Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 20

 

  "There's a . . . new building there," she said. "In the middle of the square. "

  Swinburne, not entirely sober himself, goggled at the glass but apparently couldn't see beyond his own reflection and the steam of his breath.

  Gabriel leaned forward and squinted. The high dome and pillared entrance to the Wyld's Globe exhibit was the only building visible out there in the dark. "Nothing new that I can see," he said.

  "That dome," Lizzie said. "Wasn't it grass there. . . ?"

  "That's been there for eleven years, Guggums. Ever since the Great Exhibition. "

  "Is it a church?"

  "My sort of church," said Swinburne, slouching back in his upholstered chair and reaching for the decanter of claret. "The world, introverted. "

  "It's a giant globe," said Gabriel patiently, "turned inside out. You go in and you can see all the seas and continents around you. "

  "Turned inside out," echoed Lizzie. "I'm turned inside out. Everything around me is my own grief and loss, and inside I'm just an empty street, an empty building. "

  Gabriel wished she weren't so devoted to poetry; she wrote a lot of it, and it was, frankly, pedestrian stuff, though Swinburne loyally claimed to admire her verses.

  "Nonsense, Gug," Gabriel said. "You're ill, it colors your mood. I think a creme brulee and a glass of sauternes - "

  Lizzie was frowning and shaking her head. "If the globe is inside out, where's God? Rise up from one place and soon you'd only bump your head against another! And Hell - under the surface - is infinite! Don't bury me!"

  "For God's sake, Gug, pipe down! Nobody's going to bury you, you're not dying. Algy, she listens to you, tell her she's not dying. "

  Swinburne was a frequent visitor at Chatham Place, and he and Lizzie were forever reading to each other, or playing with the cats, or jointly composing nonsense verses and wrestling for possession of the pen as inspiration struck one or the other of them.

  Swinburne blinked at her now over the rim of his wine glass. He lowered it and said, "Don't die, Lizzie darling. Who else could I find who doesn't despise me?"

  She sniffed and shook her head. "It's the ones who love us that are the peril. 'And well though love reposes, in the end it is not well. '"

  Now she was quoting an unpublished poem of Swinburne's. The young man, whose red hair was now sticking out in all directions, pursed his lips in wry acknowledgment. "But Gabriel and I love you. We're no peril. "

  "You don't love me as much as two others do," she whispered.

  Gabriel shivered. Two, he thought; and he remembered Trelawny's words this afternoon: . . . if the person were so unwise as to welcome one of them and then welcome the other one as well.

  Lizzie looked back out the window, and tears stood on her eyelashes as she kissed one finger and then stroked it down the glass. "Oh, do you see her? She followed us, but she won't come in where it's warm. "

  "Who?" asked Swinburne, to Gabriel's alarm.

  "Don't let her get started on - " he began, but it was too late.

  Lizzie was sobbing, and Gabriel pushed his chair back and stood up, waving to the waiter.

  "My daughter," wailed Lizzie, "dead but weeping, immortal but starving!" Gabriel had strode around to her side of the table and was pulling her shawl across her shoulders and shushing her, but she went on, "Is my second child to join her out there?"

  Gabriel was peripherally aware of eyeglasses and red lips and mustaches turned toward them from the tables nearby, and for a moment a smell of wet clay seemed to eclipse the aromas of beef and cigar smoke and wine sauces, but he had got Lizzie to her feet and was concentrating on guiding her toward the dining room door; he could hear Swinburne's boots rapping on the polished wood floor behind him.

  Gabriel dug a five-pound note out of his pocket and thrust it at the wide-eyed waiter, who hurried to fetch their hats and coats; and after what seemed like an infernal eternity of tugging at sleeves and scarves and glove cuffs, they were at last stepping across the foyer and he was pushing open the heavy front door. Wintry air numbed his cheeks and stung his teeth as he whistled to a cab standing at the curb a dozen yards away, and when the driver shed his blanket and shook the reins, Gabriel turned to Swinburne over Lizzie's shaking shoulder.

