Hide Me Among the Graves (68 page)

Trelawny simply reached out and tapped the invisible pot, then nodded. “You
took
it?”

“His assistant threw it to me, over the pit where Chichuwee's chamber used to be. Polidori visited him right after you did. Lethally.”

“All
the old Hail Mary men,” added Johanna.

Trelawny pursed his scarred lips, deepening the lines in his face, and Crawford reflected that the old man must be in his eighties by now.

Trelawny pulled the bell cord, and when the cab slowed, he half stood and pushed the door open, letting a gust of chilly air into the cab. “To the river, first,” he called up to the driver. “Steps, we want to get down to the water.”

He pulled the door shut and sat down again beside Crawford. “We need river water to boil,” he explained.

Johanna squinted tiredly at the old man. “My mother and I saw Rose last night, in the Tottenham Court Road. She's still alive, not resurrected.”

Trelawny was still, staring at her. At last he said, “You didn't—catch her?”

“We were lucky to keep her from killing us. No.”

Trelawny closed his eyes and shook his head. “He's holding off, then, in hopes of getting
you.
That's good—he'll be like the dog in the fable, getting neither bone.” He opened his eyes and looked warily at Johanna. “No offense meant.”

“And,” Crawford said hastily, “I spoke to your Miss B., down the sewers. She's in fragments, and wanted me to give her some of my blood.”

Trelawny looked at him, then looked away and sighed. “Poor old girl, though I'm glad to hear she hasn't recovered. But she wasn't just scattered in some mud puddle, I hope?”

Crawford blinked at McKee and Johanna, sitting across from Trelawny and himself. “No,” he said. “Er … very nice room. Couch.”

Trelawny nodded, squinting out the cab window at the white-fretted buildings. “Can't help being a bit fond of her still.”

Johanna's face was stern, and she looked older than her twenty years when she said, “I bet you could help it, if you tried. I'm not fond of mine at all.”

The old man scowled at her, then grinned. “You've grown up since I saw you last, my dear.”

“You,” said Johanna, “have not.”

“True, true. Bit late to start, now. But perhaps the hour calls for one truly immature soul.”

At a set of marble stairs below Savoy Street the driver waited while Crawford hurried down to the river shore and dipped the invisible pot into the muddy shallows and then wrapped it in his scarf to keep the river-side loiterers from becoming curious about it. Within five minutes he was back in the cab, holding the thing in his lap.

It sloshed when the cab got moving again, dousing his trousers in very cold river water; soon the interior of the cab was steamy with a smell like the Billingsgate pavement at the end of a market day.

“Your cologne, sir—” began Trelawny.

“Could be yours too in a few seconds,” Crawford said through clenched teeth.

Trelawny shut his mouth.

Johanna had been yawning, but now she abruptly giggled; instantly she stopped and waved her hand in apology, and then she was sobbing quietly, frowning as if disgusted with herself.

McKee patted her daughter's knee. “It would have been something to see those two splashing each other.”

Conversation lagged while the cab wound through the already crowded streets of Soho and Mayfair and Belgravia, and then rocked along at a good speed down the King's Road to Chelsea, where it made its way up Sydney Street past the Gothic bell tower of St. Luke's to Pelham Crescent.

Trelawny unlatched the cab door when the vehicle creaked to a halt in front of one in the long row of imposing white houses.

“Hand me the pot,” he said when he was standing on the street, and Crawford was glad to lean out and let Trelawny take hold of it. It now looked like a glass pot half full of muddy water. The cab driver looked on curiously but didn't appear to note anything unnatural.

“Bring the girls, living and dead,” Trelawny said. “Luckily the neighbors are accustomed to seeing unsavory characters at my house.”

“I hope you've got a fire going,” said Crawford as he climbed out of the cab.

“I know how to boil water,” Trelawny assured him testily.

“In the fireplace,” said Crawford. He took Johanna's hand as she stepped down to the slushy pavement, then reached for McKee's. “The three of us are half frozen.”

Trelawny nodded, conceding the point. “I'll lay on more coal.”

Once inside, Crawford retrieved his coat from Johanna and they pulled chairs up around Trelawny's fireplace, where the flames waved tall and blue with a new shovelful of coal. The old man even provided brandy when Crawford asked if he had any, and Crawford and Johanna each gulped a glass of the liquor.

Trelawny's house was spartan, with only a few chairs and bookcases against the spotless white walls, and fussily clean.

After a few minutes, Trelawny said, sternly, “My granddaughter is almost certainly not having brandy by a fire. Adjourn we to the kitchen.”

They all crossed through the dining room to the stairs, Trelawny carefully carrying the half sphere of brown river water, and when they had clumped down to the basement kitchen, Crawford was again struck by the old man's neatness. Somehow Crawford could not imagine that Trelawny employed servants, but the red linoleum floor of the kitchen was swept and dry, and there were no damp clothes hanging over the stove or dirty dishes in the scullery beyond; Crawford peeked into the pantry and saw dust-free glasses and china plates in neat rows, and the pantry sink's lead lining was undented. Small windows in the area-side wall, unsmudged by soot, let in gray daylight.

Trelawny knelt by the stove and opened the firebox door, and after dumping one small shovelful of coal onto the fire, he got to his feet with resolute ease and no grunt of effort. He retrieved the invisible pot from the kitchen table and placed it with a clank squarely on the front iron cook-lid.

He gestured toward the four wooden chairs around the table, and McKee and Johanna sat down.

“Give up the ghost,” Trelawny said with a kinked grin as he held out his hand, and Crawford fetched the bottle out of the pocket of his coat.

