Hide Me Among the Graves (2 page)

“… Led you to find
him
.” Not
it,
she thought.

He freed his hand to ruffle her brown hair. “Understand, child, I had at that point nothing to lose. The Pope had already excommunicated the Carbonari.”

Christina was momentarily glad that her sister, Maria, was living with another family as a governess, for Maria was virtuous and devout; and that her brother William was at work at the government tax office in Old Broad Street, for at the age of fifteen William was already a mocking skeptic.

Her brother Gabriel, though, who was off at Sass's art academy in Bedford Square, would be intrigued. Christina wished he were here.

She nodded. “I understand.”

Hesitantly she reached her hand across toward the statue, giving her father time to tell her not to; but he made no objection, and her fingers closed around the cold thing.

Into her mind sprang the last line of the Milton sonnet:
I also serve who only stand and wait.
But that wasn't right—it was supposed to be
They,
not
I.

“You shouldn't touch it,” he said, now that she already had.

She let go of it and drew her hand away. “Did you buy … it, from the Austrian soldier?”

Her father waved his hand in front of his spectacles. “In a sense, child.”

Christina nodded. “And this little stone man gave you a—a vision of Mother? Here in England?”

“That it did, though I'd never been to England, and I fell in love with her image—and set out to find her and marry her.” He nodded firmly. “And I did.”

Christina smiled. “Love at first second sight.”

But her father's face sagged in renewed self-pity, the vertical lines around his mouth making him look like a ventriloquist's dummy. “Poor Frances Polidori! Working for wages in strangers' houses now! It was a bad day for her when she became Frances Rossetti, married to this half-blind wretch who earns nothing anymore—whose only hope now is to … to move on, and join so many of our old friends!”

He cast a theatrical glance at the framed portrait on the far wall. It was a picture of his wife's brother, John Polidori.

Christina recalled that her uncle had committed suicide in 1821—four years before her father found her mother. Her father couldn't ever have met the man.

“Did you put it under your pillow, like a piece of wedding cake?” she asked, springing to her feet and crossing to the street-side window.

The rings hissed on the rod as she pulled the curtains aside, letting in afternoon sunlight reflected from the row of tan-colored houses on the other side of the Charlotte Street pavement. She glanced left and right through the glass, hoping her brother Gabriel might be coming home early from the art academy, as he often did, but she didn't see his slim, striding figure among the weaving hedge of horses and carriage wheels.

From behind her came her father's frail voice: “Turn off the gas, if you're going to scorch us with sunlight! What pillow?”

She turned back to her father, and the sun glare from the windows across the street now made momentary dark webs in her vision, connecting everything in the parlor.

“In Malta,” she said. “Did you put the little man under your pillow?”

“Don't touch it again, Christina,” he said quietly. “I shouldn't—I should have thrown him into the sea. Yes, under my pillow, on Midsummer's Eve.”

Christina recalled that today was Midsummer's Eve—June 23. Was that why her father had brought the thing downstairs and shown it to her?

He was shaking his head, and strands of his sparse white hair were falling over his glasses. “It's a wicked trick, no good from it—you children, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades! Where did
that
come from? Eh?”

Christina smiled as she walked back across the old carpet to the table and stood on a chair to reach the stopcock at the base of the chandelier. When she and her brothers and sister had been children, they had played endless games of whist and Beggar My Neighbor in the nursery, and at some point they had each adopted one of the suits of cards: Gabriel was hearts; William, spades; Maria, clubs; and Christina was diamonds.

“I think several of us dreamed it,” she said, hopping back down to the floor, “and it was fun to have … secret identifications.”

“Not in a house with children!” muttered the old man. “And even now, you're only fourteen! I've been a terrible father.”

Christina paused, staring at him. She and her siblings had read Maturin's eerie
Melmoth the Wanderer
and
The Arabian Nights,
and their mother often read to them from the Bible. William would scoff, but William was at work.

“Just,” she said, “with it under your pillow? No … special rhyme to say?”

“Prayers, you should say! With a rosary under your pillow! Not what I did…”

“What did
you
do, Papa?” she asked softly. “Confess.” His mention of rosaries had reminded her that he was at least nominally Catholic, though her mother and her sister were devout Anglicans.

“Promise me you'll destroy it when I'm gone—crush it and scatter the powder into the sea. Promise.”

Not destroy it now? she thought. “I promise.”

“I—God help me. I bled on it. I rubbed some of my blood on it, first. Promise!—but where would you children be, if I had not? Is it a sin to have sired the four of you? What would have become of Frances, as she was—a governess and still unmarried at twenty-six? Now she's the wife of a professor of Italian at King's College!”

A retired professor, thought Christina, with no pension. But, “Just so,” she said.

He had begun coughing piteously, and it probably wasn't all for show—he did have bronchitis again.

“Stir up the fire,
vivace mia
,” he quavered.

Christina slid the fire screen aside and reached into the fireplace with the shovel and pushed the gray coals into a pile to make a bed for a handful of fresh lumps of coal from the iron basket on the hearth.

Then she heard her brother Gabriel's boots tapping up the steps, and a moment later heard the hallway door unlatch and swing open. The air in the parlor shifted and abruptly seemed stuffy when Gabriel strode into the room with a few whirls of the outside summer breeze still at his back.

“Salve, buona sera
!” he said with cautiously preemptive cheer, tossing a couple of books onto a chair by the door and shrugging out of his coat.

