Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 54

 

  Crawford and McKee and Johanna were huddled with a dozen other passengers just aft of the big starboard wheel cowling. Crawford's cough had not abated, and he hugged himself inside the overcoat he had bought at a train stop in Maidstone.

  "Sorry," he gasped after the latest coughing fit. "Thames water doesn't seem to be good for one's lungs. "

  "The cats," said Johanna, holding on to her hat in the breeze from behind, "probably gave you an extra life or two. "

  McKee just shook her head, staring out at the green waves of the English Channel. Crawford knew she was worried about his health, and the money that they were spending much more rapidly than planned, and the prospect of beginning life anew in a country whose inhabitants spoke a language she didn't know.

  They were still an hour out of Dunkirk, and they had been told that the tide would be low there, and that the ship would not dock but land passengers in rowboats.

  Crawford said to McKee, "What shall we have for le petit dejeuner, Madame Crawford?"

  McKee had learned that much from him on the train. "Frogs," she said.

  "Great bread and cheese," countered Crawford.

  "And wine," put in Johanna.

  "Will we ever come back?" burst out McKee. "Will we ever . . . see London again?"

  Crawford leaned against the tall cowling, feeling the vibration of the big paddle wheel turning inside it.

  "I think we had better hope not," he said.

  BOOK III

  Give Up the Ghost

  March 1877

  CHAPTER ONE

  Did he lie? does he laugh? does he know it,

  Now he lies out of reach, out of breath,

  Thy prophet, thy preacher, thy poet,

  Sin's child by incestuous death?

  - Algernon Swinburne, "Dolores"

  SNOW WHIRLED DOWN out of the gray sky, and the young woman who was crouched behind the big letters of the ENO'S FRUIT SALT sign high over Tudor Street pressed her back against the warm chimney bricks and began the song once again, singing loudly against the wind:

  There was a man of double deed

  Sowed his garden full of seed.

  When the seed began to grow,

  'Twas like a garden full of snow. . .

  It occurred to her that she was in her own garden of snow up here, with rounded white drifts at various levels all around her, and icicles fringing roof edges and the projecting rims of cold chimneys.

  The metal pattens on her boots were braced against the shingled roof of a tiny gable that poked out of the main slanting roof, and she wondered if anyone within might hear her; but the window would certainly be closed in this weather, and the little garret room probably wasn't heated - the chimney at her back wasn't radiating warmth from any hearth within a dozen vertical yards. She felt as if she were on the lowest-hanging skirt of some slow-moving airship, hidden by the snow and the fog from the earthbound city so far below.

  She shivered and fished a flask from under her outermost coat and unscrewed the cap with trembling gloved fingers, then pulled the scarf down from her face and took a sip. The whisky was warm, and she exhaled a plume of aromatic steam before pulling the scarf back up.

  She still couldn't hear a reply to her singing, and she hoped this unseasonably late winter weather had not diverted them from their usual early-March routine: go to the rooftops to watch for churning black clouds rushing over the skyline. She recalled seeing several of the things during her years as a Lark - sometimes the weirdly distinct little clouds were elongated perpendicular to the direction of travel, and waving at the ends like wings.

  And in the moment before her recent singing was answered from another roof, she saw one - a rolling black shape nearly invisible in the snow-veiled distance to the northeast; it dipped and disappeared behind some paler building that blended into the uniform whiteness. I'll have to mention it to them, she thought, when they get here.

  Only because she knew the song was she able to recognize the lyrics audible now from some nearby roof:

  When the sky began to roar,

  'Twas like a lion at the door. . .

  She pulled down the scarf for another warming sip of the whisky and then screwed the cap back onto the flask and tucked it away.

  She was twenty years old now, far removed from the deep perceptions and narrow lives of the Larks - even seven years ago she had had difficulties dealing with them. She wondered if she would even be able to convey the news of the black flier over Fleet Street.