Trelawny held it up to the window light judiciously. “Well, you've got the sediment roiled up—probably a good thing. I should remember her name.”

“Maria,” said Crawford, remembering that Christina's sister had been unfailingly kind to him when he had been so often imposing himself on the Rossettis in the spring of 1862, after McKee had disappeared; and last night her ghost had shielded him from Polidori.

The brown river water was already boiling and steaming, and Crawford remembered Chichuwee's claim that the pot was actually up in the Alps, where the air pressure was lower. Trelawny twisted the cork out of the bottle's neck.

“Intelligent woman, as I recall,” he said, “and dead only three months—let's hope for the best.”

Crawford stood beside him at the stove. “Let me talk to her,” he said.

“As you please.” The old man poured several splashes of the clouded brandy into the boiling water—and the steam immediately gathered itself in to form an oval.

“Maria,” said Crawford to the steam. He glanced nervously at McKee, who nodded.

“Maria,” he said again, more loudly. The kitchen smelled now of brandy and fish.

The bubbling of the water produced a whisper: “Where is Christina? She was reading ‘The Lady of Shallot' to me.”

“Christina is at home, and thriving,” Crawford said, wondering how true that might be. “We need to know how to banish your uncle, John Polidori.”

“We … stopped him with mirrors,” said the bubbles slowly as the face in the steam bobbed. “I learned it from the … the old Jewish books. I can't remember their titles.”

“That was good,” said Crawford. Sweat and condensed steam beaded his face and tickled in his gray beard. “But that didn't work forever. We need to know how to stop him forever.”

“Cut the stone out of Edward John Trelawny's neck,” said the steam.

“Barring that,” put in Trelawny.

“I gathered you know of another way,” pursued Crawford.

“I might,” spoke the slow bubbles. “‘The mirror cracked from side to side; / “The curse is come upon me,” cried / The Lady of Shallott.'” The bubbles seemed to sigh. “It would damn souls.”

“How would it be done?” asked Johanna.

“I never would say, while I lived.”

“But you're not living now,” said Crawford gently. “You can say, now.”

“I was in the river Purgatory for long cold days and nights. Catholics knew about that. Now I … live with Christina? An indulgence?”

“Yes,” said Crawford. “We'll return you to her as soon as you've told us.”

He hadn't anticipated being ashamed of questioning this ghost, but he found that he was. Maria had been a deeply devout Christian, and more intelligent than him, and nevertheless kind to him; and he was taking advantage of the limitations of this poor malodorous little fragment of her … which had stepped out to save him last night.

“I told you—I was in the infinite dark river, with the worms.”

“No, when you've told us the
other
way to banish your uncle.”

The steam said, “Oh—someone would have to cut Christina, so that she bled—she couldn't do it herself. She would have to appear to be threatened. And then she would have to call for him, our uncle, as if for rescue. She would have to invite him back to herself. She would not want to do that, because she has always wanted to do that.”

The bubbles popped and the steam oval nodded.

“That—would
not
stop him,” put in McKee.

“No,” agreed the evanescent bubbles. “But he would come to her, in his human body—vulnerable, by daylight, not the … monster in the sky. And then there would have to be a death.”

For several seconds no more words came out of the bubbling brandy and river water, and Crawford cast a worried glance at McKee and opened his mouth, but the steam spoke again.

“I don't want Christina to die,” it said.

“Well—no,” agreed Crawford.

“If she died there, and he were confined in the right sort of pentagram in daylight, I believe he would die too. Blood relatives, and the diabolical link. But for this, if she is to be able to keep me, and read to me—”

Again there was silence, and Crawford waited it out.

“I believe there would have to be a murder,” said the bubbles, and the emotionless monotone voice seemed grotesque now, “and Christina could catch the new ghost and use its agitated mental strength to double her own—and, still linked with our uncle by blood relation and her will, she could then stop our uncle, hold him in his human form. Forcibly. For a little while. He wouldn't be able to fly away, as long as she was able to keep imposing his human form on him. He could still run—but I think he could be killed then, and stopped forever with silver and wood and cremation.”

Crawford was feeling nauseated, and he realized that it was a reaction to having made this frail phantom violate Maria's principles by divulging this. But he remembered something McKee had said fourteen years ago:
People who have let themselves be bitten by these devils can sometimes catch a very fresh ghost, ingest it, and it supposedly gives them extra psychic strength
—
lets them control the people around them for a minute or so.

“If it didn't work,” said Johanna nervously, “we would—everybody present would be in big trouble.” She blinked. “Even if it
did
work.”

“‘Who is this?'” whispered the steam, and before anyone could answer, it went on, clearly quoting again, “‘and what is here? / And in the lighted palace near, / Died the sound of royal cheer; / And they crossed themselves for fear…'”

The steam oval dissolved in the air, and at the same moment Trelawny fumbled the bottle and got a fresh grip on it, as if it had moved in his hand. Crawford took it from him and shoved the cork back in the neck and set it on the table.

“We'll return that to Christina,” he said.

“Yes,” McKee agreed weakly.

Crawford and Trelawny sat down at the table, both of them staring at the bottle.

After a while, “How can we …
kill
a person, to do this?” asked Johanna. “Plain murder.”

“I could do it,” said McKee in an unsteady voice. “If it was a stranger, and—and if I was drunk again.”

Crawford said quickly, “No, you couldn't, Adelaide.”

Trelawny smiled at her, his eyes half closed. “I named you Rahab, not Jael.”

Crawford recalled that Jael had been the woman who, in the Book of Judges, had saved Israel by pounding a tent stake through the head of a Canaanite general.