  "Sorry, Algy," he said, "she's - "

  "Take care of her," said Swinburne, shivering in his too-large coat. "And thank you for dinner. " Then he nodded and set off walking away down Panton Street.

  It was difficult to get Lizzie into the cab, as she kept looking yearningly back at the restaurant. Probably wanting us to wait for our dead daughter, thought Gabriel grimly as he pushed her up the step; either that or she's reconsidering the creme brulee.

  "WHAT ARE YOU WRITING, Christina?"

  "Nothing," snapped Christina crossly, rolling the pen between her fingers. "Nothing!"

  The room was too warm and reeked of William's tarry latakia tobacco. The tassels that dangled from the runner on the fireplace mantel were throwing their usual shadow pattern on the high ceiling, and to Christina, as she looked up in frustration, the little wavering Y-shaped figures looked like tiny men clinging to a cliff edge over an inferno.

  Like Catholic souls clutching the last edge of Purgatory, she thought. Filthy Romish superstition!

  Her bearded, bald-headed brother blinked at her in surprise but took no offense. He never did. He had only been home for half an hour, his job at the Inland Revenue offices in Somerset House having kept him late, and he had been scribbling busily in a notebook before he had noticed her scowling over her papers at the slant-front desk below the old portrait of their uncle.

  "I'm sorry," Christina said. William was the only one of the four siblings who provided any substantial household money - Maria's Bible classes hardly brought in a hundred pounds a year, and Gabriel's income from his paintings was erratic and carelessly spent - and William never complained about the fact that the whole family lived off his salary. He wrote poetry too - he had probably been writing verses just now - though it was all hopelessly pedantic and uninspired.

  Christina absentmindedly blew a strand of hair out of her face. "I'm trying to continue the story I burned last year. "

  "'Folio Q,'" said William, putting down his notebook and taking off his spectacles. "Continue it? Have you written it out again? I thought it was very good. "

  "I know you did. But I didn't write it. " She took a deep breath. "He did," she said, pointing her pen up at the portrait above the desk. "Through me, through my passive hand. "

  He frowned. "Do you mean you were inspired - "

  "I mean he - wrote - it. His ghost did. I was in a sort of trance, and I didn't know what I'd written - what my hand had written - until I read it. "

  "Ah, you mean automatic writing," William said, nodding in sudden comprehension. "Really! That's why you burned it. But that's fascinating! Why didn't you tell me?"

  "You? You're so skeptical - "

  "Only about obvious superstitions," he protested. Like Christianity, Christina thought sourly. "But," he went on, "never about possibly valid scientific phenomena. Some intriguing work is being done these days in spiritualism. "

  "Well, he's giving me nothing tonight. " She tossed the pen onto the paper and glanced irritably up at the portrait. John Polidori, with his antique collar and his curly black hair and his dark eyes peering off to the side, for once just looked stupid and cunning.

  "Was it - important? That he do?"

  "Yesterday he was writing about Lizzie, through me. He knew, or said, that she's . . . expecting again. I need to know, from him, what her prognosis is. "

  William tamped the smoldering tobacco in his pipe. "I hope she recovers from this . . . nervous prostration of hers," he said, puffing smoke. "Gabriel loves her. "

  "So should we all. She's family now. "

  "Why don't you just visit her? And why would our departed uncle be particularly informed ab
out her condition?"

  "He'd know better than anyone," said Christina. "He's what's making her sick. " With, she thought, perhaps some assistance from the historical Boadicea, God help us.

  William pursed his lips and stroked his beard. "Ghosts, if indeed they exist, aren't supposed to be able to hurt people. All the evidence indicates - "

  "There's fresh evidence. Firsthand evidence. "

  William blinked. "What's - going on?"

  "She - he - oh, hang on a moment. " Christnia stood up and crossed to the mantel, where she had left the rolling pencil disk Gabriel had tossed to her yesterday. She picked it up and hurried back to the desk.