  She took a deep, whisky-fumy breath, and then sang,

  When the door began to crack,

  'Twas like a stick across my back;

  When my back began to smart,

  'Twas like a penknife in my heart;

  When my heart began to bleed -

  She hesitated, for she could hear the muffled clatter of them scrambling across the far side of this roof, then sang the last line:

  'Twas death and death and death indeed.

  Crouching on the roof now and squinting back up its slope, with one arm braced against the chimney, she saw three shapeless hats, then a fourth and a fifth, poke up from the roof crest above her against the marble sky. The lean faces under the floppy hat brims were in shadow.

  "I need to see the old man," she called. "He sent for me. "

  "Bugger that," one of them growled. He or she was holding a long-bladed knife in one raggedly gloved fist.

  "And I saw one of the black fliers just now," she went on. "It went down over Fleet Street, very near here. Did any of you sorry lot see it? He'll want to know about it. "

  The line of heads wobbled uncertainly, and another of them spoke up. "You got the Neffy smell on you. "

  "So do you, each of you. I used to be one of you, damn it. He sent for me, call him. "

  For several seconds the shadowed faces just peered down at her. Then regular clanking sounded from the far shoulder of the building; at least one person of adult weight was ascending the iron ladder from the adjoining rooftop. Could it be the old man already?

  But she recognized the voice that called "Johanna!" and her eyes widened in dismay.

  The Larks had ducked away out of sight on the far side of the roof, and Johanna scrambled up to the peak and glared down at where they were crouched in the lee of an advertising sign overlooking Whitefriars Street.

  "Call the old man!" she said fiercely.

  After a moment, one of the ragged Larks dug a clay egg out of a pocket and blew the remembered low, mournful note; it rolled away through the snowy air, seeming to shake the spinning snowflakes.

  Johanna stared unhappily to her right, at a ridge between two nearby chimneys in the direction opposite the gang of Larks, and soon two bundled-up figures began to appear by labored degrees from behind it, and Johanna recognized her mother's overcoat, and then her father's cough. Her mother was forty-one now, and her father fifty-three, and Johanna blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down her cheeks and freezing on the scarf. They should both be sitting by the fire back in the rented house in Cherbourg, she thought furiously.

  Her father was holding her mother's hand as she stepped carefully down a snow-covered slope of shingles, the pattens on her boots scraping up shavings of ice, and as he followed her McKee was facing the Mud Larks across the flat section of roof that was hidden from the streets below.

  "Where is our daughter?" she demanded. "We heard her singing with you. "

  "Up here," called Johanna through clenched teeth. She pounded a gloved fist against the roof peak, loosening a little avalanche. "I told you not to come after me! I begged you to stay home, in my note! I'm - an adult now!"

  "So are we," gasped her father, waving his arms to keep his balance on the squeaking icy roof. "And then some. "

  Johanna hiked herself up to sit astride the roof peak. "How did you . . . find me?" she called down to them.

  "We followe
d the Larks," said her father, looking around the rooftop clearing in evident bewilderment.

  "Why now?" wailed McKee, squinting up at Johanna. "Cherbourg was safe!"

  The Lark blew the little whistle again, and the flat note stretched out over the rooftops.

  "Safe for the last what, month?" retorted Johanna. "Just as Rouen was, or Amiens, or St. Brieuc, or - how long do you think it would have been before he found me in Cherbourg too?"

  "But," McKee said, "with no preparation, in the winter - in the middle of the night!"

  "And a dreadful day for a Channel crossing," said her father; he paused to cough, and then he went on, "We caught the first boat out of Le Havre, but you weren't on it. You must have found one right at the docks in Cherbourg. " He coughed again. "What kind of springtime weather is this?"

  Johanna sighed through her ice-crusted scarf, and was about to answer her mother, when a new voice intruded:

  "I called her. "

  A lean figure in a black Inverness cape and a slouch hat stepped out from behind the tallest chimney, on the far side of the low square area below Johanna.

  And she caught a hint of echo in her own head, a leftover of the mental connection that had conveyed his message to her in a dream two nights ago.

