Hide Me Among the Graves (10 page)

As Trelawny strode toward a door at the far end of the alley, two of these men stepped into his way.

“Ho, Mahomet,” drawled the shorter one, “first visit was free.” His gray felt top hat might have been salvaged from the river, and his blackened toes stuck out from the ragged edge of his pavement-length coat. “Second visit costs money.”

His companion, skeletally thin in the remains of a frock coat, exposed toothless gums in a grin. “Fork over your purse, Ahmed.”

The man opened his coat with one hand to show a long knife in the other.

On his previous visit to this place, Trelawny had asked directions in Turkish from one of the immigrant residents; and though he had been born in Cornwall, his face and hands were indelibly tanned by years of Mediterranean sun, and the local residents had evidently concluded that he was some species of Arab.

Trelawny took an apparently inadvertent half step forward, his open hands raised in front of his shoulders as if to assure the men of his passivity—he was nearly seventy years old, and he let his lined face sag in an expression of senile dismay—

—And then his right arm straightened in an instantaneous blow that drove the heel of his hand into the thin man's shoulder; the collarbone broke with an audible click and the man dropped to the pavement as if shot.

In the same motion, Trelawny dove forward in a fencer's lunge and slammed his right fist into the shorter man's belly; as the man doubled over, Trelawny recovered forward and gave him a slap across the ear that sent him spinning into the wall. Muffled laughter or coughing sounded from the people in the shadows around the combatants.

Swearing in Turkish just because of the reminder, Trelawny hurried to the door at the end of the alley and drew a knife of his own, and he slipped the blade between the door and the jamb to lift the inner bar.

When he had stepped into the low-ceilinged room beyond and pushed the door closed and latched behind him, a black-bearded man in an interior archway lowered a pistol. Daylight, reflected down through holes in several overhead ceilings and the roof, glittered on gold teeth as the man smiled.

“You come unseen?” he said, speaking English with a Turkish accent.

Trelawny was still holding the knife. “Yes, Abbas. Well, a couple of your hooligans out front are hurting, but I left Miss B. in the Seven Dials.”

“Ah. Blinded by the crossing sweeper who gives change and keeps only a ha'penny.”

“Blinded on the occasions when he gives back the payment entire,” said Trelawny, “and then uses his Lady Godiva broom, his Rapunzel broom.”

These references were clearly lost on the other man, but his smile widened. “I will not give back payment for the Greek boat, beyond doubt.”

It was clearly a hint. Trelawny nodded and with his left hand fetched a purse from his waistcoat pocket. He tossed it to Abbas, who caught it in a hand missing several fingers.

The Turk hefted it, then turned and spoke to someone behind him; a moment later Trelawny heard footsteps pounding away up wooden stairs, and he knew that a semaphore signal would be sent from the rooftop of this house, relayed by flags waved on other rooftops across the City, to a man on London Bridge, who would signal a crewman on a cargo boat now laboring up the Thames. The crewman would shortly be diving overboard and swimming to the docks by the Billingsgate fish market.

Abbas sat down on the damp boards of the floor and picked up a bottle. “You wait so long until perhaps it is too late.”

Trelawny sat down cross-legged near the door and stuck his knife upright in the floor beside him. The house smelled of mildew and olive oil and spinach cooking. “I wanted to be sure this was the right boat. I don't kill innocent people.”

“Anymore.”

“Anymore,” Trelawny agreed.

“Betrayal, in the other hand,” said his companion as he twisted the cork from the bottle, “is good, eh? These in the boat are your—your
allies
long ago.” He took a deep gulp of the liquor and smiled as he held the bottle out toward Trelawny. “For them you killed … how many Turkish peoples on Euboea, in the Greeks' revolution? Children and women too?”

Trelawny took a mouthful of the liquor—it was arrack, harsh and warming. “Many,” he said after he had swallowed it. “As many, probably, as you killed Greek women and children in the Morea. But I have renounced the gods I sought then, to whom I made that blood sacrifice. Now,” he said, waving in the direction of the river, “I hinder them.”

Remembering the man he had hit outside, he rubbed his own crooked collarbone, wondering if the stony knot in his throat next to it was bigger than it used to be. It did seem to be. Nevertheless, he thought uneasily, I do hinder them.

Abbas nodded several times cheerfully. “And we help, when you pay us. But why, old enemy, do you not work with the Carbonari? They would fight these old gods for nothing, for even paying
you
.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Trelawny, rocking his knife free. He tucked it back into his sleeve and lithely straightened his legs and stood up. “Maybe I just don't like Italians.”

Abbas tapped his own chest. “And you like Turks?”

“I suppose I don't really like anybody. Do you mind if I vacate your premises by the back way? Your injured neighbors out front may have found reinforcements.”

“You leave peace in your wake, now, always. Yes, go away by the back.”

Trelawny nodded and stepped past the sitting man and, skirting a kitchen in which several robed women huddled over a smoking black stove, climbed through a glassless window in the hallway. He was now in a long unroofed space too narrow even to be called an alley—a gap where two crumbling buildings didn't quite meet—and short boards were wedged everywhere between the walls like rungs of a three-dimensional ladder. Any number of destinations could be reached by climbing in one direction or another, even downward into ancient ruptured cellars, and Trelawny began pulling himself up toward the right, toward the shingle eaves and rain gutters that were in sunlight far overhead, knowing that he could get to a rooftop in Earl Street this way, and from there to a flight of lodging house stairs that would lead him down to the Earl Street pavement and the Seven Dials, where the diminutive Miss B. was undoubtedly waiting for him in front of the druggist's shop where he had left her.

