Graves
Page 49

Crawford took the bowl from Johanna and tilted it toward the lamplight - the blood in it was staying dark, not reddening in the air.
The man laughed, straightening his arm now and looping a length of thread around the pin in his elbow. "Trust a medical man to notice that! Always happens, with people born under the Thames - we're partly dead, drowned, always." He looked past Crawford at Christina. "And now the wine."
Christina stepped forward across the mushy boards but just gave Crawford a stare and didn't roll back her sleeve yet.
He nodded and wiped the fleam blade, then again lifted the lamp chimney and carefully turned the blade in the flame.
"Johanna," he said, "gin again, but just for the elbow this time, eh?"
Christina rolled up her sleeve and handed Johanna a fresh handkerchief, and Johanna poured gin on it and then swabbed Christina's elbow.
Crawford was aware of young Andrew standing beside him as he gently tapped the fleam against the soft skin of Christina's inner elbow, and he was glad to see that she didn't even wince as the blood flowed around her arm and dripped rapidly into the bowl Johanna was holding.
From the corner of his eye, Crawford saw that the straw dolls were hanging motionless now. "You've got the attention of all the children," said Beetroot, nodding.
When Crawford judged that several tablespoonfuls had run into the bowl, he reached for the handkerchief Johanna was holding, but the man caught Crawford's wrist.
"Not yet."
Christina just closed her eyes as more of her blood sluiced around her elbow and fell into the bowl.
After another thirty seconds, Crawford took the handkerchief from Johanna, and the man nodded reluctantly.
"I suppose that'll do." He pointed to another pin in his shirt, raising his eyebrows, but Christina shook her head and just wrapped the gin-soaked handkerchief around her elbow and then folded her arm to hold it tightly.
"Smooth work," she said to Crawford.
Beetroot took the bowl from Johanna. "Laces, now, laces!" he exclaimed, snatching up several lengths of string from the table and stirring them with his fingers into the mixed blood.
"Shoes, Andrew, shoes!"
The boy sprang to the shelves and tucked several pairs of shoes under his arm, then crouched beside Johanna and held them up one by one beside her right foot.
"These," he said, straightening up with a battered pair of high-topped black shoes.
Beetroot dredged one string out of the blood and handed the dripping thing to the boy. "You've got the left shoe, you're clockwise," he said.
And then the two of them were threading the strings through the lace-grommets of the shoes in a peculiar spiral pattern rather than the ordinary crisscross progression. Crawford saw that the man was stringing the right shoe counterclockwise. The dolls jiggled excitedly overhead.
At last Beetroot and Andrew tied careful knots in the middles of the spiral patterns.
"Here," Beetroot said, thrusting toward Johanna the shoe he had prepared as Andrew handed her the other. "These'll be a bit loose, since you're not to untie them, ever. Stuff 'em with rags to make 'em fit. Shoes!" he yelled to Andrew, fumbling in the blood for more strings. "You people can go," he said, his attention now on the next pair of shoes, and the two pairs after that.
"Put them on now," McKee told Johanna. "While we're still underground and it's still raining."
Beetroot looked up from stringing a fresh shoe and nodded.
Johanna's nostrils flared in distaste as she looked at the ugly old shoes and the bloody laces in them, but she handed them to McKee and then braced one hand against the wall to take off her boots.
Crawford picked up his muddy coat and dug out his handkerchief, and he gave it to Johanna to stuff into one of the shoes; then, after glancing around, he unbuttoned the collar from his shirt and handed it to her for the other one.
"Thanks," said Johanna as she fitted her stocking feet into the hiding shoes. She glanced around at her companions. "We all looked better at the wedding an hour ago, didn't we?"
"It's been a disheveling day," Crawford agreed, thrusting his arms through the sleeves of his soggy coat.
Johanna waved back at the room, though the jiggling of the hanging dolls seemed to be the only response.
"Let's get out of here," said Crawford, taking her arm and turning her toward the ladder.
He went first up the old wooden rungs, but the few people on the street, huddled in doorways against the rain, only glanced at him incuriously. He waved the rest of his party up, and in a few minutes McKee had led them to the more populated expanse of Earl Street, where she turned left, back toward Seven Dials.
Johanna was limping, but when Crawford gave her a concerned look, she told him, "I've worn worse, I'll get used to them." Then she grimaced up from under the umbrella. "But do I sleep in them?"
"I - don't know," he said.
Johanna shrugged and kept walking. "That boy Andrew didn't look well, did he?" she said after a few more paces. "I bet soon there'll be another straw doll."
Hurrying along beside them, Christina whispered something that might have been a phrase from a prayer.
The rain trailed to a stop just as they emerged into the irregular square at the junction of the seven streets, and a stray beam of sunlight flickered across the circle in the center, momentarily visible between wheels and horses' legs.
Christina had rolled her wet sleeve down again, and a stain of blood showed at her elbow, but she didn't seem to have any trouble walking, and they would be able to flag a cab here.
Then she halted and touched her throat and brushed her face as if she'd walked through a spiderweb. Crawford caught Johanna by the hand and asked, anxiously, "Miss Christina? Are you well?"
She managed an unhappy smile. "As well as I ever am. We seem to have reestablished our footsteps - his attention is on me again."
Crawford glanced quickly at Johanna, who tentatively spread her fingers and sniffed the air. "Not on me," she said softly. Then, more loudly, "He's not watching me!"
"Yes," said Crawford, starting forward again and peering around for a cab, "you sleep in them."
And it looks as if we're going to France tomorrow after all, he thought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
'... I wander, knowing this
Only, that what I seek I cannot find;
And so I waste my time: for I am changed;
And to myself,' said she, 'have done much wrong
And to this helpless infant. I have slept
Weeping, and weeping have I waked; my tears
Have flowed as if my body were not such
As others are; and I could never die.'
