Hide Me Among the Graves (13 page)

“I believe the British Museum is ahead of us,” McKee remarked now, peering out at the vague shapes of the buildings looming past on either side. Windows of houses were luminous yellow smears in the angular black silhouettes.

The cab's windows rattled and the wheels made a loud grinding sound on the crushed stone of the street surface, and Crawford had to lean forward in the dimness of the interior to hear her.

“I don't know where we are,” he said, trying to remember precisely why he had agreed to this. “Talk louder.”

“My father took me to the British Museum when I was eleven,” she said. He cupped a hand to his ear, and she added, “Oh, for God's sake, sit over here beside me so I won't have to shout.”

It seemed, on the whole, ridiculous not to. He nodded and stood up in a crouch and sat down on the forward-facing seat, of which McKee's crinoline dress occupied more than half. He smelled lavender with the faintest undertone of garlic.

“The, uh, British Museum,” he said.

“Yes. I mainly remember being scared by the Egyptian mummies—I was afraid we might happen to be in there in the moment when the General Resurrection took place, and they'd start to come to life all around us.”

Crawford realized that he was smiling in spite of himself. “Well—on the whole, that would be a festive moment, wouldn't it? The Second Coming, Jesus arriving to judge the living and the dead? You couldn't have been much of a sinner at the age of eleven.”

“As opposed to later, you mean. Shall I tell you how I came to be ruined, eight years after that?”

Crawford's smile had disappeared. “Certainly not, Miss McKee. I think we're almost at our destination. Do you suppose there'll be a dinner?”

He had obtained with no trouble from his dog-owning client a note of invitation to the salon, but the note, written on the back of her calling card, simply said,
Please welcome into your company John Crawford, a poet, and his guest.
No reference to dinner. He had taken McKee's advice and copied out twenty lines from a middle canto of Southey's
Thalaba the Destroyer,
just in case.

She shrugged. “This isn't my pasture any more than it's yours. It sounded like more talking than eating—which ought to mean beer, at least. I grew up in the country, in Sudbury. You know it?”

“Certainly.”

“In '54, when I was nineteen, I was visiting cousins in London; one night we got separated in the crowd in Mayfair. I was dazzled by all the bright gas jets and music and the fine-dressed ladies and gentlemen … as I thought at the time. The
elegant scene.
And I got lost, and found myself in a dark street with the crowds all somehow gone, and an old woman in an open doorway spoke to me. I told her I'd lost my way and asked her how to get back to Langham Street, where my aunt and cousins lived, though I didn't know if it was in Soho or Fitzrovia or St. Pancras or what—I've heard it's in Fitzrovia—”

“Yes,” said Crawford.

“—but she swore she knew it and would have her groom escort me back, but first I must come in and have a cup of coffee to take the chill off. I did. The coffee was drugged. When I woke up after noon the next day, I learned that at least one man had visited me. I was kept prisoner for a week and then wholesaled with two other girls to Carpace across the river.” In the dimness he saw her raise one hand and let it fall. “There's no going back.”

“I'm sorry,” Crawford said stiffly, squinting through the front window into the light-stained fog ahead of the driver. Then he glanced at the pale oval of her face and said, “And … and I'm sorry.”

“Do you have siblings? I don't remember.”

“No.”

“If I were—your sister, say—what would your feelings be?”

“I'd want to find that old woman who drugged you. I'd want to kill her.” He sat back, wishing he'd brought a flask. “I want to kill her now.”

“That's something.”

Crawford was startled then by a squeak from her purse—she had evidently brought her bird along. She went on, “I imagine there'll be sandwiches or relish trays or things of that sort—artistic folk won't stay if there's no food or drink at all.”

“Stands to reason,” he agreed. “Haven't you—sorry, I ought not to ask you personal questions.”

“‘Ought not'?” she said sharply. “‘Personal questions'? Why are we in this cab?”

Crawford inhaled through his teeth and nodded, conceding the point. “To find out what became of our daughter,” he said. “Fair enough. So—haven't you, now that you're free of the Carpace woman, tried to contact your family? How many years has it been?”

“It's been eight years. I ran away from Carpace's house to the Magdalen Penitentiary four years ago, and I've been out of there for two years, in the Hail Mary trade. No, I haven't tried to approach them. My father is a curate and my mother teaches at the church school … if they're still alive.” She gave a hitching laugh. “That
was
a personal question, wasn't it?”

“They wouldn't …
blame
you, surely, for having simply stumbled into a trap.”

“I hope no reasonable person would blame me. No, they'd be saddened by it but overjoyed to see me alive and restored. And I would dearly love to see them again, before they die.” She glanced at Crawford and then away. “But I love them, you see—I think they're safe from the devil I've acquired, as long as I don't go near them.”

Several seconds went by with just the noise of the cab and the passing blurs of light outside the window glass. “The, uh, Hail Mary trade?” he said finally.

“A veterinarian, and you don't know the term? Aves.” She sang three lines from the Irish song “Danny Boy”: “‘And if I'm dead, as dead I well may be, / You'll come and find the place where I am lying, / And kneel and say an ave there for me.'”

“Avis, aves,” said Crawford, nodding. “Birds. The bird business?”

“Exactly. Songbirds. It overlaps with some other trades—gypsy soul-catchers, absinthe-sellers, the eyeglasses men.”

Crawford was curious about these, and about how they overlapped with the songbird trade, but the cab had pulled up in front of one of a row of tall narrow houses; a gas lamp shone beside the door at the top of the steps, and the curtained windows glowed upstairs and downstairs.

