Hide Me Among the Graves (43 page)

Iridescent gleams played over the scaled serpent's body as it swung heavily in the vibrating air, its wings a blurred gale of rainbow colors; vertically slitted eyes like poisonous golden apples swiveled back and forth in the room's brightness.

Trelawny could feel the freezing chill of her gaze as it swept past him—and then his hands were numbed as she focused on the box.

And the serpent shape rippled and seemed to implode, and the floor shook as it fell and crashed to the carpet. Trelawny kept the box aimed at the bending, darkening shape. Streamers of heavy black smoke blew away from her and out the open window.

The eyes had shrunk to black stones, but they could not look away from the mirrors that were etched now with Swinburne's beloved blood.

Boadicea was a spasming black fetus now, waving stiffening limbs on the carpet as more of the thick black smoke burst out of her and spun away; Trelawny was able to scuff closer on his knees, and he could still feel the electric shiver of her attention in the box in his aching hands.

At last, with a loud crack, she lay still on the frosted carpet, a black statue no more than two inches long—and he lowered the box onto her and gingerly tilted it to scoop her inside as he swung the lid shut.

For nearly a minute he didn't move, but just knelt there, gasping as the night breeze from the open window warmed the room. Thick black soot stained the floor and wall and windowsill.

Carefully he lifted the box an inch, and it was not particularly heavy—and he allowed his muscles to relax a little; her mass was nearly all gone, presumably carried away in the billows of leaden smoke. This trick had indeed drastically diminished her.

At last he got shakily to his feet and swung the latch on the box's exterior, shutting her in. He tucked it under his coat and gripped it against his ribs with his elbow.

Swinburne, sprawled on the carpet over by the fireplace, had begun to snore. Trelawny retrieved both rapiers and hung them back up on their hooks; the scattered papers and books he left where they lay, and after taking a deep breath and letting it out in a long, shivering exhalation, he turned and walked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.

J
OHANNA HAD BEEN
living in the house on Wych Street for three days, sleeping in Mrs. Middleditch's old room—apparently more in the closet than on the bed, according to the maid, and always with McKee's bright-eyed goldfinch close at hand—and haphazardly assisting Crawford in the surgery, when Christina Rossetti finally responded to Crawford's note.

When Christina arrived at one
P.M
., Johanna had only ten minutes earlier returned from the latest of her so-far daily “shoreline sorties,” which took her to the river for conferences, or it might have been fights, with the newest crop of Mud Larks; when she had returned from the first such expedition with a black eye and scraped knees and mud stains on her new clothes, Crawford had told her not to go there again, but she had insisted that she needed to—the Mud Larks were all prepubescent children who had had dealings with the Nephilim, and they were hired by the old Mud Lark man to recognize and follow people who “had a whiff of the Neff about them” and report any such to the old man. “There's a lot of stirring about among the Neffies,” Johanna had told Crawford as he'd dabbed some Lugol's iodine on her knees—he gathered that the term referred to people who were currently or had once been infected by a vampire or were perceptibly soliciting it—“I'm too old now to mix with the Larks anymore, but they're all real aware of
him
being out again, picking up his old sources. I need to—we need me to—keep track of him as much as can be done.”

Adelaide McKee had stopped in for brief visits every afternoon, and yesterday she had viewed Johanna's black eye with rueful fatalism. “Those Mud Larks are mostly a damaged lot,” was all she had said. “Always see a way out and have your knife handy.”

Johanna had nodded. “I know,” she said, “I was one myself for a while,” making McKee and Crawford both wince.

Yesterday afternoon Crawford had taken Johanna with him to Allen's riding school in Bryanston Square. Mr. Allen hired out his horses as much as he used them for lessons, and even in the off-season he charged five or six guineas rent a month, and so he was anxious to keep them healthy; hardly a week went by without Crawford getting a summons from him. Yesterday Crawford had shown Johanna how to press her ear to the left side of the horse's chest, just forward of the seventh rib, and use his new watch to count the heartbeats; she had used some mnemonic system she'd learned for estimating the number of loose shoes in different-sized shipping crates to memorize the proper pulse rate for different breeds and ages of the horses.

Now she was kneeling on a stool by the marble counter, kneading linseed oil into a mix of bran, mashed turnips, and lard—the concoction was to be sent to Mr. Allen's for a horse suffering from strangles, inflammation of a gland behind the jaw. The goldfinch's cage was on a shelf by the windows.

It was not a day when Crawford had servants in, so when he heard the door chime, he leaned a mop against the wall and hurried through the dining room and down the hall to the street door and pulled it open.

Standing on the gravel pavement in the midday sun, Christina Rossetti looked older than the intervening seven years could justify; her hair was the same shade of brown as before, and her face and throat were still smooth, but some spirit or liveliness seemed to have been taken out of her.

Crawford touched his own gray beard. “Miss Rossetti,” he said quietly, “thank you for coming. Let me take your hat and coat. We're in the back, in the surgery.”

Christina stepped up over the threshold, and Crawford saw her glance at all the mirrors that were now hung in the entry.

“And your house reeks of garlic,” she noted in an approving tone. She took off her coat and handed it and her bonnet to him. “You wrote that Adelaide is with you?”