- William Wordsworth, "The Excursion," lines 804 - 811, as copied by Christina Rossetti into her commonplace book, 1845
WILLIAM AND MARIA were at Tudor House when Christina arrived there at one thirty in the afternoon. Gabriel was sitting at a small table by the bay window in the long drawing room upstairs, cradling a moldy notebook in his hands and looking out over the river, when young Henry Dunn showed her in, and William and Maria stood in the far corner of the room, whispering.
"Good Lord!" exclaimed William, stepping around the long table. "You're all wet and muddy! Did you fall somewhere?"
"I was saving a girl from our uncle," Christina said, "for a while, at least." She walked up to Gabriel and waved toward William and Maria. "Have you told them?"
He looked up at her blankly, but Maria said, "We know the statue is not yet destroyed - Gabriel has misplaced it here in the house somewhere." She was staring at Christina's dress. "I thought you were going to a wedding! Did you get in a fight?"
"I had to climb down a hole in a street in St. Giles, and" - pointing at her stained sleeve - "lose some blood."
Maria drew in a breath with a hiss, and Gabriel looked away.
"Algy didn't take it," he said. "I asked him." He idly flexed the old notebook in his hands, and bits of the cover flaked off in his lap.
"You've read his poetry," Christina said witheringly, echoing Trelawny.
Gabriel shrugged.
William cleared his throat. "We think Gabriel may have misremembered where he put it last night. I should have helped him hide it, after he woke me and told me he had retrieved it. But I just said, 'Good,' and went back to sleep."
Gabriel nodded. "I had a lot to drink before I finally went to bed. Understandable, I think, under the circumstances."
Christina's mouth was open in astonishment, and she said to him, "But you saw those two creatures this morning! - you saw them appear! - in your bedroom! And you must - "
"They've appeared in this house before," interrupted Gabriel irritably.
Christina looked out the window, and after a moment she pointed to a passing wagon. "And what is that?" she demanded.
Gabriel looked out the window. "What," he said, "trees, a street, a wagon..."
"What kind of wagon?"
Gabriel peered through his spectacles. "I don't know. A yellow wagon. Have you lost your wits?"
Maria had stepped up behind Christina and was peering over her shoulder. "Comer India Pale Ale," she said, giving Christina a mystified look.
Christina bent over to hug her brother and sighed. "Oh, I'm so glad your eyesight hasn't recovered!"
For a moment Gabriel's face clouded in real anger, and then he just laughed softly and pushed her away with one hand. He took a deep breath, then said, "You thought I blooded it? That wasn't what our uncle wanted - I was never one of Boadicea's victims."
And how can you be certain of that? wondered Christina; but she said, "It would nevertheless have constituted renewing your vows to him, I'm sure."
William was standing by Christina now. "We need to search the whole house, attic and basement too, and the garden," he said. "Gabriel might have hidden it anywhere, in his ... distracted state last night. And Gabriel, you must try very hard to remember! Walk around the house with us! Christina, do you think you could sense the statue, if you were near it?"
Christina frowned and glanced at Gabriel.
He was staring out the window again. "Never mind, William," he said softly. "Christina is right. Algy has certainly taken it and rubbed his restorative blood on it." He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. "The only thing my midnight escapade accomplished was to make our uncle stronger."
"And to recover your poetry," William pointed out, nodding at the moldy notebook in Gabriel's hands.
"Yes." Gabriel laid it down and wiped his hands on his waistcoat. "My poetry." Christina could smell the book's mildew.
Gabriel put his spectacles back on and stood up, and he gripped Maria's shoulders. "He almost took Christina by force on Wednesday night," he said. "The only thing that saved our sister was the timely intervention of Charles Cayley!"
"I know," said Maria, staring straight back at him, "of no way we can use to trap our uncle."
She turned and left the room.
Christina called after her, and crossed to the doorway to call again down the hall, but a moment later she stepped back into the room, shaking her head.
"Moony won't play," she sighed.
After a pause, "'No way we can use,'" echoed William, "Christian scruples of some sort?"
"Yes," said Gabriel, sitting down again. "And immovable."
"Can we ... get it," said Christina, "from Algy? He'll have hidden it."
"We could torture him," said Gabriel with a shrug, "but he'd like that."
"Appeal to him?" suggested William. "In friendship?"
Gabriel shook his head. "Try appealing to a drunkard, in friendship. And this is vastly more compelling than drink."
"We must none of us marry, or have children," said Christina. "William, you and Maria have been safe up till now, you're apparently considered members of its family somehow - possibly because you grew up with the statue, you participated in its renaming of us all as card suits - a provisional protection at best, I think. You both need to begin taking precautions. Whenever - "
"Never marry?" protested William. "Never have children? Because a ghost would be jealous? I'm forty years old, I can't - "
"He's more than a ghost!" interrupted Christina. "You were there at the seance on Tuesday - and I think you saw him, and he even spoke to you, in your vision! I think he spoke to each of us."
William opened his mouth and then looked away, and in that instant Christina was sure that William had somehow met their uncle again, since the seance.
"You said he kills people we love," William went on stubbornly, still looking away. "Whom has he killed?"
"Well - he killed that veterinary surgeon's wife and sons..."
"He did?" William was looking at her now. "When was this? Killed them how?"
"Fifteen or twenty years ago," admitted Christina. "They were on a boat on the river..."
"I'll wager the coroner came to a different conclusion than 'killed by a ghost.'"
"Oh - your children will die, William, trust me! Gabriel, do seances have to be done at night?"
"Hmm?" He shook his head. "I don't know. They always seem to be."
"I can think of one ghost that might know how to unmake our uncle - your son. The dead boy. And ghosts don't seem to be able to lie."