“You pay the cabbie and go to the door first,” said McKee. “When they open the door, I'll join you as you go in.” Seeing his puzzled look, she added, “You and I ought not to be together under a naked night sky.”

“I take your meaning,” said Crawford slowly, remembering their calamitous meeting seven years ago on Waterloo Bridge. What the hell am I doing here, he thought bleakly—but just see it through, see it through. “I'd forgotten.”

McKee caught his arm. “Now I think of it—once we've been admitted, let's stay on opposite sides of the room.”

“What—why? Who am I to talk to?”

“We don't know who or what might have been invited inside. Did you bring your garlic?”

Crawford touched his waistcoat pocket. “I did, but—”

“So did I. I think we'd be well advised to play this as if we were outdoors. Might be nothing would happen, but just in—”

“Why am I even
here
?” demanded Crawford—quietly, for the cabbie had stepped down from his perch and was standing outside the door now. “If I'm not to be anywhere near whatever you're doing?”

“Watch me—if it goes wrong, barge in, devils or no devils.”

Crawford nodded tightly. “Garlic flying. Aye aye.” He picked up his hat and opened the door, wincing at the cold night air, and stepped down to the gritty pavement. He paid the cabbie and then tapped quickly up the steps to the house door.

His knock was answered by a middle-aged man whose old-fashioned knee breeches and stockings indicated that he was a servant; Crawford handed him his hat and the dog owner's calling card.

The man glanced at the card and looked down the steps to the cab. “And guest, sir?”

Crawford stepped past him into the entry hall and nodded, hearing the cab door slam below. “She, uh, catches cold easily,” he said. “I didn't want her to stand in the chilly air.”

“Of course, sir. Guests are in the library and sitting room, through those doors.”

Crawford strode toward the indicated doors, and another servant pulled them open. Crawford stepped through, moving quickly to maintain a distance between himself and McKee; and he found that dozens of people in a dimly lit room all now seemed to be staring at him. He nodded vaguely and shuffled away from the clear area of carpet in front of the doors.

It was certainly a large room, with a very high ceiling, though its dimensions were hard to guess since the only illumination was dozens of candles; no, there were several gas jets too, but they were enclosed in thick red glass shades. He could smell coffee and vanilla under a haze of cigar smoke, and he hoped there would be more substantial fare than just coffee and cakes.

An unguessable number of people were sitting in clusters of chairs or standing beside a long table to his left. There were no white ties on the visible gentlemen, and his fretfulness about his own frock coat and cravat abated; but McKee would be coming in behind him in a moment, so he hurried to the farthest ring of chairs. Long curtains indicated tall windows at intervals along the length of the room, and dark paintings were hung with their frames nearly edge to edge all over the walls, extending so high up that surely nobody could ever look at the top several rows, even in daylight.

Looking back, he could see the dim shapes of faces looking after him, but when McKee stepped into the room, they turned toward her. Grateful that he had only momentarily been the object of attention, Crawford sat down in an empty chair in the nearest circle, to the left of a lean, gray-bearded gentleman, on the far side of whom stood a tall woman in what seemed to be a toga.

The old man was staring at him, and Crawford nodded and said quietly, “How do you do?”

“Stupidest question I've ever heard,” the old man growled, and he looked away.

On Crawford's left, a young man in a lacy collar giggled softly and whispered, “That's Edward John Trelawny, the great friend of Shelley's.”

“Oh.” The people in the chairs around him seemed to be looking expectantly toward the long table along the wall opposite the curtained windows, but Crawford glanced curiously at the old man on his right.

He had heard of Trelawny. The man had reportedly been a close friend of the poets Byron and Shelley, and a few years ago he had published a sensational memoir of their last days. And Crawford recalled that the man had published an autobiography some thirty years ago, recounting his bloody adventures as a pirate on the Indian Ocean. Crawford remembered hearing that Trelawny had joined Byron in fighting to free Greece from the Turks, and had married a Greek maiden in a cave on Mount Parnassus—perhaps that's who the tall woman was.

Crawford looked past the young man on his left, peering to see where McKee might have alighted, but he couldn't make her out in the red-tinted dimness. He wondered uneasily if she had found Carpace.

“I am sorry to announce,” said a woman's strong voice then from the direction of the table across the room, “that our guest speaker will not be joining us—”

Trelawny snorted, and the woman standing beyond him seemed to stir. Crawford heard exclamations of dismay in German and French from nearby circles. The man to Crawford's left was now peering at the speaker through a pair of opera glasses.

“—because of a sudden illness encountered on the river this morning. We hope to have her back with us soon.”

Crawford hiked up in his chair to try to get a better view of the speaker—she appeared to be in charge, and McKee had said Carpace was hosting this affair—but he could only see that she was very wide and wore some sort of tall ornamental headdress.

“Therefore,” the woman went on, “we'll proceed directly to individual recitals and political dialogues.”

Crawford heard the notes of a flute start up somewhere in the middle of the long room, and farther away a man's voice began singing something dirgelike, and a young woman seated across from Crawford in this ring of chairs waved a sheaf of papers and announced, “If I may, I will read a passage from my
Lunar Encomium
.”

A portly man beside her stood up and fetched a candle from a nearby table, and then he knelt by her and solicitously held the candle beside her elbow so that she could see the pages.

Trelawny leaned forward while she read the first several lines of her poem, about which Crawford was only able to discern that it was in iambic pentameter, but Trelawny soon leaned back and yawned audibly. None of the other people in the circle took note of it—apparently Trelawny was expected to be rude.

After perhaps a minute, the young woman stopped reciting, and since it was at the end of a line and the man with the candle had wobbled to his feet, Crawford concluded that it was over, but he didn't clap his hands until several others in the circle did.