Hide Me Among the Graves (11 page)

“I'll be rested. I should go out sometimes.” Her fingers touched the torn paper, then quickly retreated. “Please.”

Gabriel exhaled and shook his head in reluctant acquiescence. “If you're better by then. If! But no more of this—this
necromancy
.” He picked up the paper and the pencil disk. “Let poor Walter rest in peace. You owe him that.” He turned on his heel and left the room, ignoring her weak protests and kicking the door shut behind him.

He tucked the pencil disk into his pocket and squinted at the paper.

Walter was Walter Deverell, who had died eight years earlier. Deverell had been a close friend, a year older than Gabriel and a teacher at the Government School of Design, and it had been he who discovered Lizzie in a milliner's shop near Leicester Square. Deverell had immediately hired her as a model, and Gabriel and his group of young painters—who called themselves, a bit self-consciously, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—had all soon hired her too, to model for various of their paintings.

Gabriel had long suspected that Lizzie would rather have married Deverell than himself, and when he thought about Deverell—which he tried not to do—he had to suppress a nasty satisfaction that the man had died when he did, at the age of twenty-six.

Since Deverell's death Lizzie had two or three times contacted his ghost at séances, or claimed that she had. But—Gabriel hooked his reading glasses out of his breast pocket and sat down on the couch—Gabriel had never until now seen a transcript of any of those conversations.

At the top of the sheet of paper,
Walter, are you there?
was written three times in her clear hand. Below the last one was a meandering and unbroken pencil line; Gabriel managed to decipher it as,

there fair ne'er

Well, thought Gabriel sourly, that's well said.

Lizzie's handwriting followed it with,
What shook me awake this morning?

Gabriel could only read the next line as,

parnassus has its flowers

Very poetical, Walter, he thought. The flowers on Mount Parnassus woke her up, of course.

Lizzie had followed it with,
Where can we be safe?

And the pencil oracle had scrawled,

dark river you come soon

Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?

Below that Lizzie had written,
Must I die soon?

—to which the meandering line replied,

or never

Lizzie countered,
You know why I can't.

—and Deverell's faint handwriting followed with,

worse for both you if you stay

Gabriel started to get to his feet, then slumped back. It would do no good to try to reason with Lizzie right now.

“Damn you, Walter,” he whispered furiously, “you want her with you
still
?”

Lizzie's next line was,
I can't.

And the last line on the sheet was Deverell's:

ask his sisters are there in your soon

Gabriel tossed the paper away; it swooped back and forth and settled on the carpet.

According to spiritualist lore, a ghost could only be invited to reach up from the river and participate in this sort of written communication—they couldn't be compelled; it had to be voluntary. Walter was apparently as poisonously eager to converse as she was.

If
converse
was the proper word. Morbid malignant gibberish. And Gabriel couldn't see that the ghost had said that Maria and Christina were coming here.

He got to his feet and walked down the hall to his studio, stepping around stacks of books along the way. When he had married Lizzie almost two years ago—after so long an engagement that everyone, including her, had assumed he didn't mean to go through with it—he had got the landlord to cut a door through to the next house in the row, connecting Gabriel's old bachelor rooms on the first floor of Number 13 Chatham Place to the corresponding floor of Number 14. He had moved his bed—the bed he had been born in—to the newly acquired bedroom where Lizzie now sat, but he hadn't shifted his studio.

Stepping now into the wide, high-ceilinged room, he let his eyes play over the canvases leaning in stacks and the sketches tacked to the walls.

He owed three paintings to the estate of a deceased patron—three paintings or the return of the 714 pounds the patron had advanced to him—but all he had been doing was portraits of Lizzie. It was Lizzie's sad face in every picture, looking in every direction but straight at the viewer.

How could she still be in love with a man who was dead, and who furthermore could no longer frame a coherent sentence? But Deverell was fixed forever in her memory as he had been in 1854, young and almost ridiculously handsome—while Gabriel's hair, though still curly and black, had begun to recede, and he wasn't as slim as he had been in 1854, and he believed his trim goatee gave him dignity, but his youthful Byronic looks were gone.

He inhaled the smells of linseed oil and turpentine and crossed the bare wood floor to the window wall, where he stared out at a string of barges moving downstream, and a low-in-the-water sloop with filled sails moving slowly the opposite way, and the smokestacks of the iron foundry on the river's south shore. At least, he thought with a wry smile, I have the advantage of being alive.

But if she had married Deverell, came a sudden and unwelcome thought, while she was still a virgin, Deverell would still be alive, and she wouldn't be dying.

The doorbell in the hall clanged then, and he was grateful for the interruption as he hurried to the stairs; already he could hear Christina's voice below, and he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Now both of his sisters were clumping up the stairs, stout Maria in the rear—and he frowned in irritation and mild alarm to see that they were somehow both dressed as nuns.

“Sisters!” he called down in greeting—adding, with somewhat forced cheer, “Have you come to save our souls?”

“Not primarily yours,” said Christina.

In the shadows of the stairwell she was backlit from below, and not for the first time he noted the planes of her narrow face, framed by the dark hair parted in the middle and swept back. He had twice used her as a model for the Virgin Mary, and her present expression made him wish he could stop her right now and sketch her for a painting of Mary ascending to the upper room in Jerusalem to meet with the apostles after the Crucifixion.

“Where is Lizzie?” asked Christina quietly when she had stepped up beside him.