  Her mother now had her back to Johanna, staring up at the newcomer.

  "Are you - a ghost?" asked McKee.

  The question seemed to irritate Trelawny - he swept his hat off and flung his head back, his white hair blowing around his dark face in the snow, and said in a booming voice, "I wish to God I were! It's a bad world that brings an old man out onto the roofs on a day like this. Back down to the streets, now - we're fools to talk under the bare sky, let alone all clustered together. "

  "I saw a flier two minutes ago," said Johanna. She waved a hand north. "It went to earth a street or two away northeast, probably in the Strand around St. Bride's or Ludgate Circus. " In spite of everything, she smiled behind her scarf, pleased that she still remembered London geography after having been away for seven years.

  "Fliers!" cried Trelawny. "So close! And such as you are on the roofs! Down, now. If we're not - "

  "He called you?" interrupted McKee, though she was walking back toward the roof slope she had just descended, and the ladder on the far side. "How?"

  "He can reach me in dreams," said Johanna, swinging a boot over the roof peak and sliding down to the surface her parents stood on, "just like the other can. " She stepped across the icy tarred surface and stood worriedly beside her father. The bitter chill couldn't be good for his lungs.

  Trelawny had skated down from his perch to join them, and now he raised his gloved hands. "Reach her from the opposite spiritual direction," he clarified. "These, you recall, are the hands that baptized her. " He turned to the mute Larks on the other side of the flat roof and said, "Good. Resume your patrol. "

  "You called our daughter back to London?" said her father, who hadn't moved.

  Trelawny's face was shadowed as he pulled his old hat back over his head. "I tried Chichuwee, day before yesterday," he said gruffly, "but he could provide no help. "

  "Help in what? Never mind, it doesn't matter - our daughter is leaving with us on the next boat back to France. "

  "You and Mother take it," said Johanna. She squeezed his hand through two layers of glove leather. "This is for me to do. You two will just get killed if you stay - wait for me in" - belated caution kept her from again saying the name of the city - "in the place we've been living. "

  "What's for you to do?" burst out McKee.

  "He," said Johanna, not wanting to pronounce the name Polidori out here either, "has got himself another girl. She's fourteen, just a year older than I was when that dead boy came after me, wanting to - to have a child, some sort of child, by me. She's to be his bride, since I fled. "

  "My granddaughter, that is," said Trelawny. "Rose, Rose Olguin. I will - not have her digging her way up out of a grave and" - he added with a shudder - "and having congress with that dead thing. "

  "You said your children were in America," protested Johanna's mother.

  "Argentina," said Trelawny impatiently, "one of them. Others stayed here and died. Of course. But the daughter in Argentina moved back to London two years ago, in spite of my warnings, and now her fourteen-year-old daughter - "

  Johanna noticed that the Larks had disappeared over a low wall to the left; and a moment later the roof moved sideways under her boots. She hopped to keep her balance, but her father sat down and her mother crouched and braced one hand against the roof surface. Patches of snow slid down all the roof slopes, and she heard a low rumble roll across the City.

  And then something buzzed past her ear, and when she jerked back, she saw a wasp swinging away through the moving veils of snow.

  A wasp, she thought, in the middle of a snowstorm? Only after that did she think: An earthquake? In London?

  "Follow me!" yelled Trelawny, moving now away from the way McKee and Crawford had come, toward the roof-edge wall beyond which the Larks had disappeared.

  The roof was still swaying, and Johanna helped her father to his feet, waving away another wasp, and before hurrying after Trelawny she glanced back the other way.

  A figure stood now beside the chimney where her mother and father had first appeared; its face under a tall silk hat was shiny black, and at the end of each of its long arms it waved a thin bamboo stick as if conducting an enormous orchestra.

  "Where where where?" it called, in such a melodious voice that Johanna thought it had begun to sing.

  A loud, hard pop shook the air, and the figure bowed and thrashed its sticks wildly but didn't lose its balance; looking the other way, Johanna saw Trelawny lowering a smoking pistol.