She would be angry. It wouldn't matter much now, while the sun was up, but he wasn't looking forward to the night, when she would be … bigger.

A
T LOW TIDE
there was a narrow sandy beach between the embankment wall and the river in the shadow of Blackfriars Bridge, and a gang of ragged children had somehow found it and were wading out into the icy water and bending to sift the sand through their blackened fingers.

Standing on an iron balcony a hundred feet above, shaded from the bright winter sun by an overhanging roof, Dante Gabriel Rossetti puffed on a cigar and stoically watched several large sheets of paper, bobbing on the ripples out of reach of the scavenging children, as they were swept out of the sunlight and into the shadows under the bridge.

He was wearing baggy houndstooth check trousers and a buttoned-up waistcoat under a black wool coat, but the wind—which had carried the drawings so far out over the river to the west that they had only now disappeared from sight—seemed to be finding the gaps between all the buttons.

And in spite of the cold, the Thames here smelled like a cesspool, largely because the ancient Fleet Ditch, a subterranean channel now, flowed into the river beside Blackfriars Bridge. God only knew how those little street Arabs in the shallows below kept from being poisoned by the sewage—They must build up an immunity gradually, he thought, like Mithridates of Pontus who was said to have deliberately acquired a cumulative tolerance to all the poisons of his day.

The thought made him shift around to look over his shoulder back into the parlor, and in fact he didn't see the slim figure of his wife on the couch. Probably she had gone back to bed with the laudanum bottle. They were to go out to dinner with a friend tomorrow night, and she would conserve her meager strength for that.

Their bedroom was always foul with the metallic reek of laudanum. Since her miscarriage in May of last year, Lizzie had needed ever-increasing doses of the opium-in-alcohol medicine to fight her fevers and insomnia. Already today she had taken twenty drops of it, to counter the fit that had shaken both of them awake at the ungodly hour of six this morning. The medicine had worked, and it was now presumably helping her back to sleep, but Gabriel was irremediably wide awake.

Lizzie would be awake again in a few hours. He wondered if she would remember throwing his drawings off the balcony.

He pitched the cigar out toward the river and shuffled back through the French doors into the relative dimness inside, and, before stepping to the bedroom to check on her, he looked at the framed watercolors hung around the blue-tile-fronted fireplace. They were all Lizzie's—his own work was in the studio down the hall—and on this cold malodorous morning he saw her pictures as lifeless, the figures blank faced and awkwardly proportioned.

From across many years he remembered a disturbing pencil sketch of a rabbit, drawn by his sister when she'd have been about fourteen, and he absently touched the revolver he always carried in a holster on his right hip.

Flickers of reflected sunlight from the river played across the high blue-painted plaster ceiling, making Lizzie's pictures look as drowned as his drawings of Miss Herbert and Annie Miller would soon be.

The room smelled of cigar, the Fleet Ditch, and garlic.

He crossed to the bedroom door and opened it quietly, but Lizzie was not in the big four-poster bed—she was sitting at the desk by the open river-facing window, hunched so closely over whatever she was doing that her wavy red hair lay tumbled across the desk and hid her face and hands.

“Guggums,” he began, using his pet name for her, but he stepped back when she gave a kind of whispered inhaled shriek and tore a paper she'd apparently been writing on.

Her face when she looked up was pale and thin, but her eyes on him were enormous.

“I'm sorry!” she said hoarsely; then she added, “Walter says your sisters are on their way over here.”

Clearly it wasn't a visit from Christina and Maria that she was sorry about—though this was an inconsiderately early hour—and he was careful not to seem to be hurrying as he moved to the desk.

She had laid out a large page torn from a sketch pad, and it was covered with lines of penciled writing—passages of her own neat handwriting alternating with a wavering loopy script, the source of which, Gabriel soon realized, must be the pencil that stood upright in a little disk that sat on the paper. Gabriel reached out slowly—Lizzie didn't stop him—and pushed the disk, and it slid smoothly across the paper, leaving a penciled line. Apparently the disk rolled on confined ball bearings.

“You promised Doctor Acland that you'd give this up. He says it makes you sicker.”

“Séances,” said Lizzie weakly, throwing herself back in the chair. “This isn't—”

“Oh,
don't,
Gug—you know he didn't mean the groups, the hand-holding! You
know
he meant—talking to dead people!”

She gripped the arms of the chair and got halfway to her feet, then collapsed back, panting.

Her eyes were closed, and her eyelids were wrinkled. “Who can I trust,” she whispered, “besides dead people?”

He opened and closed his mouth several times before he spoke. “I've done everything I—we're practically
on
the river—and—”

“And the garlic and the mirrors,” she said, “and your gun. I know.”

Gabriel looked around the musty room in frustration, then snapped, “You're too weak to go out to La Sablonniere tomorrow night. I'll call on Swinburne and tell him it's off. Mrs. Birrell can make us some soup.”