“In the bedroom,” said Gabriel, “sleeping at last, I hope—she had a fit at dawn, then threw a dozen of my drawings into the river. We can talk in the studio without … disturbing her.”

Maria had made it to the top of the stairs, puffing, and now sidled around the couch to pick up the sheet Gabriel had tossed down.

“Automatic writing?” she asked.

“Ah—she does it with a sort of sliding pencil device—”

“Bring it along,” said Christina, starting down the hall.

GABRIEL CLEARED BOXES AND
brushes off a couple of stools for his sisters, but he remained standing, hoping the light from the glass window-wall at his back would make any facial expressions harder to see.

Both women were studying the pencil lines on the sheet.

“Walter Deverell said you'd be dropping by,” Gabriel remarked lightly, waving at the paper. “Why are you two dressed for the convent?”

“I came straight home from the Magdalen Penitentiary,” said Christina, “and Maria was on her way to All Saints. I suppose you understood Walter to be referring to you and Lizzie, here, where he writes, ‘worse for both you if you stay.'”

“I suppose I did, if indeed that's Walter, and not just Lizzie's imagination. I thought you were scheduled at Magdalen for another … two days, was it?”

“Yes.” Christina took a deep breath and exhaled. “But I seem to have done a bit of automatic writing myself. ‘Folio Q' won't stop writing itself.”

Maria closed her eyes and shook her head.

Gabriel raised his eyebrows at Christina and made a beckoning motion with his hand.

There were tears in Christina's eyes. “It's Uncle John who's writing it, I'm nearly sure, and I don't think it's voluntary on his part. I think it's his—his dreams, if such creatures dream. And he says—” Her voice faltered.

Maria spoke up.
“Sembra che Lizzie sia di nuovo in dolce attesa
,” which was Italian for
Apparently Lizzie is expecting again.

Gabriel was glad that he had chosen to stand against the light, for he could feel his face chill and he assumed he had gone pale.

“That's not possible,” he said. “Do you think I didn't learn, from the first one? I've admitted you were right, and—since May, we haven't—”

Christina started to say something, but Maria interrupted: “Why did she throw your pictures into the river?”

Gabriel was still frowning. “Jealousy. Baseless. Old pictures of models I don't use anymore.”

“Stunners,” said Maria with a wan smile, using Gabriel's term for beautiful women.

Gabriel nodded in dismissal of the brief diversion and turned to Christina. “Uncle John,” he said clearly, “and poor old Walter too, if that's what he meant there, are wrong. The dead chaps are, in this, unreliable.”

Lizzie's recent words came back to him—
Who can I trust besides dead people?

“I'm sorry,” whispered Christina, staring at the paint-dappled wooden floor.

Gabriel understood that she wasn't apologizing for anything she'd said or done today.

So did Maria. “You were only fourteen,” she said. “And Papa, God rest his soul, deliberately led you into it.”

Gabriel wavered, then stepped forward and briefly gripped Christina's shoulder. “I would have done the same,” he said. “I
did,
eventually.”

And so did my poor Lizzie, he thought.

“If we could
find
it,” said Christina, without looking up, “and destroy it—I promised him I would grind it to powder and sift it into the sea—”

Gabriel stared at his sister with mingled sympathy and cynicism—after their father's death, the three of them had searched every corner of the old house in Charlotte Street, but they had not found the tiny black statue; and Gabriel wondered if Christina would be so resolute to destroy the thing if she were actually to have it again.

“Prayer,” said Maria, “is our only hope now.”

“And the temporal measures,” said Christina with a sigh. “Garlic, mirrors, and celibacy.”

Gabriel was still angry that his resolve—his selfless resolve!—had been called into question, and by dead men. “Well, if Uncle John thinks—”

“He isn't really our mother's brother,” said Maria. “Poor damned John Polidori is just the latest mask—a suffering, half-alive mask!—that this thing is currently wearing. It's Gog and Magog, the eternal enemy of God's kingdom, from the prophecies in the books of Ezekiel and Revelation.”

Gabriel saw Christina's face go blank, and he quickly said, “No doubt, no doubt! Or something of that general description, I'm sure.” Maria looked away, so he was able to send a warning frown to Christina.

“If we'd see you in church occasionally—” began Maria, but Christina interrupted her.

“We could be sure it
was
you,” she said, “since I don't believe Uncle John would venture into a church. You remember the drawing you did when you and poor Lizzie were in Paris on your honeymoon? The two couples in the forest?”

Gabriel did indeed remember it. It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a man and a woman in medieval clothing, visibly astonished at coming face-to-face with exact duplicates of themselves.

“I called it
How They Met Themselves
,” he said cautiously. “It was a study in—”

“It was a prophecy,” said Christina. “Forgive me, Gabriel, but I wonder if Lizzie would agree that the two of you have been celibate since May.”

Gabriel stepped back toward the window, perhaps to keep from raising his hand to his sister.

“I,” he said hoarsely, “know you've never approved of her—but she would not ever—”

“She would have thought it was
you
,” wailed Maria, raising her hands halfway to her face as if she meant to cover her eyes. “You knew—when you drew that picture!—that creatures of our uncle's sort can take on the appearance of their hosts.”

Gabriel was shaking his head and had started to speak, when the window glass rattled and the timbers creaked as a reverberating boom rolled over the house.

His sisters had both stood up and were staring past him out the window, so he spun around—a plume of black smoke was churning and swelling over the water of the Thames a hundred yards out from the shore, and pieces of debris were spinning upward across the view of the buildings on the opposite shore.