“Not exactly.” Crawford hung the things on hooks between mirrors. “Not at the moment,” he added, leading the way. “I'm with our daughter, Johanna.”

Christina Rossetti shuffled after him through the dining room into the white-tiled surgery, and she blinked around, in the gray light from the windows, at beakers and books and mortars and pestles and the rows of glass-stoppered Winchester bottles full of variously colored liquids like extract of belladonna, sugar of lead, and spirits of turpentine. She wrinkled her nose at the cacophony of smells, not least of which was the acid odor from the mop bucket, and then stared uneasily at a big print hung on the far wall, an etching of a horse exhibiting thirty numbered equine maladies all at once.

Johanna looked up and raised her lard-caked hands. “Hello!” she said brightly, wiggling her fingers. “Have you had lunch?”

“This is our daughter, Johanna,” said Crawford nervously. “Uh, careful, the floor's wet. I was mopping.”

“You—” began Christina; then she gasped and said to Johanna, “You were following me yesterday!”

“Oh!” exclaimed Johanna. “Yes! You had on a brown coat and bonnet. The girl I was with—”

Christina looked ill. “Ragged leather trousers with braces? That was a girl?”

Johanna nodded and resumed kneading the poultice. “I hear she cuts her face with cold iron whenever she gets frightened. Nancy doesn't talk at all, but she's a wonder for sniffing out Neffies. She could smell your history on you, and she wanted to see if you'd got bit again.” Johanna looked up and smiled. “Lucky for you she decided you haven't been!”

“No,” agreed Christina, blinking bewilderedly at the girl. “I haven't been.”

“Uh,” said Crawford, “speaking of such things, I wrote to you—because—”

The doorbell rang again.

“Excuse me,” he said, and hurried back to the front door and pulled it open.

McKee stood there in the dress she apparently always wore.

“He's passed out drunk,” she said evenly. “I can stay for an hour.” She stepped past him into the house. “Johanna's in the surgery?”

“With Christina Rossetti. She—”

“She finally responds to her correspondence! And I'm sure her brother was lying.”

Crawford nodded as he led her through to the back of the house. He and McKee had found the Rossetti house in Euston Square, and Christina's brother William had told them on several visits that his sister was not at home.

McKee sniffed and spat when she stepped into the surgery. “Always smells in here like somebody tried hard to burn something that doesn't really burn.”

“Ah,” said Crawford, “Miss Rossetti, Miss—Mrs.—” He waved vaguely. “You know each other.”

“Adelaide!” said Christina with a warm smile, “it's wonderful to see you again! I'm sorry I was too ill to receive you on Sunday and yesterday!”

McKee nodded, half smiling. “You're here now,” she allowed.

“Miss or Mrs.?” said Christina, raising her eyebrows.

McKee frowned and opened her mouth to reply—but at that moment the caged bird cheeped several times, and a banging crash sounded from the front of the house, and then heavy boots were clumping in the hall.

Christina sprang nimbly to the doorway and leaned against the wall beside it, one hand in her handbag; Johanna snatched her knife out of the sheath inside her shirt, swearing softly as she gripped it in her greasy right hand; Crawford sprang toward the cabinet where the scalpels were kept and slipped on the wet floor and sat down hard; and McKee, shaking her head, crossed her arms and stood in the middle of the tile floor.

She was looking through the doorway into the dining room, and she said, “Tom, what the
hell
are you doing?”

“Don't speak to me, whore!” yelled a big unshaven man who now reeled into the room. “Where is he?”

His face was red under a shapeless hat, and the old black coat he wore was stretched across massive shoulders, and in his gnarled fist he gripped a foot-long iron rod. He blinked blearily at the people in the room, and his watery gaze fixed on Crawford, who had hurriedly got back on his feet.

“Hah!” the man said to him. “You don't even buy her clothes!
I
do!”

“Tom,” said McKee loudly, “go back home. You know I buy my own—”

Tom turned toward her and raised the iron bar—

And a short, sharp explosion concussed the air of the little room, and everyone flinched.

Crawford, still clutching a scalpel with a ludicrous inch-long blade, straightened and blinked around. His ears were ringing, and the reek of burned gunpowder now eclipsed the room's ordinary smells.

Tom had stepped back, half lowering the iron rod, his face blank; Johanna had ducked under the counter; and McKee was staring at Christina, who was holding a smoking revolver in both hands.

Crawford's gaze swept over Tom, but he saw no blood, and then Johanna, peeking up from under the counter, pointed behind him. Crawford turned and saw a ragged hole in the plaster of the wall.

McKee stepped forward and wrenched the bar out of Tom's hand. “Well done, Sister Christina!” she called, without taking her eyes off him.

Abruptly a second gunshot shook the room, and this time Crawford cringed at the shrill twang of a ricochet and saw the pistol spin across the tile floor. Johanna darted out and snatched it up and pointed it at Tom, who now had his eyes clenched shut. The goldfinch was fluttering wildly in its cage.

Johanna briefly caught Crawford's eye and nodded toward the cabinets in the dining-room side wall, where another hole had been punched through the white-painted wood of one of the doors.

Christina had evidently dropped the gun, and it had gone off when it hit the floor—and the bullet must have missed her by only a yard or so.

Her face was white, but after looking around at everyone, she managed an awkward laugh. “I'd dig those out,” she quavered. “They're silver.”