  "I forgot about this - Gabriel told me to use it. "

  "It looks like one of those children's toys that spin," said William.

  "Lizzie was using it to communicate with a dead friend," she said without looking up from her paper. "I saw the sheet she used - apparently you write out a question first - I could ask Uncle John to continue - "

  But as soon as she set the disk on the paper and laid two fingers on it, it started moving; a tingle passed through her chest, and the fingers of her free hand stretched out and then clenched in a fist. She heard William stand up from his chair, but she didn't look away from the pencil line already being traced.

  When the disk paused, it had written,

  get it out

  "Get it out?" said William, standing now behind her shoulder. "That's not clear. "

  "Shh. " Christina began awkwardly trying to write a question with the upright pencil, but the thing was moving again.

  river closest meet tell you

  The writing was faint and loopy, and William squinted at it. "Riven closet?" he asked.

  "'River closest. ' I think he wants me to meet him by the river," said Christina in a quavering voice. "I won't go. I won't. "

  William straightened up. "You believe he would hurt you?"

  "Well, no. Not me. I believe he loves me. "

  She started to say something else, but the disk was moving again:

  need you always

  She inhaled sharply, then leaned down and said to the pencil, "Where by the river?"

  find you I will

  Christina let her gaze fall from the paper on the desk to her shoes. She would need to put on boots, and a coat and hat and gloves - at least the hateful sun had set - and find a cab; Gabriel lived right on the river, perhaps he would not mind letting her spend the night there, save her the cold trip home - of course she would want to come home -

  The disk jiggled under her fingers and wrote,

  my dear ones my francesca

  William was peering at it. "I don't think. . . " he began slowly, but the disk was moving again:

  christina vivace mia

  ". . . that that's our uncle," William finished.

  "No," said Christina, careful to keep any disappointment out of her voice or manner. "No, it's. . . Papa. "

  "Why is he writing in English?"

  Christina recalled the conversation she'd had with her father seventeen years ago, when he had let her take the tiny Polidori statue. "I think he uses English when he's - ashamed of himself. "

  "Wha - why should he be ashamed of himself?"

  Because he used me, Christina thought, sacrificed my honor to his devil, in the hope that the devil would . . . restore his sight, his fortune, his youth. A dishonorable bargain, and one in which he was cheated to boot.

  And she recalled what Trelawny had said this afternoon. "Ghosts are ashamed of being dead," she said.

  William stepped back to the center of the parlor. "I'll go with you. "

  "No, William, it's - "

  William, of course, with his generally mocking attitude, had never been told the story of Christina's catastrophic intimacy with their father's statue, and she didn't want him to learn it tonight.

  "It won't happen unless I'm alone," she said. "I'll be safe - I'll go to where they hire boats, by the Adelphi wharfs. "

  William was frowning. "But I'm one of his children too. Why would he - he didn't say that you had to come alone. "

  "Dear William! I'm sorry. But this time it must be just me. You can contact him afterward, and meet him . . . or his ghost, at any rate. "

  "But isn't his ghost him?"

  "Not . . . not much. Most of him will have gone on, though I know what you think about Heaven and Hell. This fraction of him might be - a Catholic might say that it was - his participation in Purgatory. "

  "I - for God's sake, it's after nine o'clock, Christina! I insist on going with you. "

  "If you do, nothing will happen. We'll take an uneventful walk by the river and come home again. I'll be perfectly safe alone, I promise you. " She smiled at him. "You know I'll get my way in this. "

  After another few seconds of frowning disapprovingly, William looked away. "Do you have money?" he asked in a flat voice. "You'll want a cab both ways. "

  "Well, if you could," said Christina, mentally adding as always, "lend me a pound. . . ?"

  William pulled his coin purse from his waistcoat pocket, snapped it open, and handed her several coins.

  "Even so," he said gruffly, "tell him, if you would, that I - love him. " He grimaced. "If his ghost is there, and even if it's not much of him. "