Christina knew he was apprehensive about having left school early—their father often complained that Gabriel was wasting the tuition money—but her brother's first words had made her realize that she and her father had been speaking in English. Everyone in the family was fluent in both English and Italian, but old Gabriele nearly never spoke English in his home.

Her father closed his hand over the little statue and returned it to his pocket.

Christina glanced at the old man, and he very slightly shook his head. Do you mean stop speaking English now, she wondered, or stop talking about the statue?

Either way, her brother's jarring entrance—he was riffling through the mail beside the empty chessboard now, looking very much the man of the house in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, though he was only two years older than Christina—had broken the morbid, secretive mood. Gabriel's ostentatious youth, his clear blue eyes and his untidy auburn hair, made her father seem decrepit and almost senile by comparison.

“Buona sera,
Gabriel,” she said, and added, still in Italian, “Would you like some tea?”

BY SEVEN O'CLOCK WILLIAM
and their mother had come home from their jobs, and after the family had dispatched a platter of pasta primavera, three elderly Italian men came calling and sat with Christina's father on chairs dragged up by the fire.

Christina and her brothers sat at the window-side table, sketching and composing rhymes by lamplight while the old men argued politics in histrionic Italian on the other side of the room, airing their eternal grievances against the Pope, and the kings of France and Napoli, and the Austrians who controlled Italy.

Christina and her brothers half listened to the familiar talk, and their mother sat at the cleared dining table in the next room with a stack of clothes, stitching up frayed sleeves and darning stockings.

The daylight on the bricks and windows across the street slowly faded from gold to gray, and then the curtains were pulled across and the chandelier was relit, and eventually the clatter of hooves and wheels on the pavement outside became just the fast snare-drum approach and diminishment of individual hansom cabs.

At one point Christina heard the old men talking about the Carbonari, and she looked up from her sketch of a rabbit.

Her father might have been watching her for several seconds, for immediately he beckoned to her; and when she had got up and walked across to his chair, he pulled a folded handkerchief from his robe pocket and handed it to her.

“Hold it for me,” he said quietly, in English.

Christina knew that her mother couldn't see them from the other room—and she didn't need to unfold the handkerchief to know that it was wrapped around the little statue, for she could feel the cold of the stone through the linen.

She gave him a quizzical glance, for earlier he had said that he carried the thing around with him now—and he had told her not to touch it. His expression was impossible to read behind his thick lenses, though, so she nodded and tucked it into the pocket of her frock and went back to her sketching.

But her rabbit began to go wrong under her darting pencil—the hind legs and back seemed broken now, and the creature's face began to take on a human-like expression that somehow expressed both scorn and pleading—and when she heard her brother Gabriel gasp at the sight of it, she crumpled the paper.

“I think I'll go up to bed,” she said. She curtsied toward the blinking old men but avoided looking at her father, and she hurried from the parlor to say good night to her mother and to light a candle to guide her up the stairs.

UNTIL FOUR MONTHS AGO
Christina had shared the slant-ceilinged bedroom on the third floor with her older sister, Maria, but Maria had left home on her seventeenth birthday to work as a governess for the children of a family in the country. Maria was the one who always remembered to say her prayers, and Christina, now alone, often forgot.

Tonight she forgot. She lit a pair of candles that stood on a niche in the chimney bricks, washed her face in the basin and brushed her teeth, but as she climbed into the bed in the corner and blew out the candles and pulled the bed curtain across, her thoughts were of her father's little statue. It still sat rolled in the handkerchief in her frock, which hung now from a hook by the door.

The window overlooking Charlotte Street was outside the tent made by the bed curtain, so she sat up and pulled the heavy fabric aside—drafts or no drafts—and stared at the dimly glowing east-facing square in the wall. She was seeing it nearly end on, and couldn't hope to glimpse stars through the sooty glass, but she was vividly aware of the volume of space outside, all the tangled streets sloping down to the dark moving river, and the vast breathing sea out beyond all the bridges and docks—and then she was dreaming, for under the moon the river and the sea were alive with hundreds, thousands of pale figures waving jointless arms, dark spots intermittently appearing on their distant faces as eyes and mouths opened and closed.

The window rattled, and she was fully awake again. She and her siblings called that dream the Sea-People Chorus, and she hoped it wouldn't persist all night, as it sometimes did.

She preferred it to the visions of the creature she called Mouth Boy, though—an apparition who never appeared to the others, and whose head was flat because it was just an enormous mouth, with no eyes above or behind it. And even as she thought of him she thought she heard his characteristic harsh bellow's breath all the way up from the pavement below the window; it might have been an exhalation of his that had made the window rattle.

It was unpleasant to have such dreams when Maria wasn't in bed beside her! Often Christina and Maria would have had the same nightmare, and been able to hold each other in the darkness and reassure each other that the visions were imaginary.

This night seemed full of ghosts and monsters impatient to command her helpless attention—and her eyes darted to the faint outline of the door across the room, beside which hung her frock.

The window rattled again, and her resolve was instant. She bounded out of bed in her nightgown and groped her way to that corner and patted her hung frock till she felt the lump that was the handkerchief, and in a moment she had fumbled it out, shaken the little stone figure free, and hurried back to bed with the cold thing in her fist.

Blood, she thought—and she bit her finger, chewing beside the nail and ignoring the pain, until she could feel slickness there with her thumb. She rubbed the wet ball of her thumb over the tiny face of the stone figure, feeling the points that were the crude nose and chin of it.