Hide Me Among the Graves (23 page)

“Take care of her,” said Swinburne, shivering in his too-large coat. “And thank you for dinner.” Then he nodded and set off walking away down Panton Street.

It was difficult to get Lizzie into the cab, as she kept looking yearningly back at the restaurant. Probably wanting us to wait for our dead daughter, thought Gabriel grimly as he pushed her up the step; either that or she's reconsidering the crème brûlée.

“WHAT ARE YOU WRITING,
Christina?”

“Nothing,” snapped Christina crossly, rolling the pen between her fingers. “Nothing!”

The room was too warm and reeked of William's tarry latakia tobacco. The tassels that dangled from the runner on the fireplace mantel were throwing their usual shadow pattern on the high ceiling, and to Christina, as she looked up in frustration, the little wavering Y-shaped figures looked like tiny men clinging to a cliff edge over an inferno.

Like Catholic souls clutching the last edge of Purgatory, she thought. Filthy Romish superstition!

Her bearded, bald-headed brother blinked at her in surprise but took no offense. He never did. He had only been home for half an hour, his job at the Inland Revenue offices in Somerset House having kept him late, and he had been scribbling busily in a notebook before he had noticed her scowling over her papers at the slant-front desk below the old portrait of their uncle.

“I'm sorry,” Christina said. William was the only one of the four siblings who provided any substantial household money—Maria's Bible classes hardly brought in a hundred pounds a year, and Gabriel's income from his paintings was erratic and carelessly spent—and William never complained about the fact that the whole family lived off his salary. He wrote poetry too—he had probably been writing verses just now—though it was all hopelessly pedantic and uninspired.

Christina absentmindedly blew a strand of hair out of her face. “I'm trying to continue the story I burned last year.”

“‘Folio Q,'” said William, putting down his notebook and taking off his spectacles. “Continue it? Have you written it out again? I thought it was very good.”

“I know you did. But I didn't write it.” She took a deep breath.
“He
did,” she said, pointing her pen up at the portrait above the desk. “Through me, through my passive hand.”

He frowned. “Do you mean you were inspired—”

“I mean
he
—
wrote
—
it.
His ghost did. I was in a sort of trance, and I didn't know what I'd written—what my hand had written—until I read it.”

“Ah, you mean automatic writing,” William said, nodding in sudden comprehension. “Really! That's why you burned it. But that's fascinating! Why didn't you tell me?”

“You? You're so skeptical—”

“Only about obvious superstitions,” he protested. Like Christianity, Christina thought sourly. “But,” he went on, “never about possibly valid scientific phenomena. Some intriguing work is being done these days in spiritualism.”

“Well, he's giving me nothing tonight.” She tossed the pen onto the paper and glanced irritably up at the portrait. John Polidori, with his antique collar and his curly black hair and his dark eyes peering off to the side, for once just looked stupid and cunning.

“Was it—important? That he do?”

“Yesterday he was writing about Lizzie, through me. He knew, or said, that she's … expecting again. I need to know, from
him,
what her prognosis is.”

William tamped the smoldering tobacco in his pipe. “I hope she recovers from this … nervous prostration of hers,” he said, puffing smoke. “Gabriel loves her.”

“So should we all. She's family now.”

“Why don't you just visit her? And why would our departed uncle be particularly informed about her condition?”

“He'd know better than anyone,” said Christina. “He's what's making her sick.” With, she thought, perhaps some assistance from the historical Boadicea, God help us.

William pursed his lips and stroked his beard. “Ghosts, if indeed they exist, aren't supposed to be able to hurt people. All the evidence indicates—”

“There's fresh evidence. Firsthand evidence.”

William blinked. “What's—going on?”

“She—he—oh, hang on a moment.” Christnia stood up and crossed to the mantel, where she had left the rolling pencil disk Gabriel had tossed to her yesterday. She picked it up and hurried back to the desk.

“I forgot about this—Gabriel told me to use it.”

“It looks like one of those children's toys that spin,” said William.

“Lizzie was using it to communicate with a dead friend,” she said without looking up from her paper. “I saw the sheet she used—apparently you write out a question first—I could ask Uncle John to continue—”

But as soon as she set the disk on the paper and laid two fingers on it, it started moving; a tingle passed through her chest, and the fingers of her free hand stretched out and then clenched in a fist. She heard William stand up from his chair, but she didn't look away from the pencil line already being traced.

When the disk paused, it had written,

get it out

“Get it out?” said William, standing now behind her shoulder. “That's not clear.”

“Shh.” Christina began awkwardly trying to write a question with the upright pencil, but the thing was moving again.

river closest meet tell you

The writing was faint and loopy, and William squinted at it. “Riven closet?” he asked.

“‘River closest.' I think he wants me to meet him by the river,” said Christina in a quavering voice. “I won't go. I
won't
.”

William straightened up. “You believe he would hurt you?”

“Well, no. Not
me.
I believe he loves
me
.”

She started to say something else, but the disk was moving again:

need you always

She inhaled sharply, then leaned down and said to the pencil,
“Where
by the river?”

find you I will

Christina let her gaze fall from the paper on the desk to her shoes. She would need to put on boots, and a coat and hat and gloves—at least the hateful sun had set—and find a cab; Gabriel lived right on the river, perhaps he would not mind letting her spend the night there, save her the cold trip home—of course she would want to come home—

The disk jiggled under her fingers and wrote,

my dear ones my francesca

William was peering at it. “I don't think…” he began slowly, but the disk was moving again:

christina vivace mia

“… that that's our uncle,” William finished.

“No,” said Christina, careful to keep any disappointment out of her voice or manner. “No, it's… Papa.”

“Why is he writing in English?”

Christina recalled the conversation she'd had with her father seventeen years ago, when he had let her take the tiny Polidori statue. “I think he uses English when he's—ashamed of himself.”

“Wha—why should he be ashamed of himself?”

Because he used me, Christina thought, sacrificed my honor to his devil, in the hope that the devil would … restore his sight, his fortune, his youth. A dishonorable bargain, and one in which he was cheated to boot.

And she recalled what Trelawny had said this afternoon. “Ghosts are ashamed of being dead,” she said.

William stepped back to the center of the parlor. “I'll go with you.”

“No, William, it's—”

William, of course, with his generally mocking attitude, had never been told the story of Christina's catastrophic intimacy with their father's statue, and she didn't want him to learn it tonight.

“It won't happen unless I'm alone,” she said. “I'll be safe—I'll go to where they hire boats, by the Adelphi wharfs.”

William was frowning. “But I'm one of his children too. Why would he—he didn't
say
that you had to come alone.”

“Dear William! I'm sorry. But this time it must be just me. You can contact him afterward, and meet him … or his ghost, at any rate.”

“But isn't his ghost
him?
”

“Not … not much. Most of him will have gone on, though I know what you think about Heaven and Hell. This fraction of him might be—a Catholic might say that it was—his participation in Purgatory.”

“I—for God's sake, it's after nine o'clock, Christina! I
insist
on going with you.”

“If you do, nothing will happen. We'll take an uneventful walk by the river and come home again. I'll be perfectly safe alone, I promise you.” She smiled at him. “You know I'll get my way in this.”

After another few seconds of frowning disapprovingly, William looked away. “Do you have money?” he asked in a flat voice. “You'll want a cab both ways.”

“Well, if you could,” said Christina, mentally adding
as always,
“lend me a pound…?”

William pulled his coin purse from his waistcoat pocket, snapped it open, and handed her several coins.

“Even so,” he said gruffly, “tell him, if you would, that I—love him.” He grimaced. “If his ghost is there, and even if it's not much
of him.”

“I will!”

Christina kissed him on the cheek and hurried to the hall to get her things.

GABRIEL HAD TO TAKE
most of Lizzie's weight as they clumped and scuffled up the dark stairs at Chatham Place, and when he had sat her down on the bed and turned up the gas flame he wiped his face with a handkerchief. Laudanum and the closed windows gave the room a stuffy sickroom smell.

“It's nine thirty,” he said breathlessly. “I've got to go.” On Monday nights he taught a drawing class at the Working Men's College in Great Titchfield Street. “I'll be back at eleven or so.”

“Is that tonight? Miss the class tonight,” she said, falling back exhaustedly across the bed. Her closed eyes were smudges of darkness. “I'm afraid he'll come to me, or she will, if you're gone.”

He or she, Gabriel thought. How are we to free her from
two
of them?

“I can't,” he said. “The students will all be there.”

“Gabriel, I don't want to have to—do what I'd have to do, to resist them!”

Gabriel forced himself not to roll his eyes in impatience. “You're safe
here,
indoors in this house, and I'll only be a couple of hours.”

“Bloody lot you know,” she muttered, turning toward the wall. Her dress was going to need pressing before she could wear it again.

“What was that?”

She rolled around to face him, her eyes wide with apparent fright. “Stay, Gabriel! I don't want to be left with nothing but Walter's counsel.”

“Walter! Walter is dead because your—your
new lovers
were jealous! Walter's just a half-wit ghost now.” He blinked away tears impatiently. “Walter's not the—
father of your child
.”

Lizzie shook herself and looked around the dim-lit room and absently smoothed out the pleats of her dress. Gabriel wearily recognized one of her abrupt changes of mood.

She muttered something of which he caught only the words
my child.

“What?” he snapped.

She sighed, calm now. “Nothing. Go to your school. Your students matter more to you than I do.”

“Damn it, Guggums—”

“You were perfectly beastly to me at dinner.”

“I
was—? Who was it made such a scene that we had to run out? Algy must think you're insane.”

“Algy loves me like a sister. You love me as a model for pictures.” Gabriel started to object, but she interrupted, “Give me my laudanum bottle, and then go.”

“You've had quite enough of that damned stuff. You hardly know where you are these days. I don't—”

She rolled her eyes and shifted on the bed as if to stand up. “Can't you do even
that
for me? Never mind, I'll get it for myself.”

Furiously, Gabriel snatched up the bottle and strode to the bed and shoved it into her hand. “Here,” he said, “take the lot!”

She was sobbing weakly behind him as he strode out the bedroom door and down the stairs.

CHRISTINA HAD HAD TO
knock at the side window of the hansom cab on the corner, waking the cabbie, and now that she had climbed out at the river end of Villiers Street ten minutes later, he swung down from his perch at the back and stepped up into the cab again to resume his interrupted sleep.

“I'll be right here when you're ready to return,” he said gruffly, pocketing her shilling and pulling his collar up and his hat down. “Unless somebody hires me first.”